Nickelodeon

Nickelodeon commissions two new live-action comedy series featuring original music that will be co-produced with Sony Music, per Variety. Nick has picked up a new series entitled Victorious (20 episodes) from Dan Schneider (Zoey 101, iCarly, among others), and an untitled series (20 episodes) from the great Scott Fellows (Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide). The shows are part of multi-year deal between Nick and Sony to develop projects with a strong music component.
The new Fellows show revolves around a boy band that wins and American Idol type competition show. The series stars newcomers Kendall Schmidt, Carlos Pena, James Maslow and Logan Henderson.
Victorious stars Victoria Justice (Zoey 101, Spectacular!) as a new girl at a high school for performing arts. The series is slated to bow in early 2010.

Smith & Tinker

Bellevue, WA-based toy and game start-up Smith & Tinker received $29 million in funding from a group of tech and game investors including Paul Allen's Vulcan Capital, Alsop Louie Partners, Foundry Group, Leo Capital Holdings and DCM, which led the round. One of the company's first creations is Nanovor, a hybrid targeted at boys which links online and offline play. A proprietary handheld which extends the play experience offline, dubbed the Nanoscope, is due to be released starting in October. Smith & Tinker plans to build Nanovor into a full scope entertainment franchise, including weekly animated webisodes, comics, a graphic novel, field guide.

Little Airplane Productions, RDF Digital USA

Little Airplane Productions (The Wonder Pets!, 3rd & Bird!) is producing two new animated preschool series, Small Potatoes! and Jo B. G. Raff!, both of which are created by Josh Selig, Founder/President, Little Airplane Productions. Little Airplane's producer Jeffrey Lesser will produce the two programs. Little Airplane will showcase the two new series this October at MipJunior/Mipcom.
Small Potatoes! (10x2) The short-form series revolves around four musical potatoes as they use their imagination to take them on adventures and explore different musical genres.
Jo B. G. Raff! (26x11) Featuring a new style of animation called, Soft Toy Animation, creating a stuffed toy look for the characters, the program follows best friends, Jo B. and G. Raff, as they co-host their own preschool series. Complicating the show is that G. Raff takes off just as each show is about to begin and Jo B. travels far and wide to find them leaving the duo hosting the show from the moon to the Pyramids of Giza.


RDF Digital USA and Artificial Life partner to produce a new kid-targeted interactive animated half-hour TV show called Sleuths. The show promises a new level of mobile viewer participation, not yet seen in the US, which allows audiences to become part of the storyline. Utilizing Artificial Life's MoPA-TV system, kid viewers can register their own avatars that will appear on screen three times during each live telecast for elimination-style voting sessions. The show's detective characters will ask the avatars to answer a question related to the mystery and kids watching at home then text in their responses. At the end of each episode, a random selection of 5 avatars get to appear alongside the animated characters in a digital shout-out to kids who solved all three puzzles. Producer Max Benator, SVP/Multiplatform Entertainment, RDF USA, will initially pitch the show to kid-targeted cable networks as a unique 2-screen entertainment property with a range of sponsorship opportunities.

PBS Kids programming notes

PBS Kids programming notes:
PBS Kids will premiere five new weather-centric episodes of the preschool animated series Sid The Science Kid the week of September 14-18, 2009 (check local listings). The five new episodes explore the science of weather and the seasons. Additionally, a pbskids.org/ sid will launch a new online game, focusing on weather and learning, simultaneous to the new episodes. The Sid the Science Kid TV series is co-produced by The Jim Henson Company and KCET/Los Angeles for PBS Kids, with the website produced by KCET New Media in partnership with FableVision.
PBS Kids is hosting a marathon of the new preschool CGI animated series Dinosaur Train, with back-to-back episodes during the two-hour PBS Kids block on Labor Day, Monday, September 7 (check local listings). From The Jim Henson Company, Dinosaur Train will join the PBS Kids weekday lineup. Additionally there is also a corresponding Dinosaur Train interactive website at www.pbskids.org/dinosaurtrain.

National Geographic Little Kids magazine launches a new online component at littlekids www.nationalgeographic.com. Like the magazine, the website is targeted to preschoolers 3-6 and their parents/caretakers. The site features a range of games, crafts, recipes, experiments and videos, as well as resources to help parents talk to kids about various things including the first day of school.

Cookie Jar Entertainment's animated preschool series Caillou is moving to Treehouse (Canada) where it will debut on Monday September 7 at 7:30a. Caillou will air regularly on Treehouse Monday-Friday at 7:3a, Tuesdays and Thursdays at 1p, and Saturdays at 7a and 10p and Sundays at 7a and 10:30p. A fifth season of Caillou is currently in production, a co-production with South Africa's Clockwork Zoo, and is slated to bow on Treehouse in fall 2010.

Sesame Workshop

Sesame Workshop heads to Mipcom this October 5-9, 2009, where it will offer a new slate of Sesame series, which are currently in development, as well as its new version of The Electric Company (26x3):
Abby's Flying Fairy School (13x8) a CGI-animated series featuring Sesame Street's Abby Cadabby and her friends, including Niblet who is part gerbil/part unicorn, as they attend Fairy School. The CGI characters in Abby's Flying Fairy School were designed by Peter De Seve (character designer for Ice Age).
Munchin' Impossible (26x5) With the goal of saving the world's cookies, The Man, a gingerbread man cookie that heads the CIA (Cookie Intelligence Agency) sends Cookie Monster out in the world to find healthy eating alternatives. The short-form series is a mix of puppet and live-action content.
Elmo's Backyard (26x5) as Elmo explores his own backyard, finding everything from a spider web to a frozen birdbath, the mixed puppet and live-action series encourages kids to learn through exploration. The short-form series is based on a science education curriculum including process, exploration and vocabulary etc.
3-2-1 Let's Go (working title, 52x30) the original series is hosted by Abby Cadabby and features segments from Play With Me Sesame, Global Grover and introduce kids to Bert and Ernie's Great Adventure, Sesame Workshop's first claymation series.


Cookie Jar Entertainment and Canadian Broadcasting Corp. (CBC) launch the Busytown Mysteries website in Canada this week at www.busytownmysteries.ca or www.kidscbc.ca/busytownmysteries , which is, of course, based on the preschool TV series of the same name and in turn is based on the work of author Richard Scarry. The Busytown Mysteries site invites kids to be residents of Busytown and offers a range of preschool-aimed educational interactive games, creative projects and activities and My First Email.

Discovery Kids Channel

Discovery Kids Channel unveils its fall 2009 schedule for K2-5 and K6-14. Discovery Kids will continue to operate as a TV network until Discovery and new partner Hasbro launch a new kid-targeted TV network (title TBA) in its place in fall 2010. Discovery Kids fall 2009 programming highlights include:
Ready Set Learn! - programming block daily 9a-2p (K2-5):
The block, hosted by Paz the animated Penguin, will feature developmentally appropriate preschool series including Peep and the Big Wide World, Hi-5, Hip Hop Harry, Bigfoot Presents and Wilbur.
@DK programming block daily 2p-10p (K6-14)
Making its network debut is The Saddle Club, based on the books by Bonnie Bryan. New episodes of The Saddle Club will bow Sundays at 6p.
Tutenstein at 2p; The Future is Wild at 4:30p; Bindi: The Jungle Girl at 5:30p; Endurance - at 8p; and Adventure Camp at 8:30p

THE MEDIUM Dancing With the Paws - NYT

August 16, 2009
THE MEDIUM
Dancing With the Paws

By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
A recent episode of “The Backyardigans,” the sublime animated series on Nickelodeon, pays tribute to the composer Kurt Weill. Not the plot: it’s about a hippo-journalist whose alter ego fights a robot. But the music conjures Berlin cabaret, with original songs by Evan Lurie, the sly maestro of Hollywood scores.

I asked Lurie, by phone, whether he has ever composed a great stand-alone single for “The Backyardigans,” which is aimed at children ages 2 to 5. He chortled and said, “I came up with one melody” for the hippo-robot episode, “and I thought, That’s really a Kurt Weill song.” He hummed a bar. “But Kurt Weill would be writing about why a woman was wronged by a man, and this song was about why the robot wants cheese.”

Why does the robot want cheese? An absurdist sensibility drives “The Backyardigans,” which chronicles the derring-do of five chewy-looking swashbucklers — Tyrone, Tasha, Pablo, Austin and Uniqua — in a range of David Hockney hues. With each episode devoted not just to a separate quest but also to a different musical genre — 80 so far, including Irish jig, King Oliver jazz, funk, bossa nova, township jive, Kenyan high life, tarantella, psychedelic soul, countrypolitan — the show blows you away with its artistic exactitude. A memory from childhood floods back: the fierce insistence on precision, in tempo and in visual detail, known to any passionate player of make-believe.

“When I was in preschool, the backyard seemed endless,” the show’s creator, Janice Burgess, said. “Where our fence met our neighbor’s — that’s one of my sense memories from when I was 2. It’s this notional adventure space.” Her show convenes five animal personalities in a halcyon set of neighboring backyards that transform — via digital imaging — into eye-popping photorealist panoramas: deserts, oceans, tundras, jungles, rivers.

And then the dancing starts. In preparation for each episode, Beth Bogush, a former program director at the junior division of the Alvin Ailey School, gets music from Lurie. She devises routines for each song and assembles five flesh-and-blood dancers to perform the parts of the Backyardigans on film. Animators study this film and then, with reference to laws of physics and physiology, manipulate the Backyardigan figures on their screens until they credibly reproduce down to the last detail the dancers’ sashays, waltz steps, brushes, balls and lifts.

Where the main constraint on Lurie’s composing is the voices of the singers (each part is sung by an actual child with a roughly one-octave range), Bogush, for her part, is periodically hampered by the undancerly physiques of the on-screen Backyardigans. Let’s not mince words: Tyrone’s a moose, Tasha’s a hippo, Pablo’s a penguin and Austin is a kangaroo. (Uniqua is unique.) “Their arms don’t go over their heads,” Bogush explained by phone. “The distance from the characters’ crotch down to the floor is — a little different.”

With time, though, Bogush and the show’s animators have found ways to create richly detailed and often gorgeous moves for short-limbed, round-bellied bipeds whose bodies barely comply. Originally the plan was to create “The Backyardigans” using “motion capture,” a procedure that records human movement and translates it onto digital, on-screen models. This works well in creating, say, video-game versions of Tiger Woods, whose movements are wide and grand, but it didn’t work for “The Backyardigans.” The action, Burgess told me, looked “too floaty.” She didn’t want drift; she wanted snap — crisp movement with strikes and specificity.

As Burgess spoke of 3-D animation, I briefly thought she was talking about muppetlike models. But she meant computer graphics that represent geometric data in three dimensions. The figures in “The Backyardigans” are created in computer 3-D, while the backdrops are essentially 2-D digital paintings, which are less — as she put it — “real.” I wondered what “real” meant in this context, and Burgess cracked up: “ ‘Real’ means — I don’t know. It’s really in the computer?”

Burgess’s embrace of levels of reality made me think of the varieties of imaginative life. In dreams, and in literary and musical fantasies, pleasure often derives from disembodiment, from moving frictionlessly through space, from floating. But there’s another kind of fantasy life — make-believe in the physical world. This, as “The Backyardigans” makes clear, is the enterprise undertaken by session musicians, actors, dancers and children in their backyards. Make-believers (as opposed to fantasizers) want nothing more than the intense physical experiences that authenticate their games — the clatter of armor, the rope burn from a lasso. Don’t you remember how hard you used to work as a kid to get the sounds and textures of some backyard game — cowboys, pirates, police — exactly right? It was those details that seemed to prove that this new, and newly strange, life was really, really happening.

Points of Entry: This Week’s Recommendations

THE LIZARDIGANS Among the coolest local New York acts in history is the Lounge Lizards. It’s time to savor the moody, gorgeous solo work of Evan Lurie, one of the band’s original members. Lurie’s CD “How I Spent My Vacation”can be bought through Amazon.

YOUR BACKYARD FRIENDS The 2008 “Born to Play” CD, available on Amazon, will net you great “Backyardigans” music, including my favorite zydeco psych-up song, “Go, Go, Go.” To see the show itself, turn to iTunes: Season 1 can be bought entire; Seasons 2 and 3 come by the episode.

INFINITY AND BEYOND In 1994, the year after the computer-generated imagery in “Jurassic Park” opened our eyes, “Babylon 5” became the first TV show to extensively use C.G.I. Check out Renderosity.com about making your own 2-D and 3-D digital art.

Scholastic Media, The WotWots, iPhone

Scholastic Media will launch several new live-action and animated series at Mipcom and MipJunior this October:

In the live-action arena, Scholastic Media has two new properties based on books and an original series:
The Wedding Planner's Daughter, based on the book series by Coleen Murtagh Paratore, which follows Willa (17) on her mission to find love for herself and her commitment phobic mother.
Goddesses, stemming from Greek mythology the story revolves around three teen sisters who are mistakenly sent by their father, Zeus, to Athens ... Georgia instead of Athens, Greece. In Georgia, where they are unable to use their goddess powers, the teens must find their way to survive high school.
Additionally, Scholastic Media offers its original comedy Motor City, about three 20-something friends living in Detroit and dealing with all the firsts that being a young adult brings ... first loves, apartments and jobs.

For preschoolers Scholastic introduces three new animated projects
Chicken Socks - based on the Klutz activity book franchise, is set in a clubhouse and invites viewers on adventures of creation and learning.
Dragoonies - a preschool-aimed sing-along series that follows six little dragon pals as they head to school for the firs time.
Fuzz and Sparkle follows disco-loving aliens as they embrace their inner explorer with humor and music.

New episodes, new time slots, broadcast deals and toy launches for the preschool animated series The WotWots. The WotWots is produced by Pukeko Pictures and made at Richard Taylor's Weta Workshop (Lord of the Rings). In the UK Five's Milkshake! block is moving The WotWots to its new time slot at 8:35a beginning September 7, with all new episodes of the series debuting from October 13. In Australia, ABC1 & ABC2 begin screening new episodes this week at 9a and 12:40p weekdays, respectively. Meanwhile in New Zealand, TVNZ continues to air The WotWots weekdays at 8:50a. Hasbro is set to launch a new toy line (e.g. plush, figures, play sets, publishing) based on the WotWots this September in Australia and New Zealand and October in the UK. Additionally, ABC Commercial's International Program Sales group has sold The WotWots animated series to MTV Finland, Canal + 'Mini Mini kids channel' (Poland), Thai Public Broadcasting Thailand and Media Corp Singapore, with further deals to be announced soon.

Nickelodeon, which launched its first set of iPhone apps in February of this year, conducted a comprehensive study about how kids and families use the iPhone and iPod Touch, surveying 500 parents who have the devices in their homes. The study found that kids not only play games on their parents' devices but that they're also getting their own units to play with and that parents are cool with this.
A majority of parents surveyed consider the iPhone/iTouch to be appropriate for use by children under the age of 18. Perceived appropriateness skews older with the ages of 12+ where at least 50% of parents would begin to consider either device most appropriate to use
In comparing the two devices (iPhone vs. iTouch), the iTouch is considered more child-friendly (no usage charges to worry about)
Music, games, photos, and phone apps (iPhone only) are considered the most appropriate for children
Distraction (keeps the kids occupied), entertainment and education are the top benefits parents consider when allowing or thinking about allowing usage
Kids of all ages prefer games that have objectives scores and timers are viewed as important and add excitement

KidZui, Sesame Street

KidZui, which develops kid-targeted content for the web, launches ZuiTube .com, a free online video service that offers kid-friendly content. Initially ZuiTube.com is offering a library of 60,000 parent and teacher approved videos, with new content added daily, as well as allowing kids to upload their own video creations. ZuiTube is powered by YouTube, but is not affiliated with YouTube or Google. KidZui also operates the KidZui browser, which provides access to 2+ million kid-appropriate games, websites and videos.

Sesame Street launches its 40th season on TV on PBS this November 10 (check local listings). With a new show open and close, the new season features a nature-centric curriculum, My World is Green and Growing, including learning about the benefits of planting their own garden, as well as a new "block" format hosted by Word on the Street Muppet, Murray, from real locations around the world. Also new to the series will be the use of CGI animation in Abby's Flying Fairy School, a segment staring series regular Abby Cadabby. Of course there will be celebrity guests appearances as well as parodies of adult properties, this season except a take on Mad Men (minus the smoking and drinking no doubt). Additionally, in honor of the anniversary year November 1o will also see the release of a tw0-disc compilation DVD, Sesame Street: 40 Years of Sunny Days and the illustrated coffee-table book A Celebration: 40 Years of Life on the Street.

Hasbro, PBS, Nick Jr., Wildbrain

Hasbro appoints Stephen J. Davis to the newly created position of President, Hasbro Studios. The new LA-based studio will produce TV series based on Hasbro's brands, new branded content and produce programs from third party content creators. Davis will take up his new position in September. Many of the shows will run on the new yet to be named TV network created under a joint venture between Hasbro and Discovery Communications, which is slated to launch in fall 2010, as well as on channels in international markets. Most recently, Davis was CEO, Family Entertainment Group. He also managed a development and production venture between Southern Star and World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), and previously served as President/Mobile and Online Media, InfoSpace, and prior to that he was President, Granada America. Davis is also a member of the Board of Directors and Executive Committee of NATPE and also serves on other boards. Additionally, Davis also serves as a producer on Young Buc's, a teen-centric scripted pirates series in development at ABC Family, among other projects.

Nick Jr. UK commissions the animated preschool interstitial series Alphabet Romp from Purple Frog Media, per C21 Media. Each of the 26 interstitials will feature a different letter in poems and raps and the like. Foolhardy Films will produce the animation for the series, which is slated to debut later this year. Purple Frog retains all ancillary rights to the property.

PBS launches season 9 of Between the Lions on PBS Kids on Monday, September 21 (check local listings). The 9th season of Between the Lions includes 10 new episodes that will focus on topics including jobs and construction vehicles, wind and weather as well as seasons and celebrations. In addition to an animated special, other new elements of the new season include several new characters such as The Beetles, who offer a rendition of the book Beetle Bop, and the rap duo Hip-Hoppopotamus and Rhymosaurus, and a new band, Phlounder, Also joining the regular cast are dinos Velociraptor and Brachiosaurus, who demonstrate several strategies to help kids read difficult words.

Wildbrain teams with Jack in the Box to launch a Yo Gabba Gabba! and Jack's Kid's Meal promotion. Beginning this week Jack in the Box restaurants will offer one of five Yo Gabba Gabba finger puppets with the purchase of one of its Jack's Kid's Meals. In addition, Jack in the Box customers can go to www.jackskidstoys.com to receive free Yo Gabba Gabba! downloads and discounts on series related merchandise at Ty's Toy Box.

PBS Kids Go, Cartoon One, Sundance Channel, TV One

PBS Kids Go unveils plans at TCA to launch the new series Wilson & Ditch: Digging America exclusively online at www.pbskidsgo.org this fall. Produced by The Jim Henson Company and targeted to K6-10 the series follows two humorous gopher brothers learning about American culture, history and geography make their way to famous and less so destinations across the country in their green-powered van. The series also features interactive games, original comics as well as blogs and podcasts featuring Wilson and Ditch. Created by Joe Purdy (story editor/Dinosaur Train, Sid The Science Kid) and Craig Bartlett (creator/Dinosaur Train, Hey Arnold), Purdy will pen the website content, with Bartlett directing the animated segments creating the site's comic strip material.


Cartoon One, a Rome-based indie animation studio, is completing production on the series Red Caps (26x26), a co-production with Epidem ZOT Finland. Targeted to K6-9, the action/comedy is designed to encourage kids to stand up for their rights and take responsibility for the planet and environment as the Red Caps set out on a different adventure in each episode. The series, which will be screened at MIPJunior, has been pre-sold to RTL 2 (Germany) and will also be broadcast in 2other countries across Turkey and the Middle East from September. A Red Caps 3D feature film, The Magic Crystal, will be completed next year. Additionally, a series of Red Caps books, online games and community as well as board games are slated for next year too.

Lands' End launches Packland an online world for kids where they can explore in four different environments, jungle, ocean, fantasy world or a spy lab where they can create their own virtual backpack. In each of the four environments, kids can Pack Art to add to their backpack (e.g. gear and gadgets) as well as changing the backpack's color, giving it a name and sharing their creations with friends or printing from the site too.


Sundance Channel premieres season three of the network's original eco-series Big Ideas for a Small Planet tomorrow at 8p. The 13-episode series airs within The Green, the network's weekly primetime block focused on environmental programming. The new season will provide further revelations and discussion surrounding green design, inventions and inventors and processes affecting our communities and everyday lives. This season several celebrities such as Jackson Browne, Thom Filicia, Cindy Crawford, Soleil Moon Frye and members of the Philadelphia Eagles will be profiled.

Continuing with the green theme, TV One introduces viewers to a new 30m eco-reality series starring actor/director/writer Mario Van Peebles and his family. Mario's Green House opens September 27 at 6p with eight new episodes airing weekly followed each Sunday at 630p by an encore presentation of the previous week's episode. Mario's Green House follows Mario, his wife Chitra and their five children as they begin a major eco-renovation of their existing home and embark on a green lifestyle makeover. The series is produced in collaboration with Equator HD by Hour One LLC.