Maybe I was a little out of the age range for Full House, but I do not get the nostalgia train for this show. I guess as squeaky clean family sitcom fare goes, it was well done; I certainly can appreciate that it takes skills to turn out vanilla cream every week with the double-takes and prat falls and mild zingers with appropriate pauses for the canned laughter - for real, I get that there’s an art to doing it well. I get that they did manage to produce a product year after year that appealed to a mass market. Yet, when it was on the air, there was not one thing appealing about it to me.
That Mary Kate and Ashley turned their small fame into media and fashion moguls was the best thing about the show to me.
Thorne created a company, Dualstar, and did something else that no Hollywood producer would do: He made the twins, 7, executive producers.
“Well, they and I cast, hire directors, hire writers and oversee everything they’re doing,” says Thorne. “And there’s no element that we don’t do. Everything is controlled by us.”
Along with the videos, which have generated an astounding $500 million in sales, the girls began to make CDs. It was so successful that Thorne sensed that “tween” consumers, with allowances to burn, would be willing to buy even more.
According to Thorne, there are about 52 categories of entertainment, fashion and lifestyle that are part of the Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen line – including clothes, fragrances, cosmetics, shampoos, videos, books, CDs and home furnishings.
