IF YOU'RE THE parent of a toddler old enough to sing and dance, brace yourself. The Wiggles are coming back to Hong Kong. The four-hour concerts sold out so fast organisers Playhouse Disney have added extra shows.
Adults should realise the tickets are 'free seating' because their offspring will be too busy jumping up and down to the colour-coded quartet to sit down. They'll all be here: Greg in his yellow trademark 'skivvy'; Anthony in blue; Murray in red and Jeff the purple Wiggle who's always falling asleep. Then there're the sidekicks: Dorothy the Dinosaur, Wags the Dog, Henry the Octopus and Captain Feathersword the friendly pirate. They've been called the Beatles for the under-fives and in a few years the four wholesome Australians have overcome short attention spans to crack a preschool market jaded with computer games and Pokemon.
An institution in Australia and New Zealand since the early 1990s, they are one of the few Antipodean acts to make it in the United States. Not that international success was instant. Like their songs, which hark back to a bright, shiny, Partridge Family era, the band grow on their audience and this was certainly the case in the US. They graduated from a group that no one knew when they played Florida's Disneyland in 1998, to supporting Barney, the porky but politically correct purple dinosaur, a year later. By last year half of their total US$8 million (HK$62 million) earnings for 2002 came from the US, greatly helped by Disney Channel picking up episodes of the Australian Wiggles television show.
This blanket exposure catapulted them on to millions of American children's screens, their popularity seeing their 43-city US tour sell out in one hour last year.
One father in Newhaven, Connecticut, was so desperate to avoid disappointing his Wiggles-mad kids he spent two hours on the phone chasing tickets. Finally he secured them at US$30 a piece (HK$234, compared with HK$158 for next weekend's shows in Hong Kong) and wasn't deterred that the seats were for a Thursday morning show, three months later and two hours' drive away.
Having conquered the US and with a licensing deal with the mighty Disney under the belt, the boys face every live act's problem - how to perform to as many people at once in as many places at once while still flavour of the month. And those clever chaps at Disney have hit on a solution. If Anthony Field, Murray Cook, Jeff Fatt and Greg Page - who have toured Hong Kong four times, most recently in April last year - can't be omnipotent, make Wiggles clones. Under the Walt Disney Association deal, new versions of themselves are being cast for Asia.
Unlikely though it sounds, a new Fab Four has already been chosen to crack the Taiwan market, and shock horror, the red Taiwan Wiggle is a woman. With a bilingual format in Putonghua interjected with English, president and managing director of Walt Disney Asia Pacific Jon Niermann believes they will be just as successful in this region.
