*read first The Truth about Pato (I) HERE
That night, after the conversation with Novel, (in charge of executive production, the main control on the scripts and the direction of contents in England), we were devastated. Pato had died…. We couldn’t believe it… Pato .. our little Pato.
Neither the new designs, nor mine and Guillermo’s arguments about our point of view for the contents of the series, of the comic side, nor our own executive producer, Kath, could convince them. They couldn’t imagine the character, there was no way of changing their opinion – and the next day, they were flying from London to Madrid to tell us, amongst other things, exactly how the series was going to be from now on in terms of characters and stories.
We really didn’t like these meetings. Not because we didn’t have a good relationship with them (although we weren’t the best of friends either) but it was basically because we had nothing in common … we were like night and day. We didn’t understand each other at all. The meetings were really dull, no smiling, they simply wanted a different series to us.
At this point I will stop for a moment so that you can understand the incredible frustration we suffered in those days, after all the hardwork and all the excitement, after all our investment (which was massive for us, a company only 2 years into operation). After getting to the point of entering into partnership, we then find out that they didn’t want the Pocoyo that we had sold them. And not only what had happened with Pato (this was nothing more than a disagreement), it seemed we had a different vision. However, it was either this… or nothing. If we didn’t accept our executive producer’s rules, they would up and leave (understandable in part). But we just didn’t have the strength to start over again with our search for a partner, so for us there was no other option, all we could do was look to the future.
However, as always, our guardian angel, was working behind the scenes. A couple of months later Ann Brogan appeared in Granada and took over the project. Ann understood that Pocoyo was something else and decided to start over and go back to square one (thanks Ann!). This is another story that I will tell you later on …
now, where were we?....
Pato...?
Had he or had he not died?
Yes … he was dead!
Although …. Something happened that night and Guillermo and I were in the office until late at night preparing for the meeting the next day.
At 10 o’clock in the morning the two people from London walked through the door. It was a grey and rainy day in Madrid, Beethoven’s funeral march could be heard playing in the office, in the middle of the meeting room table, a wooden box and two small trees.
- Before starting, we wanted to take a minute’s silence for Pato’s death, his body was present with us, there in the wooden box … these were our first words after sitting ourselves in the meeting room.
They weren’t impressed… they didn’t even smile (this was a classic comic moment!).
- Before he died, Pato wanted to leave us his legend, a surprise … something even we didn’t know….
Pato had ….. a son!!!!
The music stopped and we spread out all over the table loads of sketches of the new Pato that we had created the night before, much smaller and fatter, with a green hat instead of the original black one, with big orange feet. Pato’s son was incredible, would they be capable of killing his as well?...
No, they didn’t do it, they liked him – and I want to point something out here. In the majority of cases, crisis are opportunities … you have to look at them like this. They pushed us to the limit, yes, but this Pato was superior to his predecessor, much more pre-school. They were right, there was a better Pato although they didn’t know who he was. Creativity is infinite, there is always a place where ideas can grow, and despite not being in agreement on lots of things, all of this taught us a very important lesson: as much as we wanted to feel that the series was “ours”, there were other forms of understanding and pushing ourselves to see things as they did made us better producers. In the end we all got what we wanted and this was the most important thing to come out of all that difficult decision making.
