“We’ll Puppet from Behind”: Mainframe Entertainment, Americanization, and Canadian Children’s Media’s Twenty-First Century Service Turn

This article examines the history and economics of Mainframe Entertainment (now Mainframe Studios) from the early 1990s to the present, as the studio transformed from an ambitious producer of globally popular series to a service production outlet for U.S. children’s brands. Specifically, it analyzes the transnational forces and corporate logics that produced Mainframe’s sharp turn to service work in the twenty-first century, a turn that has since come to define Canadian children’s media production in Canada more broadly. It also considers the ways in which over the past three decades, the Canadian children’s television industry has transitioned from one best described through a globalization paradigm to one that has been shaped by dependence on US media brands, while suggesting that the transformations of the business of Canadian children’s television during this period need to be understood as prefiguring the industry’s current crisis, in which domestic production has plummeted, studios are closing, and networks are being shuttered.