Happy Dinosaur and The Cryptic Message
How weeks after I found a cryptic message I left for myself, I finally realized what in the world was going on in my head.
17 January, 2022
I do not have classes this day since it is Martin Luther King Jr. Day and I was supposed to on campus but I am home in New York eating a round of cheese and planning my week. I get a text which leads me to check my “notes” app on my phone and I open them to find a cryptic message I wrote to myself at 1 am. It read:
REVERSE WEBKINS!!
I don’t know. I wasn’t even awake at 1 am, but I vaguely remember getting an idea and waking up to write it down. However, this was giving “Seinfeld” vibes because I have no idea what “reverse Webkins” means. I was confused because I don’t even know what “forward Webkins” means so I was really stuck but I seemed like dormant Lyla really thought this was the best idea she ever had. I have not played Webkins in a long time and since my first class was the following day, I thought about this note for ten minutes and then forgot about immediately.
Flash forward to January 27th and I’m finishing getting packed to go back to campus. I am pulling bins out of my closet and a box falls on my head and—ah ha—my Webkins! As I’m putting the stuffed animals back in the box I found a tag on an Endangered Dama Gazelle with the key to every child’s alternate reality—the key to what every child wants from their stuffed animals and what PIXAR made into four imaginative movies: the key to bringing toys to life. This is a dramatic way to say I found its activation code.
This tag sent my gears spinning and I’ve been spending the last week with a loading sign over my head trying to remember what a “reverse Webkins” situation would be and then today during MGMT 3501 I got it.
I remembered. But unlike Seinfeld who realized his cryptic note was not actually that funny, I realized this idea was actually for Happy Dinosaur and digital consumer customization. The part of this idea that was the “reverse” of a Webkin is that instead of a digital animal coming with your physical toy, you get a physical dinosaur from your customized, digital dinosaur.
As I have said in some previous posts, I would like to introduce a Happy Dinosaur Website this year and start working on it in the Spring. I want to offer a customization for Happy Dinosaur plushies that functions like a mini-game or a “character personalization.” A customer interested in choosing their own dinosaur colors can start off with a blank dinosaur on some kind of creative stage and can select from a digital color palette the body color, spots color, and scales color. I would like the digital dinosaur to be able to rotate along a Y-axis so you can see what he looks like from multiple angles. When you finish customizing your dinosaur you pay for it and you will be sent the physical toy. Along with the physical toy is a digital cartoon dinosaur “gif” that you can download and share. This is the “reverse” part of the physical-digital toy combination. Kids can record themselves customizing their dinosaur and be able to share on social media.
You can select accessories for your dinosaur and have your digital dinosaur try them on in different styles and colors. Since Happy Dinosaur originally started out as a cartoon, making the digital dinosaur in 3D-animation should be easy from a imagery perspective. After you purchase your dinosaur you receive a code along with the plush so you can return to the HappyDinostore website if you want additional accessories for him after purchase.
This will be one of the two options for Happy Dinosaur plush customization, with the other being the Personality Palette quiz that is being designed in my Technology Team by Shreya Kanetkar. I look forward to being able to test this customization out and launching the online store. I am now thinking that if you get a code for your dinosaur if I could add a min-game to the Happy Dinosaur website that wouldn’t require you to make an account. I certainly wouldn’t remember all my passwords and accounts are such a bother. I will say that while I forget all my passwords…the only password I will go to my grave remembering will be my Webkin’s log in.
I had a laugh with this blog post, and especially from the Seinfeld reference lol. I think this could be a really interesting direction to take the brand in. Another interesting idea could be if users or artists could submit their own styles and they could be turned into accessories too. Keep it up!