Except for the muscles rippling under his form-fitting dress shirt, Magnus Scheving at first glance bears little resemblance to Sportacus, the hyperactive, health-promoting hero he plays in the international hit children's television program LazyTown.
Unlike Sportacus, Scheving does not have a thin black mustache that juts out as if he had recently been electrocuted. He does not reside in a dirigible in the sky. He does not have a ski hat-cum-nightcap permanently affixed to his head.
But both he and his alter ego are devoted to a single, impassioned cause: getting couch potato-prone children to exercise, eat good food and generally lead healthier lives. And somehow Scheving, the creator and chief executive of the vast entertainment and licensing company known as LazyTown Entertainment, has become one of Iceland's best-known figures and biggest exports, a sui generis hybrid of Jack LaLanne and Richard Branson.
He has been credited with prying a generation of Icelandic children off the computer and into the frigid outdoors. Now that LazyTown is broadcast in 106 countries, including the US, he wants to do the same for everyone else.
Scheving, 42, has worked, often simultaneously, as a talk show host, motivational speaker, actor, director, writer, carpenter, fitness instructor, health club owner, healthy-lifestyle ambassador, stand-up comedian, entrepreneur and aerobics competitor. In a recent interview in LazyTown's boardroom in this Reykjavik suburb, he held forth on those and other pursuits, supplementing his remarks by writing on a whiteboard, as if giving a lecture.
He demonstrated an infectious charm, a healthy ability to laugh at himself and a tendency toward hyperbolic non sequiturs.
"When I was 15 I had a larger salary than the prime minister," he announced. Of his knack as a carpenter, he said: "You will see downstairs there is a steam bath that I built myself in one weekend."
Lazytown Entertainment, begun 12 years ago, is now so influential in Iceland that when it organized a promotion in which children could exchange special LazyTown "money" for healthy products, sales of fruit and vegetables increased 22 percent in one month.
Across the country, children go to bed at 8:08pm, because that is when Sportacus does (or else he gets grumpy and overwrought).
The show depicts a community whose children are constantly tempted by the sweets and sloth offered by the world's slobbiest villain, Robbie Rotten. But the day is inevitably saved by Sportacus, who repels junk food by the deft use of tennis rackets, passes off apples and carrots as energy-enhancing "sports candy" and never walks into a room when he can just as easily do a double flip through the window.
A compact 170cm, Scheving does the stunts himself, with the aid of three "guys in their 20s," he said proudly. He thought carefully about what to call his creation — "I wanted to have sports in it, but I didn't want to call him 'Sportsman,"' — and its potential for wider exploitation down the road.
"Tarzan was a great concept, but you can't really sell his clothing, because he was naked," he said.
Scheving grew up in Borgarness, a small town 90 minutes northwest of Reykjavik. He studied to be an architect, but realized that such a job was inadequate to his boundless ambition. During his 20s, a friend bet him that he would not be able to learn and excel at an unconventional sport: competitive aerobics.
RSS