Skateboarding legend Tony Hawk is developing an animated children’s television series called Skatebirds. Here are the details.
Legendary skateboarder Tony Hawk has teamed up with Montreal’s Laughing Dragon Studios to develop Skatebirds, an animated TV series aimed at kids aged six to 11. The show will, according to Deadline, “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”.
Episodes of Skatebirds will be 11 minutes with expansion into shorter-form formats for platforms such as TikTok and YouTube also planned.
Hawk said of the series “I’m excited to partner up with Laughing Dragon Studios for this unique series. 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”.
For a period in the early 2000s, Tony Hawk was one of the most popular sports stars in the world. Rising up the ranks of the skating scene, he became well known for being the first person to successfully execute the ‘900’, a complex skating move, on camera. His popularity exploded upon the release of 1999 video game Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, launching a hugely successful franchise which ran for over two decades.
He became involved the Jackass franchise, appearing in various stunts across the first three films, usually with fellow skateboarder Bam Margera. He also appeared in several other films, including Police Academy 4: Citizens On Patrol, Gleaming The Cube and xXx. 2021 saw the release of Tony Hawk: Until The Wheels Fall Off, a feature documentary about his life and career from director Sam Jones.
Interestingly, an indie game inspired by Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, called Skatebird, came out in 2021 (pictured above). It also featured cute birds pluckily riding around on tiny skateparks on their decks. The new Skatebirds series doesn’t appear to have anything to do with the game, though – or a 1970s animated series of the same name we just found via Google.
