TV Sale
1975 · 10m · Canada
Directed by Ernie Schmidt
Genres: animation, comedy, satire
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, provocative
An animated satire opens with a television salesman's pitch for a solid-state set and skewers programming that is built around products rather than viewers.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A 1975 animated broadside that turns the sales pitch itself into the subject—not a commercial masquerading as content, but a film that *is* the deconstruction of that con. This is the kind of subversive structural joke that most programmers would bury, and it's exactly why it works.
Schmidt's satire sits squarely in the lineage of didactic animation and media critique that runs through the NFB's social documentary tradition, wielding formal economy and tonal precision to dismantle its target without a wink.
The decision to let the salesman's pitch carry the entire film—to give the viewer no escape hatch, no narrator to guide them—is the move that transforms a smart premise into something genuinely unsettling, and it costs nothing but conviction.