After over a year of buzzing it's finally upon us: The Hub will launch this Sunday, 10/10/10, and it's time to take a little look at what the initial offering will be. The website is already up, of course, so you can check it out at http://www.hubworld.com. I'm just looking at the line-up there, rather than in any industry or trade journals (although Wikipedia has a long potential list), and it looks like the expected Hasbro content but with a good mix of other things, both from the back catalog (HIT's rolling back out Fraggle Rock, for instance) and new productions. So this is what we have:
A revamped version of one of my favorite shows as a kid, Pound Puppies. I used to love to watch this and to play with my own Pound Puppies even more. The licensing and merchandising should be gangbusters; I know it was, more than any other show except maybe G.I. Joe, at my house in the 80s.
Which brings us to G.I. Joe Renegades. What connection it has to the feature film I don't know, for better or worse, and it looks like it's been recast with the Joes being outlaws fighting to prove their innocence by facing off against a large corporate Cobra. Maybe it's the post-Enron or Halliburton version? An interesting twist--will it supply sufficient toys and coolness to hook the modern boy's 6-12 demo?
And speaking of retooling old 80's toons after a big screen version, there's Transformers Prime. I think it's very possible that the first Transformers film rivals The Last Airbender for Worst Film Ever Made, so in this case I'm hoping the producers aren't sucked in by all that Michael Bay nonsense and follow the lead of Avatar's creators Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko and create a cool new series without any relation to the feature film. (For news on that new Avatar show go here.) Transformers was equally cool at my house in the 80s as G.I. Joe--I spent my school hours designing new Transformers, my recesses pretending to be Transformers, and my afternoons watching or playing with my Transformers. There's so much coolness here--I'm really crossing my fingers for this one.
Other remakes include My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, and Strawberry Shortcake's Berry Bitty Adventures; expect to see others soon, I suspect.
Then there are some other cool shows; I'm most excited about the documentary-based Meerkat Manor--I think it's always fantastic when kids watch nature documentaries, like when I took my daughter to see the original Meerkat Manor feature film a couple years ago as part of the Tribeca Film Festival. As you can read in my blog about it, it was a little scary in parts for her at that age but overall was excellent, and I loved it (you have to be amenable to giving animals names and attributing human emotions to them). This is an example of Discovery Kids' influence on The Hub (well, I think it was actually on Animal Planet, but it comes from the same gene pool, I think), and since that's one of my favorite kids' TV stations (perhaps I'll get to write it an epitaph before it goes) I hope there's a lot more where this came from.
There's also The Twisted Whiskers Show, Dennis and Gnasher, a game show called, appropriately, Family Game Night, another called Pictureka! (with hidden pictures), the anime action show Deltora Quest, Dan Vs., and Cosmic Quantum Ray, a sci-fi action comedy perhaps in the mold of something like TMNT. Overall a great line-up, one that lays to rest fears that the Hub would just be the Hasbro Network.
It will give those of us interested in kids' TV (including kids) a lot of new material to watch. The Hub website also has a channel locator to help you find it on your own television. It looks like the more mature material, including reruns of shows like Family Ties and Happy Days, should make this a good nostalgic family channel. I haven't found any mainstream press reviews as yet, just the trade press stuff on the business developments that I'll forego re-posting here, but hopefully the station's invention will lead to a bit more critical scrutiny of kids' TV. We're making it through the recession and broadcasters are becoming a bit more daring with new content, I think, and Hasbro's and Discovery Kids' commitment to television as a delivery medium shows a lot of faith that it will remain viable for a long time to come, even in a 24-7 on-demand liquid media environment. Children's media will continue to evolve online, but this is a huge development for it on the television, and as a parent I hope it will be worth spending some time there.
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