Entrevista, Oct 2005

October 2005
By Anna Carugati

Magnus Scheving is not just a world-class athlete, entertainer and writer in his native Iceland. He is the creator and star of the children’s series LazyTown. What started as a book and a lifestyle philosophy for kids, advocating healthy eating and exercise, has turned into a top-rated TV series. As LazyTown’s hero Sportacus, Scheving jumps, flips and does airborne splits, and in the process is a very positive impact on children’s lives around the world.


TV KIDS: How did the idea for LazyTown come about?

SCHEVING: Thirteen years ago, I started as a public speaker. I went around the world to talk about fitness on behalf of the government. I saw there was no role model for health for children and I really wanted to do something about this. I asked myself, is it doable to make an entertaining TV program about a healthy lifestyle for kids? I held more than 4,000 live events in 52 different countries. And I jumped up and down with kids and parents, and I figured out that there were two things that kids really liked: they like to move and they don’t want to be talked down to; they want to be treated with care and respect.

And parents asked me the same questions again and again. I boiled them down to seven main issues that were important to all parents, whether they were in Iceland or Canada or Uruguay or Korea. When you are raising children you want them to be safe; you want them to be educated; you want them to eat healthy foods; you want them to go to sleep early and brush their teeth; you want them not to hurt other kids; and you want them to learn how to share things. Then I said to my team, ‘Guys, we are never going to compromise; we only want to do the best.’ I put my team to work for eight years in Iceland, which is an ideal test market, because it’s a small population and you can get feedback quickly and easily. We worked for eight years because we wanted to try our concept on two generations of young children.

TV KIDS: How did LazyTown the TV series get started?

SCHEVING: LazyTown started as a book. Then we did two musicals, which sold out for four years. Then we stopped, because I couldn’t jump anymore! We produced videos and board games. We have our own 24-hour radio station for kids. We had a national campaign in Iceland that increased vegetable consumption by 13 percent and decreased soft-drink use by nearly 16 percent in only 30 days. We got a Scandinavian health award for that campaign. Then we did 11 other books.

I then traveled around the world, attended 400 meetings to see what other people were doing. I was asked, ‘Why are you traveling to Germany and Japan?’ I did it because I really wanted to see what was being done in other markets, Why are they successful? Why do they have properties? How much money do they have behind it? Why do kids like it?

We decided that to get critical mass and spread the LazyTown lifestyle, we wanted to go on TV. We made a style guide and a presentation for TV stations. We went to the biggest market in the world, the U.S., and sold it to Nickelodeon. They took a big chance, because we said we wanted to produce this series in Iceland. They said, OK, we want 35 half-hour episodes. I said I want to shoot this in HD, because I want this to be of the best quality possible and have live characters, puppets and CGI backgrounds. So in Iceland we built a high-tech studio. We shot LazyTown and people said this is too good for children’s TV, and I said, you are preaching to the wrong guy!

LazyTown premiered on Nickelodeon in the U.S. in August of 2004, and it reached the Top 5 kids’ programs in only ten days. In Canada, in just 30 days it became extremely successful. In South America, it was sold to Discovery Kids. We sold it to Germany and in two weeks it became number one; and in Norway it became number one in only one day. It will air on the Disney Channel in Spain, France and Italy. It recently premiered on the BBC and on Nickelodeon in the U.K.
Everywhere LazyTown has aired, it’s gone straight to the top.

TV KIDS: If you get young children to understand the importance of a healthy lifestyle, can it have a long-lasting impact on them?

SCHEVING: What we have seen here in Iceland for 14 years is proof of that. The health minister of Iceland recently announced on TV that for the first time in ten years, obesity is not increasing. Reporters asked what the main reason was, and he said LazyTown. When I walk down the street in Iceland, I see teenagers who were little children when I started LazyTown. They show me push-ups and handstands. And when I have foreigners with me, it’s really strange—I have to explain what is happening!

Yes, it can have a huge impact. I have thousands and thousands of e-mails from kids who haven’t smoked or have started to exercise because of LazyTown. It has motivated people to change their lifestyles.

We parents—all of us—are really struggling, because we are bad role models. We work too much. We’re never home. We don’t have time to live a balanced life. LazyTown is about balance—not eating junk food all the time, and not eating carrots all the time, it’s in the middle. A healthy person is a person who has balance. If you get that early, without realizing you are doing it, it goes into your subconscious, then you succeed.

If you play tennis or play golf, you do it because you love the game. When you are hitting the ball in tennis, you’re not thinking, ‘This will give me great thighs.’ Same with golf—you are walking outside in the fresh air. That’s why it’s good for older people—they go out and walk without realizing how far they are walking.

TV KIDS: How did you pitch the show to Brown Johnson [the executive creative director of preschool television at Nickelodeon]? She told me you had the whole crew doing push-ups? Tell me about it.

SCHEVING: [Laughs] Basically, we are a little strange! This is entertainment, and if you can’t entertain a person in a room who is listening to you pitch your show, then you surely cannot be entertaining on the screen, that’s my philosophy. When we talked to Brown, the whole crew was there. We just showed them a little of the LazyTown lifestyle. They did push-ups and jumps with us.

I had a joke with my crew. I had 163 people working on LazyTown here in Iceland for more than 14 months. There were 40 foreigners, and the rest were Icelandic. They are now working on the Clint Eastwood movie that is being shot [in Iceland]. In December, as a joke, all my crew had to do 100 push-ups in one hour—otherwise they were not going to get paid. Everybody did it. And it was very funny, because there was one guy struggling—he was at 98 and there were only 30 seconds to go. The whole crew was cheering him on, Go for it! He barely made it. We do a lot of physical activity as entertainment.

TV KIDS: When you started as a public speaker years ago, did you ever think you’d reach this level of success today?

SCHEVING: Not really. I’m an extremely rich man in the sense that I have a good family, great people who work for me, and I do something that I like—that is everybody’s dream. I have always been extremely proactive. I jump the same height if I have two kids in the room or 6,000. I always do my best. It doesn’t come as a surprise that I’m trying to do my best. If that brings me where I am now, then I’m happy.

I am really proud of the reaction I’m getting to LazyTown. I got an e-mail from a grandmother who lives in Idaho. She wrote, “I went to visit my daughter, my grandson came to the door and he was eating carrots. I walked into the kitchen and asked my daughter, ‘Why is he eating carrots? He never eats them.’ And my daughter answered, ‘I don’t know. He’s watching this program called LazyTown and I have to run down to the store and buy carrots.’ He was playing all the characters from the show: Sportacus, Stephanie and Robbie. You don’t realize what you are doing, you are changing the diet of a generation.” That was so gratifying.

Basically, kids are helping me! It’s what I have learned from them, not what I am teaching them. Everything I am doing on the screen is something I have learned from kids.