There’s a bit of the wide-eyed 4-year-old in Charles Pachter as he strolls down the Midway at the Canadian National Exhibition.

Each blast of light and sound and colour from this roller-coaster or that chance to spin the wheel and win a prize stops the celebrated artist in his tracks, and it’s “Oh, I need a picture of myself with this,” or “Oh, isn’t that something?”

It’s a trip 70 years into the past, to the summer Pachter spent at the Ex, playing the title role in the National Film Board short Johnny at the Fair.

“I was a movie star for one year and it’s been downhill ever since,” Pachter says.

Pachter went on to forge a career as one of Canada’s best-known pop artists, with a penchant for celebrating, and sometimes tweaking, classic Canadian iconography. The hockey player murals at College subway station are his work, as are a wide array of images of Queen Elizabeth II riding or petting a moose.

But in 1947, he was just an energetic little kid from midtown Toronto whose aunt heard the NFB was looking for a boy to star in a movie about the Ex.





The CNE had been closed before its 1942 season and converted into a military barracks and training ground for the rest of the Second World War. But by 1947, it was set to reopen and poised to show Canadians all the wonders of the modern, postwar world.

To mark the Exhibition’s triumphant return, the National Film Board assembled an 11-minute film about a little boy who goes to the CNE with his parents, gets lost and winds up seeing all the wonders the Ex has to offer — in between brushes with Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, heavyweight boxing champ Joe Louis and figure skater Barbara Ann Scott, the “Wondergirl of the Ice Rinks.”

Pachter recalls “doing somersaults and picking my nose and blowing bubble gum” at the audition.

The producers hired him almost immediately, for a fee of $101, and Pachter’s real-life mother and father were brought in to play Johnny’s worried parents.

Every day for two weeks that summer, Pachter ran amok at the Ex for the cameras.

Read more:

There’s still a few days left to enjoy the Ex, even on a $50 budget

In photos: As summer spins down so does the CNE

On this day in 1956, a Soviet delegation made a covert visit to the CNE

Back in those days, Pachter says, the CNE was more like an educational fair.

“They had all the newest things that came out,” he remembers. “The women dressed in cocktail dress and high heels and the men were in suits. The Ex now is a whole other ballgame.”

The film’s narrator — actor Lorne Green, who went on to star in TV’s Bonanza and Battlestar Galactica — heralds glamourous new gadgets like electric typewriters, “television receivers,” plastic bathroom sinks, rear-engine cars, fireproof ironing boards and jet planes.

There’s a “Chemical Wonderland” where scientists cook up “1,001 substances never before seen in nature.”

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Johnny sees it all, visiting the hall of mirrors, a fashion show, a speedboat race.

Scott plants a kiss on Johnny’s cheek that the nonplussed Pachter quickly wipes off.

“It was a dream, with all these crazy characters that I just accepted as normal at the time and I went around watching it all with great glee,” Pachter said.

The big dramatic scene comes at the end of the film, when Johnny is led away in tears to the “Lost Children Area.”

Except the director couldn’t get the young actor’s tears to flow.

“My mother said, ‘I know how to make him cry,’ ” Pachter recalls, “and she picked up a hunk of mud and swatted me across the face.”

Johnny at the Fair has, like many NFB shorts, become a kind of kitschy classic over the years, introduced to new generations in the 1990s, when an edited version was featured in an episode of the cult TV show Mystery Science Theatre 3000.

But the moment that shaped Pachter the most ended up on the cutting room floor.

“This eccentric old guy from northern Ontario named Joe Laflamme used to go to fairs all around North America with his pet moose,” Pachter says.

“I can still smell the fur.”

Years later, images of moose would become a major focus of Pachter’s art, an enduring symbol of Canadiana that dominates his work.

“(Filming) was just a sensory blast for two whole weeks,” Pachter said.

“It must have impacted me in a way that I wasn’t able to understand until I became much older . . . So much of it is now part of my vocabulary as an adult painter, how I spent most of my life trying to search out the Canadian psyche.”