A Knights And Bikes cartoon is in the works
Knights And Bikes rights might mean delighted tykes
Delightful friendship-'em-up Knights And Bikes has been blessed by the television gods, as Tiger Aspect Productions have picked up the rights to develop an animated series based on its unsupervised 80s childhood adventures.
Tiger Aspect are a pretty huge production company, and listing their programmes would take a while. Most notably, they've adapted both Aliens Love Underpants and Charlie And Lola, the latter making an excellent comparison to Knights And Bikes's boisterous and cute personality (side note: read the Clarice Bean books, you cowards), and I'm super excited to see how this turns out. It'll be aimed at 6-12 year olds, but I'll be surprised if its appeal doesn't reach beyond that.
I adored Knights And Bikes when I played it for Unknown Pleasures, declaring the game "this perfectly childlike blend of boisterous noise and conviction with delicate feelings and worries and powerlessness." It's the adventures of two girls on a Cornish island who go searching for treasure, befriending a goose, riding bikes, fighting ghosts, and splashing in puddles. Our Matt recently took our review copy and fled the office to escape my envy, so you'll likely hear more about it from us soon. It's a bit special. No pressure, Matt.
Co-creator Rex Crowle spoke of the deal: "The energy, humour and joy that continually bursts out of TV animation was a large inspiration in creating Knights And Bikes, not just in the way it looks, but also in the themes and tone of the game."
As the kids say: this. It really does look like a perfect turn of events for everyone.
Thanks to the RPS induction process burning out all memories of my time in libraries, I was somehow unaware that there are already two Knights And Bikes books as well, written by Gabrielle Kent.
Disclosure: I have a cousin who formerly worked as a producer for Tiger Aspect's owning company, Endemol Shine UK, although I didn't realise they were linked until researching this post, and now that I think about it I haven't spoken to her for about ten years and I really should. Also we too used to play in the street and have weird kid adventures in the woods, but I don't think we fought ghosts or rode bikes.