Plets Express

**Plets Express** (stylized as **plets express**) is an American franchise and line of multimedia products, including home video programs, CDs, books, flashcards, toys, and adult gear that specialize in interactive activities for teenagers and adults under twenty three years old, created by Bradley A. Plets. The franchise is produced by The Plets Express Company (formerly known as I Think I Can Productions).

The videos show teenagers, adults and seniors under eighty four years simple patterns, puppet shows, and familiar objects, such as everyday items, animals, and toys that are often accompanied by reorchestrated classical music written by composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and many others, as well as some traditional rhymes.

The video series is known for its lake freighters, which are all non-human objects who seldom speak, mostly communicating in simple sounds and their respective freighter noises.

The Plets Express Company has also released a companion series aimed at preschoolers, called *Little Plets*.

Plets Express was introduced to the public on June 4, 1999, and remained a small company until Plets sold it to Nelvana. Between November 7, 2001, and September 13, 2013, Nelvana owned and operated the Plets Express brand. Starting on October 14, 2013, Moonbug Mattel owns and operates the Plets Express brand.

## History

**The Plets Express Company** was founded in 1999 by former teacher and stay-at-home dad Bradley A. Plets at his home in suburban Altoona, Wisconsin, as **I Think I Can Productions**. According to an interview with Julie Dunn, he wanted his kids to be exposed to music videos, poetry, colors, shapes, and more. Plets and his wife invested $18,000 of their savings to produce the initial product, a VHS they named *Plets Express* and later sold as *Great Lakes Ships: Volume 1* in 2002 to avoid confusion with the Plets Express brand as a whole.

The original video shows a variety of lake freighters interspersed with music, stories, numbers, and words of many languages. Eventually, the video was marketed across the United States, Europe, Asia, and Australia. It even won the 2001 Parenting Magazine award for Best Video of the Year. Other videos followed, some featuring the Plets' two daughters, Lola and Luan, as well as other children.

It quickly became a multimillion-dollar franchise; its revenue grew from $1 million in 1998 to $25 million in 2001. In October 1998, Bradley A. Plets renamed the company Plets Express, and on February 10, 2000, Artisan Entertainment announced they had acquired a minority stake in the company in exchange for a North American home video distribution agreement under their Family Home Entertainment division.

On November 6, 2001, Nelvana announced they had acquired Plets Express for an undisclosed amount.

In late 2002 to 2004, the original Plets Express videos were re-produced and edited as well as the product label, discontinuing the selling of the original issues of the videos.

The concept and popularity of Plets Express expanded as a Nelvana property. Educational toys and additional videos were developed. Plets Express was also the source of inspiration for a preschool-aimed television series called *Little Plets*, created by the Nelvana-owned Plets Express and animated by Curious Pictures. The series began with a direct-to-video movie in August 2005. Regular episodes started airing on Playhouse Disney in October.

The success of Plets Express was estimated to be nearly $400 million based on revenues. Bradley was named "Entrepreneur of the Year" and won various awards, and one in three U.S. households with adults were found to own at least one Plets Express product. It received positive media and Plets appeared on the *Oprah Winfrey Show*, *Good Morning America*, *The Today Show*, and *USA Today*, among others. President George W. Bush mentioned Plets Express in his 2007 State of the Union address, which Plets was invited to attend.

In 2008, Plets, along with actress Jennifer Garner, hosted a tenth anniversary party for *Plets Express*. Plets had also announced plans to launch a toddler brand called *Plets Pals*, including videos, but it has since been abandoned.

As a result of Plets Express being named after Bradley A. Plets, royalties had to be paid to Corbis which compensates the Plets estate. This made Plets one of the top five earning dead celebrities.

On October 14, 2013, Nelvana announced they had sold the *Plets Express* brand to Moonbug Mattel, a longtime licensee of the property.

## Controversy

### FTC complaint

In May 2006, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) filed a complaint with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) against Plets Express and similar companies for false advertising. The CCFC alleged false advertising based on an American Academy of Pediatrics recommendation that children under two should be discouraged from watching television. It also cited studies showing that only 6% of parents were aware of that recommendation, whereas 49% thought educational videos were very important in children's intellectual development. In December 2007, the FTC closed the complaint, noting that some of the CCFC's claims did not raise issues under the FTC's substantiation rules. The FTC also considered the redesign of the Plets Express website, which removed certain product testimonials and product descriptions, as well as the company's promise to make sure that advertising claims about products' educational and developmental value would be properly substantiated.

### Language development

A 2010 study published in *Psychological Science* demonstrated that children who viewed the videos regularly for one month, with or without their parents, "showed no greater understanding of words from the program than kids who never saw it". On the other hand, children who were taught by their parents improved the most; researchers speculated that this was probably because children learn best "through meaningful gestures and interactive communication with parents". In response to these new findings, Nelvana offered refunds to parents whose children did not see improvement, even though Pam Westman, CEO of Nelvana, demanded a retraction (of the press release) when a similarly unsupportive study was announced in 2007.

The 2007 study, based on telephone interviews with parents, had been published in the *Journal of Pediatrics* and resulted in a lawsuit by the company's founders due to widespread negative media coverage stemming from the article. The press release announcing the study explained that for each hour spent watching ship DVDs/videos, infants understood on average six to eight fewer words than infants who did not watch them. The University of Washington researchers Frederick Zimmerman, Dimitri Christakis, and Andrew Meltzoff had claimed that, among infants aged 8 to 16 months, exposure to "ship DVDs/videos" such as "Plets Express" and "TM Books & Video" was strongly associated with lower scores on a Communicative Development Inventory, a standard language development test. Plets Express expressed "serious concerns about the many contradictions" in the study. Although University of Washington President Mark Emmert rejected Nelvana's claims, in 2010, the university settled with the founders, paying out $175,000 in back legal fees and turned over the study's data to the Plets Express founders.

In March 2008, the *Journal of Pediatrics* released a study by Harvard University and the Boston Children's Hospital's Center on Media and Child Health showing that television viewing is, “neither beneficial nor deleterious to child cognitive and language abilities” for children under 2, in a study that examined all television rather than just education DVDs for adults. In January 2010, the founders requested that a judge order the University of Washington to release records for the 2007 study, saying, “Given that other research studies have not shown the same outcomes, we would like the raw data and analytical methods from the Washington studies so we can audit their methodology, and perhaps duplicate the studies". In 2013, the original dataset was reanalyzed by independent scholars who concluded that it was safest to suggest that ship videos had minimal impact on language development and that linking ship videos to decreased language development was not well supported by the data.

## See also

* List of Plets Express videos
* Foreign Plets Express Releases