The creation of “Emkei the Monkey.”
Baby Goes Pro created an animated character, named Emkei the Monkey. Here is his story.

Hi...I am Emkei the Monkey. My name is pronounced \em\ \kā\ according to Webster’s Dictionary, or simply M.K. for short. That may seem like an odd name but, you see, M and K are the initials of Ms. Gigi’s twins, Madison and Karson. Ms. Gigi thought the name was cute, but it also needed a purpose and thus the acronym E.M.K.E.I., which you can read about in these pages.

Once my name was figured out, it needed to come to life through animation so the best character creator you could imagine was hired. He works for a very well known media company and is an Annie Award winner, which are like the Oscar's of animation. You have probably seen many of his characters before but didn’t even know it!

My character creator came up with 15 versions of me on the first go around. Here is a sampling. Can you find one that most resembles me?

The next step was to narrow down the features which were most appealing about each and narrow me down to the top 3 choices. Here is what I looked like next…

From this, two main monkeys where picked, the first one and the second one above. To help the decision, children and adults where surveyed. Adults liked number two and children liked number one. So number one was picked, of course! Kids liked the hat on number two so a hat was added the to number one. I also got shoes so I could play sports. Notice my washboard stomach and my biceps!

This was close to being me, but not final as colors needed to change.

Here are many color variations. Can you find me here? I am the last one on the right.

Finally, my creator did some turnarounds so they could see different views to allow my 3D animator to model me properly.

This is me in all my sporty outfits!

There you go, that’s my story….short but sweet. I hope you get a chance to check out all the sports that I love to play and realize that sharing those sports with your kids inspires them to move!

There are many more great plans for me. I have already been at the White House and at the International Toy Fair in New York City. At the fair I got to wear Olympic Gold Medals! Ms. Gigi won two of them playing tennis, one in Barcelona and one in Atlanta. At the White House I got to move with children in the South Lawn and I was even on the Today Show with Al Roker. I have a dream to be featured in a book or on a TV show giving me other ways to introduce children to sports and all the lessons that participating in sports has to teach. Boy, there are so many lessons, I don’t even know where to begin… but to name a few off of the top of my head, there is teamwork, sportsmanship, courage, discipline, stick-with-it-ness and so many other lessons. I will visit schools and talk to children about the benefits of participating in sports and encourage them to join me and move!.

I want to get kids excited about playing sports early in life so when they grow up they will want to be just like me, a healthy and active (adorable too if I do say so myself) sports loving monkey!