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For Young Readers, Will Disney’s Hex Mark the Spot?
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When it comes to exporting popular American kidculture to other parts of the planet, the Walt Disney Co. is the out-and-out, hands-down, no-doubt-about-it world champ.
Now Disney is turning the tables and importing a fad.
You heard right. Batten down the hatches and lock up your young ones. It’s a book! It’s a TV show! And it just might be a multimedia, money-minting onslaught coming straight from Italy.
It’s “W.I.T.C.H.”
Which, according to Disney’s marketing machine, is a group of five girls, in their early teens, “with special powers to keep the world safe from evil.” But there is nothing to keep America safe from “W.I.T.C.H.”
The company will introduce the first couple of volumes in a series of paperback books, selling for $4.99 apiece, next month. A TV show based on the characters is slated for Disney cable next year.
Deborah Dugan, president of Disney Publishing Worldwide, says, “We are building a major franchise.”
Disney, which bills itself as the world’s largest publisher of children’s books and magazines, is hoping to slip the world another Mickey. “W.I.T.C.H.” comic magazines are already published monthly in 64 countries and in 27 languages. More than 1 million copies are sold each month. In France and Germany, kids buy more than 100,000 copies each month. In Italy, more than 200,000 copies are sold monthly.
Though the stories are mostly published as comic books in other countries, the Disney brain trust believes that American girls will prefer chapter-book storytelling, at least in the beginning.
The letters of the title stand for the first names of the main characters — Will, Irma, Taranee, Cornelia and Hay Lin. Each heroine has control over a natural force or element: energy, water, fire, earth and air.
In the first American paperback, “The Power of Five,” the girls meet at their school, Sheffield Institute, and discover they have super powers. They also have wings. Together, they battle monsters.
Translated from Italian, the book is written in a breezy style. For example: The principal, Mrs. Knickerbocker, “stalked around the school with her ample chest thrust out before her and her even more ample backside swishing from side to side with terrifying force. It reminded Taranee of the swirling brushes of a street sweeper, dead set on ridding the hallways of filth (otherwise known as loitering students).”
Disney sees grand possibilities for “W.I.T.C.H.,” including action toys, clothing and maybe even a movie. There is a TV series in development in France. “The TV show will be edgier,” Dugan says. “It will draw more boys. It will have lots of action and be more cutting edge.”
Disney has also created Web sites for fans in Finland, the Netherlands and other spots around the globe. “Girls in Poland are talking to girls in Brazil,” Dugan says.
In the face of its split with Pixar Studios (responsible for silver screen hits such as “Toy Story” and “Finding Nemo”), rating woes at its ABC network and an internal power clash between Chief Executive Michael Eisner and former director Roy Disney that coincided with a multiyear stock slide, Disney is hungry for some hopeful signs.
The first “W.I.T.C.H.” story was published in 2001 in Italy — where Disney has a lucrative tradition — by the same team of Milanese cartoonists that produces a weekly magazine featuring Topolino, the Italian version of Mickey Mouse. Topolino was introduced in 1932. Average weekly sales of Topolino in Italy these days: 320,000 copies. In Germany, sales of Mickey Mouse magazine are even bigger.
Several years ago, the Italian group was assigned “to come up with a concept that would appeal primarily to girls,” says Ellen Morgenstern, communications director for Disney Publishing Worldwide. “W.I.T.C.H.” has worked in every place it’s been launched, she says, even in China and other “countries that are very stringent about the content they allow you to bring in.”
The writing is not edited for each country, Morgenstern says, but sometimes illustrations are redrawn to be more geo-appropriate. “In Saudi Arabia we had to make the socks on the girls go up a little higher.”
Will “W.I.T.C.H.” cast a spell on American girls? Sheilah Egan, a bookseller at A Likely Story in Alexandria, says that her store will definitely be stocking “W.I.T.C.H.” “They’re going to be cute,” she says. But, she adds: “It’s very odd. They are manufacturing a set of characters not based on a previous book, a fairy tale or something.”
She points out that “people are hungry for the fanciful.”
Other contemporary series, such as “The Babysitters Club” and “Sweet Valley High,” also appeal to girls.
Sometimes, Egan says, series appear and then just fade away. “Other times,” she says, “they hit at just the right time.”
Deborah Johnson, book buyer for Child’s Play on Connecticut Avenue NW, says she has seen the books in Disney’s spring catalogue, but she is not planning to buy any. “I believe in books that come from authors’ minds and not from committees,” she says.
“There are so many good books in the world that speak to people more directly and come from writers’ hearts as well.”
She adds, “Why give children books that encourage them to watch television?”
Staff writer Frank Ahrens contributed to this report.
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