Kids' Light Intertainment Channel (KLIC) has produced the first animated musical for children on the Internet, using Enliven Viewer, one of the hottest new technologies available for creating interactive content on the Web. With Enliven, a plug-in application for Web browsers like Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape, the animation begins to run right away, using a streaming technology to play the first segment, while the other segments download in the background.

The Body Shop.

Hardly a traditional musical, KLIC's site features Swampland of Gross, Snitchragula, and Alien Body Shop, animated segments that participants visit and play. Children ages 8-12 are the target audience for the show. Some of the content is truly tasteless in a way kids giggle over, but is not violent and is intended to be good fun.

Snitchragula, the title character, is an ancient fortune teller, who greets viewers with a wary eye and invites questions. Like a darker version of the hugely popular Magic 8 Ball game, Snitch varies her answers in an amusing and scathing manner. This animation, although fairly limited, is a popular part of the site and has a quick download time.

Alien Body Shop, a Dr. Seuss meets Goosebumps-style scene, is a place where viewers can develop a character of their own out of a wild assortment of body parts and watch the assembled parts move. Several combinations of parts are possible, so characters can be developed and redeveloped until the perfect specimen takes form. Using Enliven interactively to develop characters might be a powerful tool for gaming companies looking for feedback on successful character types, according to Wendy Robbins, producer for Kids' Light Intertainment. Most people playing Alien Body Shop choose the same character composite initially, meaning that it has the most universal appeal. (This animation is available both as an Enliven and a Shockwave file.)

Swampland of Gross, the portion of the site best fitting the description of animated musical, has a large cast of characters singing and moving through different areas of a bizarre and fantastically colored world. The animation here is more extensive, involving more complicated interaction and has a multipart story. (It also requires more download time than the other segments.) Recommended: View this segment as a grand finale to your visit. Kids can engage in a slime fight between two groups of characters, pick some interesting objects out of a variety of pulsating noses, and make a fart symphony. "Younger kids especially love to slime," said Robbins. "They keep coming back to that part over and over."

The main menu

More From KLIC
KLIC has recently added an online shopping area to the site, called the "Outta Space Store," where shoppers can purchase such grossessities as slime chemistry sets, edible brains, squid spit, mucus-making kits and Gurgly Gutz.

Plans for upcoming additions to KLIC include a chat area for kids to meet and discuss animation, the Internet, and stories, and a mad libs page, where wacky and nonsensical stories are created by inserting random words into a predefined story. Additional animated musical stories like Swampland of Gross will be added in the months to come.

"KLIC is not stereotypical multimedia development," said Paul Santinelli, product manager at Narrative. "It's one of the most fun and engaging things out there for kids who are dialing up and looking for interesting sites." KLIC is run by a talented and energetic crew who have a strong sense of what kids like to see and play with, and their initial offering gives us a vision of the range of multimedia content that will be available within the next 12 months: Web-based animated games with sound and relatively fast download times. The games are relatively simple, and the animation is still somewhat limited compared with an 8x CD-ROM-driven game, but the improvements in speed and interactivity are tremendous compared with other products available on the Web.

KLIC partnered with Narrative Communications during Enliven's beta testing phase in 1996, and developed their animated segments as a way to showcase their wildly colored and imaginative designs as part of the Narrative gallery of animation.