Spot (franchise)

Spot is a children's book series by English author and illustrator Eric Hill. The success of Hill's books about Spot led to other media productions, including television and home video titles, music albums, and CD-ROM titles.

First published in 1980, Where's Spot? was inspired while Hill was working in creative marketing; he noticed that his three-year-old son was fascinated by the process of lifting up a paper, on a design that he was creating. Captivated by this thought, Hill created a story about a puppy which incorporated the flap design. During the late 1970s, this was an extraordinarily innovative concept, and it took some time for any publisher to take any notice of the idea before Puffin books decided to publish his book. Within weeks of the first book being released it topped the Bestseller list.

Hill said that, "When I first drew Spot I realised that when I came to draw the spot on his body and the tip of his tail I was copying the markings on an aircraft. I grew up drawing aircraft – that is how I learned to draw. "I am quite convinced now, as I look back, that the actual training of drawing cartoons – which is, of course, my style – led to my producing Spot. Cartoons must be very simple and have as few words as possible and so must the Spot books. I designed Spot out of my previous background as a designer and illustrator. It was quite unconscious but I can see now that I have created a ready-made trademark of its kind, with the essential spot on the body and a bit on the tail."

Over time, the book was translated into more than sixty languages. In the Afrikaans version of the book Spot is translated to "Otto", widely believed to be the surname of a South African friend of Hill's. This name has been attributed to Spot, as many of the books were believed to be inspired by the life of aforementioned friend, J. Otto.^{[citation needed]} In the Netherlands, Spot is known as Dribbel.

Since 1980, with the success of Where's Spot?, the late Eric Hill went on to write and illustrate numerous other books, with most being translated into Welsh (as well as the TV series, commissioned by S4C), some have also been translated into Scottish Gaelic, and Where's Spot? has been translated into Cornish.^{[citation needed]}

In the 1990s, a number of books were released with sound effects, produced by Publications International and published by Frederick Warne. The U.S. edition of the sound books were somewhat different from the UK editions of the book. The text in these editions is slightly altered, and in some cases, the title is changed as well. They are produced and published by Publications International.

The books are set in the typeface Century Schoolbook Infant, a very rare, single-story version of Century Schoolbook.

With the success of the books, the BBC commissioned an animated series, which first appeared on 9 April 1987; with Paul Nicholas providing the narration, and re-narrated in 2000 by Jane Horrocks. The series aired on television channel across the world, including RTÉ in Ireland, with the series dubbed into Irish Gaelic with the title Echtrai Bhrain. A DVD version was released in Japan in 2005 with Japanese, English and instrumental audio tracks. The DVDs used the same name for Spot as the books in Japan, that being コロちゃん (Korochan). The series aired on Playhouse Disney and CBeebies.