EXCLUSIVE: Tony Hawk has long conquered the skateboarding world and next up on his list of tricks is animation.
The legendary skateboard champion has teamed with Montreal’s Laughing Dragon Studios to develop Skatebirds, an animated TV series aimed at kids aged 6-11.
The series, inspired by Hawk’s ‘Birdman’ nickname, will aim to “celebrate skateboarding’s playful community while emphasising its adventurous nature,” producers say.
Skatebirds will revolve around “a group of young skateboard enthusiasts, who just happen to be birds, who flock together to support their hometown and show the world that when they put their feathers together, they can do anything they set their minds to.”
The series will theme around teamwork, friendship and community — some of the elements of the skateboarding community that Hawk’s feats helped foster. Hawk previously created The Skatepark Project, which helps to fund public skateparks across the U.S. and in other parts of the world
Episodes of Skateboards will be 11 minutes with expansion into shorter-form formats for platforms such as TikTok and YouTube also planned.
Hawk was a professional skater between 1982 and 2003, known for the first documented successful ‘900’ trick. He and later licensed his name to Activision, which build a video game franchise named after him, and branched out into numerous fields. In 2021, HBO licensed Tony Hawk: Until The Wheels Fall Off, a feature documentary on the life and career of the skateboarding legend, from Mark and Jay Duplass‘ Duplass Brothers Productions and director Sam Jones.
“I’m excited to partner up with Laughing Dragon Studios for this unique series,” said Hawk. “Skateboarding unites communities, gets kids active and builds a sense of self-confidence while providing opportunities that can be limitless. Keep an eye out for our show, which will be entertaining for a global audience… regardless of whether they skate or not.”
Full-service 2D animation studio Laughing Dragon has worked on projects such as Apple TV+’s Central Park and Disney’s Disenchanted, and is developing an internal slate including Skatebirds and madcap mythologic title Isaac & Friends. It is also working on an animated adaptation of Least I Could Do, a webcomic created by Laughing Dragon founder Ryan Sohmer and Lar deSouza.
Sohmer, CEO of Laughing Dragon, said: “There’s a list of people that I hoped to create an animated series with somewhere in a drawer of a home I no longer live in. At the very top of that list is Tony Hawk — a guy who managed to get this uncoordinated human atop a skateboard and tasting asphalt a few moments later. I could not be more thrilled to have Tony leading the way on Skatebirds and introducing this community to a whole new generation.”