Fear not parents of picky eaters and food-flingers! A new unbranded food series by Chipotle Mexican Grill entitled RAD Lands launches today that will both educate and entertain your junk-food craving kids and feature musicians, celebrity chefs and YouTube personalities mom and dad can enjoy, too.
The Neon Trees, Biz Markie, Portugal. The Man have all created new music and videos for the show that was created in partnership with The Magic Story (the team behind the beloved Yo Gabba Gabba! series featuring that dreamy DJ Lance) and CAA Marketing. The show is intended to educate families about food, where it comes from and how it's prepared.
"We can’t really express how excited we were to get a call from Chipotle asking us to appear and sing on their show RAD Lands because we are huge fans of the show’s creators, The Schultz’s," Portugal. The Man said in a statement to Billboard. "Countless hours on the tour bus have been dedicated to their shows."
RAD Lands' narrative centers on an animated segment called "The Cultivators," a rebel group committed to saving the galaxy’s plants and animals to preserve access to fresh food. The squad's nemesis, meanwhile, attempt to homogenize food and turn it all into highly-processed junk food.
The musicians' original videos will appear during the show's music segment called Fresh Songs.
The first season will be available exclusively on iTunes in the US and Canada. As part of the initiative Chipotle will donate $100,000 to the Chef Ann Foundation, a non-profit organization that works with U.S. schools to serve healthy, nutritious and delicious food to students.
"Chipotle is ensuring that better food is accessible to everyone," said Mark Crumpacker, chief marketing and development officer at Chipotle. "We created RAD Lands to educate young eaters and their parents about food in an entertaining and engaging way. We don''t advertise to kids so the show is completely unbranded. We hope that it sparks conversation and curiosity among families, ideally leading to smarter and more informed choices about food."
In addition to the Neon Trees, Biz Markie and Portugal. The Man, Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne will also appear in the series.
Also appearing in RAD Lands are chefs Amanda Freitag, Michael Voltaggio and Duff Goldman.
"Chipotle and the RAD Lands series are a great fit with the values of my foundation," said Ann Cooper, founder of the Chef Ann Foundation, in a statement. "We are thrilled with the generous support from Chipotle and iTunes through this program, and hope it encourages others to contribute what they can to influence future generations’ views on food."
As part of the initiative, Chipotle is partnering with Discovery Education, a provider of digital education content for K-12 classrooms for RAD Lands In School. An online program for secondary schoolers will launch this spring and will pair episodes with lesson plans and activities and emphasize nutrition, environmentalism and culinary skills.
Chipotle's first original short film, "Back to the Start," launched in 2011 and was set to Willie Nelson covering Coldplay’s 'The Scientist.'" The film won a Cannes Lions award in 2012 and was distributed across 10,000 cinema screens and ran in its entirety during the 54th Annual Grammy Awards. The spot had more 300 million media impressions, hit 5.9 million on YouTube and had 45 million Twitter impressions.
Subsequent videos included the song "Pure Imagination" from the 1971 film classic Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, performed by Fiona Apple; and an animated short set to a remake of the Backstreet Boys’ 1999 hit "I Want It That Way" recorded with Alabama Shakes’ lead singer Brittany Howard and My Morning Jacket frontman Jim James.
