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Snoopy, Charlie Brown and the rest of the Peanuts Characters To Join the FunMail Wireless Messaging Family
(February 17, 2002) Cannes, France -- FunMail Inc., a leading provider of MMS and SMS visual messaging services announced at GSM World Congress today that it will incorporate the beloved PEANUTS character family into its line of visual messaging services. Through an agreement with United Media, PEANUTS will become available to FunMail's network of wireless carriers and wireless portal customers including Vodafone, Globe, Smart and MSN.
"Snoopy, Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy and the whole PEANUTS family has been a part of everyone's lives for over 50 years," said FunMail CEO Adam Lavine. "The warmth and comfortable familiarity of PEANUTS makes them a wonderful additional to the FunMail service offering."
The FunMail service selects Multimedia Messaging (MMS) or Picture Messaging content based on a user's SMS. For example, if a person types in "HAVE A GOOD TRIP" they could get an animation of Snoopy flying through the air on his doghouse. FunMail's Animation Studios is creating unique animations optimized for wireless handsets using the content already created by PEANUTS creator Charles M. Schulz.. PEANUTS characters will be available as color animated MMS messages, as well as black and white Picture Messages which are compatible with over 500,000,000 phones worldwide.
"We are confident that FunMail can do a great job bringing the classic PEANUTS characters to life," said Jean Sagendorph, Licensing Manager at United Media. "FunMail's animation is of the highest quality, and its growing network of characters is impressive. They were an obvious choice when it came to choosing a wireless animation partner."
According to the GSM Association, consumers send over 24 billion wireless short messages (SMS) per month worldwide. It is widely expected that these messages will increasingly become multimedia in nature (MMS). FunMail is one of a select few companies with live, revenue-generating MMS services. The FunMail solution integrates with a wireless operator's existing messaging infrastructure, upgrading it to include intelligent visual messaging capabilities.
Over the many seasons since "A Charlie Brown Christmas" debuted in 1965, the PEANUTS specials have won five Emmy Awards and 15 Emmy nominations, as well as two Peabody Awards for Excellence in Broadcasting.
Lee Mendelson serves as executive producer of the special. The animation was produced and directed by Bill Melendez and Larry Leichliter. The original music was composed by Vince Guaraldi and David Benoit, and was arranged and performed by David Benoit. PEANUTS is licensed and syndicated by United Media.
This program carries a TV-G parental guideline.
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