My Canadian experience is minimal, having only spent a week in Vancouver as a child, but I have always enjoyed the work of Nelvana, Cookie Jar, and of course the NFB (for adults and children alike). It seems fitting to not only recognize how Canadian work has influenced children’s media in the United States and other English-speaking countries, but to honor a Canadian station on its own terms, within Canada itself. YTV’s effect on the country’s children was and is immense, and the same can be said for its production companies, as it has provided a distribution outlet for a great deal more Canadian content than would found an audience otherwise.
Because I’m not an expert and Amanda Burgess is, I recommend that anyone who is truly interested simply download and read her article (plus a lot of other great material in that issue). But I’d like to summarize a few points.
There were several ways in which YTV revolutionized the children’s television market up north. The first instance was indeed the foremost, coming about through the station’s very creation in 1988: by creating the first round-the-clock children’s station, it broke kids’ programming out of the daytime block (before 4pm) and enticed advertisers to invest in primetime and all-day programming, quite a feat for a commercial station competing (against the CBC) in a country whose cinema has been so markedly defined by government sponsorship. The increase of funds opened the way for increased production, and the all-day programming mentality provided for kids themselves to be able to watch their shows, well, any time of day.
A second innovation, about which I’ll speak less, was the introduction of anime to Canada, first through Sailor Moon and then, exponentially more so, through Pokemon. The influence of Japanese animation on the West has been immense, so any firms facilitating that interchange have shown acute foresight.
As well as broadcasting programs by established production companies, both American and Canadian, YTV also made a name for itself by collaborating with smaller firms, taking risks through more adventuresome projects than other networks. As Burgess says on page 66, “Collaboration appears to be YTV’s calling card in the Canadian independent production arena.” The station has a brand that will build viewership enormously for the series, but it still allows enough autonomy that production companies feel empowered, with creative integrity. That’s a win-win situation for producers, and while I’m sure there have been some kinks and strained production meetings over twenty years’ time that is still a fantastic reputation to have created as a distributor. (For the most recent example of this co-production-friendly corporate climate, stay tuned for the February rollout of RollBots, by Amberwood Entertainment in Ottowa.)
Also, I was impressed to learn that YTV airs a wider variety of programming, including movies, than any American kids’ station. That, I suspect, is due in no small part to the formal and stylistic innovation engendered by the NFB for something like sixty-three years now; Canada has consistently showed more willingness to experiment with cinema's formal elements than any other English-speaking country in the world (looking at kids’ films, that can range anywhere from silly cartoons like The Cat Came Back to educational masterpieces like Universe).
Well, the article and its sidebars have a plethora of more information—particularly interesting to me was a short history of YTV’s storied history with its American sister Nickelodeon—so I hope to have whetted an appetite for some to go read it in full. And let me join with the myriad well wishers who placed ads in the issue to wish a happy birthday to YTV and its staff.
**
Now, as a housekeeping note, I should say that it's actually proven more time consuming than I'd like to be running two concurrent series of longish entries while I'm trying to finish a kids' TV spec script, a piece of adult video art, and my new website at randyastle.com, besides that pesky day job. So I think I'll be suspending Asian Literature Mondays until I'm done discussing all the prominent birthdays of 2008. Sorry to all the thousands of readers waiting on pins and needles (sarcasm!).
No comments:
Post a Comment