The CBC teasers started last week.

We were told that the teams in the National Ice League would, again, hold their training camps in Reykjavik.

More recently, the league announced the eligibility of Icebots, robotic players. The Canadian teams, however, are sticking with humans.

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And so it begins: Ice, an animated fantasy that will debut on the pregame show of Hockey Night in Canada on Saturday, will pit good Canadians against bad robots.

Ice, the brainchild of Hockey Night executive producer Joel Darling, is a cartoon series in the future. The hero is a player named Wheels (voiced by actor Shaun Johnston), who plays for Vancouver, which doesn't make sense because Toronto is supposed to be Hockey Night's centre of the universe (even a parallel universe).

"Things change in the future, I guess," Darling said.

With an eye to increasing Hockey Night's young audience, Darling has been thinking about a cartoon series for several years, particularly during visits to toy stores with his young children, who, like all kids, are into transformers and robots.

"I always thought there was room in the pregame show for some fantasy and that's where it all began," Darling said. "Early on, I thought it would be something for kids. But as I've gone down the road, I'm hoping six and seven-year-olds to people 50 and 60 will watch."

The characters include Miss G (voiced by Canadian actor Wendy Crewson), "the comely" league commissioner; Vincent Lucre (Albert Schultz), a "cunning" Ice owner; and Missie Moolah (Cynthia Dale), who's "a bad girl and she knows it." Hardly the stuff to inspire Robert Towne's return to typewriter, but Darling believes the writing is compelling enough to connect with a youth and adult audience.

Insight Sports West in Edmonton won the contract to produce the 26-part series. In less than a month, writer Mike Dodson and animator Graham Melley produced a story and book of characters. Darling said he was impressed.

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"I told them my idea, which was pretty far-fetched -- a futuristic hockey world with something resembling the Canadian teams," Darling said. "A few weeks later, they produced a bible of characters and laid down what their vision was. The writing is very clever. It was just bang on."

In addition to actors, several hockey people are also involved in the production. Hockey Night host Ron MacLean and Maple Leafs forward Tie Domi do voice cameos, as does Paul Morris, the former Maple Leafs public-address announcer. Retired player Brett Lindros plays Bear, "the cornerstone of the Calgary defence."

The computer animation in the series is contemporary. It looks like something you would see in a video game. The process is also relatively inexpensive compared with the cost of producing cartoons in the old days.

"It's very cost effective," said Trevor Cousineau, the executive vice-president of Insight Sports West. "I can't speak for the total cost of the project, but if you were working in the cell animation world, which is rapidly becoming eclipsed by this type of technology, you would be talking about literally dozens of animators working in a Korean animation sweat shop for hours and hours to generate very small sets of scenes."

Insight's team consisted of about four. The cost of producing the series is believed to be less than $500,000, and Pizza Hut is on board as sponsor.

Saturday's opening segment will run three minutes. But the remaining episodes will be limited to 70 to 90 seconds, each one, of course, ending with a cliffhanger. The short pieces speak, it seems, to the attention span of kids, but also to the fact that Ice will run within a 30-minute show already flush with content.

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The CBC expects to be able to measure the appeal of Ice by breaking down its Nielsen ratings minute by minute and also by the number of hits on a CBC World Wide Web site built especially for the show.

There is the potential for merchandising opportunities and perhaps a multiyear run, but before Ice is hailed as the Star Wars of sports TV, we'll need some critical and audience reaction.

For his part, Darling is optimistic.

"I think it's a winning project," he said. "I think right now, we've kind of quietly told ourselves we'd love this to go for three years." All the news? F rom one weird universe to another: At The New York Times, sports columns by veteran Dave Anderson and Harvey Araton were killed because they disagreed with the newspaper's editorial position on Augusta National Golf Club's refusal to admit women as members. The Times says Tiger Woods should boycott the Masters and CBS should pull its coverage.

Anderson told the New York Daily News: "It was decided by the editors that we should not argue with the editorial page." Araton, in his column, wrote that women face bigger issues than whether they can become members of a ritzy golf club.

Guess what? The gagging by the Times of two staff writers, who were expressing reasonable opinions, is more contemptible than Augusta's men-only policy. truth@globeandmail.ca