The Ink Blog

It was the opening of CBC-TV's "Hockey Night In Canada" for at least one season and it featured a "Field Of Dreams-like" sequence of stylized hockey players soaring on and off camera, around and about one another other on a multi-plane ice surface. The player's heads were black ovals and the mist around their feet obscured their skates. But no such details matter in this piece, as animation is all about movement.

In 2011, I had a chance to correspond with one animator who worked on this piece of vintage TV gold. Known only to me as “ZenLogo”, I found he had been creative director with Mort Lesser Film Studio in the 1950s and 1960s, working under animation guru Bruce Walker. The studio was one of the world’s top private film houses, working with TV producers and advertising agencies. A Clio Award winning spot for Craven M cigarettes was made using the studio’s facilities, which boasted one of the largest sound stages in North America. Talents like Bob Goulet, Colonel Sanders (who impressed ZenLogo as a “miserable old bugger”), Petula Clark and Leslie Nielsen graced the stage there, used almost exclusively for TV and advertising – legend has it, no motion pictures were shot there.

According to ZenLogo, the original spot was filmed and broadcast in colour, but because CBC had to soothe Canadian taxpayers by conserving costs, recordings of HNIC were kept on the much more economical black and white kinescopes (filmed captures of TV productions), rather than broadcast-quality videotape. Any and all remnants of the amazing clip in existence now are in living, albeit scratchy, snowy and jumpy black & white. Ideally, one could hold onto hope that the original film was safely stashed away in a film archive, however reality and idealism do not often travel the same track.

The Lesser Studio itself had a rich history. Mort Lesser was a fledgling photographer who walked with a camera and donkey up and down Toronto streets, offering to take pictures of people on the beast and profit by selling them prints. Eventually, his hard work paid off and with the advent of TV, his film house became a gold mine for advertisers. Lesser was well positioned to put together his production studio, which was involved in the pioneering of live action/animation for the likes of Kellogg’s and General Foods spots (as alluded to in episodes of AMC’s “MAD MEN”) as well as the aforementioned Clio-winning “Craven M” spot, which boasted impressive ideas and character designs by the talented Bruce Walker. The firm nurtured contracts with all the big ad agencies, such as J. Walter Thompson, Ogilvy, Leo Burnett , etc.

Lesser Studios was located right in the heart of the “Toronto the Good”, just off the corner of Bay Street and Charles Street West. Like all animation studios (it seems), there was a popular drinking establishment nearby. A bar in the Windsor Arms hotel became an after-hours hangout for the talented, hardworking creative folk at Lesser Studios.

Years passed and the halcyon days for advertising began a dank downhill slope. The studio was eventually torn down to make way for an office tower. Mort Lesser eventually downsized his business to an audio/visual production company. He eventually retired to the Pembroke area with his wife Jean, where they quietly collected the impressionistic art of Jackson Pollock, Henry Moore, etc. Mortimer Lieberman Lesser passed away in July of 2012. ZenLogo confided that through all the fluctuation and upheaval, he and Bruce Walker lost track of one another sometime in the early 1970s, never to reconnect again.

The animated Hockey Night In Canada opening appeared on vintage NHL games broadcast on Leafs TV and on YouTube in the early 2010s, bringing back fond memories for folks like me, who were children of the TV age. I feel privileged to have gleaned this wealth of background knowledge about this one small snippet from my wide-eyed youth and would love to chat to anyone with more related stories and memories to share.