It seems Leslie Nielsen (Men with Brooms) just can’t get enough of Ottawa animation house Amberwood Entertainment. And vice versa. The 76-year-old comic – narrator of both Katie & Orbie and the preschooler series Pumper Pups – is set to make his debut as a cartoon character in Zeroman, a superhero spoof Amberwood is currently developing with Teletoon.

‘I think it’s going to be highly saleable in Europe,’ says Amberwood president Sheldon Wiseman. ‘Leslie is very popular over there.’

The traditional 2D animated comedy, aimed at a very broad family audience, will star the voice and caricatured image of Nielsen as a bumbling, super-powered crime fighter. Producers Wiseman and Mark Edwards are working with RoboRoach scribe Dan Smith on this one and, if they get the go-ahead from Teletoon, will go into production in January, aiming to air in March 2004. Each ep is expected to cost about $460,000.

Meanwhile, Amberwood has just delivered another 26 half-hours, season five, of Hoze Houndz to Family Channel and is in talks to bring back the spin-off, Pumper Pups, for a second go-round on Treehouse, following its two-year hiatus.

The company is also developing its first CGI series, Dustrunners, and was at MIPCOM this month showing off a two-minute demo tape of the show. The sci-fi action series, about interplanetary bootleggers on the run from evil multinationals, comes from an idea pitched by industry newbie Michael Milligan. ‘He’s very inventive, very creative,’ says Wiseman. ‘He’s thought the concept out extremely well.’

Keep it Weirdsville

Toronto prodco Darius Films hopes to begin shooting two features this fall – the thriller Plastic Owls and the docudrama The Life and Hard Times of Guy Terrifico. The doc has 90% of its budget squared away, says producer Nicholas Tabarrok, thanks to a distribution deal with Thousand Words, the L.A. firm that also backed Waking Life and Requiem for a Dream, and is looking for a Canadian distributor to foot the rest of the bill.

Vancouver journalist Michael Mabbott will direct, working with DOP Rudy Blahacek (Past Perfect) and editor Mike Doherty (The Herd).

The picture recounts the life and times of the ‘outlaw country’ musician who ran with Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings back in the ’70s. Shooting will run 15 to 20 days.

Tabarrok is also reportedly in advanced talks with a director, funding agencies and cast on Owls, and will produce the 90-minuter with former Blackwatch president Chris Dalton. The script, about a man out for revenge against a swindling businessman, comes from Will Wennekers (Night Class).

Darius also recently landed both Telefilm Canada money and director Allan Moyle (Jailbait, New Waterford Girl) for the feature Weirdsville. ‘It’s drugs, it’s prostitution, it’s Satanism and deviant sex,’ he says, ‘and immediately my mind went to Allan Moyle. Sure enough, he responded very favorably.’ It’s the story of two low-lifes and their adventures in a one-horse Prairie town. Moyle is story editing the script, also by Wennekers, and Tabarrok is toying with the idea of coproducing with a Winnipeg or Saskatchewan company.

Design o’ the times

Mountain Road Productions is turning its attention from where yuppies live to where they eat, work and dance. Having wrapped its long-running Lofty Ideas series, the Ottawa prodco broke ground on a new interior design show and will soon deliver a 12-minute pilot of Destination: Design to HGTV.

‘It’s a little different for HG,’ admits director/producer Tim Alp. ‘It’s about commercial design. Restaurants, stores, nightclubs. Really funky, hip, cool places. Top-notch kind of places. Anything that’s really out there.’

Alp spent $20,000 of HGTV’s money over the summer, shooting in Ottawa and Montreal with rookie host Sithan Desilva. Irene Sousa associate produces, Mike Tien is DOP.

And if the CBC doesn’t return his calls, Alp will soon put Urban Legends: As Told True on the block. The $38,000 10-minute pilot, funded by and aired on CBC’s ZeD earlier this year, investigates the origins of those improbable modern-day tall tales – AIDS from payphones, alligators in the sewer, that sort of thing. ‘I’d really like to get it going but they still haven’t given me an answer’ he says.

Kings of Kensington

Kensington Communications has been kept busy over the past five years with The Sacred Balance. But as the $4-million documentary series (4 x 60), adapted from David Suzuki’s bestseller, hits the air this month on CBC, the Toronto prodco can finally get back to some other productions.

Full Circle is the working title of an hour-long one-off wherein producers and codirectors Robert Lang and Mike Fuller return to Sayisi Dene, the northern Manitoba native community they profiled 30 years ago for The Nature of Things. Sheila Petzold also produces. Richard Stringer (Exhibit A) is DOP. Funding on the $250,000 project comes from Telefilm, the CTF, CBC and APTN. Post-production is underway and Full Circle is expected to air, again on Nature of Things, in 2003.

Lang reports that development has also begun on The Defenders, four one-hours to be coproduced with Steven Silver (The Last Just Man), with help from the International Center for Transitional Justice, a human-rights group in New York. The series will ‘look at transitional justice in emerging democracies’ and other countries, he says. ‘Countries in which they’re trying to re-establish the rule of law in which there was none. Sierra Leone, for instance, Cambodia or South Africa.’

Lang and Silver are pitching to Canadian and U.S. broadcasters and hope to shoot through 2003, applications will likely go out to Telefilm and the CTF.