Cover Story: Due South
by Gord Wilson

Marir Welman is Director of Communications at Mainframe Entertainment Inc.

GW: Way back when, besides ReBoot you were doing Beast Wars, the latest version of Transformers.

MW: We’re just getting into the fourth season of that now. It's done extraordinarily well. For a children’s animation show to go through a fourth season is virtually unheard of. It's received very very good ratings. Whenever I meet a boy under the age of twelve and he finds out I'm at Mainframe, he wants to ask all kinds of questions about Beast Wars. It's very popular. The toys have done extremely well as a result of the exposure from the tv show. They've now asked us to look at doing a fourth season that sort of veers off a bit and doesn't follow the same story line that we’ve been doing for three years. It sort of takes a new approach and has some new characters and puts them in a new character setting. Beast Wars is currently in syndication in 212 different cities.

GW: What about your new show, War Planets? That's a toy-related tie-in, right?

MW: That started because Trendmasters, the toy company, saw what we had done with Beast Wars and approached us with a toy line they had called War Planets, subtitled Shadow Raiders. They said, "what can you do for this?" The show doesn't actual toy line, because there weren't any characters in teh toy line; it was vehicles and planets. We took the toy line and gave it to our designers and said, "take this to its logical conclusion." One of out designers, Clyde Klotz, won an Emmy last year for his work on Beast Wars. They invented a whole cast of characters for these vehicles and planets, and we came up with a premise for the show. It's become much bigger, more complex thing that the toy line ever was. So what they're doing now going back to scratch and doing toys based on the TV show. The toys that are in the stores right now are the old toys, and bear only a passing resemblance to the program. The new batch of the toys are coming out this year will be based on characters from the show.

GW:The good news in the US is that ReBoot is coming back with a vengence on the Cartoon Network.

MW: The Cartoon Network has exclusive rights for ReBoot for the first year and exclusive cable rights for the second year. They bought all three seasons--39 episodes--and right now we believe it's going to be a strip, which means it's going to be run five days a week. That means at the rate of five episodes a week, you will have worked your way through five seasons within eith weeks. ReBoot is schedualed to start in March or April of the first quarter of 1999, however, we're still waiting for definate information. Even now were there hasen't been a new ReBoot episode on the air in the states for two years, we still get mail everyday from people asking when ReBoot is coming back. The lasting powr of this series has been quite phenomenal.

ReBoot has been running in Canada all this time, and has run in Europe, with a limited run in the UK, and has done very well wherever it has aired. We're quite excited about finally getting back on the air in the states. We hope not only to capture the diehard fans who watched it when it was ABC, but to grab some new fans as well. Hopefully ratings will be sufficient to have Cartoon Network or some other broadcaster say, "hey, how about a fourth season?" That's what the fans would really like, but that will depend on the audiences response to the run in the US.

GW:When Disney bought ABC, they kicked ReBoot off in favor of proprietart Disnay programs, didn't they?

MW: Yes. Disney bought ABC and all the independent productions had their contracts cancelled. The really ironic thing is that when we went into syndication after that, the Disney-owned ABC channel in LA bought ReBoot and aired it.

GW: We'd hoped videos would be released in the US, but there were only a few available, and not the best episodes.

MW: All that came out on video were a few episodes from season one. Part of the problem was that the license was Polygram International, which is a huge company, and I think we just got lost in the mix. We've bought the remainder of their video stock and that will be for sale through our website. We're in negotiating on seasons two and three for video release. So eventually all seasons will be available on video.

GW: Now let's talk about the other object of delight, which is the toys.

MW: Irwin was the original licencee for the manufacture of figures and toys for ReBoot, and they did season one and season two figures. They did a straight run of all the figures and some specialty ones like Bad Bob. Because we were unable to sell ReBoot season three into the US at the time it was airing in Canada, licences dropped away. In this industry, licences are not interested in a property that is not airing in the US, pure and simple. The Canadian market is simply too small. So, because we didn't get a broadcaster in the US, the toy, poster, and appeal contracts for the 1997 season didn't get renewed. Lots of companies are interested in the toy contracts now. But it depends on what broadcaster you go with what company makes the toys; it's all political and it's all tied up between networks. Certain companies work with certain broadcasters.

So there was a whole third season that was unsupported in merchandising and licensing that we actually ended up losing money on, because it was fairly high end. For the third season, though, we were out from under the network Broadcasting Standards and Practices yoke. When we were on ABC we really had to dumb the show down. They wouldn't allow us show any imminent jeopardy, nobody was allowed to be shown being hurt or killed. The shows were one-offs, with is to say that the story line didn't carry on; they were aiming at really young kids. We went with it because we got it on the air; we got the first season produced. Year two we pushed it a bit because we were in syndication, but that was when all the broadcasters were going through the big process with Congress in the states, and the whole broccoli TV issue. So the stations were under risk and they wouldn't let us go too far.

Then we got to season three. We didn't have a US broadcaster for it and se said, let's got it, let's make ReBoot what we always thought it should be, which was an action-adventure series for kids age eight and up. Season three is a vast departure from season one and two; American fans are going to be quite shocked and surprised.

People who have seen it love it. It's a bit darker; it's a continuing story arc through all sixteen episodes, which breaks down into four chapters each, and it's got a lot more imminent jeopardy in it; like a sci-fi series. Season two ended with Bob being shot off into the Web by Megabyte, so season three starts off with Mouse, Dot, Enzo and AndrAIa in Mainframe without Bob. Hexadecimal and Megabyte are working together to take over, and they're winning. Just before Bob left, he made Enzo a guardian trainee; now Enzo is the only guardian in Mainframe.

Our goal was to see season three into the US because we needed to make that money from the show. Hopefully it will do as well as it did elsewhere. If it does maybe the Cartoon Network of someone will say, "how about another season?" It's always been on prime time in Canada, but I'm not sure when it'll run in the US.

GW: Voltron Became very popular as part of the Tsunami line-up on the Cartoon Network when it came back as a CGI show.

MW: Voltron is now number two, right behind War Planets in the syndication roster.

GW: We see more and more fresh Canadian animation showing up on US TV from Nelvana, CINAR, Marv Newland, Danny Antionucci, and certainly Mainframe. Do you think it's becoming easier to disribute programmes in the states?

MW: The distribution issue is really about the lack of risk taking in content in the US. That's why we had trouble selling season three. There is far more appetite for something that works, like X-Files, and copy it to death for a couple of seasons.

So there's so much consolidation going on in the entertainment industry with studios. It used to be ten or fifteen years ago, you'd go to the broadcaster or studio and say, "here's our ten best ideas for a series, which ones do you like?" They'd pick one or two, and you'd go to the next broadcaster and say, "here's our eight best ideas, which do you like?" They'd shop the shows that way. Now, the martket place has changed. A lot of production is being done in-house and a lot of studios have bought production houses. Now, instead of taking original concepts to the broadcaster, what they want. There isn't as much original, fresh, creative work being done because it tends to be a 'follow the leader' mentalitly. We're trying to resist that. We're still coming up with original concept material, but allowing the broadcaster to help shape it.

GW: I just read Joe Barbera's biography, My Life in Toons, in which he details the struggles Hanna-Barbera had in getting started. They were up against a similar situation, because they the stations and advertisers owned the shows.

MW: That group of people has worked their way through the upper ranks and are now on their way out, in terms of power in Hollywood. Now the baby boomers are running things, and a different generation is coming in. I don't know whether it's better or worse; every generation runs things differently. But these things have a way of working themselves out. If things get too extreme one way or another, they will bounce back because eventually the market will force them to. There's a lot of discussion now in the American press about the 500 channel universe, the fragmentation of the market and how the networks are unable to hang onto the number of viewers they used to.

GW: What's the fourth show you're shopping into the US?

MW: The new series we're working on, which will come out this year, is called Weird-Ohs, based on the classic car model line. We've got a rights agreement with Testor Corporation, which is going to brong out a new line of models which show the new characters and they're going to do a classic re-issue. It's a cool show that looks very different than anything else we've produced; it's like old Warner Bros. stretch and squash comedy taken into 3D. Very physical humor lots of squashing and stretching, eyes popping out. That will be YTV in Canada and we're negotiating with a cable network in the states. If we get this one in the states, that means we'll have four shows on at the same time in the US.

Imformation on Mainframe Entertainment is available on the web at www.mainframe.ca

This is an actual article from the FPS magazine. I'm not making any money off of this article; this is just to inform and for the fans of Mainframe.