Watch the Howard Stern episode of Like News. © 1999 Mondo Media.

As the year 2000 surges forward, a sarcastic teenager named Skeeter Dubois peerlessly interviews our world's high-profile newsmakers. On another set, two pub-crawling thugs dubbed Cecil and Stubby carry on with their riotous reviews of the latest flicks. On yet a third stage, a captivatingly capricious God -- in tandem with the Devil, herself! -- pursue their mischievous co-hosting duties on daytime talk. What do these spirited and disparate characters possibly have in common?

Veteran San Francisco digital animation studio Mondo Media creates, produces and distributes these animated "stars" in three enormously popular on-line series Like, News, Thugs on Film and The God and Devil Show. Net audiences can relish and interact with these weekly "Mondo Mini Shows" on a variety of major dot coms including Shockwave, Netscape, Entertaindom, AltaVista, Excite@Home and AtomFilms. Recently bolstering their "virtual syndication network" to an impressive total of 14 sites, Mondo Media is escalating its winning strategies by continually forging new partnerships which place their distinctive brand of original content across diversified areas of the red-hot Web.

Mondo Beginnings
Founded in 1988 by John Evershed (CEO) and Dierdre O'Malley (Director of Marketing), Mondo Media has established itself as a commanding on-line force with a production facility of more than 75 artists, animators, writers, producers and business staff. All of this right brain/left brain talent is vigorously riding the forward momentum created by the powerful audience and industry response to their quirky, highly engaging shows. Fueled with another round of substantial investment just last month, Evershed's group is teeming with confidence. "We have over 10 years experience as a company and we know how to produce shows efficiently," he states, adding: "And we have the ability to put an artist's content in front of millions of eyeballs a week." Mondo's new millennium goal, Evershed says, "is to continue to build our syndication business, create, commission and acquire new content for distribution, establish the Mondo brand further and convert our audience into revenue."

An adventurer from early on, John Evershed pocketed his 1981 degree in English Literature and got a job cleaning monitor screens around Toronto's public kiosks. He remembers, "I was always interested in the intersection between art and technology," so he hung around the company's content studio until they hired him, thus beginning his expedition through the developing digital worlds. Migrating to San Francisco on a job with Chronicle Videotex, Inc., Evershed spent the next couple of years designing and producing interactive applications. He then partnered with Dierdre O'Malley, an independent producer sporting an Economics degree, and together they founded Mondo Media, basing their new studio in the bay area's "Multimedia Gulch." Their earliest client was Prodigy for whom they created content and advertising for its on-line servers. This soon led to other Silicon Valley jobs encompassing point-of-purchase and software demos for retail clients such as Compaq and Hewlett-Packard.

While working on Microsoft's Encarta, Evershed and O'Malley got a taste of entertainment creation and began focusing their talents toward that objective. Their break came in 1993 when an order for the game Critical Path came from publisher Media Vision. Proving a financial and critical success, Mondo followed it up with a second CD-Rom adventure entitled The Daedalus Encounter. For the next few years, O'Malley recalls, "We continued to work on the art and the aesthetic of games until all of a sudden, there was the Internet...it starts formulating and we decided that was the business we wanted to be in." Their inaugural short-form animated project was for Macromedia's then titled "shockrave" site. Called Tech Sergeant, it featured an irascible character who responded to viewers' on-line software questions in an unconventional and irreverent comedic fashion, proving the creative fore-runner of the studio's individualistic style now flooding the Web under the banner "Mondo Mini Shows."