Media News - the multimedia rundown

Cat in the Hat is all that!

Portfolio Entertainment has secured a raft of new deals for hit 2D animated series The Cat In The Hat Knows A Lot About That! and additional sales for holiday movie The Cat In The Hat Knows A Lot About Christmas!

New broadcast partners for The Cat In The Hat Knows A Lot About That! includeSky Kids (UK) for season 2 and season 3. Sky Kids is also taking four educational games based on the show - ‘Buildama-loo’, ‘Invention Engine’, ‘Camp Time’ and ‘Arcade Escape’.

Fuelled by curiosity and imagination, the Cat leads best friends Nick and Sally on extraordinary adventures into the natural world. With the help of Thing One and Thing Two and their whimsically versatile Thingama-jigger they’ll go anywhere from the bottom of the ocean to the centre of a beehive. The Cat in the Hat ‘knows a lot’ but he doesn’t know everything, making him the perfect guide to learning and fun.

Inspired by the top-rated, fun-fi lled animated original series, The Cat In The Hat Knows A Lot About That Christmas! is a one-hour holiday movie, originally broadcast on PBS Kids, bringing our favourite characters together to discover the magic of Christmas.

Kittens explode onto Switch!

Multiplayer card game Exploding Kittens is now available on Nintendo Switch.

Gamers can play with friends in the same room or online, play with strangers in online play or play single-player against kitty-bot opponents. This version of the game includes the Streaking Kittens, Party Pack, Betrayal Pack expansions, exclusive cards and illustrations by The Oatmeal.

With millions of games sold and downloaded, Exploding Kittens is a game for players of all ages who are into kittens, explosions, laser beams and sometimes goats!

In 2020, Exploding Kittens reached the milestone of selling more than 11 million games.

L.O.L. Surprise! joins Roblox

Popular collectable dolls L.O.L. Surprise! have joined the digital world with a L.O.L. Surprise Offi cial Party.

This kid-safe digital game, launched on April 2, brought global, popular gaming infl uencers into the experience playing directly with fans in the lead-up to launch.

Working with SuperAwesome’s Game With Me tool, kids have been able to experience a moneycan’t-buy opportunity to play live with their gaming heroes, as well as provide their own insights and feedback on how to enhance and improve the game play.

The free gaming experience includes a wide range of features linked to the toy brand, including interactive doll characters, L.O.L. Surprise! outfi ts and accessories, fun dance-offs, surprising challenges with unlockable rewards, and more. Designed for co-play, the game seeks to engage parents in their children’s play to create fun digital experiences for the whole family.

The game will have the highest possible safety measures in place to safeguard fans playing on the Roblox platform, including realtime AI moderation, removal of in-game purchases, and daily compliance monitoring.

Breyer horses saddle up with puppets in Piper’s Pony Tales

Epic Story Media Inc. (ESM) and kids and Milkcow Media have teamed up to co-produce a new short-form series called Piper’s Pony Tales created by Milkcow Media’s Alexander Bar ( responsible for Ricky Zoom, Wolf Joe, Ranger Rob, and Mike the Knight).

Targeted at preschoolers, the series brings the world of ponies to life through kids’ imagination using highlyarticulated puppets. The series will launch this month on a dedicated YouTube channel with Epic Story Media handling all licensing and merchandising, and global content distribution.

ESM has signed Breyer Horses as the Master Toy partner for the project in North America and LATAM and is currently in discussion with other global partners for toy and broadcast placement. Breyer, a division of Reeves International, Inc, is one of North America’s most iconic creators of collectable horses, producing the toys since 1950.

In the series, Piper loves to daydream about having a pony of her very own. But, for now, the closest thing she has is her toy horse, Spark and her stable playset. Piper has turned her playroom at home into a sprawling setting for making up Pony Tales. Together with her best friends, Casey and Paloma, the three use their well-loved toy ponies to act out exciting adventures. And when Piper makes up stories about her best horse friends, they magically come to life.