Intriguing topics such as fish condos, cat houses for dogs and cockroach cure-alls are all in a day’s cd-rom work at Ron Mann’s Toronto-based Sphinx Productions.

Mann and Toronto filmmaker/editor Robert Kennedy have just begun production in New York City on Joey Skaggs Strikes Again!, a cd-rom for The Voyager Company telescoping the 25-year career of media hoaxster Joey Skaggs. Mann, for whom this will be the fifth disc for Voyager, had always wanted to do a film about pranks, so when Skaggs approached Voyager to do a cd-rom, the two were brought together.

Mann wrote the script with Skaggs, and culled his archives of pranks – there have been 80 over the years – winnowing those to be included down to 12. The material includes everything from phone messages (very irate) to rigged news stories from cnn and the New York Times to interview clips from tv shows where he’s sent impostors of himself. In addition to Skaggs’ media-terrorist antics, Mann says Skaggs designed an exclusive try-this-at-home prank that cd-rom owners can participate in.

Mann’s fourth disc with Voyager, Poetry in Motion II, has just been published. Featuring performances by poets such as Michael Ondaatje, Spalding Gray, and the eternally-acrid, professionally-dissolute Charles Bukowski, the new release is a sequel to the original Poetry in Motion, the first cd-rom translation of a film (also by Mann). Poetry II is only available on cd-rom.

Asked about the conventional wisdom and market stats showing that the money to be made in cd-rom is only for a very elite top percentage of titles in specific hit categories, Mann replies that from a creative point of view, it allows him to do more titles quickly and less expensively than film.

‘I get to work on projects I couldn’t do in film, says Mann, pointing out that his latest feature film, Grass, will cost $1.3 million and take one and a half years to make, while Skaggs will be out in five months and will cost about $83,000. The cd version of Grass, currently in production, is destined to be Mann’s sixth title with Voyager.

Mann, a veritable vet of the infant cd industry (and the most prolific cd-rom producer in Canada), says since ’92 the market has grown, and his royalties have been quite substantial. Mann says Voyager, a leading publisher of intelligent product, has pioneered what cd-roms can do, blazing a sales path via catalogues and bookstores for its more than 60 non-mass-market titles, which CityInteractive is now handling in Canada. Poetry made about $300,000 in gross sales and cost about $75,000 to produce. Mann says his costs are currently in the $50,000 to $75,000 range.