Predicting the Jetsons Predicting the Future

I chuckle a bit when I read how “The Jetsons invented (fill in the blank).” The Jetsons didn’t invent much of anything. The show itself was a time inverse of The Flintstones, some of the settings owed something to World’s Fairs in Seattle and New York, and the “inventions” can be found in “Popular Science” and similar magazines that the writers brought to the studio for gag ideas.

They can also be found in the John Sutherland industrial cartoon Your Safety First, produced for the Automobile Manufacturers Association in 1956. It has a number of things in common with The Jetsons, which first aired in fall 1962.

There’s no food-a-rack-a-cycle, but the family in this cartoon enjoy a meal that is in pill form. The dinner tray is wheeled in automatically, just like those robot vaccuums of today.



Hmm. How to spend the evening (at home, of course).



In a clever gag, the covering of the dinner tray acts as a vacuum and inhales the table cloth and the dishes. Wheeling itself somewhere, the table lifts up to become a big screen TV as the chairs around the table re-arrange themselves so the family can watch. Where are the cries of “John Sutherland invented the big screen TV?”



Because this cartoon was made in the 1950s and not the future, there is a 1950s gag about the ubiquitousness of Westerns on television.



Your Safety First also features Jetsons-like bubble-top cars and the George-like father complaining that his four-hour work day of the future is too long.

No, the father isn't voiced by George O'Hanlon. It's Marvin Miller doing his Captain Cosmic voice from Destination Unlimited. Gerry Nevius and Charles McElmurry are the layout artists and likely had a hand in the designs. Neither worked on The Jetsons.

It's a shame a reddened, battered print is the only one in public circulation.

Everybody Sings

The early Fleischer cartoons are loads of fun as objects come to life, or pop out of nowhere to say something then disappear.

In the Screen Song “I’d Climb the Highest Mountain,” everyone gets into a yodelling number, starting with three Mickey look-alikes.



Then a tree with a mouth.



Then a bird, followed by her newly-hatched off-spring.



Next, a door in an apple opens and a worm pops out to lend its voice.



Mountains in the mid-brackground join in.



The singing quasi-Mickeys are blown off a mountain-top by a singing crescent moon.



Evidently the song has exhausted the moon as it grabs a cloud and pulls it over as a blanket.



Seymour Kneitel and E.R. Timinsky (later known as Reuben Timmins) are the credited animators.

Soitenly!

Television gave new life to old short films that had been rotting away on a shelf after being seen once or twice (if reissued).

Not all of them, of course. There were musical series, newsreels, travelogues. They were of no use to television.

Cartoons and two-reel comedies were. Kids would eat them up. They could be run over and over and over. TV brought more fame (and life) to Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse than theatres ever did.

Of all the comedy series produced in the sound era, perhaps the one that benefited the most from constant airings on television was The Three Stooges.

Self-appointed do-gooder groups HATED the Stooges. So much pointless violence! But Columbia Pictures, which ground out the Stooges shorts, found gold in those old films. Thanks to television, the studio discovered millions and millions of kids loved them. They were silly. And no one really got hurt in them.

Their fans are still loyal. No doubt you don’t have to go far on the internet to find a debate over which replacement Stooge was the best/worst.

Columbia got out the pick-axes and started mining more Stooges gold. Here’s an Associated Press column from May 28, 1959.

Three Stooges Are Amazed At Popularity
Comedians Were On 'Finished' List Year and Half Ago
By BOB THOMAS
AP Movie-TV Writer
HOLLYWOOD (AP)—Here's evidence of how fantastic show business can be: the Three Stooges are starring in a feature movie.
A year and a half ago, the Stooges were finished, washed up. They had come to the end of a record stand of 24 years at Columbia Pictures making shorts. Their knockabout comedy was considered passe, the market for short subjects had vanished.
Then it happened.
Released to TV
The Columbia subsidiary, Screen Gems, released the first batch of old Stooge comedies to TV. Wham! The Stooges, a show business team for a third of a century, found themselves at the height of their fame.
When they were making shorts, they earned $70,000 from the filming and picked up an equal amount on personal appearances. This year they are already guaranteed a $275,000 gross, and the figure may go much higher.
The boys have returned to Columbia, but not to make shorts. They are filming "Have Rocket, Will Travel," their first feature as a starring team. Back in the '30s. they appeared with their old boss Ted Healy in some MGM movies. And more recently they have done some quickie musicals.
“But this is the first time we've been starred in a feature,” said Moe Howard proudly. "And we're getting 25 per cent of the take."
Moe is the leader of the Stooges. He's the one with the black bangs. Larry Fine has the operatic hair-do and Joe Derita is the fat one who takes most of the knocks. He was preceded in his post by Moe's brothers, Curly and Shemp, both now deceased, and comic Joe Besser.
Leisurely Pace
I found the trio on a stage with a mass of space-travel props. Unlike the days when they were making shorts, their pace was almost leisurely. They've got a shooting schedule of 10 days and may go 11. They used to make the two-reelers in as little as two days.
"It's fantastic what has happened to us," Moe mused. "We've got more offers than we can handle. Now we're doing all kinds of merchandizing—hats and other things with our faces on them. We've got an advance from a bubble gum outfit that is bigger than they gave the entire National League!"
Flat Salary
The Stooges made 218 comedies and profit not a cent from their showings on TV. Not directly, that is. Like Laurel and Hardy and other comedy pioneers, they worked for flat salaries. But the results of their newfound popularity are considerable.
"We're the only act that is bringing kids into night clubs," Moe said. "The kids are bringing parents who had never been inside night clubs themselves. We play matinees for the kids and give them three shows. First, we come through the audience and greet each kid personally, then we do the act, then we sign autographs.
"A lot of trouble, yes. But let me tell you, those kids are okay. Look what they've done for us!"

In this era of residuals, it is unfathomable that film actors were paid like fast food cooks—you get paid per shift, whether you flip a burger once or ten times. But that’s how it was. Granted, no one foresaw life for a John Nesbitt Passing Parade, an RKO Pathe Sportscope with Andre Baruch, or a Stooges comedy after it appeared once in a theatre. Larry talked to the North American Newspaper Alliance about it in a column printed on May 3, 1968.

Three Stooges Know How Cruel Television Can Be
By HAROLD HEFFERNAN
HOLLYWOOD (NANA) — Three fellows who know better than anyone how cruel television can be are Moe Howard, Larry Fine and Joe De Rita, famed the world over as “The Three Stooges.”
When TV struck a heavy blow at the motion picture business 20 years ago, it began reaching out for every available old movie with which to feed its insatiable demands for day and night entertainment. Short comedies were in particular demand, and the two-reel knockabout slap-stickers— 228 of them— starring the Three Stooges became the hottest item on the market.
They were run and rerun until the sprocket holes were chewed to bits and new prints were rushed into TV projectors. A brand new generation was paying homage to the three zany clowns.
“The Three Stooges” were sitting atop the world— but in name only!
“Everyone got the idea we must be piling up millions,” said Larry Fine, the mad one with the wild fuzzy hair, the specialist in face slapping and anatomical dropkicks. “But the sad fact is we weren’t getting one thin dime. We were going broke and were out of work as we watched all the furor our comedies were creating.”
The demand for more Stooge movies became so great that Columbia Pictures, which produced the original shorts, called them back to inaugurate a series of feature comedies. Among these were “The Three Stooges Meet the Gunslingers,” “The Three Stooges Meet Hercules,” and "Have Rocket Will Travel.”
Their sixth feature-length film now shooting at Allied Artists Studio is something of a space epic titled “Flying to the Moon Looking for Green Cheese.” Marquee title appeal isn’t so important with this trio— just as long as the “Stooge” magnet goes up in the bulbs.
The reason the Stooges, along with other stars of their era— including Laurel and Hardy —never were able to cash in on the fat TV returns traces back 15 or more years to the lack of a definite plan of action on the part of the Screen Actors Guild in obtaining a residual sharing agreement with the studios selling products to TV.
Only in rare special instances were actors able to cut themselves in on the gravy train. Actually, it was not until Feb. 1, 1960, that contracts were completed whereby those participating in pictures made after that date, not before, were to share in the TV runs.
"We were at least 12 years late in forcing TV to cough up a share of the proceeds," said Fine, who figures he and his partners should have cut a melon of at least $2 million during the blacked-out period.
"A lot of us were really hard hit. While TV stations all over were burning out our old comedies, the studios weren't interested in giving us more films to make simply because we were being overexposed. It was a rank double-cross all around."
If any team was harder hit than the Stooges, it had to be the hilarious combine of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. The arrival of TV found the two at the sunset of their career. Both were suffering from crippling afflictions.
Comedy-maker Hal Roach sold 60 of their famous shorts and features for a staggering sum, yet the two stars died more famous than ever and virtually penniless.
On the other hand, Bill (Hop-along Cassidy) Boyd engineered a special profit-sharing deal before his western features began flooding the airwaves and today he’s living but his life in Palm Springs luxury.
Another kind of the late show, John Wayne, never received a dollar from his 25 features still flashing through the tubes, but fortunately, the Duke and all his heirs are not ever likely to be in need of residuals.
Fine, whose troupe is an offshoot of the famous “Ted Healy and His Stooges” musical comedy act of the 1930s, places blame for the actors’ belated TV deal directly upon the governor of California.
“Ronald Reagan Was president of the Screen Actors Guild at this most critical point in the TV negotiations,” he charges “He sold the old-time actors down the river while he feathered his own nest by arranging to receive 50 per cent of all revenues of the shows he made for General Electric and the Borax people who sponsored ‘Death Valley Days.’ ”

Columbia Pictures had no pretentions about the Stooges films. It churned them out, spending less and less on them as time went on. The Stooges had no pretentions, either. Their humour was low-brow and hokey. They were anti-pretention. Maybe that's why they made people laugh. And still do.

He Got It

Is it just me, or does every gag in Bunker Hill Bunny (released 1950) seem familiar?

The cartoon was written by Tedd Pierce, who certainly borrowed one routine from an earlier Bugs Bunny cartoon directed by Friz Freleng.

In this short, Yosemite Sam (who says “Ahoy!” like he did when he was a pirate, except he’s a land-dwelling Hessian in this one) pitches a cannon ball at Bugs.



Two ends of a Bugs “surprise” take.



Bugs rushes back into the fort to emerge with a baseball bat to swat the cannon ball. In Freleng’s cartoons, he always seems to change into appropriate clothing for the gag and does it here.



A typical Freleng take with little realisation lines around the head.



Sam pulls a baseball glove out of nowhere. “I got it! I got it! he yells, going back on the ball.



The gag is on the flag that is raised after the cannonball explodes.



It’s a variation of gag from Baseball Bugs (released 1946). Mike Maltese got the writing credit but I can’t help but think he and Pierce were a team at that point.

Carl Stalling borrows from “Freddy the Freshman” by Cliff Friend and Dave Oppenheim for the background music in this scene.

More NOISE!

The nameless little dog begins his attempts to get Spike to make noise and get thrown out of the bear’s home in Rock-a-bye Bear (MGM, 1952).

Spike is relieved he got rid of a picture of a sexy girl without making libido-induced sounds and goes to sit down. You know how Tex Avery did this in several cartoons. To avoid making noise, a character runs outside into the distance where he lets go, then returns and the next gag follows.

Here are some frames that give you an idea how the first gag went down.

If I had to guess, Mike Lah animated the indoor scene and Grant Simmons was responsible for the outdoor scene. Walt Clinton is the third animator. Johnny Johnsen painted the backgrounds.

Rich Hogan and Heck Allen both get a story credit. Hogan left animation when Avery took time off at MGM to deal with personal things. Allen was re-hired after some time with Walter Lantz (he said Fred Quimby fired him several times so he went hunting for work elsewhere).

Life Begins at 39

Here’s yet another of seemingly-countless biographies of Jack Benny that appeared in feature sections of newspapers over the years. This one comes from the Long Beach Independent of Dec. 11, 1955.

It’s very accurate, though you could quibble on some minor points. The photos accompanied the story.

FOR JACK BENNY
Life Begins at 39
By Terry Vernon
Independent TV-Radio Columnist
THERE IS ONLY one man in show business who is 39 years old yet was born in 1894. He is, of course, Jack Benny. He has been riding on that 39-years-of-age gag for so long that most people have forgotten how many years have gone by since that Feb. 14 in Chicago when Benny Kubelsky was born.
Benny has won every signal honor that entertainment can bestow . . . except one. That one is the golden statuette of "Oscar," symbol of supremacy in the world of motion pictures. This despite the fact that he has done scores of films in Hollywood and also made “The Horn Blows at Midnight." He still hopes to capture an "Oscar" some day one his own merits.
Waukegan, Illinois, is duly, recognized as Jack Benny’s home town, but he actually resided there a comparatively few years. When Benny was 16, he and Cora Salisbury, pianist at the Barrison Theater where Jack worked after school, teamed and went on the road playing vaudeville dates in adjacent towns and cities. Later he teamed with a Chicago pianist, Lyman Woods, and this pair began to gain fame. They toured as far West as Seattle and even played an engagement at the famed London Palladium. But Benny, as such, was still just a fiddle player.
WORLD WAR 1 interrupted his theatrical career, so he made the most of it and joined the Navy. Stationed at Great Lakes Naval Training Station, he took part in the famed Great Lakes Revue to raise money for Navy relief. This was the birthplace of the man who has become a legend in comedy on the vaudeville and Broadway stages, radio, movies and television. It was during one of the productions that Benny tucked his faithful fiddle under hls arm and, began to talk. This unusual procedure wowed the sailors and before long his talk was more important than his fiddling.

“It was actually Ben Bernie who caused me to change my theatrical name,” says Jack. “I used Ben K. Benny as my stage name until Bernie became quite popular. Feeling there was too much similarity and anyway (with a sly look and twinkle of the baby blue eyes) I didn't wish to, you know, make Ben look bad by overshadowing him . . . you know . . . I changed my name to Jack Benny.”
THERE IS LITTLE doubt but that Ben K. Benny, Benny Kubelsky or Jack Benny would have overshadowed anyone regardless of name. He has no peers in his chosen field of comedy and because he keeps his shows flexible insofar as format is concerned, no other comic can copy him for any length of time.
After getting out of the Navy and starting out on his own in the vaudeville theaters he played a little fiddle, told some jokes and acted as emcee for the stage shows in whatever theater he was playing. This work gave him that wonderful sense of timing that no other comic possesses to such a degree. He learned that the spoken word can be important but that the unspoken word oftentimes carries more punch.
He headed for New York and wound up doing musicals for the Schuberts and Earl Carroll. This was his stepping-stone to Hollywood and a movie career that is remembered chiefly for his work in “The Hollywood Revue” for MGM.
BUT IN BETWEEN pictures he had nothing to do except draw a salary and Benny is not noted for inactivity.
This might account for the fact that he wandered around town and met Mary, who was Sadye Marks, salesgirl at The May Co. He and Sadye hit it off and in January 1927 were married in Waukegan at the apartment of an old friend of Jack.
Then back to Broadway and a role in an Earl Carroll musical where he was doing very well. Fact is, he turned down $1,500 per week (big money in those days) in the road show company in order to enter radio. In the early 30s, some may recall, radio was coming into its own. Amos n' Andy were household words and movie houses stopped the film so patrons could hear the latest in the life-story of the two favorites; Stoopnagle and Bud [sic] were big-time comics; Eddie Cantor had taken the plunge and Burns and Allen, Fibber McGee and Molly and many other old vaudeville teams had turned to this new medium.
“If they can do it, I can,” thought Benny, so in early 1932 he agreed to take a guest spot on "The Ed Sullivan Show." He had bumped into columnist Sullivan in a Broadway restaurant and Ed asked him to do the job.
"But I don’t know about radio,” stated Jack.
"Nobody does,” said Ed.

BENNY DECIDED to take the flyer, and that next night walked up to the microphone, and said: "This is Jack Benny talking. Now there will be a brief pause for everyone to say ‘Who cares?’.”
Apparently a lot of people cared when he got through for shortly thereafter he was on the air with a sponsor and began to grow into the biggest comedian the world has ever known. His first bankroller was Canada Dry Ginger Ale but through the years he has been identified with many another sponsor. Probably his most famous sponsor was General Foods and Jack altered his usual opening by saying, “Jell-o again, this is Jack Benny talking" and to this day, twelve years later, many people still believe he is sponsored by Jell-o.
Benny developed his own material for those early shows, worked out the gags and gradually drifted into the format he now uses consistently. It is one that makes him the hapless boob, the man with human frailties who has the same faults shared by many others . . . and also the money lover and penny pincher.
IN ONE OF HIS EARLY shows he had Mary come on as a girl from Plainfield, N. J., who’d read poems and make wise-cracks. This was to be a one-time shot but the public clamored for more and Mary Livingstone became a regular part of his shows.
When Jack gained popularity in radio it was natural that movies would beckon him and he signed a contract. This meant moving his radio show to California so he planned to make the transition on the air. In one of these shows the Benny gang were aboard a train and the Pullman porter was portrayed by Eddie Anderson. This, too, was a one-time only shot but the public so loved “Rochester” that Benny hired him and made him a star in his own right. Don Wilson joined the Benny gang in 1934 as announcer and became so much a part of the show that he has been under contract to Benny ever since.
IN THE YEARS that have passed Benny has started many others out on careers. Frank Parker, who has reappeared on the air with Arthur Godfrey, was one of the first of a series of tenors who were an integral part of the Benny format. Others have been Kenny Baker, Dennis Day, and, while Dennis was in the service, Larry Stevens.
Benny always has music on his shows, and the orchestra leader becomes a part of the act. This technique is now being copied by other comics and most noticeable is John Scott Trotter on the "George Gobel Show.” The men who had led the bands on Benny’s shows include Ted Weems, Frank Black, Don Bestor, Johnny Green, Bob Crosby and probably the most famous, Phil Harris, who had bigger parts in the show than did the others and made more out of his roles.
Looking back through the years Benny still gets the biggest kick out of the “feud” he had with his good friend Fred Allen. There was a time when every set in the nation was tuned to Benny's show one night and then to Allen's to hear the interchanged of insults between the two comics.
The feud started out when Fred Allen did a takeoff on an amateur show. He hired an eight- year-old violinist and the boy played “The Bee." Allen quipped, "Only eight years old and you can play 'The Bee,' why Jack Benny ought to be ashamed of himself."

THE NEXT WEEK Benny came back on his own show to disclose indignantly that he could produce six persons who would verify that he could play "The Bee” at the age of four. This feud gained space in national magazines, front pages of newspapers, and other comics even joined the act.
Back in Hollywood Benny began making movies again and included in this group were such releases as “George Washington Slept Here,” “Buck Benny Rides Again,” “Man About Town,” “To Be or not to Be” and “The Horn Blows at Midnight.”
In 1950 Jack Benny began his career in television. “The Jack Benny Television Show” was seen Saturday, Nov. 11, on KTTV 11 at the time the station was a CBS affiliate. He was a sensation from the start and has handled TV very carefully without jeopardizing his popularity.
Grandfather Benny now lives quietly in Beverly Hills with Mary, and all he has to do is work out his television shows, rehearse, entertain and occasionally play some golf. His adopted daughter, Joan, and her husband come to visit whenever possible and then 39-year-old Jack Benny becomes 61-year-old Grandfather Jack.

Animating the Beatles In Vancouver

A short stroll along Burrard Street south of Davie Street in Vancouver’s West End reveals some fairly newish apartment towers and small shops. A half century earlier, the stroll would come across a different scene. The major film studios had sales offices in one building. There was a radio station where I had been employed four decades ago. And a little further down the street, there was a TV operation to which was attached the city’s animation studio.

If you think of animation in Canada, what comes to mind are several studios in Ontario—Nelvana being a fairly major player at one time; Crawley Films, which produced Videocraft’s Tales of the Wizard of Oz; and Trillium Productions, makers of Rocket Robin Hood, a series which somehow has fans despite its wretchedness. But Vancouver was the home of Canawest Film Productions, one of those (gasp!) runaway operations that accepted subcontracts for entertainment cartoons.

This being Canada Day, and having spent the majority of my life living not too far from the site of Canawest’s studio, I thought I’d post a little bit about it, as I suspect you are familiar with some of the animation turned out there. Several feature articles appeared in the local press over the ‘60s and ‘70s, but I’m only going to select two that outline the opening and closing of the studio.

First, a Canadian Press wire service story from November 5, 1964.

Cartoon Kind to Viewer
By VERN LACEY
VANCOUVER (CP) — Gordon Reid decided last year that the intelligence of the public is being insulted by television commercials.
So the television station manager started producing animated cartoon commercials designed to entertain rather than irritate as they deliver their sales pitch.
His station KVOS-TV (B.C.) Ltd invested $60,000, hired 14 more staff and established Canawest Film Productions. The television station is U.S.-owned and located in Bellingham, Wash., 40 miles south of here while Canawest is classified as a Canadian company located here. KVOS beams for B.C. markets.
Twelve profitable months and dozens of cartoons later, Canawest has customers across Canada and in the U.S. Pacific Northwest.
Mr. Reid says he decided to produce the cartoon commercials after he realized that even he, the station manager, was sick of some commercials.
"They just give the public credit for any intelligence . . . there was no originality.”
On the drawing board at Canawest now is an advertisement for hunting licences on sale at Alberta treasury branch offices.
The scene is a bank with dozens of people scurrying across the floor.
Suddenly a moose gallops past the wickets chased by a hunter.
No one in the bank seems surprised.
Moose and hunter return across the screen and a bank employee casually asks the hunter whether he has a hunting licence.
Hunter and hunted comes to a screeching halt. The hunter buys a licence and away they go again.
The commercial ends with the sound of a shot.
Depending on the time and talent involved, cartoons such as this cost from $2,000 to $8,000.
Production of the cartoons is a full-time job for four cartoonists. One minute of film time requires 1,440 to 2,880 separate drawings, says cartoon production manager Tom Ashdown.
Mr. Ashdown says his men are so good that each can sketch one cartoon character and all four sketches look identical.

You’d think drawing cartoons on model would be a requirement, not a major accomplishment.

Canawest got a real boost the following year. Two years after that, the studio convinced Hanna-Barbera it could get quality animation from Vancouver without relying on all those expensive (read “union”) artists on Cahuenga Boulevard. But almost all booms go bust, and such is what happened to Canawest. The problem had nothing to do with artists or American animation contracts. The blame lies, as it often does, with federal politicians and bureaucrats, protecting a Toronto magazine.

Michael Bennett’s film column in the Province newspaper of June 30, 1977 reported the end was near.

Canawest going, but not forgetting
The credits read like an obituary for some forgotten Hollywood studio interred beneath a shopping plaza somewhere off La Cienaga Boulevard: The Beatles, Abbott and Costello, and Wait Till Your Father Gets Home television cartoons, a syndicated series called The Canadians, the best English-language commercial in the country (1968), an ABC Mystery Movie, Canada's equivalent of an Oscar for a film called Way of Wood that was shot in five languages.
The mourning this time, though, isn't on the passing of Republic Pictures of another age. It's merely a dress rehearsal, because the largest commercial film producer north of Los Angeles and west of Toronto won't be clinically dead until New Year's Eve.
Canawest Films is still warm, winding down the years of bizarre adventure and equally confounding relations with the federal government. With irony peculiar to Canada, the legislation that killed the company was supposed to nurture the kind of work it has been doing since 1961.

As a Canadian subsidiary of KVOS-TV in Bellingham, which in turn is owned by the bottlers of Coca-Cola, Canawest got caught in the hysteria of the Time-Reader's Digest debate—which somehow equated cultural sovereignty with advertising revenue—when the intent of Bill C-58 was merely to help Maclean's newsstand sales.
Unfortunately, KVOS was lumped in with three stations beaming into Toronto from Buffalo (without so much as a dummy corporation registered in Ontario) when the House of Commons committee decided to include border broadcasters in the statute.
When it was passed late last year, despite the reasoned amendments proposed by the Senate banking committee, KVOS income was effectively cut in half because any money spent by its Canadian advertisers would no longer be deductible as a business expense. (Most corporations at roughly a 50-per-cent tax level. In the old days, if a company spent $1 to advertise on KVOS, 50 cents of it would be paid for by taxes, or rather the lack of them. Now the whole dollar comes out of the client's pocket.)
The only way for Channel 12 to stay competitive was to cut expenses—and rates for commercials—and Canawest was an expensive, expendable showpiece of good corporate citizenship. The inequities of the legislation, all too apparent to the people who drafted it, still rankle Dave Mintz, president of KVOS (B. C.) Ltd., who gets tired of defending the obvious.
"In the 10 years between 1965 and 1975, in terms of capital expenditures, payroll tax, personnel expenditures in Canada from KVOS, the film companies and others created by the reinvestment of profits—approximately $75.5 million came back into B. C.,” he says.
"That compares to exactly zero for every other station serving Canada from the other side of the line."
The problem Canawest confronted for 15 years was the sort of creative parochialism associated with government and cities like Toronto: If it doesn't happen there, it doesn't happen.
"We brought $500,000 a year here from the U. S. in industrial films, documentaries and that's all going back to Hollywood," says Mintz.
"We had work in Alberta and Saskatchewan (through Canawest-Master Films in Calgary) and those jobs will go east. What nobody in a position to do anything seemed to realize was that this was our contribution to Canadian-content production, because we couldn't make it like the other television stations."
Whether the honorable members were looking for a more quixotic affirmation of the "national fabric" or a more esoteric motivation, Bill C-58 became perhaps the first law in Canadian history to be proclaimed without change from its original draft.
Canawest has lost money, a lot of it, trying to provide something the country doesn't seem to want. Animation, despite the deficit financing by KVOS of several projects from Hanna-Barbera, remains an American art form, advertising agencies package most of the major commercials for television nowadays, and producers rent cameras, sets and sound stages rather than accumulate an inventory that would cost $750,000 to replace.
“If we were doing this in Toronto or Montreal, we wouldn't own a stick of equipment," says Mintz. "Out here, you have to, and keep people on staff 52 weeks a year."
It makes for high-priced memories—for actors waiting for an audition call from the Playhouse; grips, gaffers, inkers and electricians, who worked on a 30-second spot for B. C. Hydro or filmed the completion of the highway though the Darien Gap or got scared out of Zaire.
Canawest started simply enough: three guys in a cramped studio trying to put the merchandise in the best light. Before long, they were doing slide shows, film strips, and—with some help—live commercials with live performers, filming testimonials to the Alberta Wheat Pool, the Alberta centennial (featuring Burl Ives) and travelogues for Vincent Price and a show called If These Walls Could Talk.
Then there was the Canawest initiation into "the weird, wonderful world of animation" in 1965 when King Features needed The Beatles series in a hurry to go with the T-shirts, lunch buckets and wrist watches. A small group of artists and assistants did seven episodes. England and Australia got the rest.
By 1967, though, Saturday-morning television was more than the Hollywood animators could handle. Hanna-Barbera had gone to the networks in February with 11 ideas, expecting to sell four or five of them. ABC, CBS and NBC bought nine, and all of them had to be ready for the second week in September.
"They remembered The Beatles series and asked us if we could get that crew back together," says Andy Anderson, president of Canawest, "but by that time, they were scattered all over the world.
"We ended up flying people in from Yugoslavia, England, Czechoslovakia and Spain. Good animators are a rare breed."
Anderson hired students right out of art school, housewives bored with the limitations of creative meals, anyone who could draw, paint or mix the inks. Canawest even started an animation training program with Canada Manpower, and for almost a year, classes of 20 or more painted the muscles of Samson, the waves of Moby Dick and the slapstick gestures of Abbott and Costello.
There were 150 people alone working on the Wait Till Your Father Gets Home series. The next year, nothing. The comic-strip panic was over, and by the time the Canawest comptroller figured it all out, the lessons had cost $80,000.
Canadian television, too, was either hit, miss or apathetic, an attitude Mintz had encountered in Ottawa back in 1970 when he suggested KVOS would bankroll the scripts, and even some productions, given some government encouragement. "No thanks," he was informed, "we're not interested."
When Global Television was formed, though, Anderson put the hard sell on a series about the country getting to know itself, called The Canadians.
Look, he told Global, you're back in Toronto and there's this vast, enormous thing called Western Canada, particularly B. C., because you've got to get over those mountains, which form at least a psychological barrier.
Somebody liked the idea and Stanley Burke, the voice from the past of The National, put together a news magazine that visited a pirate on Vancouver Island, a whistle farm where the owner tests the kind of things you hear from boats and trains, and a couple of longhairs who mass-merchandised the artifacts of the Age of Aquarius and had to adjust to uncomfortable wealth.
Global collapsed into bankrupt reorganization shortly afterwards, and by the time Canawest got through with the receivers, The Canadians ended up costing the company $125,000.
"We wanted to use Canadian talent, technicians and labs to produce syndicated programs good enough to at least make their money back," says Anderson, "but the government steadfastly refused to be interested. "Maybe it felt it was being bribed . . . I don't know . . . I've given up reading people's minds."

For locals of a certain age, the idea of Andy Anderson hiring animators is funnier than any of those Hanna-Barbera cartoons they made. Anderson spent his career as a news anchor on KVOS-TV.

Fortunately, the demise of Canawest didn’t end Vancouver’s animation industry. People like Marv Newland, Gord Stanfield and Bob Jaques and Kelly Armstrong brought their own talents to drawing boards and on to screens. But all this is a stroll for another day.