Brian Pickett on animated puppies, claims to fame, and being movie-ready

The Paw Patrol guy – you should have lunch with him.

I must have heard that several times before meeting up with the man himself, Lindsay’s Brian Pickett.

He’s likely used to that label these days, given the show’s global popularity. Recent estimates put the Paw Patrolfranchise value at more than $14 billion. Yep. Billion, with a B. We might not be able to make our own automobile in this country, but we sure know how to create kids’ shows – even for a global market.

The show originally premiered on TVOntario in 2013 before launching internationally on Nickelodeon, and it’s now one of Canada’s most successful cultural exports. And it’s still going. Paw Patrol is broadcast in more than 170 countries, translated into 35-plus languages, and has spawned movies, merchandise, and spin-offs.

The show is about a core group of six rescue dogs, led by a tech-savvy boy named Ryder. The heroic pups work together to protect their community with characters like firedog Marshall, police pup Chase, and air rescue specialist Skye. All the animals have special gadgets and vehicles for their work.

If you’re a parent of a certain age, you have likely stepped on a Paw Patrol puppy action figure in the middle of the night, fighting back unwholesome expletives about the wholesome show. Or maybe you have gotten an ear worm from the series’ tunes in your head. That one you can blame Pickett on.

That’s because Pickett is a composer and music producer – and along with his two writing partners, Graeme Cornies, and James Chapple, they have been responsible for all the music you hear on the show (except the opening song) from day one. And the show just keeps going.

As we settle into our chairs at the Olympia Restaurant in downtown Lindsay, the genial Pickett tells me it wasn’t supposed to be this way at all. He only got into music as a teenager to meet girls.

“It was just an escape, early on, for a nerdy, scrawny kid. And it made me kind of cool with girls I thought,” he said. “They see me up there playing guitar…yeah, it was just supposed to be a cool factor.”

You could say it worked. Meg Ward was also a “band nerd” according to Pickett, even though she attended LCVI and he is an I.E. Weldon alumni. (Pickett entered Grade 9 as I was leaving Weldon, so I missed getting to know him back then.) But he and Meg still saw each other at band competitions, despite the different high schools.

Meg’s brother, Tod Ward, played sax beside Pickett. “One day I asked him if his sister was single – kind of kidding, mostly serious – and she called me that night and the rest is history,” Pickett says of his wife.

Our server, Ciara, takes our order. As with most meetups, we decide this interview would be better with beer. A half pint of Port Perry Old Flame for both of us. (Hey, it’s Noon on a Wednesday – we didn’t want to get too crazy.)

It’s just potato bacon soup and pita bread for Pickett until he hears me order an Olympia Greek salad with chicken. He decides to get a Greek salad too.

It was right out of college, Pickett says, when he got a job in the dubbing room at a large recording studio in Toronto that did mostly advertising work. “I was basically copying and sending tapes to clients, and radio stations – stuff like that.”

Pickett and his writing partners had their sights set on writing horror movie scores. They were all diehard David Lynch fans (think Elephant Man, Blue Velvet art films, and Twin Peaks.)

“Anything dark and scary like that – that was our goal,” he said, pointing out the name of their enterprise is Voodoo Highway Music Group, after all.

And yet at the recording studio, Pickett made friends with a couple of the composers who came in, and eventually one of them gave him a job writing TV ads for Samsung. “It was our first real job,” in the industry,” says Pickett.

All this time they were living in Toronto, trying to get their careers to fully take off. He and Meg would come back to Lindsay to hang out with family on many weekends, “but we always felt so crappy leaving, packing our family up on a Sunday night while Megan’s brothers, Simon and Jay, would all be together for dinner or whatever,” because everyone could more easily get together.

But the portability of their work – and freedom to live where they wanted – would eventually be on the horizon.

“We had a scattershot approach to this when we started. We’d just take every bit of work that came our way in the beginning.”

Over almost a decade of doing ad work from 2000 to 2010, Pickett says his main claim to fame for awhile was for an ad he made in 2007 for Koodo, the discount cell phone carrier. Remember their catchy little commercial where the company’s name gets sung at the very end in a sing-song voice?

“Koo…dohhhh…”

“I think we did 30ish versions each,” he said. We were throwing everything at the wall. Wacky ideas, whatever came to mind. The one that ended up winning took me five minutes to make.”

While it was mostly ads and some other gigs for Voodoo Highway for quite some time, they finally got the opportunity to demo for a cartoon.

“You have to audition for it, just like an actor would have to audition. There’s usually like 10-20 of us who are asked to submit something.”

That something was for Total Drama Island, an animated reality TV show aimed at a tween audience that was basically a Survivor spoof. It also came out in 2007 and would herald the beginning of their career writing for TV shows, mainly leaving commercials behind.

For his audition for the show, Pickett sat down with an acoustic guitar “and just belted out the theme song.” It was the first song he ever wrote on that instrument. And it got them the gig.

“It felt good. It felt new and exciting,” he remembers.

For most songwriting though, Pickett sits down at the piano and starts “yelling out gibberish” to get things going.

Ciara is back with a wide smile and a small tray full of food to go with our beer.

In between salad and soup mouthfuls, Pickett says that after they got involved in scoring the theme for Total Drama Island, their work gradually shifted to kids’ music – right around the time they started having their own children.

While working on World of Quest, an animated musical TV series, the director, Jamie Whitney, liked working with Voodoo Highway so much he “brought us on to (do) Paw Patrol when he was working on developing it – and thank God he did.”

Paw Patrol was an absolute game changer, catapulting Voodoo Highway to ‘instant’ success (as if the groundwork had not been laid by years of work beforehand.)

From a commercial standpoint, it’s the residuals from the show that Pickett says has made it an absolute financial success for his team.

While the show is often criticized for being overly maudlin and shallow, no less than Malcolm Gladwell recently mounted a defense of the show on his podcast, Revisionist History.

Gladwell frames Paw Patrol as a “quintessentially Canadian” cultural artifact. He argues that the show reflects Canada’s national values – peace, order, and good government. That’s because each pup represents a civic role — firefighter, police officer, construction worker — and they solve problems through cooperation and competence, rather than individual heroism. It’s the kind of civic idealism, Gladwell says, that’s rare in children’s programming.

When Pickett reflects on the success of Paw Patrol, he says there’s no doubt a hit show is hard to get. “But I guess if you’re playing those odds (the scattershot approach of taking everything that comes one’s way) then yeah, you might have a hit in there, and we lucked out.”

Pickett rethinks his statement. “I’d say it’s not so much luck that we won the show, but it’s luck that the show became such a phenomenon – that it hit the way it did.”

With their growing success and better technologies available compared to when they first started, the Pickett’s were able to move back to Lindsay in 2015, after a 20-year absence from their hometown. (After comparing notes, we realize this is similar to my own return to Lindsay after a 20-year absence, when I started the Advocate in 2017.)

Paw Patrol now has many additional characters and in 2023 it launched its first spinoff show based on the popular dog named Rubble who is, you guessed it, a construction worker. The spinoff, Rubble & Crew, is also scored by Pickett and team, and follows the adventures of the English bulldog and his construction crew family.

“It’s doing extremely well too.”

Voodoo Highway has had several hit shows at this point, as large as Paw Patrol has loomed. There’s the show for children aged five through eight called Odd Squad, “which follows two young agents, Olive and Otto, who are part of an agency that seeks to save the day using math when odd things happen,” according to IMDB.

And Daniel Tiger’s Neighbourhood – based on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, is a massive hit for PBS and Voodoo Highway, and is also carried by CBC Gem in Canada.

Behind the scenes

It’s difficult for the average person with no knowledge of the business to understand how Pickett’s workflow goes. When I told a handful of people I’d be interviewing Pickett, their immediate reaction was ‘oh, like Charlie in Two and a Half Men!’

Their reference to the 12-season-strong hit comedy that aired in the early 2000s and 2010s, where Charlie would tickle the ivories when the spirit moved him, is not exactly how it works these days, according to Pickett.

“That’s an old school reflection of what we do because back in the day, you would very much have a guy like me writing a song on a piano and then sending it off to people to arrange and produce it.”

The artist wouldn’t necessarily get to see how it was used until the product was released.

“These days,” Pickett explains, “you have to pretty much deliver a finished product.”

The fact that Voodoo Highway did that in their early years, in and around 2000, worked to their benefit, right at the transition between “old school and new school.”

“A lot of the older guys didn’t know how to use all the recording equipment, so I think that helped us out a lot. We’d come in with something a little more polished.”

Sometimes for the shows they are working on, the trio gets storyboards first so they can see the gist of the storyline. Animated shows take almost a year from storyboard or from script, and not all shows have lyrics – sometimes it’s just music they’re producing.

Pickett’s preferred way of writing music is “in quiet and alone,” which sometimes means working at his home studio in Lindsay, but it could also mean heading into Toronto to their office near Parliament and Queen Streets, something he does once or twice a week.

With Paw Patrol alone it’s an episode every two weeks, and they take a break for Christmas for just one week. So there’s always lots to be done, let alone all the other shows and opportunities they juggle.

I ask Pickett if there’s a next chapter for his career, and what that might look like.

While acknowledging he’s of two minds about this, he says there is a side to him that is “very driven.”

And his driven side is telling him to try and get work for a big movie. “That’s the next step up from a hit cartoon. I mean, chances are I won’t be scoring Star Wars movies, but I could see the potential of scoring an animated movie.”

Voodoo Highway actually got asked to audition for the second Lego Movie. They called us in for an interview, as they knew us from Daniel Tiger because there’s so many catchy little songs in it.” Ultimately, they went with another team.

And there was that time they scored a Canadian-Japanese movie called Toilet, which perhaps surprisingly, was a high budget movie starring Tatiana Maslany, who most know from her incredible work in Black Orchid. “It’s centred on a family who is trying to afford to buy one of those fancy Japanese toilets for their home,” said Pickett.

And while that flick didn’t exactly make them flush with movie money cash, Pickett says they are open to other opportunities.

The thing about movies is they are a huge commitment. “We’re putting ourselves out there to do them but there’s no doubt they can be a lot of work,” Pickett said, noting they can take up to a year to complete. Balancing that with all the TV series they do would be formidable, but it would be a challenge Voodoo Highway would love to meet.

Legacy

At this point, all that’s left is the most important question I can think of. If it all ended today, I ask, and you were forever known mainly as the Paw Patrol guy, would you be okay with that?

“Yeah, I would,” says Pickett with a smile. “As much as I’m ready to do more, I’m already happy and fortunate to have what I have, professionally and personally.”

Plates are getting cleared and beer glasses are empty. The core lunch crowd is moving on, shuffling through sunbeams near the Olympia’s wide entranceway.

The last remnant of conversation now drifts to politics and the general mood of the land.

We both lament the days when people were a lot less divided – and a lot less vitriolic. “There didn’t use to be so much sky between Conservatives and Liberals,” said Pickett.

“I just wish we could get along better than we have of late,” he says.

Ah, there it is. I ask him if this is just like an episode of Paw Patrol?

“Yeah, exactly,” he says with a laugh. “That’s what they’re aiming for, yeah? Everyone works together in a perfect land where everyone loves each other. You can’t really beat that.”