There are a few things that most of us at the company have in common: We like to have fun, we wish we were rock stars (well, we’re already rock stars, but I mean actual rock stars), we love movies, and we are superhero fanatics!
To my delight, I was able to catch the Superhero Fashion & Fantasy exhibit at The Metropolitan Museum of Art this weekend (which I highly suggest), and it reminded me of a fantastic series that I saw a trailer for a few months ago.

Italian Spiderman Trailer

Italian Superman was something of a mystery to me after I watched the trailer. I thought it was a brilliant, campy one-off, and nothing more. To my surprise, I saw an episode featured on Yahoo! Video last week, and was psyched to find the first two episodes up on YouTube, MySpace, and Yahoo!. The story that accompanies it is just as outlandish as the series, explaining that Italian Spiderman was adapted from the novel, Death Wears A Hat, and filmed in 1964 by Italian filmmaker Gianfranco Gatti, and produced by Alrugo Entertainment.
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Working at Next New Networks has its perks. Two weeks ago I received a random email invite to a screening of the new Indiana Jones movie, The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull. At first I was wondering what PR list I had managed to get myself on, but what I didn’t know it at the time was that it was actually a Next New Networks field trip set up by Tim Shey and our awesome contact at Paramount, Casey. With permission slip in hand, I hopped in a cab to the premiere with Tim, Rachel, Justin, Erik, Steve, Scott, Vanessa, and a few others.

When we arrived there were a TON of lines set up outside with fans, photographers, and Dr. Jones look-a-likes! Of course, being the cool kids that we are (well, that and Casey being the bomb), we didn’t have to wait in line and we walked right in to grab our seats, and then predictably made a mad dash to the concession stand. Hot dogs, popcorn, and nachos in hand, we returned to our seats on the balcony (which were sweet!) to relish in the delight and excitement brewing within the theater. As we relaxed into our seats we were serenaded into anticipation by the Indiana Jones theme music. Right before the film got started there was a ruckus at the balcony entrance, and low and behold, it was Shia LeBeouf hanging out! Next walked in Karen Allen and Harrison Ford! With all the stars in place, the lights dimmed, and the adventure began continued.While I won’t spoil ending for you, I will leave you with a few online features to warm up with before you go see what many of us have been waiting almost 20 years for! (more…)

Photo credit: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

A belated congrats to our friends Kent Nichols and Douglas Sarine, of Ask a Ninja fame, who will be writing, and Kent directing, a remake of Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. I was lucky enough to be standing with Kent when the news broke on The Hollywood Reporter, not because we hang out all the time (although I wish we could), but because of a happy coincidence, as Kent had stopped by our SXSW party that night. I’m sure I was one of the first of many people to freak out and congratulate him that night and the following days — making the jump from web auteurship to a feature film deal is a huge achievement.

Kent and Doug are heroes of ours, and we’ve gotten friendly over the past year or so, especially after both they and Fred spoke at Pixelodeon last year, delivering two of the renegade keynotes of the festival. They’re legendary in the web video space for being one of the few web productions that’s in the black, attracting a year-long sponsorship / revenue sharing deal (which they just renewed) with Federated Media, and smartly merchandising and licensing with an Ask a Ninja book, t-shirts and clothing, and DVDs. What I love about Kent and Doug is that they aim high and know the value of where they are right know, and the knowledge they have. They’ll be keeping the Ninja going, showing the common sense that in Hollywood translates to cunning business savvy. As Kent writes on his blog:

This move is about career. Going into movies gives us access to the top of the Hollywood food chain. Show business is still an aspirational place — web shows want to be cable shows. Cable shows want to be broadcast shows. And broadcast shows want to be films. (And I guess now, films want to be Broadway musicals, but that’s a different story…)

By going to straight to features, the entire showbiz world is still open to us. We’ll be able to move freely up and down the aspirational chain without being pigeonholed as the web guys. And actually we’ll be even more valuable since we have a deep understanding of the new media landscape.

Kent’s right. This is awesome news. And if anyone thinks otherwise, The Ninja will totally kill them.

Back in May a former Turner Broadcasting colleague, Patrick de Bokay, stopped by to kindly ask me to judge the shorts competition at the Miami Film Festival. I don’t really like to travel, even to nice places, but when the date’s so far away I always say ‘yes’ since I figure 2 million things will get in the way and something will force me to not go.

I’ll be there next week, seeing some great films.

As if “Internet People” wasn’t cool enough.

The first episode of Channel Frederator’s first original cartoon series, The Meth Minute 39, was an instant smash hit, seen more than 4,000,000 times with over 10,000 comments in our super-distribution (courtesy of Next New Networks).

On the heels of CF’s 100th episode, I’m extremely proud announce the official debut of our weekly series, The Meth Minute 39. Starting today, and every Thursday into next July, the original vision of New York filmmaker Dan Meth explodes, with a cartoon featuring James Brown crossed with “The Matrix.”
(And check out some of the internet love already coming Dan’s way on his blog.)

Bookmark the page, set your RSS feed, or hit ‘Subscribe’ on your iTunes or YouTube.

You’re going to enjoy it. Everyone else is.

Albie Hecht is one of my best friends –ah, one of our best friends; all of the Next New partners have worked together with Albie a lot over the years– his company World Wide Biggies –”a New York-based developer of digital entertainment for kids, families and young adults”– has just announced the opening of a digital production studio, an investment raise of $9million, and distribution deals. His partners include co-leaders NBC Universal and Platform Equity, and Hearst Corp., Greycroft Ventures and Prism VentureWorks. Wow.

Nobody’s going to beat Albie and his great team (including our other close friend, and I might add, my first creative hire in television, Scott Webb), nobody. They were early media converts to the transformative power of the interactive digital world’s effect on the traditional television business.

Albie’s one of the cultural stars of the last dozen years. As Herb’s President of Nickelodeon Entertainment produced an unending string of hits like the humngo series and movie SpongeBob SquarePants, the $100 million movies of A Series of Unfortunate Events and Rugrats, and lately Nick’s runaway success The Naked Brothers Band. And Scott was Nickelodeon’s innovative Worldwide Creative Director for several years; you’ll remember, among other things, his sheparding of the truly original series Pete & Pete, and his mid-90s foresight to be an early internet pioneer with the creation of Nickelodeon Online.

Did I mention that nobody’s going to beat Albie? Congratulations to the Biggies.

For me, one of the fascinating joys of travel is seeing what’s interesting to different peoples about culture. Generally, and stupidly, I don’t think of Western Europen media at a great divide from the US, but then I pick up the International Herald Tribune and there’s an article celebrating the 50th anniversary of a typeface for goodness sake (The IHT is owned, of course, by the New York Times, where I could rarely imagine such frivolous writing). Helvetica is at once the most famous font of the modern age, and one of the most dismissed, ignored, and revilled. It’s so common that though I think of myself as a middlebrow type hobbiest, I had no idea it was introduced as late as the 50s, which would mean when I first worked with it professionally it was less than 20 years old.

Read the article, see the movie, use the type. We do.

(Thanks to Richard Rutter for the great photograph of the great Helvetica documentary poster.)