Where's Wally? (called Where's Waldo? in North America) is a series of children's puzzle books created by the English illustrator Martin Handford, first published on 25 June 1987. The books consist of a series of detailed double-page spread illustrations each depicting hundreds of people doing a variety of amusing things at a location. Readers are challenged to find a character named Wally and his friends hidden throughout the pages. Wally is identified by his red-and-white-striped shirt, bobble hat, and glasses, but many illustrations contain red herrings involving deceptive use of red-and-white striped objects. Later entries in the long-running book series added other targets for readers to find in each illustration. The books have also inspired two television programmes (the 1991 Where's Wally? animated series and the 2019 Where's Waldo? animated series), a comic strip and a series of video games. As of 2007, more than 73 million Where's Wally? books had been sold around the world since the debut of the series in 1987. The series has been translated into 26 languages and is published in over 50 countries.
History In 1986, illustrator Martin Handford, a graduate of the University for the Creative Arts in Kent, was asked by art director David Bennett, at Walker Books in London, to develop a book of detailed crowd scenes. Bennett was inspired by the book series Busy Places by Philippe Dupasquier. While the book was being prepared for Bologna Children's Book Fair, someone at Walker Books suggested Handford hide a distinctive-looking character in crowd scenes for readers to search for. Handford came up with the idea of "Wally", a world and time traveller dressed in red and white stripes. The first Where's Wally? book was published on 25 June 1987. First published in the United Kingdom by Walker Books, the series was introduced in the United States under the title Where's Waldo? because an executive at the book's initial American publisher, Little, Brown and Company, disliked the name "Wally" because it reminded him of Wallis Simpson. American publishing rights were later taken on by Candlewick Press, the American subsidiary of Walker Books. The books became extremely popular internationally and the character name was localised in a variety of regions, where Wally was known as Walter in Germany, Charlie in France, Van Lang in Vietnam, Jonas in Lithuania, and Ubaldo in Italy, among others. The franchise also spawned other media in a more storyline-based form, including a 1991 television series, Where's Wally?, a comic strip Where's Wally? and a series of video games. In the early 1990s, a topless beachgoer in a Where's Waldo puzzle caused controversy in the US and caused BJ's Wholesale Club and certain school libraries to pull the book from shelves, leading to its appearance in the American Library Association's list of the 100 most frequently challenged books of the 1990s. Handford continued to publish books in the series, and sometimes it took him up to eight weeks to draw two-page illustrations of the elusive "Wally" and the many characters surrounding him. He made Wally progressively harder to find by reducing his size on the page and surrounding him by more characters. In the first book, Wally was on average 0.99 square centimetres (0.153 square inches) big. This was reduced to 0.80 cm2 (0.124 sq in) in the second book, 0.33 cm2 (0.051 sq in) in the third, and between 0.20 and 0.17 cm2 (0.031 and 0.026 sq in) in the fourth through seventh books. He has also been surrounded by more characters, from 225 on the first book's first page to about 850 on the last book's first page. In January 2007, Entertainment Rights purchased the Where's Wally? franchise. On 1 April 2009, Entertainment Rights went into voluntary administration. On the same day, Boomerang Media acquired all of Entertainment Rights' subsidiaries including Entertainment Rights itself, Big Idea and Classic Media. The following month, Boomerang Media began preparations to unify former British and US subsidiaries of Entertainment Rights under the name "Classic Media", while Big Idea would operate under its own name. The Entertainment Rights PLC company was folded in December 2010. In 2012, Classic Media was acquired by DreamWorks Animation. DreamWorks Animation was then acquired by NBCUniversal in 2016, thus Universal Pictures gaining the rights to most of Entertainment Rights' catalogue of works.
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