George "Night of the Living Dead" Romero: - "I don't think you can trademark zombies, man"

[Amerigo Vespucci]

An amiable George Romero, the director of six (and counting) flesh-eating zombie movies, sat in the cramped studios of San Francisco modern rock station Live 105 as a line of his most devoted fans got the chance to ask him one question on the air. Among the living dead enthusiasts were a young woman with a decaying corpse tattooed on much of her thigh, another beauty with Betty Page bangs who dolled herself up in corpse paint, a guy who insisted that you had to watch all six "Saw" movies in one sitting to really understand them, and then there was me. Being a morning show contest winner isn't how I usually go about meeting filmmakers these days, but Romero is one of the few figures towering enough to reduce me to being the same slavering gore geek that I was during my freshman year of high school.

At 70 years old, Romero seemed bemused by the adulation still generated by his intestine-munching cadavers so many decades after he first unleashed them on the Pennsylvania countryside. When my big moment arrived, I asked Romero if he wished he'd been more like Walt Disney and trademarked the hell out of all things zombie following the success of "Night of the Living Dead" in 1968.

"I don't think you can trademark zombies, man," he said with a chuckle. "They were around long before I came along. They were always in the Caribbean. I just made them suburbanites."

But Romero did more for the walking dead than act as their real estate agent. He found them as folkloric boogeymen and left them as a contagious, flesh-eating metaphor for societal breakdown. Before "Night of the Living Dead," the concept of the dead rising, consuming the living and only being killed by a blow to the head, didn't exist at all. In the four-plus decades since that audacious, low-budget shocker, Romero's zombie apocalypse scenario has become as much a part of American culture as Ol' Walt's trademarked versions of Grimm's Fairy Tales. As for more traditional zombies, it's doubtful that flash mobs heeding the call of the Internet would be as driven to mill sugar cane like the undead from the 1932 Bela Lugosi vehicle "White Zombie" as they are to clamor for brains.

http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/survival_of_the_dead/index.html?story=/ent/movies/film_salon/2010/05/28/george_romero_survival_of_dead

[SoxFan]

1. Having seen this, Disney trademarked zombies, vampires, and, for the hell of it, gnomes.