The Jojo the Scarecrow script and children’s book were written as part of a multimedia endeavor in 1999. At the time, I owned a children’s entertainment start up, and our objective was to launch one children’s character into the market. We adhered to a philosophy that there are many roads to the Rome of children’s entertainment success and because we weren’t sure which was fastest, we got on all of them. At the time, children’s “properties” launched from CD-ROM’s, storybooks, plush toys, music, film and television, much like today.
Jojo the Scarecrow was developed into a CD-ROM game, a pre-reading storybook, a plush toy, musical film script, storybook, board game, television pilot and a musical CD which is the only thing we manufactured and it won the prestigious Dr. Toy Award. Today we have the CD recorded in Spanish as well, but it hasn’t been distributed or manufactured for sale.
Our company, Digital Generation Entertainment, was an under-funded start-up, and we built lots of prototypes to attract investors. We were introduced to Mattel Toys and started negotiating a buy-out when they lost billions of dollars over the purchase of The Learning Company. This ended our negotiations at a very bad time. We were basically out of money and shelved the entire project.
You can hear the Jojo the Scarecrow album by clicking here.