Sometime in the mid-eighties Jules Octavian attended a party in Timmins Ontario. There he saw a never-aired episode of a television show called Hudson’s Boys! He’s never forgotten that night.
Inspired by Gerry Anderson’s classic children’s sci-fi show Thunderbirds, Hudson’s Boys! follows a group of remote fishing guides as they perform rescue missions in the wilderness of Northern Ontario using a heliplane cobbled together with parts liberated from abandoned Mid-Canada Line radar stations. Apparently the series was pitched to Northern Ontario media mogul J. Conrad Levigne, owner of the biggest microwave network in the world at the time, who green-lit the production thinking a marionette-based show would be be targeted at a youth audience. It was never aired and only a handful of people have caught a glimpse, and only then if they happened to be at a party attended by the enigmatic creator.
As you know, I’ve been searching for County Fence’s next step and video production seems natural. It’s also a massive undertaking for which none of us have experience. But a marionette-based show might be different. In the days of Anderson and his company, Supermarionation, puppets were an expensive endeavour. Each puppet not only required a puppet maker but often multiple puppeteers and a voice actor. Thunderbirds and the later Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons were also known for their detailed and elaborate sets requiring a team of model makers in addition to the space to store them. That’s over and above the usual television production requirements. But these are the days of 3D printers, pocket video production studios, and online video streaming. If Hudson’s Boys! follows 1970’s Canadian children’s television production value, the bar won’t be too high, and at least one season of the show has already been produced.
Northern Ontario in the sixties and seventies was a place of opportunity. Remote, yes, and also a harsh landscape it was also a place where one could find a well-paying job in mining or forestry with no experience. Cost of living was low and the company towns popping up throughout the region were often designed by leading urban planners to ensure people actually wanted to weather a Northern Ontario winter. This was a population that wanted to let their hair down with disposable income who could build their own culture and communities.
J. Conrad Levigne began his career in the hotel industry, later moving into radio when he struggled to get English broadcasters to play French-Canadian music, Northern Ontario having a significant French-Canadian population. He parlayed that into regional television, ultimately becoming an independent-minded Canadian Broadcasting Corporation affiliate. The opportunity for Lavigne in Northern Ontario was the lack of population density: there was demand but not enough for bigger broadcasters to invest in the required infrastructure. That’s how Lavigne managed to own the biggest microwave network in the world: he needed it in order to cover the huge distances of this sparsely populated region. Yet in the end this was Lavigne’s downfall: not the profitability but rather the monopoly. When nobody else would invest in the region’s broadcasting infrastructure it meant Lavigne had a monopoly, ran afoul of competition laws, and had to be broken up. It was the end of an era.
That era, however, was the perfect environment for shows like Hudson’s Boys! Lavigne was producing a surprising amount of regional content, especially children’s shows, and had the money to invest in new ideas. He signed off on Hudson’s Boys, the creator disappeared for a year or two, and when he returned he had a new show and the infrastructure required to rapidly and cheaply produce new episodes.
It was Jim Henson that realized the television screen was the perfect puppet theatre. In the early days of television puppet theatre was still a common form of children’s entertainment. Filming it made for low-budget Saturday morning programming. However Henson differed in that he envisioned the frame around the television screen as the theatre itself: allowing literally anything to happen within that box. No longer did backgrounds need to be static arts and crafts affairs: they could go anywhere. It was also Henson who insisted that puppets need not be limited to children’s entertainment, which is at least part of The Muppets’ special sauce. Our creator believed Henson but, fortunately for us here at County Fence, Lavigne did not.
The YouTube creator business model has become well-established: reasonably popular shows through a mix of Patreon, merchandise, and advertisements can support a small crew of content creators…about the same sized crew as a low-budget puppet show would require. If we can track down the creator we can at least give the episodes already in existence the audience they deserve. But we also might be able to reboot the show on a shoestring budget with a skeleton crew. It would be a bonus if any of the puppets have survived.
The problem is that Jules no longer remembers the man’s name and Lavigne’s CFCL Channel Six is long-since defunct. Given the man’s approach to life at the party where Jules met him it seems likely the creator of Hudson’s Boys! may no longer be with us either. And so the first task is to track down the original tapes, if they still even exist. As this first volume of County Fence comes to a close next week I’ll be leaving for Northern Ontario in Jules’ Healey 3000 to search for them. We’ll be making use of the hashtag #HudsonsBoys on our mastodon account where we’ll be sleuthing out any information and reporting on anything we find. Wish me luck and stay tuned.
-Greg
