Toronto-based commercial animation shop Cuppa Coffee Animation made its first foray into long-form kids’ programming with the five-minute short The Adventures of Sam Digital, nominated for a Rockie Award in 1997. The company’s next venture, Crashbox, a 26 half-hour series for hbo, created by Eamon Harrington and John Watkin of Malibu’s Planet Grande, is vying for an award at the upcoming Rockies.

Crashbox takes a game-show format, with children pitting their wits against the show’s cast of characters to solve riddles, puzzles and mind games. The series is set deep inside the inner workings of a computer, but here’s the twist: in stark contrast to the smooth state-of-the-art digitalia one expects to find buried in a computer, the environment of Crashbox is surprisingly and wildly low-tech – elastic bands, conveyor belts, turning wheels, train tracks and string keep the computer running.

The series combines over 20 different animation styles – stop-motion, animation, claymation, cutouts, cel animation, etc. – with puppetry and live action.

‘We are a mixed-medium company with a very organic animation style, so this show was a chance to dream up all sorts of wild and crazy stuff,’ says Cuppa Coffee’s Adam Shaheen.

Crashbox, which has been picked up for an additional 13 episodes and has brought a host of other projects to Cuppa Coffee’s doors. HBO Family has asked the animation studio to produce two interstitial Crashbox spin-off programs, Who Knew and Smart Mouth, 60- to 90-second educational segments involving the show’s characters.

They are also animating HBO Family’s 411 series, which offers kids all sorts of helpful hints – from keeping their pet’s water dish cold in summer to easy ways to log on to computers.

Cuppa Coffee is also making inroads with The Cartoon Network, producing one of its own preschool series pilots, Clever Trevor, for the American cable channel. The seven-minute, stop-motion and cel-animated pilot centres on an English child, transplanted to an American city, who loves to daydream and doodle his school days away. The boy conjures up all sorts of imaginings and fanciful adventures, such as in math class, where the geometry sets come to life and cel-animated aliens ride around on eraser-ships.

Cuppa Coffee is working with New York illustrator David Golden on the project. Each seven-minute episode is budgeted at $250,000 and Cartoon Network has first option to pick up the series.

A half-hour cbs Christmas special, Snowden’s Christmas, is also underway.

Ironically, Cuppa Coffee’s initial long-form success has been in the u.s. ‘I haven’t been able to sell our work in Canada,’ says Shaheen.

Cuppa Coffee plans to develop more proprietary children’s programming, particularly educational kids’ tv. ‘We aren’t interested in doing Saturday morning cartoons,’ says Shaheen. ‘Shows like Crashbox are smart and educational with entertainment value.’