Storyboard for an Imperial Esso commercial.

Beginning of the End
Harry Gutkin met John Halas in New York City in 1960, and the two worked out a plan to alternate production of a weekly cartoon. PGA created a pilot from a series of children's books that Gutkin had published and one of his animators, Ray Darby, had created before PGA was founded. The series was to be called T. Eddy Bear. The pilot was then included on a demo reel with Halas and Batchelor's famous Hamilton the Musical Elephant and a handful of commercials from both companies.

Although the menagerie of animals was cute and kookie and the UPA-style animation colorful and inventive, the sample vignettes were miscalculated and uninspiring. T. Eddy Bear never found a buyer. It was the beginning of the end for PGA.

With production costs rising and profit margins evaporating because of costly trips to labs outside of Winnipeg, PGA struggled throughout the swinging sixties. Twenty-second animated commercials took over 300 person-hours to complete; the average contract was for $5,000 to $6,000. Live-action could be done for about one-tenth of that.

The coup de grace came from the CBC. Canada's government-sponsored TV network ruled that it would no longer accept animated ads for products aimed at children. The CBC was convinced that, "Animation was like a Trojan horse that secretly worked its way into children's minds." Cereal ads for Coco Puffs and Rice Krispies were the first to go. Everything else that was animated was somehow suspect.

So, in 1966 PGA merged with another local ad agency, Brigden's, and reluctantly abandoned animation for print advertising. Luckily, they found a local buyer, Kenn Perkins, for their trusty animation stand. That meant that animation in Winnipeg did not come to an abrupt end. For that we can all be grateful.

Gene Walz ( walz@cc.UManitoba.CA) is head of the film program at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg. He is currently finishing a biography on character designer Charlie Thorson and is now editing a book called Great Canadian Films.