'LazyTown' inspires kids to get up and go
Sportacus is not your standard sex symbol.
He has a Salvador Dali mustache and a wardrobe limited to spandex unitards and matching vests. He travels almost exclusively via somersault and back flip.
He's the main character in a TV show aimed at 4-to-7-year-olds.
But he's one reason ''LazyTown" -- a Nickelodeon show that has sparked a cult of healthy living among a certain preschool set -- has a grown-up following, too. There are devotees of Sportacus, the show's fitness-freak Icelandic superhero. (The Internet abounds with cries of ''Sportacus is hot" and ''Sportacus is fine.") There are appreciative parents. (''Dear Nickelodeon: My grandson now eats carrots!")
And there are people like David Nunez, 27, an artist in Austin, Texas, who saw the show last year while he was baby-sitting his nephew and made a quick post on his website. ''I swear, if I was in college and into 'mind-altering' experiences," he wrote, he'd be watching all the time.
A half-hour of ''LazyTown" does, indeed, come across as a psychedelic trip, a healthy Nordic version of ''Pee-Wee's Playhouse." The hero, Sportacus (Icelander Magnus Scheving, the show's creator), lives in a blimp and saves the day via high-altitude aerobics. The protagonist, Stephanie (New York actress Julianna Rose Mauriello), wears a bright pink wig and sings an anthem that starts, ''Bing, bang, diggadiggadong." The villain, Robbie Rotten (Icelandic actor Stefan Karl, with prosthetic forehead and chin), putters in a basement factory, making twisted contraptions to keep the townsfolk on their duffs.
The music is Abbaesque technopop. The sets are Ikea gone surrealist. The rest of the cast consists of life-size latex puppets with weaknesses for junk food.
It's a combination that speaks to kids; broadcast weekdays at 11:30 a.m., LazyTown is the fourth-ranked preschool show on US commercial television, drawing 4.4 million viewers per week, and airs in 42 countries. But the grown-ups can't stop talking about it, either. Nunez's original ''LazyTown" posting still draws tens of thousands of hits, along with comments from teens and college students from Spain to Argentina.
Nunez figures it's the weirdness, the colors, the Icelandic accents. He put the show on his
Now, Nickelodeon is poised to turn ''LazyTown" into a licensing empire. A toy line is forthcoming from Fisher-Price, and soon Sportacus and Stephanie will appear on packages of baby carrots. A CD of fizzy music from the show is coming out this week. And tomorrow night, Nickelodeon will air a prime-time special, an hourlong version of the show that focuses on Sportacus's failed efforts to take a vacation. Stephanie and the puppets plunk him in a lounge chair and order him to relax, but whenever they're not looking, he sneaks in a few fancy push-ups.
An active imagination
Scheving, Sportacus's alter ego, did not get where he is by resting.
The ''LazyTown" impresario, 41, is the sort of unselfconscious renaissance man who stands out starkly in a country with 297,000 people. He became a Nordic aerobic champion on a whim, after he and a friend made a bet that they could excel in sports they had never tried. In the early 1990s, he was working construction in the daytime, teaching aerobics by night, spending weekends as a motivational speaker, and moonlighting as a comedian. He recognized a looming obesity problem among Icelandic kids. He decided to do something about it.
So he created a town that needed saving from its slothful ways and a ''little bit above average hero" to do the good work. He published a book called ''Go, Go LazyTown" and put together a musical that he hoped would motivate kids to eat healthy and exercise.
''I said to my team, let's try to stay in Iceland for eight years before we even move it out of the country," Scheving said this month from Orlando, Fla., where he had just starred in a traveling theatrical version of the TV show.
After performing his original stage show for two generations of Icelandic kids -- and launching a bevy of LazyTown products, from bottled water to vitamin supplements to sneakers -- he was convinced that his message got through. Today, when he walks the streets in Iceland, 17-year-olds drop down in front of him to show off their one-armed push-ups.
So he decided he was ready for the next step. He produced a prototype TV show and brought it to Nickelodeon in the fall of 2002.
Brown Johnson, executive creative director of Nickelodeon preschool television, remembers the meeting well. She was skeptical of taking on an international show but took the pitch as a favor to a colleague. Scheving and his partner wore velvet business suits. And then, at some point, Scheving dropped to the floor.
''All of a sudden, there's this really handsome man doing basically splits in the air in front of me," Johnson said. She ordered 35 episodes to run in the network's Nick Jr. block of programming for young kids.
Nick Jr. made substantial changes to the Icelandic version, dubbing the hero ''Sportacus" (his original name, in Icelandic, translated as ''Sport Elf"), making the affair a little less preachy, and replacing some live-action characters with puppets. Now, Stephanie lives with Mayor Meanswell, her slothful uncle, and cavorts with Ziggy, a pint-size glutton with a lollipop fixation. She also plays with Pixel, a video game fanatic who stands in for a generation of technophiles. In one show, he finds himself much more facile at video soccer than at the real-life version until Robbie Rotten shows up with a soccer-playing robot.
But for the most part, Johnson said, the network followed Scheving's high-energy vision of trampoline leaps and advanced 3-D animation. Scheving recruited a production team of veterans from Woody Allen movies and the ''Matrix" films. He did 80 percent of his own jumps, filming 3,600 different leaps in one long day of shooting. And as production rolled on, from January to December 2004 on a Reykjavik soundstage, he led the cast and crew in daily warm-ups. To disco music.
''LazyTown" first aired in August 2004, and within two weeks, it was a hit. Kids took to the rituals (Sportacus yells ''Door!" when he wants to jump out of his airship, and ''Ladder!" when he wants to climp up again) and started imitating the vernacular; in one episode, Sportacus describes fruits and vegetables as ''sports candy," then collapses in a heap, during a race, when Robbie slips him a fake apple made of sugar.
And parents started reporting that their kids were leaping into bed when Sportacus does, at 8:08 p.m.
How long the imitation will continue is unclear; there is some irony, after all, to the notion of using a TV show to encourage active living. But Scheving revels in the e-mail one grandmother sent him: ''You are changing the diet of a generation."
The show has also been endorsed by Iceland's equivalent of the surgeon general. Television, Johnson says, can be powerful motivation.
''You've seen kids pretending to be Power Rangers and princesses, being their favorite characters from TV," she says. ''If you can offer a role model on TV that's really active, why not?"
It doesn't hurt if their moms are watching, too. Even if it's because of Sportacus's spandex suit.
''We don't encourage it, but all you have to do is meet him," Johnson said. ''Then you go to Iceland and they all look like that."
Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com. 