WB flips over ‘Mucha Lucha!’

Harry Potter and Bugs Bunny don’t have to worry -- yet -- but Warner Bros. is gearing up for a big multimedia push, one that just happens to involve animated pint-sized Mexican wrestlers.

Warner Bros. Animation has tapped its first-season Kids’ WB! series “Mucha Lucha!” -- about the comic adventures of masked wrestlers Rikochet, Buena Girl and the Flea -- as its potential next big brand. To bring that about, the series will soon begin rolling out in a number of other forms, and across parent AOL Time Warner’s divisions, from comic books to interactive games, culminating in a planned feature film from Warner Bros. Pictures in 2005.

Warner Bros. liked the show for its different, Flash-animated look and its setting in Mexican luchadora wrestling, said Warner Bros. Animation President Sander Schwartz. “It didn’t look like anything else; it was fresh, original, not at all derivative,” he said. Moreover, the show seemed designed to appeal to the fast-growing Latino community, he said, adding, “We saw an opportunity there.”

The Nielsen ratings and the online response of viewers to a “build your own wrestler” promotion convinced the company that “on all fronts it seemed to be smart to try and harness the interest,” Schwartz said, and “plan a strategy to make the whole bigger than the sum of its parts.”

So, building to the feature release, the studio also plans “Heart of Lucha,” a compilation of earlier episodes from Warner Home Video, for 2004, the same year as merchandising, including toys, apparel, party goods, stationery and accessories, will begin to reach retailers. GameBoy Advance and PlayStation 2 games are in the works; DC Comics has a limited series of “Mucha Lucha!” comic books. Harper Collins Publishing is about to release the first in a series of “chapter books,” following the characters.

The series, which just concluded its first 13-episode season, has received a second-season, 26-episode pickup from Kids’ WB! In its first year, the series, which is simulcast in Spanish via Secondary Audio Programming and has a large Latino fan base, has performed well, particularly among boys ages 6 to 11 and young teens, a prime movie audience. First-season episodes will begin airing on sister Cartoon Network next year.

But as rival kids’ programmer Nickelodeon has recently seen, moving a hit series from TV to the big screen isn’t a shoo-in, no matter how popular the franchise or how careful the roll-out. December’s “The Wild Thornberrys” movie, the culmination of several years of similar brand-building, performed disappointingly, despite good reviews.

“Will it work? Time will tell,” Schwartz said. “Indications are the audience will accept it and remain interested, but to a certain extent there’s only so much you can do.” “Wild Thornberrys,” he said, “didn’t come out at the peak of popularity for the series. Hopefully, with a measured and limited roll-out,” he said, Warner Bros. “will hit the timing right.”

But weather and competition can also throw the best-laid plans. “You can sit and plan formulas till the cows come home, but if Disney decides to release a Pixar picture anywhere you are, and you can’t move your picture, you’re going to die,” Schwartz said. “You do the best marketing plan, monitor it along the way, and if it’s going according to plan you pat yourself on the back; if not, you modify it to enhance the chances for success. But it comes to a certain point when you close your eyes, cross your fingers and hope for the best.”