Case Study: Hot Wheels Part 1

The winter of early 2002 had been a bitter one for my team. We were winding down our “Never Surrender” tour of New York City public schools in the wake of 9/11, and were realizing that Starlight Runner’s venture capital funding was never going to be completed. Our money had run out, our talent was forced to move on, and my partner Mark and I were taking part-time jobs just to get by. On top of it all, Evangelia was conceived amidst a mix of sorrow and hope. I would have a little girl, a true child of the millennium. I was thrilled, but in my heart of hearts I knew that something had to happen on the career front, and soon


In April I got a call from Amy Boylan, who was then Senior VP, Boys / Entertainment New Media at Mattel. The AP had picked up a tiny article on our work in the schools and she remembered that we’d worked together on the Turok videogame while she was at Acclaim Entertainment several years earlier. I’d written the story of the game and tied it to the comics, a web site and some action figures, so she figured I could create a simple storyline for the Hot Wheels web site. The 35^th anniversary of the die-cast metal cars was coming up in 2003, and Mattel wanted to do something special around them. Maybe shake a bit of dust off them. She could sense the excitement in my voice and within a couple of weeks I found myself hurtling toward El Segundo on a last chance power drive


I knew that Amy would be open to new ideas, and I knew that I had the skills to make this web story something bigger, more ambitious. The problem was that, while I could tell you exactly how the engines work on the starship Enterprise, I knew zip about racecars. That would be a giant goose egg.

There was no time to freak, so I got a grip and figured I could always pull aboard a NASCAR expert later, what I needed right now was access to the essence of the brand. At the time, Hot Wheels cars were one of the top selling toys in the world, having sold over 2.5 billion vehicles. Eight of the flashy little things are sold every second, three track sets a minute and 230 playsets an hour. There had been some Hot Wheels fiction in the 1970s, but nothing memorable. I knew that our story had to embody the brand credo of “Speed! Power! Performance! and Attitude!” but what was the story hook that could bring the whole thing to life? Mark and I turned to the kids.

We bought some Hot Wheels cars with us to our next “Never Surrender” and asked the kids whether they recognized them. Of course they did, and they were more than willing to show us how they played with them. I asked one exuberant second-grader what he thought of those bright orange tracks and he motioned with the little blue Deora II we gave him (surfboards still intact), pushing it up an infinitely tall, curved incline and squealing like an engine that was about to explode. I murmured to Mark, “The loop-the-loops—they’re ten miles tall! This isn’t the Indy 500, these are supercars!”

A cosmology started quickly falling together in that vast, tangled mess between my ears. There would be a parallel world built by a benevolent race of beings for the sole purpose of expressing their love for speed. It would be laced by infinitely long tangerine tracks, immense environments and exotic cityscapes, and I would connect to it all as a storyteller by making it about a boy who needed to prove himself to his father. Yeah, I have issues, but who doesn’t?

So there I am, standing alone at Mattel HQ, pitching to Amy and the Internet team. They think they’re going to hear about a web site that maybe has a Flash game or two to accompany a comic strip narrative that profiled each of the big anniversary’s 35 cars. But after I realized that they were going along with some of these ideas, I asked them if I could dream out loud for a few minutes:

To me, Mattel’s strong suite with Hot Wheels was this incredible distribution platform—the millions of j-hook individual car packs they sold all over the world. Why not make them the launch point of the storyline? We could create 35 miniature comics, each profiling the featured car in the pack, and each being an individual chapter in a great race storyline that spanned them all. And, what if the story ended on a cliffhanger and was ultimately resolved in a 22-minute animated mini-movie? We could get sponsors to pay for most of it, and could use the web site to tie it all together.

A prototype comic book cover presented at my first pitch meeting to Mattel. Note an early Vert Wheeler on the cover, now by far the most popular character in the franchise.

By the time I finished my pitch, restarting it several more times as newbies kept joining the meeting, there were over fifteen brand managers, designers, marketers and entertainment folk (some from the Barbie division!) jammed into the conference room.

The first j-hook comic book cover, featuring Vert's first official appearance.

Something big was happening. I was joyfully describing what would become Starlight Runner’s first major transmedia implementation of the decade, on a universe that would become an evergreen franchise for Mattel that is thriving today. It would be the most challenging work I’d done in my life to that point, and it would lay the foundation for how my team would develop and produce major cross-platform storylines from there on in.

The rare 36th Hot Wheels comic was a special created for Target stores by my team with less than a month's notice!

Stick around and I’ll tell you how it turned out, but for now just keep in mind that transmedia storytelling means nothing for kids entertainment unless you remember always to see through the eyes of a child


Over the past couple of weeks, some friends and colleagues have emailed to ask me whether I’ve gone out of my mind. It’s one thing, they said, to prattle on for 40 minutes about what I do for a living at a seminar. That’s good business; keeps a high profile. But then they surf over to KidScreen last week and this giant page pops up telling them that at some kind of crazy Bootcamp in Santa Monica, Gomez is going to spill the beans about how to “do” transmedia. That is, he’s gonna go into detail, step by step, from idea to rollout.

“Are you going to give away the very thing that the majors are paying you big bucks for?” said one of them. “The seven secret ingredients in Coca-Cola? McDonald’s secret sauce? The Gomez Way of transmedia storytelling? What’s wrong with you?” said another. “Which syllable in pro-pri-e-tar-y do you not understand?” said a third (okay, that one was my lawyer; he yells).

Well, far be it for me to shy away from some valid questions. After all, for solid stretches of my career I agreed with them. This mindset is known as knowledge scarcity, that you should hoard your knowledge, because that’s what gives you power. Don’t let people copy your work! If you give them your best ideas, they’ll almost certainly steal them! We’ve all heard these since we were kids. Telling clients we had something exclusive—a better way of doing things that nobody else had thought of—that should have scored us the most lucrative deals, shouldn’t it?

That’s certainly one way of looking at things, but as I travel the world spreading the word on transmedia storytelling to potential clients, students and yes, rivals, my perception about withholding my methods has shifted. Words and turns of phrase that we’ve made up at Starlight Runner have entered into common vernacular. Our own definition of transmedia has been woven into the Wikipedia entry. Journalists and bloggers lift entire paragraphs from our web site and use them to explain multi-platform narratives and transmedia storylines. Some acknowledge my company, or me but most don’t. Conferences advertise me as a keynote speaker, and then throw my whole custom-created presentation up on the web the same night. And though all this might have bugged me at first, now it doesn’t.

So here’s why, and it’s also the reason I’ve agreed with KidScreen to do the aforementioned Bootcamp: I’ve come to embrace the knowledge abundance mindset, because sharing knowledge gives you even more power.

Now I’m not talking about breaking non-disclosures or betraying confidences. I’m saying if we’re going to be valuable to one another, improve the way we do our jobs, reach audiences that we’ve begun to lose, isn’t it wasteful or even harmful to horde what we know? For well over a decade I’ve been talking about the fact that a methodology can be devised to allow for stories to be told over the course of multiple media platforms in an engaging and compelling way.

People looked at me cross-eyed. As a comic book editor and writer in the mid-‘90s, I pulled off my earliest transmedia storylines (Turok Dinosaur Hunter and Magic: The Gathering, both for Acclaim Entertainment) by flying under the radar. “Who cares that the story starts in the comics, continues on that Internet thing and wraps up in a videogame?” said my publisher. “Makes no sense to me, but the kids are buying it!”

Frankly, I thought this kind of storytelling would have caught on a lot sooner than it did. It was only because so few were doing it that I got frustrated and set about getting it done myself. It kind of formalized in my mind while trying to sell it to companies. There was a method to this madness. And by the time I’d formed Starlight Runner and landed Mattel and Disney as clients ten years after my Acclaim heyday, I thought the process I’d come up with was a valuable secret. But it didn’t take long before I realized that didn’t feel quite right.

When I got out of college, I chose to become a schoolteacher. I taught K-6 in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn for a year and I’ve taken time to teach kids ever since. Nothing in my life was had been more satisfying than watching kids’ eyes light up when they made connections, when they learned something I was trying to teach them. They were grasping concepts that would hopefully prepare them for life, just as I would grapple with these strange notions of narratives and storyworlds years later. The work of superb teachers like Henry Jenkins and Christy Dena in recent years would help confirm or deny my suspicions, back me up with academic support. If they believed, then maybe I was onto something!

So I took it upon myself to start talking about transmedia, and it wouldn’t be long before I started teaching it. And I found that the more I taught the more people wanted to learn. Again, these people would post blog entries and critiques of what I had to say. People started to follow my Tweets! To my surprise and delight, the Producers Guild of America East started providing me with forums to talk about new multimedia paradigms and what transmedia storytelling could do for those of us who dream big dreams. It wouldn’t take long before it seemed that most of the PGA—on both coasts—had gotten behind the concept.

And within three years of first hearing the word from me, guess what happened!

http://www.deadline.com/2010/04/producers-guild-of-america-vote-on-creation-of-new-credit-transmedia-producer/

And from the front page of the April 7 Daily Variety:

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118017309.html?categoryid=13&cs=1

I’ll talk about the implications of this remarkable development in a later column. The point I’m making here is that the knowledge abundance mindset works. By sharing my secrets with you, I’m promoting new approaches that will help us all, and by asking me questions and sharing your own experiences, you’ll be enriching my practices and my sense of it all. Will I be creating rivals and making myself any less special by pushing you down the transmedia path? Maybe. But I have a pretty good head start, and I’m no slouch in the rĂ©sumĂ© department, so I’m not too worried.

I also caught a couple of snipes about how KidScreen is making you pay to learn about the hot new buzzword. Well, yeah, I’ve always believed that teachers need to be paid what they’re worth, so long as they drive it all home. If I do my job right at this Bootcamp, the money will be a small price to pay—and, as usual, I intend to over-deliver.

Special thanks to Cosmic Streetcorner friend Alan Berkson for introducing me to the knowledge abundance terminology. Check out Sacha Chua’s wonderful blog entry to learn more:

http://sachachua.com/wp/2009/01/scarcity-versus-abundance-in-knowledge-management/

Have you ever followed a local band that wound its way through the bar circuit? They were your band, you learned the lyrics to their songs, loved them even when they had an off night, and cheered when they announced they got a record contract and were headed for the big time. But then you had to share them with everyone! It felt a bit odd: were they going to “sell out” and become something they weren’t, or would they maintain their integrity despite new temptations and the spotlight of popular culture? In a way, that’s how I feel about transmedia storytelling, and what a strange and exciting time it is!

Most of the whippersnapper writers and producers who dig transmedia today will cite Star Wars as their first exposure to a story so big and a universe so vast that it had to be spread across multiple media platforms in order for it to be told in its entirety. For me it was Planet of the Apes. The film cycle started in the late-‘60s; then came the novelizations, some of which expanded on what we saw in the movies. I puzzled through the Marvel Comics and the grittier comics magazine versions, attempting to somehow make their stories fill in the cracks between the events of the films, though some of them blithely ignored their continuity. There was the hallucinogenic animated series and cheesy live-action prime-time show, and bunched together it all never made a lick of sense, but it was not for my lack of trying. That’s what my Apes action figures and treehouse playset were for, after all. That’s true transmedia, by the way, when the kid at home is added into the mix.

The difference between the shambling multi-platform narratives of the ‘70s and ‘80s—and I’m including you, early Star Wars, with your Christmas special and your ‘Droids TV series—and transmedia storytelling as it has evolved to this very moment, is that the entertainment and advertising industries are realizing that there has been a fundamental shift in the way that mass audiences interact with media.

Compelling stories are no longer anchored in front of our couches. Our kids no longer have to wait a year for the next rerun of The Wizard of Oz. Within six weeks, what was in the largest movie theaters can be played on our iPhones. We may not be watching Clone Wars on Cartoon Network, but man was The Force Unleashed on Xbox fun to play! In short, we are getting our entertainment when we want it, where we want it and how we want it, and savvy producers are turning to the studios and to their financiers and to their production teams and telling them that this is highly unlikely to go away.

A lot of hay has been made over all the theorizing and defining of transmedia at recent confabs like South by Southwest and the USC/UCLA “Transmedia, Hollywood: S/Telling the Story” symposium. Some people came out of these more confused about this so-called buzzword than when they went in. But it’s really simple and practical, and all we have to do is look to our pop culture visionaries to understand the following:

Transmedia storytelling is not a trend or abstract theory. Transmedia storytelling is a technique.

Transmedia storytelling is a very real and ultimately quite creative response to the way that new generations of people want to—even expects to—receive, enjoy and interact with story. For the past decade, outside of the hallowed halls of Skywalker Ranch, it has largely been the purview of marketing divisions. These were alternative reality game implementations like I Love Bees for Halo and the remarkable Darknight “Why So Serious?” campaign. But more recently, there has been a shift in perspective that has taken place at the highest echelons of the entertainment industry:

• Brian Grazer recently announced that Imagine Entertainment has entered a first look production deal with Blacklight Transmedia, a group that has a number of “universe” properties primed for development.

• Mattel announced last week that they are joining with movie producer Neal Moritz and employing transmedia storytelling to develop and implement a brand new science fiction undersea universe as toys and across any number of media platforms.

• Microsoft is unleashing their blockbuster videogame Halo as a persistent universe with a clarified and far more compelling core storyline, integrating animation from top Japanese animation studios, novels by preeminent science fiction author Greg Bear, and Marvel Comics series. They’re anchoring all of this with Halo Waypoint, a community on Xbox Live that acts as a gateway to the storyworld as much as it does toward earning Microsoft Points.

• James Cameron has declared solidarity with fans of Avatar all over the world, and he has promised that all related content will go through a rigorous inspection, insuring that every “official” Avatar story will meet with his standards for quality and fit into a greater canon.

Perhaps most intriguing of all from the perspective of KidScreen, Bob Iger, who emerged from television to take command of The Walt Disney Company, has worked hard over the past few years to spread the focus of his conglomerate from feature films to, well, everything! The powerful Tinker Bell DVD and consumer products franchise was born at Disney Publishing with Gail Carson Levine’s beautiful Fairy Dust and the Quest for the Egg. John Lasseter himself supervised the maintenance of the book’s integrity and universe as it extended from one medium to the next. High School Musical and Hannah Montana launched through television before they became transmedia phenoms.

Sticking with Disney for another moment, Sean Bailey, perhaps most noted for his role in building Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s Internet and cross-platform company LivePlanet, successfully pitched a revival of the Tron franchise to Iger and Lasseter. The result is going to be Tron Legacy, a stunning feature film that will serve as the vanguard for a full transmedia relaunch of the Tron universe. What’s so fascinating about this is that from the get-go, Bailey and his team have insisted that each working part of Disney’s rollout fits into the context of a mega-story that starts before the events of the first film and will continue long after the events of the new one. This includes the alternate reality game (which has been recruiting and including fans and user-generated content), the videogame, the upcoming animated series, the comics—everything!

What’s more: Sean Bailey, as true an advocate of transmedia storytelling as there ever was, has accepted an offer to replace Oren Aviv as the Walt Disney Studios President of Production. There, he will no doubt echo Iger’s mandate to incubate and leverage properties to make them easily and readily extensible across the media landscape. My guess is that he will do this with the artistry and elegance of a creative producer, who understands that the Internet is not television, that players will no longer tolerate crappy videogame adaptations of movies, and that Jack Sparrow should probably not leap into a time machine to fight Nazis, no matter how obscure the comic book might be.

And people—this is only the stuff that I’m allowed to talk about! Trust me when I say that there’s way more waiting in the wings. The biggest names and largest companies in the business are planning transmedia implementations. Not all of them use the term, but they are certainly experimenting with (and making significant investments into) the technique.

My final point on all this today is that, not only to we need to learn about this, we need to stay ahead of it, even if we’re starting out small and operating independently. You see, transmedia storytelling is not just about technique; it’s about our rights as creators and producers. If we are going to go through the trouble of building and expanding our storyworlds to accommodate multiple media, then we’re going to want to be rewarded by being allowed to assert control over the creative and to take our fair share of the revenues from the product.

I see this as a potential win-win for creators, publishers and studios, but we have to be realistic. No one’s just going to hand us our side of the “win.” As transmedia development and production moves out of the rarefied and becomes the norm, we’re going to have to put a lot of thought into making certain that we remain stakeholders. My commitment to you through this blog and through various KidScreen events is that together we’re going to work out exactly how to do just that.

Full disclosure: My company, Starlight Runner Entertainment has been involved with the transmedia on Tron, Avatar and Halo.

 

 

KidScreen Publisher’s Note: 

From Joce: I’m thrilled to announce that KidScreen has partnered with Jeff to host a one-day Transmedia Bootcamp workshop on June 2 in Santa Monica. This unique event will deliver practical how-to transmedia training, using relevant kids industry examples and hypotheticals. It’s a can’t-miss learning opportunity for kids content producers and brand marketers looking to get ahead of the transmedia curve! To find out more and save $200 before April 23, visit   www.kidscreen.com/transmedia

Thanks!

-joce

Let’s get this out of the way right now, in case you haven’t already figured it out: I’m a geek. So a year or so back when my 6 year-old Evangelia came home from school and solemnly told me that she heard from some older kids in the schoolyard that “something bad is going to happen to Anni,” I couldn’t help but smile. She was starting to put the pieces together and all roads lead to Episode III, and those final horrific moments when glowing lava turns Hayden Christensen into David Prowse. I told Evi that I would take her there, but this was going to be a dark ride. “I want to see!” she said.

Goodbye Anakin, hello Darth

So, let me modify my opening line: I’m an inner city geek. I spent my childhood on the Lower East Side of 1960s Manhattan. Life was tough. Early on, I came to understand the feeling of dread that came with taking the stairs when the elevator was out; the physical threat of bullies fueled by anger born of generations of poverty; the pressure to make decisions that I knew would pull me from the righteous path. To whom would I turn for advice? Support? Protection? I loved Mr. Rogers and fervently believed him when he told me I was “special,” but the dude was not gonna back me up when I had to cut down a dark alley.

Flash forward to the ought’s, and I’m scouring my TiVo for shows to which I can introduce my 3 year-old Evangelia. Oswald the Octopus, Peep and the Big Wide World, Blue’s Clues: sweet pastel bubbles of tranquility, and they were great. But at three I was already well on my Bruno Bettelheim http://tinyurl.com/yghrj6l journey, where Red’s grandma was fatally eaten by the wolf, Cinderella’s sister cut off a toe to get into that slipper, and baby Hercules strangled the snakes in his crib.

Infant Hercules takes on the snakes

Though as young parents we’d love to think otherwise, the world outside our apartment doors does not exist in a peace bubble or ridicule-free zone. You may not live in a slum, but you can’t deny that kids strike one another, they lie, they intimidate, they emulate their parents and nobody’s perfect. As a Dad I felt compelled to use story, particularly the powerful medium of television, to prepare my little girl for all of this. Bring on the cool cartoons!

Oh, Nickelodeon, oh Disney Channel, why hast you forsaken me?

Benita Bizarre actually attempted to pluck the wings off of The Bugaloos, Witchiepoo of H.R. Pufnstuff and Hoodoo of Lidsville both blithely attempted to snuff their goody-two-shoe opponents. Kimba the White Lion regularly stood up to bullies (both two-legged and four), even as he attempted to convert a society of wild jungle animals to vegetarianism! Life and death competitions were the rule of thumb for Speed Racer. And I double dare Zack and Cody to make it through the haunted house traversed by Little Rascals Alfalfa, Buckwheat and Porky!

They don't make them like Witchiepoo anymore

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not waxing nostalgic for a time of political incorrectness in children’s programming. All I’m asking is for us to consider adding just a touch of darkness into the tales we’re telling, even for little kids. They’re stronger than we imagine. They can take it. How about a bit of actual jeopardy, a touch of real fear? A bully who isn’t a caricature but really means business, a challenge that can’t be vanquished with a quip and the flick of a switch on a wristband. Dorothy wept with terror in the Wicked Witch’s tower, but in similar circumstances, Barbie pouts.

So, in Daddy mode, off I click to Amazon, the last standing castle for the zap-happy villains of Sid & Marty Krofft. Pee Wee’s Playhouse bombarded her with bizarre creatures and edgy cartoons. Beautiful, lyrical Totoro would give Evangelia a charming adventure, anchored by the sorrow and uncertainty of a Mommy who may be terminally ill. Miyazaki’s masterpiece Spirited Away gave her Chihiro, a little girl who must brave an odyssey fraught with dangerous ghosts and monsters in order to free her ensorcelled parents.

Lyrical Totoro's story is anchored by sorrow

And yes, Evangelia and I finally did arrive on the planet Mustafar, where Anakin fell to Obi-Wan’s light saber and burned in the molten rock. It was harsh. I could see it in her eyes.  When I asked her if she understood why this happened, she said, “He killed children. He isn’t a hero any more.” Neither was Padme, by the way, she said, “because she let herself die, even though there was nothing wrong with her, and she left her babies alone.”

By challenging our children on the field of imagination, fortifying them with story, we’re preparing them for the harsher realities of the world they’ll soon encounter.

There’s a reason why we always remember fairy tales


I had just set foot on the production lot of Globo Network, about 50 miles outside of Rio de Janeiro, when I noticed something strange was going on there. Signs with characters from James Cameron’s Avatar were cropping up all over the place, even in the golf carts that were being used to wheel my party past the Big Brother Brazil set, over to the auditorium. I’d been invited to speak at Globo by a group called The Alchemists. They did advertising and brand extension for various media firms down there, and specialized in something called transmedia storytelling, a topic with which I have at least a passing familiarity. I figured I was going to talk about it with some of Globo’s writers and producers, and maybe get a decent lunch out of the deal. Not so much!

The cavernous auditorium had been completely made over to look like Pandora! Illuminated with purples and blues, massive paper creatures drawn from the film hung from the ceiling. Jake Sully, Neytiri and the images of other characters stood 10-feet tall and up to 20-feet wide against the walls and as a backdrop to the stage. Dramatic music from the Avatar soundtrack rumbled through the smoky air. Translators were prepping to purée my words into Portuguese and whisper them into scores of headphones. Hundreds of people, including famous newscasters, journalists and telenovela actors were taking their seats. I almost fainted.

Lights, camera...overwhelmed

Pale and cotton-mouthed, the first thing I told them was, “Dudes, I did not produce or direct this movie!” My company, Starlight Runner Entertainment is really good at this transmedia thing, especially when it comes to tentpole franchises and properties that appeal to young people and the young at heart. We’d been hired by 20^th Century Fox to work on Avatar, as production got under way in 2007. Our job was to hammer out and crystallize as much of Cameron’s mythology as he was willing to share, and advise Fox marketing on how best to implement the wider narrative of the Avatar universe around the release of the film, across various divisions of Newscorp and to licensors in the months to come. It was a humble and obscure contribution, certainly unworthy of the present fanfare. But, none of that seemed to matter. The Brazilians had settled in and were in the mood to listen. I had to deliver.

Stand and deliver

So “listening” became the day’s secret word. Cameron’s sense of storytelling comes from years of watching movies, good and bad, and observing how audiences responded to them. This gave him the tools to build a storyworld that was convincing right down to the tiniest details, like the way Neytiri’s blue ears shone translucent pink sometimes when sunlight hit them from behind.

As a dreamer growing up on the streets of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, I had to learn to listen to avoid being clobbered by older kids whose dreams had already been replaced by anger and fear. It was a skill I developed early on that would come to serve me well in later years. In some small way I would learn to tap into the same popular sensibility that Cameron did, figuring out how the building blocks of story connected with the needs and aspirations of people around the world.

The element of listening also sits at the bright center of this whole transmedia storytelling phenomenon. In today’s interconnected world, young people move from one media platform to the next without even thinking about it. Their communication, the way they enjoy entertainment, it all flows from one screen to the next in a digital stream of consciousness. As storytellers, we can barely keep up with them. We think repeating the story over and over again on each platform is the answer, but it’s not, because watching a movie on a smart phone is simply doesn’t leverage the best and most important features of a smart phone. We need to extend our content to flow with them.

As I told the Brazilians at Globo, transmedia storytelling is the vanguard process of conveying messages, themes and storylines to a mass audience through the artful and well-planned use of multiple media platforms. It’s a philosophy of communication and brand extension that broadens the lifecycle of creative content, and cultivates intense loyalty, because it validates and celebrates the feedback and participation of audience members.

When my talk was done, a young woman came up to me and took my hand. She told me how much she appreciated these new ideas and she called me a shaman. I’ve been thinking about that term for a while now, and in a way it applies to all writers and producers, again especially those of us who create for young people. You see, in ancient times, shamans told stories around the campfire, tapping into the questions, fears and aspirations of their tribes, adjusting the narrative based on the facial expressions, vocalizations or shout-outs from those around them. Today, with digital technology, capable of soliciting and generating near-instant feedback, we’ve come full circle.  The glow of the fire has been replaced by the glow of our screens, and you and I are the shamans, taking on the worldly and spiritual responsibility of answering questions, surprising, delighting, and inspiring our audiences, and perhaps most important of all, listening to them.

Mo'at, Avatar's shaman

So here’s the deal:

The world is changing so rapidly, and it’s my job to keep up with a lot of it, especially where it impacts popular culture, children and young adults and storytelling. I’m going to use this forum, so graciously furnished by KidScreen, to try and make sense of it all in the hopes that my observations and experience can give you a new or different perspective.

I’m also actually hoping that it’ll work both ways, and that through your email and posts to this blog, I might learn a thing or two, myself. The resulting dialog can only have a positive and dynamic impact on our shows and movies, web sites and games, characters and storyworlds


You can also follow me Facebook at Starlight Runner Entertainment, and on Twitter @Jeff_Gomez or email me,  Jeff Gomez <jeff@starlightrunner.com>

Never Surrender!