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Small Star Cinema

television series

Manuscripts, fine bindings, an engraving plate and preserved performance ephemera
Arts and lettersInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 10, 2026
Entity authorityQ7542904
Source-derived summary

Small Star Cinema is a series of live-action/animated shorts broadcast on CBC Television from April 12, 1974, to May 24, 1975, as part of their Bagatelle, Camera Twelve and Children's Cinema series. It was produced by Michael Hirsh and Patrick Loubert, and starred Clive A. Smith. Each short began with a small animated character purposefully walking into a spotlight. The series was then followed by the 1975 Christmas special Christmas Two Step also made for the CBC that has a similar premise.

Small Star Cinema was one of the first series made by Canada's Nelvana Limited; known as Nelvana Films at the time, and was their first television program. All 10 of the Small Star Cinema shorts have been documented online, however, almost all of the shorts have been lost. Only one short, "Mr. Pencil Draws the Line", broadcast on April 12, 1975, has been recovered, and can be found on YouTube as of January 2020.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Small Star Cinema” is television series. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Small, Star and Cinema, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewBest approached as a cultural-object dossier: authorship and date matter, but circulation and reception often explain the wider significance. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1974, 1975, 2020—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, Small, Star and Cinema is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “television series” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7542904. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1974, 1975 and 2020.

Critical limits

Later fame can flatten the distinction between original context, subsequent adaptation and institutional collecting history. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.

Best used for
  • Identifying works and editions
  • Tracing reception history
  • Finding collection records
Verify next

The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Small Star Cinema”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Small Star Cinema primary sources, Small Star Cinema archive and Small research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Small Star Cinema”?
  2. Where is authorship, date or provenance documented?
  3. Which edition, object, performance or recording is being described?
Subject index

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Small Star Cinema” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.