Though Marty Keltz might not be a name you instantly recognize, his Emmy award-winning work has been invaluable for children all over the world. Marty co-founded Scholastic Productions and led the teams that created The Magic School Bus, Goosebumps, and Charles in Charge as well as acting as Executive Producer on the iconic The Babysitters Club and Indian in the Cupboard feature films. We’ve been able to sit down with the man himself to learn more about his career, his history, and how he got involved in the Echocore project.
Want to meet Marty? Join the Echocore Discord!
Tell us a bit about yourself and your family background.
I was Born in Brooklyn in 1944. My dad was a textile buyer for the Anglo-African Shipping Company in New York City’s garment center and my mother ended up working part time in Alexander’s, a department store. Her family were all anarchists and anti-government. She wasn’t someone with a college education, nor did she spend time reading books, but she was very smart.
The curious thing about my story, which has a lot to do with how I got engaged in television, is that I had severe ADHD and dyslexia. These weren’t things that were diagnosed at the time, but in the fifth grade of elementary school, I was illiterate. I couldn’t read. I was in the special ed class, with a wonderful teacher who got me reading. I went from not reading at the beginning of the fifth grade to being a reader by the end.
I’ve always been really involved in education and in the early part of my career, I went into teaching straight after college. I was always very interested in children who were labelled as ‘stupid’ or ‘slow’ or whatever.
Looking back at my own situation, it became apparent to me that it was about learning differences that people have, not disabilities. There is a way in which the school systems have always rewarded linear thinkers — children who could do well on standardized tests. There was a time when I was producing, when all the studio production executives were Ivy League MBAs who were doing television based on demographic analysis and mathematical formulas.
Going back a little bit, not being able to read until about 12 must have been difficult to cope with. Did you make up stories since you couldn’t read what your peers were reading?
No, not really. My father called me a ‘television-crazy kid.’ I have a very vivid memory of being 5 years old — we got a Crosley television set, and it was a point where there wasn’t anything more popular than ‘The Milton Berle Show.’ There was a certain amount of status owning a television and being able to talk about the shows the next day. I just fell in love with television. I would get up when the TV was only showing a test pattern and still turn it on and sit there. The reality is for most of my life, I’ve been here for — and then involved with — shaping many of the media paradigm shifts in the entertainment industry. I’m doing that now with Echocore, too.
In the late 60s, in the United States, there was the development of the Media Literacy Movement. It was basically English and Social Studies teachers who were starting to use film and television in the classroom to teach literature and history. It was really the first time that there was some understanding that a child’s inability to decode black dots on a page was not necessarily indicative of their intelligence, interests, imagination, or their creativity. I hooked up with a national organization, The National Association of Media Educators, and we were educators who were using short films to teach poetry and teach story structure. I had a black and white television set with rabbit ears that I would bring to my classroom, and we would watch reruns of sitcoms. I’d teach the kids about plot, setting, character development, and all the things that would ordinarily be part of a book-based reading lesson. These are all efforts that link directly back to the fifth grader who couldn’t read. Everything I did at Scholastic and in my career links back to that fifth grader, the impact that had on me, and the monkeys I’ve had to carry on my back my whole life.
As a teacher, my interest in media literacy is what fueled my entrepreneurship really. I was a subscriber to Media Methods Magazine, which helped look at different ways to use audiovisual media to expand kids’ intelligence. I began as the East Coast salesman and left there as a Vice President and publisher. In my last couple of years there, Sony, Panasonic and some other Japanese tech companies were starting to advertise with us their emerging home video technologies, so I was right there and part of what eventually became the Betamax and VHS home video revolution. In the same way now, we’re at the beginning of something revolutionary with Echocore.
This helped inspire the founding of Scholastic productions. I was only thinking at first of home video. The opportunity I took advantage of, was that Media Methods magazine was geared towards audio-visual applications that could be used in instructional environments, which meant they were all delivered on film, not on video tape. I organized a conference about the impact video tapes could have on instructional material and that positioned me in a terrific way. Because Media Methods was so successful as an advertising vehicle, it was a magazine that Scholastic was very aware of, as they had magazines that went to teachers and wanted to see how they could get the same level of tech advertising. I knew the President of Scholastic, had lunch with him, told him what I wanted to do, and he hired me.
What did you tell him? What was your vision?
Basically, I told him what my vision was, which would eventually be called “transmedia.” We had all the Scholastic books and magazines as resources to develop into motion picture and television content. Then I had the Scholastic Book Clubs, which were the most extraordinary home distribution mechanism selling directly to students and parents. The first animated children’s video cassette was sold in the clubs in 1980 and it was a hit. Parents would usually insist the kids buy books as well as the video tape, so they would see the kids reading. I saw where this was all going to go and I can see a similar opportunity to shift existing media paradigms with Echocore today.
You and Doug met around 15 years ago. Tell us about that. How did you guys meet?
I was interested in Second Life and Twitter, especially as they were places for educators to meet, build communities, and connect. I had become quite a well-known figure in those environments.
Doug had been writing these blogs about virtual reality and the Metaverse. I am the kind of person who reaches out and gets in touch if I’m interested in something, so I got in contact! I was living in Toronto at the time and it turned out he was based there too, so we wound up meeting. We immediately became friends and committed to some of the same ideas — essentially, trying to use the Metaverse to create stories, narratives, and co-created experiences. This is when we started our work with the army, creating a fictional environment in which Afghanistan and Iraq veterans who were amputees could experience things virtually, in a way that would help them reorient themselves back into society.
Doug and I worked on a range of projects. We did one for USA Bank, which was a simulation of a branch. Then, there started to be all this research on the idea of what was happening emotionally and psychologically to you when you’re in these immersive virtual environments — the way in which reality and virtual reality can blend and become virtually indistinguishable from each other.
If we meet and talk to people who are so excited about the Metaverse today, Doug and I will smile at each other; not because we’re smarter than anybody else, but because we have had that lived experience of an immersive environment.
Doug is a pretty remarkable person. For example, you can talk to people who are incredibly geeky and that’s who they are, or you can talk to someone like me, with my head in the clouds. I like big ideas, not the nitty gritty. But Doug can easily get into the nitty gritty and ones and twos, as well as thinking big and having these very creative ideas.
How has your background influenced your interest in Echocore?
When you work in the film or television industry, you’re a fee-for-service provider. You work when you can, and if there’s no project, there’s no work. The power of Echocore is creating an opportunity where the people who would traditionally be the fee-for-service person, are now in the position to be owners of IP and benefit specifically from whatever piece they’ve done that resulted in the final IP.
The model we’re building is the exact thing that’s driving the creativity you’re seeing on Tiktok, Twitch, and everywhere on social media.
I know that Echocore can, for a whole generation of creative people, create an equality between the people who are creating the content and contributing to the experience, and what the studio historically controlled exclusively. Echocore’s commitment to creative people and creative enterprise will be much more equally balanced [than in traditional media].
How and why did creatives being fairly compensated become a priority for you?
As the President of Scholastic productions, I was in a war. My job was to make money. Since the beginning of Betamax and VHS, creatives have had the hope that “content would become king.” That’s never really happened. It is beginning to happen now and again on the internet, but it’s rare. Echocore is about cultivating an environment to allow a great output of stories. But it isn’t like we now need to deal with some gatekeeper who keeps the creator out of the loop.
I’ve been fighting battles my whole life, where I’ve wanted the good guys to win. That’s what I want to happen here too: Not let Meta win, but the good guys.
What do you think that will take?
It will take the power of these democratically driven aspirations like Web 3 and the Metaverse to defeat the forces of evil. This whole experience is my new venue and my new paradigm: a platform to do all the things I’ve always done.
To learn more about Echocore, visit the website. The Echocore Genesis NFT is your multi-season pass to a narrative-based space in the Metaverse. Or join our Discord to meet Marty and the team.
