In The Night Garden: transmedia storytelling platform for babies

A recent post by Henry Jenkins got me thinking about In The Night Garden as a Transmedia storytelling platform.

In his post, He-Man and The Masters of Transmedia he describes the way kids’ cartoon He-Man and The Masters Of The Universe and the many bizarre action figures it spawned as:

An authoring system which encouraged young people to make up their own stories about these characters much as the folk in other time periods might make up stories about Robin Hood or Pecos Bill.

And he notes that:

In some ways, contemporary transmedia is being produced by kids who grew up playing with He-Man to be consumed by kids who grew up playing Pokemon.

This set me thinking, as I have recently become a regular viewer of In The Night Garden.

For those of you without kids or living in foreign parts, I should explain briefly. In The Night Garden, or ‘Night Garden’ as professionals like myself call it, is a BBC children’s television series aimed at one to four year olds. It launched in 2007 with 100 half-hour episodes and cost £15m. Everything in it – literally everything – is merchandised, and the  show’s creators designed it specifically to plug in to the universal bedtime ritual, as Producer Anne Wood has described:

“We became very aware of the anxiety surrounding the care of young children which manifested itself in all kind of directions – but the one big subject that came up again and again was bedtime. It’s the classic time for tension between children who want to stay up and parents who want them to go to bed… so this is a programme about calming things down whereas most children’s TV is about gee-ing everything up!”

At the end of the day – and for once I really mean the actual end of the day, when Night Garden is on air – it meets a real need for parents as well. It’s basically half an hour off before ‘the final assault’.

The show is huge in the UK, and although parents have expressed anxiety about the fact that something is going that they don’t quite understand, it’s become a story world with multiple entry-points that facilitate generative play – in this case for babies who aren’t even at the talking stage. We’re starting them young on this stuff. I think Night Garden is already the biggest brand in my little son’s life. Can they get any earlier? I mean, can we do Transmedia for foetuses?

The parallels with Henry Jenkins’s son’s He-Man experiences are striking. He describes them beautifully:The parallels with Henry Jenkins’s son’s He-Man experiences are striking. He describes them beautifully:

Each of the characters had different personalities (and thus demanded different voices) and over time, you would learn their verbal ticks, the quirks of their personality, and the sound of their voice, even though no two children would necessarily perform these characters in the same way. We might think of these characters as in effect avatars, an extension of the child into a virtual or imagined world, and see these constant shifts between personalities as a predecessor of what we would describe as identity play in adolescence.

I must admit, I haven’t got a clue what’s happening but my 18 month old son is utterly rapt. The weird noises that the Night Garden characters makes are a big part of his world. The same strange sounds that Iggle Piggle makes on TV happen when you squeeze the cuddly toy, or press the triggers on the Night Garden book he will happily read alone. The Night Garden song – whether playing on television, at the CBeebies website, or when he beeps the horn on his Night Garden buggy – never fails to get him dancing. And I can’t get it out of my brain. It’s an ear worm. Try it yourself, if you dare.

I wonder what kind of transmedia stories my son’s generation, literally weaned on the Night Garden, will produce. Whatever it is, it’s going to be very weird and I certainly won’t understand it.

<UPDATE>

It was  a juicy coincidence to discover my brother Ben has posted a presentation he gave at Boulder Digital Work’s Evolve! event earlier this week that uses Voltron, an American animated TV series adaptation of earlier Japanese anime, to explain integrated agile digital working practices and team structure at BBH.

In doing so Ben was delving into a story world from his childhood to express something creatively for the generation who grew up on Pokemon. See Henry Jenkins again:

So, is it any surprise that as this generation has grown older, they have continued to use these stories, characters, even the toys themselves as resources for their own creative expression?

You see, I know how much of a world this stuff was for Ben because I was in it too. Strictly speaking we were more into Battle Of The Planets, a close relative of Voltron, which featured a cast of space orphans with special powers who lived in a spaceship with table tennis and had their own fighter jet and other weapons. But I remember us re-enacting the G-Force ‘Transmute’ moment very clearly. My youngest brother even changed his middle name to Jason for a while as a tribute to his favourite character.

Ben’s preso is below and is fairly awesome.