Four two-minute shorts featuring NHK Mascot Domo-Kun that were co-produced by NHK and Big Tent Entertainment will be streamed on the VeohTV Website starting on Friday afternoon, June 20th.  The quartet of shorts featuring the quirky and lovable Domo will be the first of 12 that will be streamed on Veoh over the coming 4-6 weeks (a couple of new entries will be added each week or so).  They will be available for viewing only, not for sale or for downloading.  Big Tent Entertainment’s CEO Richard K. Collins told ICv2 that the Nickelodeon network plans to run all 26 of the Big Tent/NHK Domo short films starting in September, and the company decided to make 12 of shorts available for viewing on the Web “in order to build further consumer interest and create excitement for the Nickelodeon launch.”

Of course there are already a lot of Domo videos taken from Japanese TV, including both interstitials and commercials, available on Veoh and other sites on the Web, but the Big Tent/NHK shorts, which were produced via meticulous stop-motion animation techniques in Tokyo at the TYO Studio and personally supervised by Domo creator Tsuneo Goda, are in English and are designed to introduce and endear the quirky Domo character to a worldwide audience.  Collins told ICv2, “these shorts are entertainment, they are funny and thoroughly enjoyable, but they are also art.  In this age of computer animation, great stop motion work like this is increasingly rare.”

Just as there is in Japan, it appears that there will be a lot of Domo-themed merchandise available here in the U.S.  In addition to apparel items, such as T-shirts from Changes, Play Along Toys, a division of Jakks Pacific, has been named master toy licensee (see “Play-Along Gets Domo-Kun License”), and Dark Horse Deluxe has a wide range of Domo items (see “Dark Horse Readies Domo Merchandise”).