With the likes of Barney the Dinosaur and Dora the Explorer making comebacks in the past 12 months its not unusual to see kids brands reboot themselves for the next generation - but whilst some do it successfully, others don't quite hit the mark.
Managing IPs is not an easy business, and even when they’re flying high, they need constant investment to keep them viable for the long term. And nowhere is this more true than in one of the the biggest areas for licensing, kids TV.
Kids television is a hugely competitive place with new shows appearing and disappearing all the time. Many survive long enough to develop licensing programs but few manage to survive for the long term and become 'ever green'. It takes a huge amount of investment, planning, and in some cases luck, for your kids show to become an 'evergreen' such as PAW Patrol, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Sesame Street or Transformers.
Not every show can be a hit with kids or then use those ratings to create the right environment for a successful licensing program. So when a show does manage it, the IP owners are then keen to keep it around for as long as possible. Transformers, TMNT and He-Man are good examples of IPs that have been able to go quiet and come back, in new iterations, several times. Others such as ThunderCats and Duck Tales have tried to come back, sometimes more than once, but have not managed to replicate their original success.
Dora and Barney have both tried to return with new shows in the past. Dora & Friends, with an aged up Dora with a circle of friends to appeal to all demos, didn’t manage to recapture the magic in the same way as the original show and the proposed 2017 Barney reboot never made it to production.
What is it that makes the return of an IP successful? Or not? Looking at those that have succeeded in similar spaces, it often includes either going back to the roots of what made it successful in the first place or changing the format to make it more appealing to ever evolving tastes.
Dora’s fellow Nickelodeon stable mate Blue’s Clues made a successful return with a new host and updates to the original animated characters to widen the appeal to the more diverse audiences without losing the core values of the show.
Toy juggernaut LEGO struggled in the late Nineties when its efforts to innovate, like launching more action figure-esque models, didn’t resonate with kids. It was when it moved back to what kids wanted from them; building sets that allowed them to use their imagination, and licensed in some of the biggest kids IPs like Star Wars and Harry Potter that things started to turn back around.
Marvel had been struggling to break out of its comic book origins and was just at the start of its cinematic universe when Disney bought the company and with huge investment and long term planning, created the world's highest-grossing movie franchise, with a total box office revenue of over $31 billion. Disney, the world’s biggest licensor also created huge licensing programs that spoke to the wider audiences the films, and lately TV shows had reached. Although the Marvel universe has seen less successful film and TV projects compared to its peak, the upcoming slate looks very promising and will no doubt see the franchise grow its box office even further.
Sonic the Hedgehog has had an amazing comeback over the past few years, and not in its original incarnation in video games, but at the movie theatre. Although some of the recent Sonic video games did manage to repair some of the reputational damage that the games of the mid-noughties inflicted, it was the trilogy of live action movies that brought Sonic back again to the levels of his long term rival Mario. Sonic now has three films under his belt, totalling over $1 billion at the global box office, and has helped the Sonic IP make a resurgence with licensing deals with the likes of LEGO.
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, now 40 years old, are the masters of the comeback. With five different animated shows and seven theatrical films as well as numerous video games and waves of action figures and vehicles. And even a LEGO range.
The brand has successfully reinvented itself by keeping some things constant - the core values of the IP - the teenage, pizza loving, brothers with their distinct personalities. The content adapted to changes in taste by moving between different 2D and 3D formats, and to changes in attitudes to violence by changing a lot of the human foot soldiers to robots.
Kids IPs can be as much hit as miss, and proven success in the past does not always guarantee success in the future. Even with nostalgia and likely parental buy-in, kids have their own tastes. The new ways that kids engage with content, across streamers and YouTube to name just two, means that this space has also become even more competitive than it was before. There are so many things bidding for kids' attention that backing the IP that will be around for the long run and create successful licensing programs has become even more difficult.
Despite this it is an extremely exciting time to be in the kids entertainment space with huge appetites for it in all its forms. And this content can travel more easily around the world, with more scope for community building and licensing program building.
Which IPs do you think have successfully reinvented themselves to stick around for the long term? And which ones do you think didn't quite hit the mark?