Former Nickelodeon Chief Has a New Plan for the iPhone

Bigby, an 8-year-old crime fighter, will appear in an iPhone app in January, but the character’s creator has “transmedia” aspirations.

Can the iPhone begin a new children’s entertainment franchise? One of Hollywood’s leading character architects is banking on it.

Albie Hecht, the former president of Nickelodeon Entertainment who helped develop such stalwarts as “SpongeBob SquarePants,” will introduce an iPhone game app in January built around his latest creation: Bigby, an 8-year-old crime-fighting genius who believes his job is to stop dragons and pirates from ruining the world.

In the game, delivered to the iPhone in partnership with the online gaming giant Addicting Games, players assume the role of Bigby, stepping on pirates’ heads to shrink them, among other challenges. The game will be aimed at 8- to 17-year-old players.

If the iPhone strategy proves successful, Mr. Hecht will immediately fan out other Bigby properties. His digital entertainment studio, Worldwide Biggies, has a “transmedia bible” already in place — episodes written for a television show, a merchandising plan, a treatment for a feature film.

“You need to look at what kids are talking about, and it’s all online,” Mr. Hecht said, adding that the youth audience “smells” slipshod efforts to retrofit characters from television for the Web and turns up its collective nose. “We know that’s a sure route to failure,” he said.

Mr. Hecht is hardly the only media entrepreneur trying to invert the old model of content creation — putting inexpensive digital distribution first to avoid investing millions in a television show only to find out that children don’t like the character. For the most part, “transmedia” success has been elusive.

With his fingerprints also on “Dora the Explorer” and “The Rugrats Movie,” Mr. Hecht has the credentials to be taken seriously. But how many 8-year-olds are running around with iPhones? “You would be surprised,” he said, citing statistics about sales to children under 17. “When prices come down this Christmas, you will see younger and younger kids with them.”