Word: kirkes
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...loud, 90 miles a minute, always trying to get something going," says ex-boyfriend Robert Hall. "Lana wanted to be 'in the scene' so she could meet someone to help her along." Her website exhibits photos of her with soap-opera actors as well as with older stars like Kirk Douglas and Paul Newman. But her screen credits (Barbarian Queen) were not up to that level. Friends described her as always ready to serve as "arm candy"--that is, a pretty date--to industry players, in hopes of landing a role, selling a screenplay idea or hustling...
Target and Kirk, however, are trying to take a reasonably successful franchise to a whole new level. Children's-merchandise aisles are dominated by characters from television and movies. It's rare that a character known through books alone can win the instant toddler recognition that drives many kids' purchases. And while Kirk's books have been big sellers, he has not had the runaway success of Ian Falconer's spunky little pig Olivia or President Bush's personal favorite, Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Still, neither Falconer's nor Carle's works are being spun into anything...
Target has taken an eccentric toymaker's vision and turned it into a product line. While Kirk says he and an assistant have done "thousands and thousands" of drawings for possible products, Target is manufacturing and delivering merchandise in just three areas: clothes, furniture and gardening appliances. Of these, the gardening tools (including watering cans, stepping stones, sprinklers and kneepads) look the most irresistible, perhaps because they constitute the least exploited category...
...might help things along that a Miss Spider TV special will run on Nickelodeon at the end of March and that Callaway and Kirk are also developing a TV series based on both Miss Spider and Nova the robot. On the other hand, the territory they're entering is not unpopulated. Rolie Polie Olie, a geometric tyke who lives on a robotic planet and who, like Nova, is a computer-generated image, is already on the Disney Channel, and his catchy theme song is lodged in the junior set's hearts. (Callaway doesn't see it as a threat...
...Kirk, he's happy to have come full circle, to be back making something again. And he isn't worried that grownup marketing concerns will make it difficult for him to summon his inner boy. "For me, it's more of an effort getting out of the place where I think like a child," he says. Financial maturity has its upside too: more pocket money to blow on robots, other toys and old woodworking tools on eBay. Not to mention the freedom to create more fantasy worlds. After all, what's the fun in growing...