Brown Bag Films’ IFTA nominated animated series, ‘The Octonauts’ is to air on the Disney Channel’s Disney Junior Channel across the US following a deal between sales agent Chorion and Disney. Brown Bag films are currently in development with a second series of the show.
‘The Octonauts’ launched on Cbeebies in the UK last October and centres around a team of undersea explorers based in ‘the octopod’ who are in search of adventure and fun. The series will air in the US in early 2012 joining the group’s other pre-school animation, ‘Doc McStuffins’ which is currently broadcasting on the Disney Junior channel.
Director of the first series of ‘The Octonauts’, Darragh O’Connell is aware of the huge effect this new move from Disney will have on the show’s audience. “The Disney Junior channel has a penetration of about 55 million homes in the U.S.”he explains. ”And the fact that ‘Doc Mc’ will be showing too is fairly amazing!”
Chorion has sold the animated shows to several other international broadcasters including RTÉ, TF1 in France, ABC in Australia, Discovery Kids in Latin America, MNet in South Africa, Yoope in Canada, RTP in Portugal, Disney in Japan and Truevision in Thailand.
“It’s just so funny because we went into production on ‘Octonauts’ without a U.S. broadcaster signed on, which is strange,” he tells us. “ And it was only when people saw what it was going to look like that the offers started coming in.”
A second series of the show is currently in development and Darragh tells us production will commence in May 2011. A director of the first series, Darragh will take on the role of executive producer for the second series with the director TBC. Gillian Higgins, producer of the first series will return to produce the second series.
