TOM SWIFT books are picked up

By Matt Holmes / June 25, 2011

The news from Variety is that every one of Simon & Schuster's long running book series on the character of Tom Swift has been picked up in one big scoop by Worldwide Biggies, a digital studio recently opened by longtime Nickelodeon and Spike exec Albie Hecht.

The plan is to roll out a feature film franchise alongside a new video game series with a t.v. series planned to follow. This is something Hecht has done in the past with JIMMY NEUTRON: BOY GENIUS. I know very little about Tom Swift, so I will let Wikipedia do the work here...

Tom Swift is the young protagonist in several series of juvenile adventure novels which began in the early twentieth century and continue to the present. Each such series stars a hero named Tom Swift who is a genius inventor and whose breakthroughs in technology (especially transport technology) drive the plots of the novels, placing them in a genre sometimes called "invention fiction" or "Edisonade".

So basically it's a little like BLACKADDER in how the continuity works. A character named Tom Swift exists around 1910 and then the next generation would follow another Tom Swift with a slight character change and living in a different era. The plan seems to be to go 'green screen' with lots of special effects and such, possibly even going the full motion capture technology which to me just seems to defeat the object completely. I mean it sounds like this series is about a young boy's adventures in the industrial age, why would we need to many special effect or worse a full POLAR EXPRESS like film? Especially when Jackson and Spielberg are doing something similar with TINTIN.