Yahoo has signed an exclusive deal with Playtone, Tom Hanks’ production company to stream a Sci-Fi animated series that’s been created by Tom Hanks himself.
Electric City will be a post apocalyptic web series portraying a future inspired and similar to the one seen in the Disney Pixar film WALL-E and Tom Hanks will be voicing the lead role. The web series will have 20 episodes, each episode will be around 3-4 minutes long and it will be focusing on topics that have to deal with energy consumption, freedom of information and etc.
Tom Hanks is a self proclaimed Trekkie and has said that Star Trek attributed as a model for Electric city. The idea for Electric City came to him around six years ago, but at the time he originally planned for it to be very serious and dark to show what a dysfunctional future could be like and it was going to use puppets for the characters and such. This led to it becoming an animation project on Yahoo.
This isn’t the first time tom Hanks has had his productions online. When he first discovered YouTube, he very soon created his own YouTube channel and created his own online talk show called “The three Minute Talk Show”. It’s said that Hanks is overjoyed about this new media, hopefully if Electric City is a success he’ll produce more web projects.
Yahoo streams many shows but most of them are news and information type shows, Electric City will be their very first scripted show. Yahoo’s Executive Ross Levinsohn joked about it being their most expensive scripted show and their first. Both the people at Yahoo and Tom Hanks said that Electric City will be a big hit and become very successful to turn into its own franchise.
Electric City will be first shown at the Consumers Electronic store in Las Vegas tomorrow, they’ll be showing three snippets from the web series. It’s sad for the people who can’t see it, but do not worry for the show will start streaming somewhere in spring.