The Globe and Mail reports in its Saturday edition that Canada's biggest actors' union is pressing Spin Master, the Toronto toy maker and entertainment company, to avoid recruiting non-union talent for a series of Unicorn Academy YouTube videos.
The Globe's Josh O'Kane writes that Spin Master is known globally for launching the massive Paw Patrol franchise with Guru Studio. Its newer show Unicorn Academy, co-produced with Vancouver's Mainframe Studios, first launched on Netflix in 2023 and has aired two seasons. The Toronto company has also created two batches of short videos for YouTube that ACTRA says have featured unionized members of the original cast.
The Toronto branch of the nearly 30,000-member Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists, or ACTRA, says it found out in early November that Spin Master did not plan to hire the original cast for its latest round of shorts, and instead would seek non-union actors. The union says it has been sending proposals to Spin Master that it believes would let the original cast return for the YouTube clips.
"Our members want to work," Kate Ziegler, ACTRA Toronto's president, told The Globe. "They want to do this job. They created these roles."
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