U.K. broadcaster CITV (children’s arm of ITV) has picked up the stop-motion preschool series Captain Mac from Kickback Media. The outlet has commissioned 52 10-minute episodes of the show, a co-production of Kickback and Cuppa Coffee Studios, and plans to begin airing the show in the fall of 2007.
Described by Kickback as Top Gun for pre-schoolers, Captain Mack follows the adventures of a brave and charismatic sky captain who leads a team of cadets that flies around in sky rockets performing heroic rescues and daring deeds. The series was created in-house by Kickback Media with writing by Simon Nicholson and designs by U.K. designer/director Mario Cavalli of Colony Media.
Cuppa Coffee founder and president Adam Shaheen will exec. produce Captain Mack with Kickback’s managing director, John Bullivant. Shaheen says, ‘The series was by far and away the most unique of properties I had seen in the pre-school market, and that has been proven by the enormously popular response broadcasters have had to the show.’ Bullivant adds, ‘I had always felt Mack should be produced in model animation and was very excited when Adam and Cuppa Coffee came on board.
One of the largest stop-motion animation studios in the world, Cuppa Coffee has produced JoJo’s Circus for Disney Playhouse, Little People for Mattel, Celebrity Death Match for MTV and the holiday short A Very Barry Christmas, which recently won Best Special at Cartoons on the Bay. For Capatin Mack, the company will have a $7.9 million budget to play with.
Kickback Media is handling all international sales and licensing activities for the series. Deals with U.K. toy, video and publishing companies are expected to be in place before production commences in September. Captain Mack was shopped at MIPTV in April and several TV pre-sales are in the negotiation stage.
