The first thing you notice about Teletoon’s schedule is how the target audience gets older as the broadcast day moves to primetime and late-night hours. After 9 p.m., the animation is aimed at adults.

That says a lot about where Teletoon has evolved to over the last decade as teens and adults increasingly watch its cartoon fare.

Sure, Teletoon has kiddie programming during the day (including episodes of Iggy Arbuckle and Atomic Betty), and there’s interactive teen fare during the Spin Cycle segment (4-6 p.m.) for after-school audiences. And primetime has toy-and-game-based action cartoons like Nelvana’s Bakugan and the U.S. import Chaotic, animated by Bardel Entertainment.

And then there is its edgier, after-dark fare.

One example is the new late-night Detour block, which features animated titles such as Metalocalypse (basically Spinal Tap meets Scooby-Doo) and Assy McGee, a cartoon about a vigilante police officer shaped like a walking pair of buttocks.

The way Carole Bonneau, VP programming, tells it, gone is the preschool target audience when the specialty launched a decade ago with a raft of shows from Nelvana and Cinar (predecessor of Cookie Jar Entertainment). Instead, a recent rebrand has Teletoon aging up to keep kids, teens and adult viewers engaged with animation when they want it, and where they want it, in an increasingly digital age.

‘We’ve proven to people that animation is not just for kids,’ Bonneau says.

Teletoon’s sweeping rebrand extends to its logo (formerly a happy face), which now has a blocky look in keeping with newer, envelope-pushing cartoons in its lineup.

The specialty is also directly targeting babyboomers with the newly launched Teletoon Retro hour nightly at 7:30 p.m., featuring classic cartoons including The Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show, The Flintstones, Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids and The Jetsons.

During the day, Teletoon targets a six- to 11-year-old audience after school with popular cartoons such as Nelvana’s 6teen, a 2D animated sitcom about six kids at work for the first time in a mall.

There’s also Studio B Productions’s Ricky Sprocket – Showbiz Boy, a behind-the-scenes look at child stardom from Oscar-winning cartoonists David Fine and Alison Snowden.

‘Kids seem to be growing up quickly these days,’ says Michael Goldsmith, director of original content, ‘and they react to ‘aspirational dramedy.”

Teletoon’s original content is a lynchpin for domestic animation production. In 2006/07, it stimulated around $23 million of Canadian production, sending 13 shows into production and carrying another 10 through development.

Some of its teen-targeted fare includes Delilah and Julius (Collideascope Digital Productions/Decode Entertainment), a Flash-animated series about two orphans left to fend for themselves, now saving the world one crime at a time.

What is missing today from Teletoon’s lineup are programs developed strictly for traditional broadcast. Instead, it is developing and airing multi-platform content for on-the-go viewers.

Original cross-platform Teletoon properties include Zimmer Twins, where young people are encouraged to create their own short one-minute films and see them streamed online, or broadcast on TV with added music and voice-overs. The broadcast aspect is produced by Lost the Plot Productions, and the website is designed by Zinc Roe Design.

‘Kids are empowered to create their own content,’ Bonneau explains. ‘It’s user-generated content, guided by Teletoon.’

Teletoon is also now available on demand and on mobile TV platforms. It recently launched the Flash-animated series Total Drama Island – a spoof on reality TV shows from 6Teen creators Tom McGillis and Jennifer Pertsch – which includes an online game with each new TV episode, and content for mobile phones and broadband streaming.

‘Total Drama Island is very current in terms of TV content, and friendly across different platforms,’ Bonneau says.

Goldsmith adds that having Canadian producers develop multi-platform animation has its challenges, including budgets.

‘The platforms are a cost of doing business,’ says Goldsmith. ‘As we develop relationships with producers, there [aren’t] huge buckets of new revenues. But we need to be there for our evolution and survival.’