What a trip!
The whole thing goes back to 1995. Jill and Tracey came home to San Diego from that vacation to Jill's friend's farm outside Park City, wanting to extend the experience for their kids.
"All that was out there was 'Barney' and 'Sesame Street,'" Tracey recalls.
They talked to a few people about their idea to create a home video featuring Wilbur the calf and focusing on early literacy. Someone sent them to Greg Anton, who had been doing video production in San Diego for years.
He gave Jill and Tracey a list of 20 things to do to get their idea closer to reality.
"He didn't expect them to come back for two weeks," says Kim Anton, Greg's wife. "They were back in two days."
One thing led to another, and the team expanded to include Kim. The three women formed a production company - EKA Productions - and created three children's videos starring Wilbur the calf, shot on location on the Utah farm. They kept their Southern California homes running, met the demands of their six children and marketed and took orders and packaged and shipped videos out of their garages.
"That wasn't fun," Tracey says as those scenes from the video history of the company play on the TV in Kim's family room. The women groan and laugh. But the videos won lots of awards, including a Parents' Choice Award, an Oppenheim Award, Child Magazine's Top 10 Videos of the year, and Parenting Magazine's Video Magic Award.
So, they thought, why stop there, why not try a TV series?
Little did they know ...
Jill and Kim flew to Dallas to meet the creator of "Barney." And because Wilbur is a puppet, the women also approached the masters - the Henson Group.
"Henson wasn't taking on any new properties," Kim says.
"We would freeze the TV screen (at the end of children's shows) and see the producers' names and call them," Tracey remembers.
They weren't cutting any deals, but everyone they talked to gave them a little information, a little advice and, if they were lucky, another contact.
They called on their professional skills: Tracey, 43, has an advertising and sales background at The New Yorker magazine; Kim, 49, worked in sales and marketing in the financial industry; and Jill, 51, is an attorney who specialized in business law. They needed every bit of their knowledge for business development, contracts and negotiations, and the tenacity and dedication the venture would require.
"One of Henson's producers told us we needed to contact Cathy Chilco," Jill says.
Chilco, a Canadian producer/director, was vice president and executive producer of International Production at Sesame Workshop. She told them that another Canadian company, Mercury Filmworks, was doing new work with puppets using a technology called Shadowmation (a high-tech combination of animatronics, live action, and computer animation).
Things slowly fell into place. Chilco Productions and Mercury Filmworks, along with Discovery Kids and the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., partnered with the San Diego women's EKA Productions to make Wilbur's TV series a reality.
Then there was the matter of finding approximately $6 million to produce the first 26 episodes of the show.
"That covers all aspects of a television production budget: writers, voice talent, puppeteers, puppet designers, composers, animation costs, editors, set designers, producers' and directors' fees, studio costs, equipment, among a myriad of other costs involved in producing a series," Jill wrote in an e-mail.
And that was on top of other substantial expenses just to ready an episode to show to potential "buyers" at the networks and studios. This was going to be a whole lot more expensive than the videos, which the women financed themselves. And they are very thankful for what they call an angel investor, a couple the women don't name, who have followed Wilbur's success from the beginning.
The last 10 years have been quite an odyssey. And for the women and their families, this has become more than a job.
"Our three families are very intertwined," Jill says. "The guys are golfing and surfing buddies, our kids are all best friends, and we constantly have pool parties, barbecues, and we take at least one if not more trips together as couples and as families a year. Tracey and I and our husbands just got back from Cabo for the weekend, and Kim stayed home and held down the fort!"
Ironically, the drive to fill a void in their own children's media is moot. Their preschoolers are now all grown up. Kurt Luedtke is 15, and brother Erik is 18; Ashley Anton is 19, and her sisters Alyssa and Avery are 16 and 12; Allie Hornbuckle is 12, and her sister Lauren, not even born when Wilbur was conceived, is 9.
Oh, and Wilbur is now a 2,000-pound steer.
Jill, Tracey, and Kim recall years of putting the kids to bed and working till 1 in the morning or later at one of their homes. They still often work odd hours, taking conference calls from New York or Canada, looking at unfinished episodes the producers send for comment, but they have moved from their garages to real home offices. Kim's is just off her family room.
They remember all the people who turned them down, who thought they were just three naive moms with a wild idea. They acknowledge there were times when they thought it might never happen.
And they won't ever forget the entertainment lawyer they met with along the way.
"He said, 'You guys will never make it. You're just doing this as a hobby.' You don't tell us that," Jill says.
"It's the 4 G's that got us through," she adds "A great idea, girlfriends, guts, and God."
SIDEBAR
Animal puppets inspired by real-life children
By Jane Clifford
In creating Wilbur and his friends, Kim Anton, Jill Luedtke, and Tracey Hornbuckle chose the kinds of animals preschoolers first learn about and then gave them personalities that reflect the stages of a preschooler's life.
"Libby is a sweet 2-year-old little lamb," she says. "Dasha, the inquisitive duck, is your typical 4-year-old, running around, taking in the whole world. We created Ray the rooster (he's older than Wilbur but has no exact age), because we wanted some comic relief in the show and we thought parents could relate to his character."
Not surprisingly, the sophisticated puppets include characteristics of real kids in the women's lives.
"We designed Wilbur after one of our sons who was 8," Anton says. "Libby was modeled after one of our daughters, and Dasha was inspired by a friend's precocious 4-year-old."
When new episodes of "Wilbur" began airing recently in conjunction with National Literacy Month, young viewers started learning from situations the characters face. Wilbur reinforces that books are full of ideas and can help them solve their problem. Wilbur chooses an actual book, and the story comes to life, taking young viewers into an animated world. As Wilbur narrates and turns pages, tracking words with his hoof, kids at home see the characters face a dilemma similar to the one Wilbur and his friends are having.
For example, when Ray stops helping Dasha and Libby with a game they are playing, a book titled "Dolphy Learns Two Important Words" teaches them why saying thank you really matters. When Dasha can't find her friend Fuzzy, the book "The Caterpillar's Big Change" teaches Dasha and Wilbur how Fuzzy turned into a butterfly.
Each half-hour episode features two situations, and Wilbur and his pals don't solve the problem at first, so real kids retell the story in their own words to help Wilbur and friends. The main message - whether it's sharing or learning about nature or the importance of thank you - is reinforced by live-action sequences, where real kids demonstrate the concept. Lively music, charming characters, dancing and more combine to promote Wilbur's mantra: "Books are mooovelous."
The women scoured the Internet for experts in early childhood education and consulted them on the show's content, aimed at helping preschoolers increase their vocabulary and listening comprehension. Children also see how books "work" - the print on a page symbolizes words, the words tell a story, pictures illustrate what the words are saying, and to find out what comes next, all they have to do is turn the page. When the kids on the show retell a story, it helps the kids at home develop the skills of sequencing, story structure, identifying concepts and making inferences.
The show, which debuted in April, already has become quite popular with parents. Some ask if there are stuffed versions of the characters (not yet).
Particularly gratifying, says Tracey: "Moms or dads are telling us their kids love Wilbur and they're walking around with books."
