Introducing MonkeyKing NFT: The dream of building a global toy brand.
A few years ago, I took my parents on a trip to Japan and Taiwan. When we got the boarding pass for the Tokyo to Taipei leg, I notice something interesting. The boarding pass has a HelloKitty background printed on it.
It didn’t occur to me at the time, but we were about to step onto the Hello Kitty branded airplane.
My wife was not with us on that trip, otherwise, we may not even get to go to Taiwan. She would probably just stay on the plane and flew right back to Japan. You can imagine the reaction she got when she found out we were on that plane and she wasn’t!
While my parents were enjoying the lay-flat seats, I spent the entire trip contemplating the Sanrio brand.
How can a brand get so massive that it get to be painted on a jumbo jet! I would die to have a chance to work toward something that massive.
That dream would stay dormant for many years until a series of recent events.
A Toy Designer Legend and NFT
While I was into crypto for a few years, I did not start understanding NFT until I met a few amazing artists through Clubhouse, an audio only social network. One of them is an amazing artist and toy maker from Malaysia, Michael Chuah.
I met Michael during an NFT workshop that I was running with Popil, another great artist I met through Clubhouse.
Michael started his career as a comic artists. He created great hits such as GengKey and many other classics. Countless teenagers in Malaysia grew up with comic books created by Michael.
In addition to creating popular comic characters, Michael was also a pioneer in pushing characters into the toy market. Michael’s toy characters are top sellers at Comic Cons around the world. The legend was also the first in creating a toy figurine of a Malaysian politician, Tun M.
I was fascinated by the possibilities that NFT, and the web3 industry at large, can bring to artists. The ability to sell art as NFT represents new form of revenue stream for artists. That’s why I collaborated with Popil to run NFT workshops and try to introduce NFT to new artists. I felt lucky and honored to have met Michael through one of the workshops. His first ever NFT, The Buceros Rhinoceros, was created through the workshop on the Hic Et Nunc marketplace.
Since then, Michael have exploded in the NFT scene. His NFT collection, The Kodekkusu Brothers, have been collected by close to 200 collectors. It now has an offshoot series, the Kodekkusu Brothers & ARTISTS collection, where Michael work with 100 other artists to create variations based on the original designs.
As you can imagine, when I approach Michael on the dream of a global toy brand, it was like a fan boy approaching a super star.
Introducing MonkeyKing NFT
Michael have celebrated 20 years of creative career. In this time he has created many many characters. Some, like those in GengKey, became well known comic characters. Many others stay hidden in Michael’s many many sketch books. Flipping through his 20th anniversary design collection you can see hundreds of never-before-seen character designs.
When we start formulating how best to approach the dream of creating a global toy brand through NFT, we reached into Michael’s many designs. We want to find a design that is easily recognizable, and can be made into different forms. We also want a design that can appeal to a diverse audience. We quickly settled on a set of characters that we believe can take this dream into the future.
Hidden among many other designs were a set of characters that Michael created based on a well-known Chinese tale, Journey to the West. The main character, Sun Wu Kong (孫悟空), was the legendary monkey king. There are already many interpretation of the monkey king concept on the market, including movies, animate series, and comics. So the concept is definitely widely recognized. However, going with a well known mythical character also comes with it’s baggage. Our design must be unique enough to standout. To that front, Michael has it covered. He is injecting his creative genius into the most well known money in the universe.
52 themes, released weekly
With the proliferation of profile pic (PFP) projects, we do not want MonkeyKing to be yet another 10,000 generative art project. Instead, every character and every theme will be hand drawn and designed by Michael. We love the release structure of the nouns project so we have decided to create 52 unique themes of the various MonkeyKing characters and release them weekly.
Each theme represent a unique potential story line of the franchise. The goal is to recruit like minded dreamers who, together, will push the MonkeyKing franchise to the moon.
Full Commercial Rights
We envision the MonkeyKing franchise to be made into different merchandise, such as comic books, stationaries, and of course, toys. To that end, we have decided the NFT will come with full commercial rights. Owners of the NFT have freedom to put the MonkeyKing characters into any commercial use. Each NFT represent not just one character but an entire theme, giving owners a complete backstory and scaffolding for future applications.
A small beginning to a big dream
Life have interesting ways of connecting seemingly unrelated dots. If you have read this far, you are likely another dot. Together, may be we are what it takes to create a network. A network that may eventually lead to a much bigger dream.
Imagine one day the MonkeyKing characters that you own being printed on someone’s boarding pass. Imagine one day seeing your MonkeyKing characters painted on a Boeing 777. This may seem unattainable at this time. To any big dream, there is a humble beginning.
This is that beginning. I recruit you to come dream with us.
Follow us on Twitter @monkeyking_wtf
