Alexandra Freeman

Early on in the production of the series, the whole team started to come up with ideas for spin-off commercial products which could be sold alongside it. One of my favourites was Annie Bates' suggestion of inflatable Basilosaurus (early whales) which children could sit on in swimming pools! One of my first ideas, though, was that if plastic models of the animals were made to scale then there were various game-like 'experiments' which could be done with them. These could be included as suggestions on the back of the packet - giving 'added value'(in commercial language!) to the toys, and we could then expand on these on the website.

Unfortunately Beasts was transmitted at the same time as the first Harry Potter film and the Lord of the Rings, which meant that the major toy manufacturers were apparently not interested in making Beasts toys. However, I was able to adapt a lot of my initial ideas into web-based games.

I did work with BBC Worldwide, however, to provide background information for their CD ROM game 'Operation Survival',and 'fact files' information for their promotional material and Kellogg games. One commercial product which was made was a quiz-based board game. For this, I worked with the Green Board Game Company to add as much extra information to the questions and answers as possible.