Remember your childhood love of Choose Your Own Adventure books? Where you were the star of the story and could decide whether to stay and fight the ninja/dinosaur/spy, or run away screaming/fall in love/jump off a cliff?
Well now the format has been updated YouTube style.
Chad Villella, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Rob Polonsky (collectively known as CMR) have produced a series called The Timemachine about three 30-something office dudes (Chad, Matt & Rob) who are trying to make it to a 12:00 pm meeting. The trouble is that Rob has stumbled across a timemachine, and the three are now bouncing between multiple eras. Each webisode is a few minutes long with a choice at the end (”Do Chad and Matt get in the garbage can?” – “Get In” / “Not a Chance”). Clicking your answer propels you to the next mini episode in the series (which is surprisingly addictive).
According to BuzzFeed half a million viewers have started the journey, but only 100,000 have made it to the end.
Katalyst Media (Ashton Kutcher’s company responsible for shows like Beauty & the Geek and Punk’d) recently announced that their latest project, Blah Girls, will be distributed by MySpace TV. The short webisodes, that run anywhere from 45 seconds to 2 minutes, feature the adventures of three gossip queen teenagers – Tiffany, Britney and Krystle.
The shows are a little South Park, a little Powerpuff Girls, a little random YouTube meme. The first show I watched featured the trio crashing a sweet 16 party they weren’t invited to only to discover it was lame until a photo-real Miley Cyrus floated in on a unicorn to spice things up.
The webisodes have generated pretty paltry traffic so far on MySpace – garnering on average between 700 and 1,300 views – with the most popular hitting 16,000 +. For now the comments are fairly negative (with users especially slamming blatent product placement for companies like Vitamin Water).
It will be interesting to watch how the show grows. Although internet video is huge, made for web TV series from major producers – like Michael Eisner’s Prom Queen and The Burg – have yet to take off in any serious way.
