Vancouver: Mr. Magoo will join Vikings, the new female Ninja Turtle, sword-wielding Irishmen and the buffoons of Police Academy in another busy production year on the West Coast.

Leslie Nielsen will star in Disney’s live-action homage to the animated series Mr. Magoo. Production is expected to start in April.

Magoo will likely rub shoulders, meanwhile, with the biggest budget feature ever produced in Vancouver. Viking film Eaters of the Dead ­ a Disney feature of the $100 million budget variety ­ is a good bet for Vancouver production crews. Ground Zero, an action feature from Castle Rock about terrorists and missile silos, is also scouting.

Madonna, the new female Ninja Turtle, is to be introduced to audiences through the new 13-part Ninja series set for production in Vancouver. Ninja producer James Shavick is also betting on Breaker High, a daily 30-minute series about high-schoolers on a ship.

Paul Bronfman is a producer of a series based on the Police Academy comedies. The 13 episodes should begin in Vancouver in April.

And Larry Sugar’s Dead Man’s Gun anthology series is also a likely go, as is the series called Roar, which is like the Oscar-winning, sword-wielding Braveheart feature but is based in Ireland.

‘We’re off to a very good start,’ says B.C. Film Commissioner Pete Mitchell. ‘Our first film list of the year, which is normally the smallest, had 14 projects.’

Cautiously, Mitchell predicts a year that will exceed the performance of 1996.

Last year’s numbers, which were originally expected to take a step backward in terms of production budget values, were surprisingly up and by large measure. In posting another record year, the industry recorded 101 productions generated $537 million in direct spending, a jump of 24%. In all, there were 33 features, 16 television series and 52 mows produced in b.c. in 1996.

Total production budgets increased to $802 million, which is also an increase of 24% over the year. The jump in production value was helped by the Disney squid film Deep Rising, the largest single budget film ever made in b.c.

The average budget per project jumped from $4.5 million to $5.3 million, an unexpected increase that explains the correction of earlier, tepid predictions.

The number of Canadian-content productions stayed flat at 34 projects, but production budgets jumped from $142 million to $214 million and direct spending increased from $110 million to $175 million. The numbers for Canadian production, however, are heavily influenced by series such as Poltergeist, Outer Limits and Highlander, which qualify as Canadian but are made for American syndication.

Feature Jumanji ­ released in 1996 ­ generated $350 million at the box office and is the top-grossing b.c.-made film.

Among the new productions either in preproduction or in front of the cameras are independent feature The Widower, Showtime mow High Stakes: The Melanie Morgan Story, abc mow Circle of Deceit, nbc mow The Soul of Betty Fairchild, usa mow Daughters and the syndicated series Stargate.