Classics Make a Comeback

October 2008

There’s a nice little piece of business early on in this spring’s feature film The Bank Job that doubtless flew over the heads of most moviegoers outside the U.K.

Two loan-shark thugs approach Terry Leather (Jason Statham) at his autobody shop in 1971 London:

Thug #1 (James Kenna): Mr. Jensen wants to know when he’s getting paid.

Leather: Any day, I swear, Perky.

(Pause)

Thug: What did you call me?

Leather: I called you Perky, Perky. Everyone calls you Perky, and him Pinky.

Thug: Pinky and Perky? They’re [obvious expletive] cartoon pigs on the telly. People call us that behind our backs?

Leather: Well they’re not going to say it to your face, are they?

Actually, Perky gets it a little wrong. Pinky and Perky weren’t cartoon pigs back then. They were puppets on a BBC kids’ series that ran from 1957 to 1973 and was huge in the U.K. and some European territories.

But they’ll be cartoon pigs pretty soon.

The fact that their names show up in an edgy 2008 heist movie 35 years after Pinky and Perky went off the air is testament to the staying power of kids’ TV brands and a reason that companies in the kids’ business are searching their archives for revivable franchises.

The new CGI The Pinky & Perky Show will air on CBBC, France 3 and other broadcasters this fall.

Other kids’ series in revival include, but are definitely not limited to, The Mr. Men Show, Inspector Gadget, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Casper, George of the Jungle and Care Bears.

The companies producing revivals or planning them say a bit of nostalgia and name recognition in a cluttered kids’ marketplace provides a leg up over new brands when pitching buyers, attracting audiences and signing licensees.

Brian Lacey, the executive VP of international for 4Kids Entertainment, has been at the game longer than most, having reintroduced Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in 2003.

“In a day and age when broadcasters are being bombarded with options for new concepts, they have to be very careful,” Lacey says. “They’re looking to build and sustain audiences. When we brought the new Turtles out in 2003, broadcasters said, ‘OK, got it, know it; we know who these characters are. It performed really well for us ten years ago.’ There is some real equity value built into these characters with broadcasters. Broadcasters know that if we’re true to the core values of the property, those core creative qualities are timeless. The issues of family, fun, adventure, fantasy, those are always going to appeal to kids. To take an original concept and try to sell it, you’ve got a lot more obstacles.”

THE COMFORT ZONE

“This is a very, very noisy, crowded market, so for sure when [a property] has built-in awareness it’s appealing to licensees and to retailers, particularly if they are familiar with the brand—it’s seen as a mitigating risk for that very reason,” explains Jennifer Bennett, the executive VP of licensing and brand development at CCI Entertainment. “There has been recent success of several retro brands, and that adds even more appeal and gives retailers and licensees more comfort.”

CCI is reintroducing two properties to the market. The first is Turbo Dogs, an animated series based on the well-known book Racer Dogs, and secondly, it will jointly develop and produce a broad array of content and
products for the consumer market based on the hugely successful Weekly Reader franchise. “It’s a U.S. publication and their parent company is Reader’s Digest,” says Arnie Zipursky, the co-chairman and CEO of CCI Entertainment. “They have been around for 105 years and they have characters that generations have become familiar with.” Weekly Reader Publishing Group will be CCI’s partner on this property.

Zipursky and his team are studying ways to take the expertise the franchise has developed within the school publishing market to create entertaining and educational products that will appeal to a broader audience around the world.

“We are looking at a number of approaches,” he says. “One of them is a science series. We’re identifying potential hosts and coming up with a fun and entertaining series where kids are learning about science. It’s done with animation and location footage and a very funky studio environment. And we are looking at a number of other shows [under the heading Weekly Reader Presents] where we take a subject and try to find a holistic approach to it [by offering] a variety of curricular topics to deal with one area. This is something we haven’t seen before. We’re looking to create an animated host for the series. The target age would be first and second grade for the holistic show and probably third and fourth grade for the science show.”

“There is a fine line between nostalgic value and a retro property,” notes Bennett. “I think there is a tremendous amount of nostalgic value with parents, so when they see Weekly Reader, it’s going to elicit some good feelings and good memories and there is that built-in awareness for it. That is one of the benefits of working with a brand that has been around for over 100 years.”

Casper is a true classic, more than 60 years old in animation, and Chloe van den Berg, the executive director of inter-national at Entertainment Rights, says a new version, set to premiere in a year, was warmly received by broadcasters from the get-go.

“The germ of the idea to bring it back came not only from our desire to reinvent and rebuild the brand, but also from conversations we were having with our international partners,” van den Berg says. “There was an appetite for a new production.” TF1 in France and Cartoon Network U.K. signed on early, and deals were subsequently clinched with KI.KA and Cartoon Network Asia, among several other broadcasters.

Casper merchandise has been available for decades, and van den Berg says the awareness of the brand has allowed Entertainment Rights to get an early start on new licensees, well before the 2009 launch. “We had such a resounding response at the New York Licensing Show,” she says. “There is enough awareness and appeal that it works without having the TV series on air. There are eight video games on the shelves or in development. [The] PlayStation 2 [version] came out eight or nine months ago. The Wii [version] is coming out in 2009.”

The new The Pinky & Perky Show is a Pinky & Perky Enterprises, Method Films and DQ Entertainment co-production for CBBC and France 3. ITV Global Entertainment is handling sales outside the U.K. and France.

Emmanuelle Namiech, the dir-ector of content acquisitions for ITV Global En-tertainment, says the history of a show helps ease the launch. “It helps to know that you are presenting a show that is going to resonate with the audiences,” she says. “When we sell internationally, we explain that there was a series that ran for 20 years on the BBC and now the BBC has decided to remake it.” That’s a plus even if the buyer isn’t aware of the original, she says.

Pinky & Perky Enterprises is handling licensing, but Namiech observes that the history of the brand helps there, too. “It’s easier to convince licensees and partners to take a gamble on something that has a strong heritage because of the brand awareness,” she says. “And the BBC platform is great. I believe they have a master toy licensee in Europe. We’ve also managed to get some presales as well, in Sweden, in Finland and in Poland.” The new series debuts in the fall.

But if one concludes that all it takes to succeed in the kids’ business today is to dredge up some old brand and put a little polish on it, one would be mistaken.

Almost by definition, being current and trendy while dealing in nostalgia is a precarious balancing act. More than one executive cited here pointed to Warner Bros.’ attempt a couple of years ago to update some of its classic Looney Tunes characters. Parents didn’t warm to edgy versions of Bugs and Daffy, and the characters didn’t catch on with kids.

Pinky and Perky posed an especially difficult challenge, morphing from stringed puppets to CGI animation. “The DNA of the show is a really fun, anarchic and silly entertainment for 6- to 11-year-olds,” says ITV Global’s Namiech. “To bring back such a classic to contemporary audiences, they had to really work on the look and feel of the show.”

The concept of the show is that piglet brothers Pinky and Perky have their own variety television show that they can never get to run smoothly. In its peak years, the original show attracted as many as 15 million viewers. The series didn’t air in the U.S., but the piglets appeared several times on The Ed Sullivan Show, including a February 1964 episode where they shared the bill with the Beatles.

“We got involved because we knew there was a great heritage attached,” Namiech says. “They’re really quirky in terms of their sibling rivalry and being pigs with their own TV show. It’s a concept that was fondly remembered. But what really attracted us to the new series was the high standard of animation and the fact that it was pure comedy. It pretty much stands alone as a great show, whether you’ve seen the original or not. That’s the key to bringing back classic brands. You have to talk to a whole new audience without relying on their emotional link into the show. At the same time, you have to respect the core values of what made the show successful in the first place.”

TRUE TO THE BRAND

One of the oldest kids’ brands being revived these days is that friendly ghost, Casper, who was created in the late 1930s by the writer Seymour Reit and the illustrator Joe Oriolo, initially as the basis for a 1939 children’s storybook. Paramount Pictures’ Famous Studios animation division bought the film rights and “The Friendly Ghost,” the first Noveltoon to feature Casper, was released by Paramount in 1945. Since then the brand has seen both TV-series and feature-film adaptations and next year it will reemerge as Casper’s Scare School from Entertainment Rights.

Van den Berg of Entertainment Rights says it is essential to keep the integrity of the original in a new series. “When you have a heritage brand, you’ve also got a huge amount of fans, a lot of people who have that memory of growing up with the brand,” she says. “You want a parent to say, ‘I grew up with this and it’s a wonderful brand; I want to introduce it to my kids.’ So you have to be true to the brand and build on its strengths.”

The new Casper’s Scare School is rendered in 3-D CGI animation and is set in a boarding school with a resemblance to Hogwarts in the Harry Potter stories.

And Casper takes on an updated persona. “We needed to age him up a little for today’s kids and make him a little more funky, a little more hip and more interesting for today’s children,” van den Berg says. “There’s a whole cast of new characters. We brought in partners, MoonScoop in France and DQ in India, who helped us develop and design the characters and get it off the ground.”

The premise is that Casper is sent off to scare school, where he’s supposed to be learning to be scary. “Casper is a little boy, a kid of today, independent, eccentric. We believe kids will relate to him. He may look like a ghost, but he’s exactly like [kids today,]” van den Berg says.

HOOKED ON BOOKS

Diana Manson, the executive VP of creative and development at Chorion, which specializes in classic kids’ properties with roots in the publishing world, says there are many pitfalls in reviving such brands. “I start the process by saying, ‘How many ways can we mess this up?’ It’s different for every property,” she says.

Chorion television series include The Mr. Men Show, based on the books Roger Hargreaves began writing in 1971; Famous Five, based on the books by Enid Blyton from the ’40s; Noddy, also based on Blyton books that were most popular in the ’50s; and the upcoming Olivia, based on more recent books written and illus-trated by Ian Falconer. All but Olivia had previous lives in television series for children.

“We’ve just done a new version of Mr. Men,” Manson says. “There have been two previous series that we had nothing to do with. They were basically copies of the books. When it was given to me to do the third version, I didn’t want to do what somebody had done before. We wanted to make it feel timely and nevertheless be true to the property. We went further
into the Laugh-In model of sketch comedy. Another issue was how to make it work on a variety of platforms. You used to just worry about narrative and now you’re looking to a number of different distribution channels. I love doing adaptations because you have to be true to the property itself and then you have to give the contemporary broadcaster what they want. Somehow it has to come together.”

CCI has taken a publishing property and reinvented it for the young TV audience. “Turbo Dogs is our big launch at MIPCOM,” says Zipursky. “This is an international co-production. We produced it with Huhu Studios in New Zealand and our main broadcasters are CBC in Canada and qubo in the U.S. Scholastic Media has U.S. rights and CCI has the rest of the world for distribution and licensing.” Based on the picture book Racer Dogs by the award-winning author-illustrator Bob Kolar, Turbo Dogs brings the unique world of Racerville to life via innovative 3-D animation.

“It’s such a fun concept if you think about dogs racing,” explains Zipursky. “And these stories are not so much about the competition of racing as they are about sportsmanship. Turbo Dogs is aimed at 4- to 7-year-olds. We’ve also got a very high-end interactive digital [online component]. It uses GPS-type technology that allows kids to play wonderful racing games and learn about navigation through GPS technology online.”

When it came to forging a new version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, 4Kids Entertainment looked farther back from the first series to the comic books that inspired it. The brand will be going into its 25th year as a property in 2009. And perhaps more was riding on the new series because of its immense global popularity in the early ’90s and its continued life in merchandise even when it wasn’t on the air.

NEW AND IMPROVED TURTLES

“What you don’t want to do is damage the franchise in any way,” Lacey says. “You don’t want to go too far away from the core values that the characters had that made them appealing to begin with. The original series was kind of a send-up of the Turtles comic-book characters. We thought it could be made more contemporary and relevant by playing up the cool qualities of the characters in the comic books and the attitudes of the turtles. We felt we could better identify the individual personalities of the characters.”

One way the comic book differed from the original series is that the TV turtles all had similar, fun-loving personalities while the comic characters each had their own.

“We just thought it could be brought back to its original roots more effectively, and that would make it more hip for today,” Lacey continues. “It plays on the attitudes of the characters in the comics and we tried to identify their personalities. We stayed with cell animation, but we changed the style. The original Turtles was much more of a cartoon. Now, the turtles look much closer to the comic-book turtles. They’re a little more buff, they’ve got a little more attitude. The color palette is slightly darker. We wanted to make sure that while the color might be dark, the story lines wouldn’t be dark. So that was always a fine line. You want to be sensitive to the original creative conceit.”