Kids Media Club Podcast

Jo Redfern, Andrew Williams, & Emily Horgan
  • 5.0 (6)
  • Entertainment News
  • Updated Weekly

Podcast meets industry water-cooler. We host weekly conversations with producers, animators, media analysts, game designers and the toy brands shaping what young audiences and consumers watch and play - co-hosted with a rotating cast of friends from the Kids Media industry.

  1. 3d ago

    Live from the Australian Children's Content Summit: The State of Australian Kids Media — with Jenny Buckland, Suzanne Ryan, and More

    Emily has travelled to Coffs Harbour for the Australian Children's Content Summit, and this episode is her dispatches from the ground — a series of short, sharp conversations captured across the event with some of the key figures shaping Australian kids content right now. First up is Jenny Buckland, CEO of the Australian Children's Television Foundation, who gives the clearest account of what happened to the Australian kids content industry when commercial broadcaster quotas were dropped in 2020 — and why the timing, colliding with the global streaming disruption, hit harder here than almost anywhere else. Then Suzanne Ryan, founder of both the ACCS itself and SLR Productions, on why she started the summit out of post-Covid isolation and producer fellowship — and why it landed at 260 attendees when she was hoping for 60. The episode also features a conversation with Barbara Stephens from Flying Bark Productions, whose studio is navigating the shift from traditional commissioning to digital-first IP development — including the freshly launched Doom Sweeper music video, which crossed 3 million YouTube views in its first weeks — and the argument that proof of concept is now proof of audience. As well as a discussion with Tina Harris, Co-Founder of Lah-Lah Productions. The thread running through all of it is the same one dominating kids media conversations everywhere: the traditional funding model is gone, the YouTube creator economy is thriving alongside it, and the most interesting opportunity right now is in the conversation between those two worlds.

  2. Aug 27 ·  Video

    How Bonkers Toys Built a Business on Digitally Native IP — with Lisa Wright and Julie Splendoria

    Emily is still in Australia, so Andy and Jo continue their deep dive into the toy industry with two guests from Bonkers Toys — Lisa Wright, Head of Licensing, and Julie Splendoria, VP of Marketing. It's a conversation that traces the arc from Slither.io and JoJo Siwa's bow to the present day, and makes a compelling case that Bonkers saw the YouTube-to-toy-aisle pipeline coming before almost anyone else in the industry. The origin story is a good one: Bonkers' CEO spotted the opportunity literally from the driver's seat on the school run, watching his kids obsess over Slither.io on their phones, and moved fast enough to be the first licensee on Ryan's World when YouTube creator toys were still being dismissed by retailers as a niche fluke. Lisa and Julie walk through how the team reads fandom — the science of views and subscriber growth, and the harder-to-quantify art of emotional hook and community intensity — and how that methodology has evolved as the landscape shifted from YouTube to TikTok to Roblox. The "playable props" strategy developed for Toys and Colors — seeding supersized versions of toys into content nine months before retail launch — is a standout example of how to build familiarity authentically rather than just blasting product placement. The episode closes with a Q4 outlook: unboxing and blind box collectibles, the ongoing Squishies evolution, sports trading cards, and the PopMart-influenced kidult trend are all flagged as the ones to watch heading into the holiday period. Whatnot gets a mention as a platform to take seriously. And Jo reveals she's been holding a Pokémon card the whole time.

  3. Aug 20

    Paw Patrol's Record Opening, the Bluey Movie Teaser, Coco 2, and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit — Andy and Jo's Trailer Roundup

    Emily is somewhere over the Middle East en route to Australia, so Andy and Jo have been let loose on the podcast control desk — new buttons and all. The result is a slightly more multimedia episode than usual, with trailers played in and reacted to in real time, and a genuinely good conversation about what the summer's animation slate says about where the industry is heading. Four things get the treatment. Paw Patrol: The Dino Movie has just posted the franchise's strongest opening weekend ever — $20 million domestically, $69 million worldwide — and Andy and Jo make the case that the trailer reveals a show that has genuinely grown into itself, with sharper animation, better timing, and writers who clearly love the world. The Bluey movie teaser gets an equally warm reception, with Andy's observation that it chooses a falling balloon as its centrepiece moment — the smallest thing enlarged into the biggest thing — landing as the episode's neatest critical point. Coco 2 prompts the more sceptical conversation: both Andy and Jo loved the original precisely because it felt complete, and the worry is that a sequel risks casting a shadow over something people remember with real tenderness. The Pixar slate discussion that follows — one original, Coco 2, an Incredibles spinoff — raises the question of whether the studio is in a defensive crouch. Oswald the Lucky Rabbit rounds things off: Disney reviving a century-old pre-Mickey character in a hybrid live action and hand-drawn animation style, which Andy and Jo read as both a smart copyright play and a meaningful reconnection with Disney's hand-drawn heritage.

  4. Aug 13 ·  Video

    Inside the Toy Industry's Purple Patch: Squishies, Kidults, Peppa Pig's Revival, and the Fast Fashion Toy Trend — with John Baulch of Toy World

    John Baulch, publisher of Toy World magazine and the author of the Friday blog that has survived every newsletter cull Jo has ever attempted, joins Andy, Emily, and Jo for a wide-ranging conversation about the state of the toy industry in 2026 — which, it turns out, is in remarkably good shape. John makes the case that the toy market is in a genuine purple patch: not driven by one breakout product creating supply chain chaos, but by four or five things working well simultaneously — Squishies, Pokémon, Lego, Toy Story merchandise, and the growing kidult phenomenon of adults buying collectibles for themselves. The conversation moves from evergreen IP and what Hasbro has done to revive Peppa Pig, to the fast-fashion end of the toy market: limited drops, chase figures, scarcity mechanics, and the PopMart model that the rest of the industry is now rapidly absorbing. John's fast-fashion analogy is the sharpest frame in the episode — the idea that the toy industry is entering a phase where some product exists to thrill in the moment and disappear, just like a Primark seasonal range, and that this isn't a problem to be solved but a structural shift to be understood and managed. For anyone working in kids IP, licensing, or content who wants to understand how toys actually work in 2026, this is a very useful 40 minutes.

  5. Aug 6 ·  Video

    Rerun: Original Animation IP and the Creator Cinema Revolution — Matthieu Zeller and Caspar Nadaud

    Jo and Emily are both away, so we’re revisiting two recent conversations that sit neatly together: one about the challenge of making original animated IP outside the Hollywood system, and one about the new frontier of creator-led cinema distribution. First up is Matthieu Zeller, president and CEO of Belgium's nWave Studios and the team behind the Chicken Hare franchise — a case study in how a European studio can build original animated IP on a fraction of a US studio budget, through loyal distribution partners and a fully integrated model that keeps creative and commercial control under one roof. Then Caspar Nadaud of Piece of Magic Entertainment on what the Amazing Digital Circus and Iron Lung have revealed about cinema's new relationship with creator fandoms — and why the old gatekeeper model has given way to something far more collaborative and equal. Both conversations are worth hearing in full — links to the original episodes are in the show notes. Chickenhare https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/kids-media-club-podcast/id1573404550?i=1000777023112 Creator Cinema https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/kids-media-club-podcast/id1573404550?i=1000775115916

  6. Jul 30 ·  Video

    Cartoon Saloon's Jason Tammemagi on Brave Storytelling, the Kilkenny Creative Hub, and Why Fear Is the Story Killer

    Andy and Jo are joined by Jason Tammemagi, Chief Creative Officer of Cartoon Saloon — the Oscar-nominated Irish studio behind The Secret of Kells, Song of the Sea, and Wolfwalkers — for a conversation that is as much about the philosophy of making things as it is about the business of animation. Jason traces a career that moved from animator to director to studio founder before landing at Cartoon Saloon, where his brief is essentially to support the creative vision of founders Tom Moore, Paul Young, and Nora Twomey while keeping one eye on strategy and market. The core of the conversation is about what it actually takes to protect brave storytelling inside a risk-averse industry — and Jason is clear that the danger doesn't only come from outside the studio. Fear, he argues, is the story killer, and it operates as much in internal notes as it does in broadcaster development meetings. The instinct to sand off anything uncomfortable or gray-area is precisely what makes safe stories unsafe. There's also a genuinely interesting thread on Cartoon Saloon's identity as a Kilkenny studio — why its Irish cultural specificity turned out to be a strength rather than a limitation, how the Secret of Kells was an act of creative bravery at a time when the entire industry was pivoting hard to CGI, and why Kilkenny being small enough that everyone walks to work turns out to matter more than it might seem. Jason's closing observation — that the industry has always been good at learning the wrong lessons — is one worth sitting with.

  7. Jul 23

    Rerun: Webtoon's Sydney Bright on Turning Webcomics Into Animation — and Why Fandom-Proven IP Is the New Development Superpower

    We're revisiting one of our favourite conversations — Emily cornered Sydney Bright at Kids Screen after she got mobbed following her panel — dropped a card in the middle of the crowd, said "come on the podcast," and here we are. Sydney is Head of Global Animation at Webtoon, the world's leading digital comics platform with 145 million monthly active users, and her job is to identify titles from the platform ripe for adaptation and take them through to screen. It's a genuinely different development model — one where audience investment is baked in before a single frame of animation is made. Sydney explains how Webtoon tracks not just read counts but comment engagement, retention, and emotional intensity of fan response as signals for adaptation potential. The conversation gets into what it actually takes to translate a webcomic into animation, how to honour a fanbase that feels genuine ownership of a property, and why that kind of proven, community-built IP is increasingly what streamers want to see walk through the door. There's a lot of ground covered — Wattpad's role within the same parent company, the upcoming Lore Olympus series with Amazon Prime, the titles on Sydney's radar for the 6 to 16 demographic, and what her animation students at Loyola Marymount are watching right now, which turns out to be a surprisingly useful window into where the industry is heading next.

  8. Jul 16

    Chickenhare and Original Animation IP: How Belgium's nWave Is Out-Crafting Hollywood on a Fraction of the Budget — with Matthieu Zeller

    Emily has been banging on about Chickenhare and the Hamster of Darkness for years, so she's delighted to have a professional reason to do it again. Matthieu Zeller, president and CEO of Belgium's nWave Studios, joins Andy, Jo, and Emily to talk about the Chickenhare franchise, whose second instalment — Chickenhare and the Secret of the Groundhog — is hitting cinemas now. nWave is a 31-year-old studio with origins in stereoscopic 3D for IMAX and theme parks, and a track record of original animated features built on character-first storytelling, European financing, and budgets that are a fraction of what US studios spend. Matthieu is refreshingly direct about what that means: no massive battles or thousands-of-character set pieces, but a clarity of emotional storytelling that he argues can out-move the big studios when the script is right. The conversation gets into how nWave structures its financing through loyal European distribution partners, why constraints produce better creative work rather than worse, and why the mid-budget family animation that once anchored theatrical and DVD has been almost entirely forgotten by an industry fixated on franchises and streaming. There's also a pointed argument running through the episode about who is actually underestimated in the room — and it's kids. Matthieu's view, backed up by test screenings, is that children handle sophisticated, layered storytelling far better than most adults in the industry give them credit for, and that the industry's tendency to dumb things down is both an insult and a missed opportunity. If you've ever wondered whether a good original family film can still get made outside the studio system, this episode is the answer.

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Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
6 Ratings

About

Podcast meets industry water-cooler. We host weekly conversations with producers, animators, media analysts, game designers and the toy brands shaping what young audiences and consumers watch and play - co-hosted with a rotating cast of friends from the Kids Media industry.

Information

  • Creator
    Jo Redfern, Andrew Williams, & Emily Horgan
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2026
  • Episodes
    187
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2022 Kids Media Club Podcast
  • Show Website
    Kids Media Club Podcast

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