Danger 5: find them online, bring them to the TV screen

Dario Russo got millions of hits online with his Italian Spider-Man. He told Miguel Gonzalez how he’s going to bring that existing audience to his new TV show, Danger 5.

When Dario Russo first conceived Italian Spider-Man – a parody of Italian action films of the 70s – as a short film for his final year at Flinders University and uploaded it to YouTube in late 2007, just as he had done with all his previous work, he did not anticipate that the fake trailer would find a cult following online… but it did.
“It was shot on a JVC prosumer HD camera, and it reflected the absolute zero budget we were working on then. It was made essentially with what we could borrow, but for some reason a whole bunch of people decided to watch the trailer,” he said.
The initial success helped Russo secure funding for 10 more shorts, which were also released via YouTube. Soon, Italian Spider-Man had reached 3.5 million views for the trailer, and something between 150,000 to 1m for each of the episodes. SBS wanted to turnItalian Spider-Man into a TV show, but due to internal issues within the production team, the project fell over.
“For me, understanding why it worked was all reverse engineering. We had a product that a lot of people were watching, and we could have potentially made a lot of money from merchandise,” he added.
The broadcaster was still interested in working with Russo, so it offered him and his writing partner David Ashby a development deal for a new show. The result was Danger 5, a comedy set in an alternate world in which World War II is taking place in the 60s, and a group of international spies is on a mission to kill Hitler.
The low-budget series, financed by SBS, the South Australian Film Corporation and the Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund, is the first created out of South Australia with an entirely local team. Its six episodes, set to debut in the second half of 2011, will be preceded by a prologue, which will premiere at this month’s BigPond Adelaide Film Festival. It will then be split into mini-episodes for online release, to build an audience for the upcoming broadcast. “With Italian Spiderman we learned that you can foster quite a good fan base on the internet. We still have contact with them, so SBS recognised the potential in being able to cultivate your audience online– especially with the type of audience that we want, which is internet users, young people,” explained Russo. “So we designed a prologue episode to be used as an internet series, preceding the rest of the show, to give it a bit more depth and to build a following before it airs on television. The online content is like a smorgasbord of a lot of the stuff that’s going to happen in the series. It also ties ends with Italian Spiderman, because although this is a very different beast, there are many stylistic cues that link in with that project. It’s of a similar ilk. SBS has supported the online component, and it will be a good test to see what
people think.”
Producer Kate Crosser first met Russo and Ashby when she was working at Adelaide’s Media Resource Centre. The failedItalian Spider-Man TV series was meant to be their first project together, but when that didn’t happen, they decided to collaborate on Danger 5. According to Crosser, the series was conceived based on what an online audience is looking for.

“It was always designed to feed back to that audience. The idea was that we would engage an online audience before it went to a broadcast stage. That’s the starting point; the first time anyone will see these characters will be online,” she explained.
NO GUARANTEES
According to Russo, Danger 5 is what he and Ashby “wanted to see on TV”, since they identified segments of the market that aren’t being catered for by Australian broadcasters.
“I don’t necessarily know if what’s been broadcast is a reflection of what people want to see. I can’t pretend to know why; perhaps conservative ways of thinking or financing.

“We wanted something that was entertaining and appealed to our sensibilities and sense of humour. Lots of people our age would really respond to it; your Gen Xs, your Gen Ys will enjoy this kind of program.  Australian comedy usually falls within the same spectrum, and there isn’t much local surreal, stylised content.”