[Tense, dramatic music from the Jaws theme song (main title tune) plays]
[Man on tannoy (loud speaker) at the surfing event Zoey (Lucy Fry) and Kiki (Jessica Green) are attending: Sorry! Sorry girls, I didn't mean to scare you. There was a mix-up on the music. Let's try another one!]
Brand new Alien Surf Girls, Starts 28th January, on Nickelodeon!
£500k losses for fun parkAlso, from This Is Money:
[Nickelodeon UK and Ireland presenter Anna Williamson and] David Hasselhoff launches Nickelodeon Land.
Washout summers have taken their toll on Blackpool Pleasure Beach after poor weather hit profits.
Bosses at the family-owned attraction say the past two wet summers and current gloomy economic climate have affected operating profit, which fell £400,000 on the previous year’s results.
Although they say sales increased by seven per cent to £31.6m, this was £2m less than budget.
Annual results for Blackpool Pleasure Beach Holdings, which includes the main theme park, hotel and the South Shore Mutual Insurance Company, show the group made a bottom-line loss of £524,000 in 2012 compared to a profit of £329,000 in 2011.
However, the Pleasure Beach has been heavily investing in new attractions such as the £9m Nickelodeon Land in 2011 and the Wallace and Gromit ride set to open this summer.
Managing director Amanda Thompson said: “The first year’s operation of Nickleodeon Land resulted in an increased volume of visitors and an enhancement to their visitor experience.
“The directors consider the extent to which the increase in visitor numbers and average spend per head was less than budget partially reflects the difficult economic climate.
“Since weather during the key 2011 season was materially worse than that of 2010, this is the main reason for the shortfall in sales compared to budget.
“Cost increases, which included expenditure to further improve the experience for our guests were in line with budget and, as a result operating profit was down by £400,000 on last year’s results.
“During 2012, when the weather has been on par with 2011, Nickelodeon Land, our six-acre themed amusement park, has been instrumental in an increase in guests which has generated additional turnover.
“This year we are confident the opening of a Wallace & Gromit-themed ride, an investment of £5.25m, will see a further increase of visitors.”
Wallace & Gromit to help troubled Blackpool Pleasure Beach with new ride
Wallace & Gromit might make unlikely superheroes, but this spring the pair will ride to the rescue of Blackpool Pleasure Beach.
The worst summer weather in 100 years in 2012 meant that the 42-acre leisure park fell short of expected takings by about £1.6million.
The company recorded a loss for the year to April of £1.3million on turnover of £27million.
Say cheese: The four-minute Wallace & Gromit ride is set to open in Blackpool in April
Directors of the park, which was founded in 1896, said the poor weather was the main reason for the shortfall, though the number of visitors was actually up.
This was helped in part by the first full year of Nickelodeon Land, a six-acre site with 12 rides featuring Nickelodeon characters such as SpongeBob SquarePants and Dora the Explorer.
Now the park, which is run by Amanda Thompson, great-granddaughter of founder William Bean, is preparing for the launch of the Wallace & Gromit-themed Thrill-O-Matic ride.
This will take passengers through scenes in the life of the Oscar-winning Lancashire duo, where they will have A Grand Day Out, visit The Wrong Trousers, take A Close Shave and deal with A Matter of Loaf And Death.
The four-minute fully enclosed ride cost Blackpool Pleasure Beach £5.25million to build, helped by a £2million Government loan. It is scheduled to open in April.
MTV-branded stationery hits the UK and Ireland
Nickelodeon & Viacom Consumer Products secures deal with Blue Sky Designs.
MTV-branded stationery and paper goods will be hitting a raft of High Street stores in the UK and Ireland, thanks to a deal between Nickelodeon and Blue Sky Designs.
The products - covering a variety of categories from binders and social stationery to pens, pencils and stickers - will be sold across a range of stores, including specialists and mid-tier retailers in spring/summer 2013, before launching to the mass market in 2014.
Price points will range from £1.99 to £24.99.
The fashion forward range incorporates bright, bold designs with a retro twist.
The agreement between Nickelodeon & Viacom Consumer Products and Blue Sky Designs runs until the end of March 2015.
Tags: blue sky designs, mtv, nickelodeon & viacom consumer pr
Fanlala launches production facility, new web series
Tween online lifestyle community Fanlala is boosting its production output thanks to a newly launched Santa Monica-based studio that will focus on creating original new web series.
A range of Disney and Nickelodeon celebrity guests – including singer Keke Palmer and the band IM5 – have made appearances at the studio, which will churn out a crop of new web shows including a weekly music countdown series called The Fanlala 5ive, an online VOD series hosted by Radio Disney personality Daphne Blunt [...] entitled Daphne's Look of the Week, and a new fictional comedy series called Josie and Her Celebrity Friends.
While such content will continue to be showcased on the Fanlala website, the company is now also working with key distribution partners including YouTube, AOL On, Blinkx and Kabillion on Demand.
Along with quizzes and pools, new video content contributed to Fanlala’s growing traffic numbers last year. The social destination also features customized music, entertainment news as well as community features.
Tags: Disney, Fanlala, Nickelodeon
Nets no longer kid around
Cultural scolds lack reliable argument on media curbs
A common refrain emerges during the "Superheroes" chapter of "Pioneers of Television," the PBS documentary series returning this month that nostalgically looks at the medium's past.
In almost every program -- from "Wonder Woman" to "The Incredible Hulk" to "The Greatest American Hero" -- performers talk about chafing against interference from "the network," which invariably wanted to make the shows lighter, broader, more comedic.
This impulse to tone down material might have been maddening, even infantilizing, but it wasn't wholly misguided, since back then kids still represented a major part of the networks' primetime audience. And while it's clear a more mature approach has resulted in better TV and movies -- there's no comparing the campy '60s Adam West "Batman" played to Christian Bale's "Dark Knight" -- excising children from the equation is one of the least understood elements in the darkened nature of our media.
Kids haven't been forgotten, of course, but rather sequestered -- segregated onto their own brightly colored island, where they can safely pick from a bountiful menu of items like Pixar movies and Nickelodeon. Even disadvantaged kids have more options, as marketers eagerly slice the youth audience into tiny niches, from preschool to tweens.
Blocking access to baser media amounts to a giant technological game of Whac-a-Mole, but parents serious about governing their young kids' media needn't worry quite so much about children idly flipping on the TV looking for something to watch. In this personalized environment, it's all waiting there for them, mediated by devices or services like DVRs and Netflix.
As for kids seeing inappropriate fare on broadcast TV, for all the media children under 12 devour, they're simply no longer a significant component of the audience.
During the current season, a mere handful of primetime shows on the major networks average a 2 rating or better among kids, and they're a pretty innocuous bunch: "Sunday Night Football," "The Voice," "Once Upon a Time," "The Big Bang Theory" and "The Simpsons." A decade ago, the number was six times that high.
Networks are more than happy to ignore tykes because -- like most of their grandparents -- they can't sell them to advertisers. The watershed moment came in the 1990s, when Fox began scheduling edgier fare earlier in the evening, and NBC moved "Mad About You" and subsequently "Friends" into the 8 p.m. slot.
The so-called "Family Hour" had always been an ephemeral notion -- advanced mostly by cultural scolds -- but as TV exec Garth Ancier said at the time, "When Fox started moving shows that did well with adults (to 8 p.m.), it was like a dam was broken, and everybody started programming differently."
Removing kids from the conversation, however, leaves those fretful about the relationship between media and society with at best a wobbly leg to stand on. Politically speaking, protecting children has always been a winner -- the kind of argument it's difficult to rebut.
Seeking to curb what adults choose to watch is more problematic. Granted, some might think Fox's new serial-killer drama "The Following" pushes too far into the realm of grim and icky, or find CBS' "2 Broke Girls" too raunchy, but others won't. Beyond speculating about what might potentially inspire disturbed minds, such a debate is purely subjective.
Concerns pertaining to children represented the system's one reliable brake to restrain entertainment standards, for good and ill. With that responsibility diminished (if not, perhaps, wholly removed), the foundation for policing content begins to crumble. Sure, slap on ratings or advisories to assist parents, try shaming those who deserve it, but after that it's let the marketplace decide and the media buyer beware.
Some critics won't easily relinquish the gauzy ideal of a collective hearth where families gather around the TV together -- an image as dated as a clunky old cathode-ray-tube set.
Even so, shifting technology and exploding choices have conspired to undercut "Save the children" as a battle cry for those alarmed by a perceived coarsening of the media environment.
That's not to say such considerations lack merit or don't warrant discussion. Still, for those who see the steady drip toward greater creative license as a tide of raw sewage, invoking the kids won't turn back the clock to TV's pioneer days.
