Dino Dan

ORIGIN: An original idea from J.J. Johnson, a partner at the Canadian production house Sinking Ship Entertainment.

DISTRIBUTOR: Breakthrough Entertainment holds the worldwide rights, excluding the U.S. PorchLight Entertainment is the U.S. sales agent for Dino Dan.

CREATOR: J.J. Johnson

PRODUCERS: Blair Powers, J.J. Johnson and Matt Bishop

MAIN BROADCASTERS: TV Ontario, Access Alberta, Knowledge Network and SCN in Canada; Noggin in the U.S. and Nick Australia.

TV SHOW: The live-action and CGI series from Sinking Ship Entertainment consists of 26 half-hour episodes.

TRAILER: Click here to visit Breakthrough’s Screening Room and watch a trailer of Dino Dan.

DESCRIPTION: Dan Henderson (Jason Speveck from Fever Pitch and Sunshine Cleaning) is an ordinary 10-year-old boy with an extraordinary obsession: he eats, sleeps and breathes dinosaurs. To Dan—nicknamed "Dino Dan" by his friends—a thunderclap is actually a T-Rex’s giant footstep and a backpack goes missing because a Diplodocus wanted the food inside. However, while Dan is an expert on dinosaurs, he is also specializes in getting his motley crew of classmates and teachers pulled into his larger-than-life adventures.

Dan is the only one who actually sees the dinosaurs, but all of his friends, family and teachers are affected by the presence of dinosaurs in his life. He is a fountain of dinosaur information and can answer almost any dinosaur question and if he can’t, that’s just an opportunity for him to put a dinosaur through a dino experiment and figure out the answer.

Dino Dan includes a cast of 18 true-to-life, photo-real CGI dinosaurs. In addition, several celebrities, including Andrea Martin, Mark McKinney, Kevin McDonald and Sean Cullen, make guest appearances in the series. The series is produced and created by Sinking Ship Entertainment. The CGI dinosaurs were produced by Optix.

STRATEGY FOR ROLLOUT:

Breakthrough Entertainment is launching Dino Dan to the international market at MIPCOM next week. Nat Abraham, Breakthrough’s head of distribution, expects that the show, targeted to kids aged 4 to 11, will strike a chord with a host of children’s broadcasters. "In a fiercely competitive and somewhat cluttered kids television market, buyers are looking for standout programming. The uniqueness and freshness of Dino Dan’s visuals and story lines will certainly fill that bill. Using very sophisticated CGI, there are 18 photorealistic dinosaurs that are integral to every episode of the series. Dino Dan is an adventurous, educational and fun series that will enlighten while it entertains."