Alfred R. Kahn

World Screen Weekly, June 28, 2007

Chairman & CEO

4Kids Entertainment

Kids today have a slew of entertainment options, from TV to the Internet, mobile phones and gaming platforms, and 4Kids Entertainment is working to make sure that it is in all of those spaces. “Television is still a major driver for children, but obviously they’re spending so much time on the Internet,” says Alfred R. Kahn, the chairman and CEO of 4Kids Entertainment. “They’re playing games, streaming videos and they are doing some community building. Three or four years ago, we decided that for us it was important to get into those channels as fast as we possibly could, because those channels would be converging really quickly.”

4Kids operates the 4Kids TV Saturday morning block on FOX, with an accompanying website, 4Kids.tv, where viewers can find out more about their favorite shows, watch them online, interact with each other, play games and buy merchandise related to 4Kids properties, like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles video games. In addition, the company operates an on-demand service, reaching 13.5 million homes via Comcast Cable and Cox Communications. “More and more, kids are going to watch on demand, they’re not going to watch by appointment,” Kahn says.

But getting kids to watch, regardless of the platform, is in itself a challenge, given the myriad of other entertainment platforms available to them. As 4Kids gears up for a new season of 4Kids TV, it is taking a page out of its own history books as it faces the multiplatform future. “If you looked at our sweet-spots in licensing, our most successful category was trading card games. [For] Yu-Gi-Oh! and Pokémon,  in the last ten years, the wholesale value of the trading card games was $6 billion. It’s huge amounts of business.”

That understanding of the market led to the launch of Chaotic, an animated series that has a built-in trading card game element.The show follows the adventures of a group of teens that are fans of the Chaotic trading card and online game. By watching the animated series, viewers can discover battle strategies that will ultimately help them master the trading card game for both online and offline play. The gaming website is currently being tested and is slated to launch later this summer.

The Chaotic game is the first venture out of TC Digital Games, a 4Kids Entertainment subsidiary focused on the trading card game market. And according to Kahn, there will be more. “Every show that will be on our network, starting in September, is based on a game. The whole positioning is that it’s like the games station.”

—By Mansha Daswani