No.3
About 10 years ago a group of us chantards got together in IRC and started discussing our best childhood memories of tv shows and how they influenced us to strive to aim higher. We discussed at great lengths shows like Mister Rogers Neighborhood and how for many of us that grew up in adverse and troubling childhood, people like Mr. Rogers were helping us feel like we weren't worthless, that we were special, and that our thoughts, discoveries, curiosity, and interests were important and valuable things, not just an annoying trait of being younger than most of those around us. We discussed at great lengths how shows like Reading Rainbow introduced us to documentaries of sorts on topics that we thought were interesting, but on a level that we could easily grasp, how they helped drive us to maintain an interest in science and technology for many years until we were able to pursue those interests on our own and become the people we are today. What we realized collectively was that while most of us may be chantards and deemed losers by mainstream society, our more lofty pursuits and interests were fostered by such media.
But then something very depressing hit us, one user mentioned that while she was happily married, she deeply regretted that when she would have kids, they would never get a chance to experience the same wonderful content that we did, and if they did, it would mostly be irrelevant to their generation. I think a lot of us felt a twinge of depression as that sunk in, as those of us who are aware of the current state of childrens' education know that the crap being produced today in the name of educational content is extremely bad. We understood that the educational content producers today aren't interested in entertaining kids while slipping nuggets of scientific logic and information, but were being created by the sort of SJW progressives that we all hated, as well as people who didn't have a STEM background.
A few of us talked about how we wished there was content like this being created, how we wished we would have an influence over the creation of such content. Some of us were interested in trying to create a show but after quite a lot of brainstorming we realized this was a fruitless endeavor as the connections and financing to make a decent show were just not available to us. But from this conversation an interesting idea arose. The idea we had was to revive a show we all enjoyed and felt would benefit future generations through an internet reboot, but in the end we realized this was a pipe dream.
That was then, this is now- The market might be ready for this
Since 2004 the internet has blossomed more than anyone could have ever dreamed. Wikipedia became the sum total of human knowledge on a single website, Youtube brought videos on the internet to the unwashed masses of the internet, and services like Hulu and Netflix grew like weeds and started fighting each other for market domination by creating and licensing exclusive shows. Sites like kickstarter, indiegogo and Patrion sprung forth and no longer were projects bound by the financing of narrow minded entrepreneurs who were only interested in recovering a profit. With such advances came power to the people and small teams with good ideas were able to not only sell ideas, but good ideas with no profitability outside of the moral and social good were able to be fed directly instead of going through charities that somehow always needed more money but had a funny way of making it disappear.
No.5
In 2004 if you had told any of us that people would be making Youtube videos of themselves playing video games and living entirely off the revenue generated by their content, we would probably have been skeptical. I doubt anyone saw this sort of explosion coming, yet here we are.
Perhaps now we are at a point where making open source media funded entirely through crowdsourcing in order to create the sort of educational content we want our children and grandchildren to consume.
Several years ago a group of us got back together on a small chan and set to the task of trying to lay the groundwork for rebooting a educational show that we felt would be worthwhile to have in this new decade. After a lot of research and discussion we felt like The magic School Bus both was most worthy of a reboot, but also the most promising. We shifted discussion and planning to the “how,” the logistics of such a task. Sure, you can get around copyrights, Scholastic owns the copyright and exclusive licensing, they have been sitting on a goldmine for years without doing much with it.
In the end we decided that no one could sue the whole internet and that we would go ahead with planning and production of a single bridge episode to a new MSB series. If things worked out then we might stand a chance of getting picked up by the publisher, if not, then we had a bit of closure to the series since it never really covered where the characters were coming from and where they were going.
Quite a ways into writing a script and working out how to run everything for even a single episode the chan we had everything hosted on shit itself and the owner give up trying to fix anything. All our work was basically lost and many of the people contributing were cut off from communicating and regrouping. What remains is the idea and the most basic framework.
The here and the now.
At this point the world is ripe for a crowdsourced, crowdfunded project like this, the platforms such as 8chan for communication couldn't be more ideal, and the talent pool is more accessible than ever. Flash has become much more common in animation and the number of people who use it as such has exploded thanks to Youtube and communities such as furries and bronies. We are at a time period where this can not only work but has the highest possible chances of success.
No.6
The battle plan.
The plan is to give copyright law the middle finger and push ahead with developing a new spinoff of The Magic School bus, taking the formula of the show, the mechanics, the characters, and the pursuit of breaking down scientific principles in a way that an object lesson through animation will be able to convey.
We will develop a bridge episode to explain the new series before shifting to a strictly to a contained episode format with a very loose set of serial plots that develop episode to episode in a way that rewards watching the series in order, but doesn’t break anything if they are out of order.
The end goal will be to just create one episode at a time and only take on the workload of making one episode at a time instead of trying to set up plot lines that will take place over a season. We don’t even know if we could make one episode yet, much less a season. The work will be split up to volunteers on a 'want to help' basis. Even the most unskilled person can be an encouragement and help keep morale high. There will be a loose management that will work as the 'director' and keep things focused and make sure things are progressing, not just devolving into rule 34 and flame wars. We want to have a coherent editorial point of view and consistent quality(even if it's poor). At the end of the episode we would publish all our assets and make it possible for someone else to pick up where we left off
Once we pop out an episode we will wrap things up and start over with the next episode using a nearly fresh slate. This will keep the obligations and workload lower as we really don't want people to lose morale by thinking that since they are a huge part of the project, that the never ending project will never be finished without them and failure would be because of their leaving.
As things progress I expect us to gain revenue through crowdfunding such as kickstarter in order to actually pay people based on their contributions. I don't think that open source and volunteer should be synonyms for poor and broke. I would love to see people receive financial reward for their artistic and technical skills that companies all too often seem to think are of little value. As for me, my reward would be knowing that I was instrumental of making something that will help garner a scientific curiosity in the next generation. If I get paid I'm impressed, if not then I still go on with this on my resume and use it to get a job animating somewhere where I can get paid.
No.7
The rules
1. Anything goes right now.
I like loose moderation and think that the average chantard deserves more leeway than they give themselves credit for, they are adults, they know what would be worthwhile to post. I'll write rules as we need them.
The mods.
For now I will be the only mod, and I expect to keep it that way until we need more moderators. I will mod this board with an iron fist and take shit from nobody until there is a well planned system for a group to take executive control of things.