Richard Lanni
Founder & CEO
Richard Lanni is a historical filmmaker, having produced, written, and directed for cinema, television, and home media. He is the director, co-writer, and executive producer of Sgt. Stubby: An American Hero and CEO of Fun Academy.
After a successful career in business, Lanni followed his passion for film with a goal of making fun, engaging, educational media for mass markets. In 2009, Lanni founded Fun Academy Media Group, Ltd. (formerly Labyrinth Media & Publishing) and operates from his homes in Cork, Ireland and Normandy, France.
Prior to Fun Academy, Lanni found success in documentary production. His 2010 series The American Road to Victory tells the story of three key engagements in the European theater of World War II – D-Day, Operation Market Garden, and the Battle of the Bulge – from the perspective of the G.I.s who fought to end Nazi tyranny.
Conscious that many documentaries were too dry and academic, he was determined to find a style that crossed over to general family audiences. Through a clever mixture of live action narration, special effects and on-location reenactment, he found a way to engage audiences who had turned their back on the genre. To date, The American Road to Victory is the most aired WWII series of all time on American public television with over 6,000 broadcasts since 2012. It has been licensed to 20 foreign territories and recently acquired for SVOD by Netflix.
Lanni is also an accomplished battlefield tour guide as well as a media production partner with the National Infantry Museum Foundation at Fort Benning, Georgia. It was during research for a WWI series that Lanni discovered Sgt. Stubby. Shifting away from his documentary instincts, he realized that the best way to reach families with this incredible true story would be through animation.