Lincoln Butterfield Debuts New Toons at MIPCOM

Buyers attending MIPCOM next month in Cannes will be able to check out three new projects from Lincoln Butterfield Animation, an independent toon studio founded by Robert Hughes (director on Disney’s Phineas & Ferb) and veteran business exec Joseph Walker. Having recently signed a worldwide representation agreement with PorchLight Ent. for its animated series Tan, Lincoln Butterfield will be looking to lure co-production partners, content acquisition execs and third party distributors with NIT: Neighborhood Investigation Team; Venture Probe and When in Rome.

NIT: The Neighborhood Investigation Team is a family-oriented project centered on a group of kids who patrol the nighborhood, solving the unsolvable, achieving the unachievable and undoing the doable. Emma, the brains of the operation, is a natural wiz at deductive reasoning. She is assisted in her investigations by her younger brother, Neville, who has a strong working knowledge of physics, chemistry and metallurgy. Crunchy, the team’s voice of reason, is a reluctant hero who is no match for Emma and her wild schemes. Created by Robert Hughes and designed by Mitch Schauer, the property is being developed as both a children’s book series and animation show.

Geared to mature audiences, Venture Probe revolves around Captain Craig Taylor, who, against his better judgment, accepts command of a new corporate-class sales cruiser designed and built by a shameless bureaucracy. Assisted by his crew of incompetent but amiable corporate shills and a cargo deck of soulless sales clones, Taylor embarks on a mission to penetrate the newly liberated (and possibly still smoldering) regions of the galaxy and sell photocopiers. Created and written by Robert Hughes and Joseph Walker, the show is designed by Antoine Guilbaud with art direction by Mitch Schauer.

Also intended for mature audiences, When in Rome is loosely inspired by the I Claudius novels by English writer Robert Graves. The show follows two cousins, Custos and Vinosusis, who weave in and out of the treacherous and comically brutal Roman Empire while slowly coming to realize that they actually have very little say about their own destinies. Created and written by Robert Hughes and designed by Frank Furlong, the property is available as a comic book and animated series.