The Franchise Surrounding "Swampy"

Hey, have you played "Where My Water?" yet? What do you think?

Disney, as I reported earlier, is hoping to build a franchise around the star of "Where's My Water" - Swampy the Alligator. This Bloomberg article highlights that further, with Disney hoping that the merchandising for Swampy will take-off as much as it did for Angry Birds.

So far the Swampy experiment is going swimmingly. Following its Sept. 22 release, “Where’s My Water?” quickly jumped to the top of the Apple App Store’s paid applications chart, displacing the record-setting “Angry Birds” game from the No. 1 spot for three weeks.
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Disney already has Swampy’s career plotted out. A 12- episode animated series will air on Disney.com and on Google Inc.’s YouTube sometime in the first quarter of 2012, part of a deal that will have the two companies spend as much as $15 million on co-branded content. A book and a movie featuring the cute green gator could follow, Decrem says.
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The company aims to replicate Rovio Entertainment Oy’s success in catapulting “Angry Birds” into something beyond a digital phenomenon.

The Finnish gamemaker sells 1 million plush toys a month -- along with T-shirts, school lunch boxes and other gear -- and publishes a comic strip online. There are also plans for educational books and a movie.

Certainly, Disney can take Swampy to heights (or depths, in this case) that the maker of Angry Birds do not have immediate access to. Still, I think that Angry Birds is a fad, very much like the Rubik's Cube and Cabbage Patch Dolls. Can Swampy sustain a  popularity beyond being just a fad? I think they should run with Perry the Platypus, because he already has an almost cult following, even among adults. I want to see a Perry character at the theme parks.

Speaking of Angry Birds, don't you think that Disney should try and license it as an attraction inside Innoventions? After all, it is a physics-based app, and might teach kids about simple, basic, Newtonian mechanics on 2-D motion. It is similar to the projectile problems that many intro physics students encounter. How they could accomplish this in an entertaining way, I haven't thought it through yet. But even with Swampy, how about a lesson on gravity?

Zz.