Dearly beloved, we are gathered today not to mourn a simple channel that housed all manner of cartoons, but to mourn a piece of our country’s always embattled artistic identity. Yes, the Canadian broadcast waves have become a lot less hospitable to homegrown animation today with the unfortunate loss of the Teletoon network. The once colourful tapestry that makes up our media landscape has become a little more grey and uncertain with the loss.
Teletoon was a channel once instrumental in promoting the reputation of Canadian-produced entertainment abroad. A channel responsible for introducing the art of animation and its boundless potential in the minds of countless young viewers. A channel which provided a home for artists and creatives to showcase their craft against a broadcasting landscape dominated by (mostly) American-produced content. Now the channel exists as a shell of its former self—rebranded under the bland corporate auspices of media conglomerate, The Cartoon Network, as “Cartoon Network Canada.” With its “death,” I’ve wondered what exactly was lost?
Teletoon hit the airwaves on October 17, 1997 under a novel mandate that stated at least ninety percent of all its broadcasted content would be of the animated persuasion. In addition to keeping in line with our nation’s prideful Broadcasting Act that requires content to “meet the needs and interest of Canadians,” the launching of Teletoon was a declaration of the need for original Canadian animation. A call for our artistically inclined countrymen to create new animated art, a call not seen or heard in this country since the pioneering Norman McLaren joined the National Film Board in 1941 and opened its doors and resources to the animators.
Suddenly, Canadian animation studios across this country—from the Toronto-based Nelvana Entertainment to Montreal's Cinar Films to the Vancouver-based Mainframe Entertainment—had an outlet for their productions regardless of animation style. They had twenty-four hours worth of time slots for which to pitch new ideas. And, most importantly, these studios had the guarantee from the fledgling network financing and broadcasting their work that their interests as Canadian creators would never be overlooked. Of course, Teletoon would acquire broadcasting licences for all manner of American and International productions and even facilitate numerous co-productions between Canadian studios and those abroad to stay competitive and diversify its programming. At its core, however, the channel was incontestably the place where homespun Canadian animation could thrive and find an audience.
To watch Teletoon in its heyday, with the impressionable mind of a child, was to be aesthetically bombarded with a cavalcade of animation styles, techniques, and genres. Not just with the commissioned programming—which broadcast the tactile sensation of stop-motion animation slotted between the unreality of the still developing CGI and classic hand drawn flash animation—but through the channel’s malleable sense of branding its own image. There is an online treasure trove of Teletoon’s signature station indents—the enchantingly bizarre pieces of original animation that would fill the empty spaces of the airwaves. Be it a claymated planet of aliens that would morph and stretch into the channel logo to advertise its preschool block of programming or a Lynchian nightmare of papier-mache stop-motion monstrosities to advertise the late-night block: no matter when you tuned in, Teletoon was truly “The Animation Station” it purported to be.
I have countless hazy memories of tuning into the station as a kid: My friends and I parking ourselves in front of the warming glow of a boxy tube television and having our minds overstimulated by the anarchic vibes of Teletoon. Watching endless episodes of Ed, Edd n Eddy and Angela Anaconda and then staying up late into the night to see the cartoons meant for adults we weren’t allowed to watch, like Delta State and Clone High. Being so young at the time, we had no idea the indelible marks that were being left on us—while it all seemed like mindless entertainment at the time, we were actually experiencing our first introduction to culture made specifically in Canada for Canadians.
I’m aware how waxing poetic about a basic cable channel of cartoons could potentially come across as intolerable and downright childish. Am I eulogising what Teletoon really was, or am I clinging to some ephemeral piece of my childhood and letting nostalgia taint what the channel actually was? After all, is this not just a swapping of one brand for another—hanging the fading and irrelevant Teletoon brand for the much more lucrative Cartoon Network? Yes, I am aware I might be overreacting, alright!
That being said, how can we not lament that this once unruly space for unfiltered, animated Canadiana is now just gone? Once the childish sting of losing something so important to your adolescence subsides, the broader picture of what this loss means comes into focus. I am confident in time this development will prove to be yet another one of those poor bellwethers for the uncertain and ever precarious status of Canadian art in an era of increased media consolidation. We mourn because we lost so much more than just a cartoon channel when Teletoon left the airwaves.
Dearly beloved, we are gathered today not to mourn a simple channel that housed all manner of cartoons, but to mourn a piece of our country’s always embattled artistic identity. Yes, the Canadian broadcast waves have become a lot less hospitable to homegrown animation today with the unfortunate loss of the Teletoon network. The once colourful tapestry that makes up our media landscape has become a little more grey and uncertain with the loss.
Teletoon was a channel once instrumental in promoting the reputation of Canadian-produced entertainment abroad. A channel responsible for introducing the art of animation and its boundless potential in the minds of countless young viewers. A channel which provided a home for artists and creatives to showcase their craft against a broadcasting landscape dominated by (mostly) American-produced content. Now the channel exists as a shell of its former self—rebranded under the bland corporate auspices of media conglomerate, The Cartoon Network, as “Cartoon Network Canada.” With its “death,” I’ve wondered what exactly was lost?
Teletoon hit the airwaves on October 17, 1997 under a novel mandate that stated at least ninety percent of all its broadcasted content would be of the animated persuasion. In addition to keeping in line with our nation’s prideful Broadcasting Act that requires content to “meet the needs and interest of Canadians,” the launching of Teletoon was a declaration of the need for original Canadian animation. A call for our artistically inclined countrymen to create new animated art, a call not seen or heard in this country since the pioneering Norman McLaren joined the National Film Board in 1941 and opened its doors and resources to the animators.
Suddenly, Canadian animation studios across this country—from the Toronto-based Nelvana Entertainment to Montreal's Cinar Films to the Vancouver-based Mainframe Entertainment—had an outlet for their productions regardless of animation style. They had twenty-four hours worth of time slots for which to pitch new ideas. And, most importantly, these studios had the guarantee from the fledgling network financing and broadcasting their work that their interests as Canadian creators would never be overlooked. Of course, Teletoon would acquire broadcasting licences for all manner of American and International productions and even facilitate numerous co-productions between Canadian studios and those abroad to stay competitive and diversify its programming. At its core, however, the channel was incontestably the place where homespun Canadian animation could thrive and find an audience.
To watch Teletoon in its heyday, with the impressionable mind of a child, was to be aesthetically bombarded with a cavalcade of animation styles, techniques, and genres. Not just with the commissioned programming—which broadcast the tactile sensation of stop-motion animation slotted between the unreality of the still developing CGI and classic hand drawn flash animation—but through the channel’s malleable sense of branding its own image. There is an online treasure trove of Teletoon’s signature station indents—the enchantingly bizarre pieces of original animation that would fill the empty spaces of the airwaves. Be it a claymated planet of aliens that would morph and stretch into the channel logo to advertise its preschool block of programming or a Lynchian nightmare of papier-mache stop-motion monstrosities to advertise the late-night block: no matter when you tuned in, Teletoon was truly “The Animation Station” it purported to be.
I have countless hazy memories of tuning into the station as a kid: My friends and I parking ourselves in front of the warming glow of a boxy tube television and having our minds overstimulated by the anarchic vibes of Teletoon. Watching endless episodes of Ed, Edd n Eddy and Angela Anaconda and then staying up late into the night to see the cartoons meant for adults we weren’t allowed to watch, like Delta State and Clone High. Being so young at the time, we had no idea the indelible marks that were being left on us—while it all seemed like mindless entertainment at the time, we were actually experiencing our first introduction to culture made specifically in Canada for Canadians.
I’m aware how waxing poetic about a basic cable channel of cartoons could potentially come across as intolerable and downright childish. Am I eulogising what Teletoon really was, or am I clinging to some ephemeral piece of my childhood and letting nostalgia taint what the channel actually was? After all, is this not just a swapping of one brand for another—hanging the fading and irrelevant Teletoon brand for the much more lucrative Cartoon Network? Yes, I am aware I might be overreacting, alright!
That being said, how can we not lament that this once unruly space for unfiltered, animated Canadiana is now just gone? Once the childish sting of losing something so important to your adolescence subsides, the broader picture of what this loss means comes into focus. I am confident in time this development will prove to be yet another one of those poor bellwethers for the uncertain and ever precarious status of Canadian art in an era of increased media consolidation. We mourn because we lost so much more than just a cartoon channel when Teletoon left the airwaves.