SOUND TRAK

While we were shooting the first season of PINWHEEL on that little up-start start-up network called, uh, oh yeah, Nickelodeon (whatever heppened to them?) our friend ALLYNN GOOEN (who was just beginning his way up) told Olga (whom he met when he ran the box office at Bil Baird's Marionette Theater) he was working with two Caldecott-winning authors on developing a property for television about listening skills. (Boy, how precient was that idea What OMG I wasn't listening WTF) Mister G. said they'd love us to create and perform the puppets. The basic idea sounded sound, so we all figured out the show around it and called the thing SOUND TRAK!

I did all the art work for the sales kit on animation cels with ink, paint, photo-montage and collage. Worked my brains off on it, too. Ultimately the series didn't achieve lift-off - - though GOOWINS BALLOOWINS did! (http://bugsandballoons.com/).

Sometimes getting there is half the fun.

Sometimes.

Just stumbled upon the art, posted below. Each scene represents a different function of listening and hearing.

Double-U Tee Eff? EL-OH-EL!

Here are Allynn's memories of THE ORIGIN OF SOUND TRAK - - or - - We Worked On A TV Series Together And All I Got Was These Drawings.

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After doing my cable tv show for a few seasons, I figured it would be good to have a message... and since I studied (and believed in) Speech... hey why not a tv series on it. At that point I thought about Annie Siedler... she had been my main Speech teacher in college (Montclair State College - now "University", in NJ). For my final exam rather than write the information about Speech correction... I had an inspiration and wrote a Fairy Tale using the Speech Problems and corrections as good Knights and monsters. She gave me an "A"... it turned out (I didn't know at the time) she had written a successful children's speech correction book - "The Hungry Thing". We've been friends ever since.

I mentioned the idea of this tv series to her and she wanted to work on it with me. After we worked on an outline, she felt it was a good time to bring in her writing partner... Jan Slepian. Ann and Jan wrote a couple books together and jan has written a number of books on her own. We met a few times before i said we should bring you guys aboard ... since they had the book writing experience and you had the puppetry and tv background (where did I fit in?).Then we all worked on it for some good time/s....

We submitted the project to several places... Jan had a friendship with Maurice Sendak... I had met some tv producers in classes I had taken... you had your connections.....My memory was that the best reaction was that they liked the proposal, but they were looking for minority shows.

That's my memory.Allynn