Animax Spawns French Speaking Siamese Bat Child

Looks like Animax Entertainment got roped into a little bit of a controversy. The wrestling tabloids have gone into gossip mongering hyperdrive over the cartoon we produce for Vince McMahon and WWE called Mr. McMahon's Kiss My Ass Club.

Yes, there are tabloids that cover the world of pro wrestling and in particular WWE. The journalistic integrity of these rags is mostly on par with Weekly World News, but then again, they don't really need any. They traffic in the sensational world of wrestling, so of course their reporting will be sensationalist. We were even more surprised though to see the "controversy" covered on Frederator, so we decided to issue a statement (we too feel Britney Spears' and Lindsay Lohan's tabloid pain.)

Yes, WWE was sued by the creators of Assy McGee. That's about where the truth in these articles ends and the rest of the assertions are baseless.

• Mr. McMahon has been doing the ass bit in the ring for years now.
  
• The initial idea for the cartoon came from WWE, but we wrote all the scripts and we designed the characters. (Only 2 episodes have been released but others are in the can.) Everything is original - Mr. McMahon's ass is 100% genuine grade A beef.
  
• We knew about Assy McGee. We were already in development and production on Mr. McMahon's ass when we saw the trailer on YouTube. We thought it looked interesting, but that, basically, it was boring. (Watched an episode on Cartoon Network recently - like the intro and that's about it.) But the existence or discovery of Assy McGee had no influence over the stories, look or anything done for WWE.
  
• The base level conception of the shows are very different. While they are both asses, they are as different as Mickey Mouse and Mighty Mouse.
  
• The WWE show launched before Assy did.
  

So where does that leave us? We're still transmedia. We're still funny. And, to be clear to our fans, even though we're getting the celebrity tabloid treatment, we're just like you.

Animax Got Into MIT!!!

Congratulations Animax! We got into MIT! Actually we got into the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium blog because of one of our transmedia productions. Huh? Not even wikipedia has a listing for "transmedia." We're pretty sure after reading this, that transmedia means how a particular piece of content is handled across various storytelling media - broadcast, broadband, theatrical, retail entertainment, etc. and how each piece of content and it's treatment contributes to a meta-narrative spanning across all media in aggregate. We're not exactly sure that's what it means because our brain started to hurt trying to understand all the MIT-speak (although, reading Geoffrey Long's blog helped.)

Anyways, all the fuss is being made over the highbrow cartoon we produce for WWE called Mr. McMahon's Kiss My Ass. It turns out that KMA is one of the "stranger transmedia products" Sam Ford has ever heard of - now, that's a pull-quote! Ford is a 2007 Masters of Science Candidate in Comparative Media Studies at MIT and is entering his second year as a media analyst for the Convergence Culture Consortium. He's also a fan of wrestling -- he didn't go as far as to say he's a fan of Mr. McMahon's posterior. KMA qualifies as transmedia because McMahon exploits his rump live in the ring (theatrical entertainment), on TV (broadcast entertainment), in print, and now, with our help, online. By the way, the latest episode features Mel Gibson.

Upon further review it seems like we've been involved in a number of transmedia productions not the least of which is the one Animax won an Emmy for - ESPN's animated Off-Mikes which spans many of the same media as WWE including radio.

P.S. Hey MIT, we feel like we deserve an honorary doctorate after trying to figure this transmedia stuff out.

WWE - The Passion of the Ass Starring Mel Gibson

Tonight the latest cartoon that Animax Entertainment produced for WWE went live. It's called Mel Gibson's Passion of the Ass and it features Vince McMahon taking the Apocalypto director to task for being a drunk, a racist and an all around ass. Mel Gibson might have been #1 at the box office this past weekend but Mr. McMahon's ass is tops.