It looks like Little Annie Fanny, Playboy magazine's buxom, comic strip ambassador of willingness, may soon apply for Canadian citizenship.

Annie, a decidedly adult entertainer who has had only part-time work in comics for the past decade or so, could soon find a more animated position in Vancouver with an unlikely employer - one of Canada's top producers of children's television.

Mainframe Entertainment, the groundbreaking computer-animation company behind such children's cartoons as ReBoot, Weird Ohs and Beast Wars (seen on YTV), is developing, with Playboy TV, a risqué, late-night animated series based on the classic Little Annie Fanny comic strip.

Details about the project are sketchy. Playboy and Mainframe are playing their cards close to Annie's ample bosom.

"It's not something we are telling the "media" [?. The text in the newspaper is gone there] about yet," says Scott Burton, publicist for the Playboy Entertainment Group.

Mainframe's Mairi Welman says the Vancouver company has deferred to Playboy's Los Angeles head office on matters of publicity.

You can understand the caution. The Little Annie Fanny comic strip, a regular Playboy magazine feature for almost three decades, is both revered as a cult classic and vilified as an egregious example of pandering sexism.

Little Annie Fanny was the creation of the late comic satirist Harvey Kurtzman, one of the most influential figures in the history of comics and the founder of Mad magazine.

Beginning in 1962, and continuing through the '80s, Kurtzman collaborated on the painstakingly drawn Little Annie Fanny with comic artist Will Elder.

Kurtzman wrote scripts that were satiric commentaries on public morals and the news of the day, and laid out the strip that would run to as many as six pages in the glossy magazine. Elder would give the detailed panels a painterly flourish in water colour.

Annie Fanny was conceived as a doe-eyed innocent with a tendency to pop her buttons at inopportune times. With teased blonde hair, and pneumatically inflated breasts, she was blissfully unaware of her animal sexuality, groping lechers out of the most saintly of men. This was the quality, more than the strip's nudity, or the objectification of Annie's sexuality, that gave offence as the decades wore on.

The strip's implications that drooling, ogling and sexual assault were the natural consequences of Annie's endowments was out of touch with the times.

The question is, how could an animated version of Little Annie Fanny avoid similar criticism. And would it even try?

A Mainframe spokesman told the TV-industry trade magazine Playback that the series would be "an English-style farce like Austin Power." dealing in statire and sexual innuendo.

The suggests that Playboy's plan might be to tone down the explicit sex, so it could sell the series to conventional broadcasters and not just carry it on it's own international TV holdings.

On the other hand, Playboy magazine's recent revival of the Little Annie Fanny strip as an occasional feature, with new artists mimicking the style of the original, displays much the same antiquated view of female sexuality that Kurtzman glorified in the 1960s.

Annie is routinely the vicim of patently obvious male ruses to get her out of her clothes and under their roaming hands.

Such issues aside, it's not hard to see what Playboy chose to work with Mainframe on the project, despite it's reputation for children's TV. Mainframe is the most experienced producer of computer-animated TV series in North America, and only computer animation could approximate the detailed ....[again the print has faded] ...Annie Fanny comic strip at a reasonable cost.

What's more, Mainframe's artists have already proved they have a rather voyeuristic affinity for the female form.

Characters such as ReBoot's AndrAIa and Dot wear form-fitting garb over impossible female super-structures. Nudity is out in Mainframe's children's shows, but cleavage is definitely in. One can safely assume that the pubescent viewers of Mainframe series have more on their minds than the show's action-adventure plots.º

Article taken from The Ottawa Citizen Arts section on Saturday, March 25, 2000.

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