Now Here Are Some Real Diaper Dandies

The recruiting video for the University of Michigan begins like so many others, with a flash of the school colors, a snippet of the school’s fight song, highlights of past athletic successes, so many bright young faces clad in football jerseys or cheerleader uniforms.

There is one noticeable difference, however.

Those bright young faces are very, very young -- the youngest checking in at 6 months, the eldest at 5 years.

The target audience, according to text on the DVD cover: “For ages 5 months and up.”

The objective, according to another line of text: “Raising Tomorrow’s UM Fan Today.”

All of this is helpful to know, because if you stumbled into a viewing of “Baby Wolverine” midway through and saw the baby building blocks spelling “M-A-I-Z-E” and

“B-L-U-E” and heard the soothing female voice cooing “Wooool-verrrr-eeeen,” you’d shrug and say, “Must have designed this one for defensive line prospects.”

A segment of the video is devoted to teaching viewers how to count from 1 to 10 by using Michigan jersey numbers as visual aids. Useful, yes, but some grown-up Michigan fans will look at this and grumble, “Where was this video back in 1993, when Chris Webber really needed it?”

“Baby Wolverine” is one of 12 titles currently distributed by Team Baby Entertainment, the brainchild of 31-year-old Michigan graduate Greg Scheinman, who will rank as the man responsible for the earliest form of college recruitment on record, at least until someone releases -- and you know it is coming -- the “In Utero Wolverine” series.

“The goal of Team Baby Entertainment is to allow parents, grandparents, alumni and friends to share their love, loyalty and passion for their university with the children,” Scheinman says on the company’s website, www.teambabyentertainment.com. “Our product is an informative, entertaining and educational way to introduce a child to the school and team you root for.”

It is also an ingenious way to give Michigan a recruiting leg up on Ohio State. At the moment, the Team Baby catalog features no “Baby Buckeye” DVD.

Scheinman has plans to expand to 20 titles by the end of the year -- and, yes, USC and UCLA fans, “Baby Trojan” and “Baby Bruin” are in the works, so have your $19.95 ready.

Early next year, in time for spring training, Scheinman plans to release five Major League Baseball titles: “Baby Yankee,” “Baby Red Sox,” “Baby Cub,” “Baby Astro,” and for parents who can’t wait to introduce their toddler to a lifetime of frustration and exasperation, “Baby Dodger.” Scheinman says he got the idea while shopping for video entertainment for his 2-year-old son, Auden, with an inspirational assist from the popular educational “Baby Einstein” DVD series.

“I’ve been a big fan of some other products that are on the market and we started watching some of them and we were looking for something that was a little more sports-related,” Scheinman said in a phone interview. “When I went out looking for them there was nothing actually on the market that was anything like that. You couldn’t find anything.”

With a background in film and television production, Scheinman decided to take matters into his own hands and “make one for myself.” Scheinman lives in Houston, so his initial strategy was to strike locally, partnering with the University of Texas for the initial Team Baby DVD, “Baby Longhorn,” filmed in late 2004 and released in March.

It turned out to be the right place to start. Scheinman reports the number of “Baby Longhorn” videos sold to date is “coming up on 10,000” and says the initial success led him to think, “Wow, we might have something here with this one. And we went out and put together a licensing agreement for 20 colleges with a company called Collegiate Images that handles the licensing rights for pretty much over 90% of the nation’s universities.”

Scheinman said no school has turned him down -- and Notre Dame, after seeing a copy of “Baby Longhorn” at a trade show, asked to be included among the original 20 titles.

“They thought the product was exactly what they were looking for in terms of a way to appeal to two different categories that are very much of interest,” Scheinman said.

“One is the alumni and fostering the alumni support and loyalty to the school. And the second is how do you build future generations of fans and students?

“So the response to it has been great -- that it’s a wholesome, educational, if you will, entertaining product that the family can really enjoy with their kids.”

“Baby Longhorn” sets the template for the other titles in the series. The 30-minute video opens with an image of a little boy, appearing to be no older than 4, decked out in a straw cowboy hat -- adorned with the Texas Longhorn logo -- and a burnt orange Texas football jersey, smiling as he shows the camera that he has already mastered the “Hook ‘Em Horns” hand gesture.

This is followed by the image of a little girl of similar age dressed as a Texas cheerleader shaking orange and white pompoms.

Elsewhere in the series, you see the same: boys in athletic gear, girls clad as cheerleaders, gender-role stereotypes getting rolled very early in the game.

“There is a little bit [of stereotyping],” Scheinman acknowledged, “but I’m really not trying to do anything to perpetuate those stereotypes. The reality is that we have all the clothing and the outfits laid out for the kids to choose what they want. I want to make it as fun and enjoyable an experience for all the children that are involved as possible. And they and their parents are typically the ones that choose what they are wearing.

“We don’t assign anything to anyone. It’s a volunteer situation with all the kids. We want them to wear what they’re happiest with. Yeah, as it turns out, most of the girls want to be dressed as little cheerleaders and they love playing with the pompoms. And a lot of boys will choose the jerseys and shirts of baseball, football, basketball [players].”

Scheinman points out, accurately, that he films boys and girls playing athletic games, with each video featuring footage of collegiate male and female athletes in competition.

He also films boys and girls banging on drums and bongos. Not only is “Baby Longhorn” raising tomorrow’s UT fans, it is recruiting members of tomorrow’s UT marching band.

Scheinman said he hopes to eventually branch out with NFL, NBA and even NASCAR-related titles.

“Baby Pit Crew”?

First, however, he has a big photo shoot planned before the end of the year, one for a video that could one day even outsell “Baby Longhorn.”

“I look forward to doing a ‘Baby Trojan’ video,” he said. “Especially if they keep winning national championships.”