The spirited first feature enterprise from IDT entertainment, Everyone’s Hero, has a special secret weapon that may become the envy of many of his year’s animated movies. While it compares to other adventure films in which a character goes on a journey of personal growth (accompanied by sarcastic sidekicks), this film holds the unique distinction of being co-directed, with Daniel St. Pierre and Colin Brady, by the late Christopher Reeve. The much-loved actor and his wife, and Dana, who passed away last March from lung cancer, served as exec producers on Hero. The couple’s influence is clearly felt as an emotional core about resilience in the face of adversity and the power of the positive spirit.

The movie, which takes place in 1932 New York, is about Yankee Irving, a 10-year-old boy who wishes more than anything to play baseball like his heroes in the New York Yankees. Unintentionally, Yankee causes his father to get fired from his job when Babe Ruth’s lucky bat is stolen, and our hero takes it upon himself to travel to Chicago and return the bat to the Babe himself.

The storyline originated when IDT founder Howard Jonas approached writer Rob Kurtz with a bedtime story about Yankee Irving which he told his children at night. Kurtz had been a sitcom writer (Grace Under Fire, Cosby) and was tapped by IDT Entertainment as a writer for future animated television projects. He wrote the Everyone’s Hero script with the intent of taking only a brief pause from television, which turned into almost two years.

“Howard Jonas liked the script a lot and gave it Chris Reeve,” says Kurtz. “Chris really responded to the story about a little boy who just doesn’t quit and doesn’t stop swinging. When he first told me how much he liked it, I was deeply touched, and then on the next pass, he asked if I’d like to work with him on it. Writers on original drafts don’t always get that opportunity. And to get that opportunity with someone like Chris was a tremendous experience – one of the greatest experiences of my life.”