« I had the idea a while back, but what eventually inspired me to create
Rotten Tomatoes is my favorite all-time actor, Jackie Chan. Every kid has their
hero(es), and one of my heroes is Jackie Chan. Since I discovered him in 1988,
I would beg (and pay) my older brother to take me to Chinatown, San Francisco -
a two hour drive from Sacramento - just to see a Jackie Chan movie. When
"Rumble in the Bronx" eventually opened in the States, I wanted so
much to support my hero that I went to see the movie every week until it was
out of my local theatre - which I think ended up being about five to six weeks.
On the day the movie opened, I went to my nearest magazine stands, and read up
on all the reviews from every paper I can get my hands on. I would follow that
by going through the web, searching for the nation's papers for reviews. Every
time a Jackie Chan movie opened, I would repeat this process. After four movies
- "Rumble in the Bronx," "Supercop," "First
Strike," and "Operation Condor" - I had bookmarked on my web
browser a collection of the nation's papers. When "Rush Hour" was
about to be released, I had already spent a year as creative director for
Design Reactor, an interactive web design studio that I helped started. By
then, I've learned a thing or two about making web pages. I wanted to launch Rotten
Tomatoes on the opening date of "Rush Hour," Jackie Chan's first
american produced film since "The Protector" (1985).
"Rush Hour"
was originally scheduled to be released in August 1988, so I started working on
the site in early summer during my free time. I must have spent a couple weeks
just thinking about the name. Originally, I just wanted to pay tribune to one
of my favorite shows on TV, Siskel & Ebert, by calling the site either
"Thumbs Up" or "Thumbs Down." Unfortunately - or fortunately
for legal reasons - every domain name with the word "thumbs" was
taken. Popular names, and variations of them, like "critics,"
"moviereviews," and "reviews" were also taken, so I tried
my best to come up with an obscure name. I thought about a very bizarre movie
that I've seen years ago called "Leolo" in which a woman was
impregnated by a tomato. I thought the quality of a tomato would be a great
rating system - rotten, maggot-infested tomatoes for bad movies, fresh, juicy
tomatoes for good movies. The domain name "rotten" was taken;
"tomato" and "tomatoes" were also taken;
"rotten-tomatoes" was not. So "Rotten Tomatoes" it is.
As far as the look and
format of the site goes, I wanted the front page to spoof grocery ads from
Lucky. Instead of fresh, sparkling tomatoes, I would have rotten,
maggot-infested tomatoes; instead of the slogan "Freshness First," I
would use "Freshness Last." In the original design released around
August of '98, it did look like an ad from Lucky, but it was kinda boring to
have the same picture on the front-page everyday. That's been replaced with a
movie collage that changes weekly. I wanted the review pages to look like a
movie ad from a newspaper. The big influence here was a full-page ad I saw for
"In the Line of Fire" when it was released in 1993 (funny how these
things come up when you need them). The ad had what must have been over fifty
something blurbs from critics. It's the first time I've seen so many blurbs on
an ad!
With the
name, format, and look finalized, and the pages coded, I was ready to launch
the site on August 20th, but to my disappointment, "Rush Hour" was
pushed back to September 18th. I launched it anyway on August 18th because the
site was ready, and I was anxious to do a reviews page. The first reviews page
on Rotten Tomatoes was "Your Friends and Neighbors," and the second
one was "Blade." »
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