Anne of Ontario?

S he may be over 110 years old, but Anne is as endearing and vivacious as ever and still enchanting audiences and readers around the world. This Island has benefitted greatly from LM. Montgomery’s best-known character. The famous red-head is showing no sign of getting old, drawing record numbers to the Green Gables site in Cavendish this summer.

It’s likely the low Canadian dollar is keeping Canadians in Canada and prompting more Americans to travel here. However the hordes filing through Green Gables may be a happy consequence of the new “Anne of Green Gables” movie that was aired on YTV back in February. This latest version of Anne, which starred Ella Ballentine, Martin Sheen and Sara Botsford, was filmed mostly in Milton, Ont., but with some scenes shot on P.E.I. The new movie garnered lots of viewers and is scheduled for rebroadcast in November on PBS. Now there’s another new Anne on the horizon. Even before production begins, Netflix announced plans to stream this latest adaptation worldwide. The initial eight episodes of CBC-TV’s new miniseries were scheduled to begin this past spring with shooting this summer, however, production is now getting underway in September in Ontario. Wouldn’t it be splendid if the filming of this new series could happen in the real setting of the Montgomery novel – here on P.E.I.? “Emily of New Moon” another TV series based on Montgomery’s books, was filmed on location on P.E.I. and starred local children. Over 1.4 million watched the first episode and following episodes attracted similar audiences. The Emily series not only brought visitors and tourism revenue to the Island, it had a direct economic impact on our province and created employment for Islanders. The province made it enticing for the Salter Street production company to film on P.E.I. including equity investments in the series and contributions toward training people for the production. Sadly, producers are not committing to shooting any of the new Anne series on the Island. “We really would love to get East to shoot, at least for some of it, because we want to be authentic,” said the producer of the new series, Miranda de Pencier, who incidentally has a grandmother from P.E.I. “We’re going to do our best for all the Anne fans out there to make a show that everyone can be proud of and love.” Islanders would love it more if it was filmed here, at least all the outdoor scenes. It’s going to be difficult to make Ontario look like our little isle. Our scenery should be enough to entice the film crews here, but did our province offer any other incentives? If not, they should have.