It just keeps getting bigger and bigger. You know you have a fun party on your hands – a real hot-dog-eating, game-playing party, not just an industry networking event – when 3,000 ad types make the trek to an Armed Forces base in Downsview, Ont., with vehicles jammed with delirious youngsters (by comparison, about 1,000 made the Genies).

It was a party that little kids recognized as the social event of the season, angling and schmoozing in the school yard and putting the hammer down with Mom and Dad to get invites.

In a style several levels above grand, The Partners’ Film Company provided a multigenerational extravaganza in 80,000 square feet of fun of every conceivable kid-pleasing variety, with over 100 staff and helpers keeping the ball rolling.

While the pint-sized train rides and ponies of previous years were on hand again this year, they had competition from some big guns – Tilt-A-Whirl and the Scrambler, which provided the spin cycle for distended bellies full of hot dogs, hamburgers, gourmet pizza, candy floss, slushies and ice cream from the sundae bar.

Among the favorites of the other amusement options was the Velcro wall whereby kids flung themselves, a la Letterman, against a Velcro surface and, to their endless mirth, stuck.

The party also featured eight screens worth of Virtual Racer and Laser Maze where youngsters burned off healthy amounts of future teenage angst running around an inflatable maze shooting at each other.

The prizes were also happening, with Canada Games’ Lion King Game and Hockey Puzzles (the puzzles among the most coveted items, with Dads making deals in response to tiny petulant cries demanding player of choice David Gilmour) as well as Partners’-logoed kiddie knapsacks.

Party organizers had hoped that big-game-laden parents would leave earlier, their hands full of boxes and booty, but it wasn’t to be; there was too much to do. Directors, producers and agency wigs of all sizes gamboled with their offspring (real or borrowed for the occasion) to the point where poor Santa almost collapsed from exhaustion.

The Salvation Army band played, food was collected for the Daily Bread Food Bank, and for a day everyone was a happy kid in ad-land.

-LTB sit-commercial

That canned laughter, those wacky antics of that lovably quirky family; it must be a sitcom. But wait, there’s more. It’sit’s an infomercial. It’s an infomercial/sitcom. While the combination of the two art forms may lead to much wailing and gnashing of teeth and the assumption that God has surely abandoned us as the apocalypse hastens, remember, some discrete elements, heinous unto themselves, like sodium and chlorine can combine effectively.

For a new infomercial for The Wolf Group and client Altamira, L.T.B. Productions departed the earnest-expert-and-testimonials framework and created a sitcom to deliver the message of investing for retirement.

The show is a combination of All In the Family, Seinfeld and any number of other examples of the genre, says ltb’s Wayne Fenske.

ltb’s Lorne Frohman, who stinted as a sitcom writer in l.a. before recently returning to his Toronto home, wrote the script with Linda Chandler and also directed the half-hour spot. The show was shot multicamera sitcom-style with everything but a live audience; a laugh track will be added later. Frohman directed from the floor, while director Wayne Moss was in the truck doing the line cut, so the show follows a live-tape-to-air format while, for commercial purposes, each of the camera feeds was isolated to its own tape machine so adjustments could be made later.

‘We’re combining things from all the different aspects of the broadcast tv commercial and entertainment areas,’ says Fenske.

The project was shot in mid-December at Oxford Studios in Toronto, with some sequences shot in Vancouver.

The bottom line is laughter as a tv family inherits a sum of money from a departed uncle and hilarity together with sound financial advice ensue. The show is presented in various vignettes with a financial guru popping up just when Dad thinks he’s escaped from his wife’s preoccupation with investing and gags include a reinterpretation of the Annie Hall Marshall McLuhan movie lineup scene.

‘It’s interesting to be with people not in the entertainment industry, but with the mutual fund people at Altamira and have them read the script and laugh out loud,’ says Fenske, who has been a producer of long-form as well as commercial work.

The spot will begin airing in January on ctv and Global.

-New hats

The principals behind ad shop Big Black Hat, which was recently dissolved due to cash flow problems, have reappeared as a working team. Art director Stephen Morgan and writer Michael Moss are currently working on a freelance basis as The Creative Department, working temporarily out of a space at College and Yonge. The newly incarnated entity recently completed a campaign for former Big Black Hat client Canoe.

-Cactus reps Benson

Vancouver’s Cactus Productions has added l.a.-based director Hank Benson, formerly repped by Apple Box, to its roster for exclusive Canadian representation. Benson, previously a stills photographer in San Francisco, moved into commercial direction in 1992 and is currently represented in the u.s. by Atherton & Associates.

Benson has made noise in the automotive field with work for Cadillac Dodge, Toyota and Pontiac and has also done people-centric storytelling work.

-Boucher quits Chameleon

Chameleon Film & Video executive producer Becky Boucher has resigned her post to pursue a career in animation. Andria Minott will assume executive producer responsibilities at Chameleon.

-Correction

The shop responsible for the Toronto International Film Festival trailer was Avion Films arm Hoodoo Films, not Avion as stated in the Top Spots credits.