After he returned from England, he formed The itsy bitsy Entertainment Company with offices in an extra bedroom of his Manhattan apartment. The first call he made was to Dean Koocher, an old friend who was working at Brown & Williamson as a regional credit manager. Viselman knew he needed someone with credible business experience to satisfy potential investors and financiers. At first Koocher agreed to help out in his spare time; eventually he signed on for good. "Dean just started taking on credit cards with my name on them and we started charging things," Viselman recalls. "It was very, very frightening."
Children's entertainment "is just one big card game and one big optical illusion."
In the meantime, Viselman and Koocher, neither of whom took a salary for at least a year, searched for investors. In the spring of 1996, itsy bitsy had $130,000 in the bank, much of it from the sale to PBS of Ragdoll's Tots TV series, a show that featured three children living together in a cottage. It was at that point that Viselman announced to Koocher that he wanted to spend $120,000 at the company's first licensing show. Not surprisingly, the audacity of Viselman's plan stunned Koocher. "We had finally started taking a little bit of salary and stopped eating pasta every day," Koocher says. "I'm like, 'Kenny, what are you doing?!"
What he was doing was following the lead of Blake Carrington. To explain his go-for-broke strategy, Viselman -- who is unabashed about his penchant for drawing life's lessons from the plots of TV shows -- recalls a scene from Dynasty, the '80s prime-time soap. "Blake had just lost everything and Krystle was like, 'Oh, no, what are we going to do? What are we going to do?' And Blake says something like," -- and here Viselman lowers his voice to mimic Blake -- "'Krystle, you open up that safe and you get out your best jewels. We're throwing a party tonight!"
By the end of 1996, they had convinced Troy, Mich.-based Handleman Company, the country's largest distributor of pre-recorded music, to purchase 19% of itsy bitsy, which allowed Viselman to invest further in promotions. Indeed, making a splash for itsy bitsy -- particularly at industry trade shows -- was key to his strategy. Typically, there are thousands of properties displayed at the licensing show; Viselman made sure his stood out. "What I've learned in this industry," he says, "is that perception is reality. The licensing show, children's entertainment, the entertainment industry in general is just one big card game and one big optical illusion."
The secret series
Tots TV, which debuted on PBS in October 1996, did not prove to be a breakout series. One of the kids spoke Spanish, and perhaps, Viselman suggests, America was not ready for a bilingual program. Still, by the end of its first year, itsy bitsy had six employees -- and the rights to a mysterious, hush-hush Ragdoll property that for a long time was referred to only as the "the secret series." Catherine Lyon, who at the time was at PBS and who now works with Viselman, recalls PBS's early discussions with Ragdoll's Anne Wood: "We would say, 'Anne, tell us about the new show.' And Anne would reply, 'I can't. Kenny won't let me."
The show was Teletubbies, and Viselman knew from the outset that it would be controversial. It was a show that appealed to a TV audience that previously had not existed, the one-year-old and younger demographic. It featured four characters -- Tinky Winky, Laa-Laa, Dipsy, and Po -- who have televisions embedded in their abdomens, who barely speak except for a syllable here or there, and who dance, fall down, and give each other "biiiig huggggggs." To some adult eyes it was an acid trip; to others it was visual Muzak, an attempt to narcotize the youngest generation of TV viewers ever. To Viselman, though, it was mesmerizingly innocent, perfect for very young children, whose parents, like it or not, often plop them down in front of a TV. And, of course, it was a potential gold mine in licensing.
Not surprisingly, given the show's controversial nature, PBS was slow to commit. To hurry the network along, Viselman faked a hunger strike. Every day for 33 days, he would fax Alice Cahn, then PBS's director of children's programming, messages such as, "I would eat my right arm off for the taste of a knish. Please respond," or "Please hurry. My mom is starting to worry."
"It was silly," laughs Cahn, "but you have got to love him.... "
Viselman was determined to place the show on PBS because he wanted that "PBS Good Housekeeping seal of approval, that quality-assurance thing." How could Teletubbies be bad for kids if it's being shown by the same folks who gave us Sesame Street?
He finally sold Teletubbies to PBS in late 1997. By then, the show had debuted in the U.K. to much fanfare -- and much consternation. "Anne Wood was pilloried as the woman who wants to ruin early childhood," says Cahn. As a result, by the time PBS was readying to launch in the United States in April 1998, "Anne called us and said, 'I can't. I just can't go through it again," Cahn recalls. That left Viselman and Cahn to promote the series. "We were doing the news shows and taking flak from parents and critics calling up and accusing us of being the devil incarnate," Cahn says. "And Kenny was a tremendous spokesperson for the series, because he truly believed in it."
Viselman was also able to capitalize on the fact that, even before the television show arrived in the States, it had taken on a life of its own. In August 1997, seven months before the U.S. debut, The Wall Street Journal ran a front-page article on the Teletubbies craze in the U.K. Among other things, the article reported that Tinky Winky had become a gay icon; that scholars were forming groups to delve into the gender and race subtext of the Teletubbies; and that an Anglican minister had pronounced that the Tubbies represented ancient Christian rituals.
As if on cue, Falwell went public with charges that Teletubbies promote homosexuality.
But the article also detailed the Tubbies' ardent following in the U.K. And all of a sudden, potential licensees in the United States, who had been leery of the show and not returning itsy bitsy's phone calls, sprung up. " The Teletubbies had been a hard sell," says Kim Winkeleer, who was then itsy bitsy's executive director of off-screen entertainment. "After we hit the cover of The Wall Street Journal, the switchboard lit up. It was lunacy!" As the launch neared, PBS took out large billboards in New York City and Los Angeles. By May 1998, when the Teletubbies dolls were introduced into FAO Schwarz, lines of people were clamoring for them.
