Chapter Text
Heritage Minutes
Heritage Minutes are produced by Historica Canada and are 60-second PSA spots dramatizing important or exciting moments in -- as you might expect -- Canadian history. The first batch were produced between 1991 and 2000, meaning that Heritage Minutes are the same age as Shane and he would have seen them on TV as a wee Timbit. A new batch began running in 2012.
While Heritage Minutes can be a bit cheesy, they have also featured (both onscreen and as VO narrators) some pretty famous folks, including Dan Aykroyd, Lloyd Mansbridge, Adrienne Clarkson, Colm Feore, k.d. lang, Rick Mercer, Victor Garber, and (HR-adjacent!) Jared Keeso. Any Canadian over the age of, like, 5 years old will likely be able to name at least one historical figure or event they first learned about from a Heritage Minute. (Mine is the thing about smelling burnt toast.)
As you might expect, there are several classic Heritage Minutes on hockey-related topics, and I expect Shane has all of them memorized:
- Maurice "Rocket" Richard (1990)
- Jacques Plante (1991)
- Maple Leaf Gardens (1993)
You can check out both newer and classic Heritage Minutes on the Heritage Minutes page.
House Hippos
The (sadly fictional) North American House Hippo is the star of a nationally beloved PSA that started running in 1999, the point of which was basically "don't believe everything you see on TV". It slightly backfired in that the #1 thing most people thought about it was Maaaan I want my own house hippo.
I cannot explain the House Hippo better than the North American House Hippo PSA itself. Please watch it, I promise you won't be sorry.
Hinterland Who's Who
Hinterland Who's Who spots, produced by the Canadian Wildlife Service, have been on and off Canadians' TVs since the 1960s. (Like the Heritage Minutes, they had an initial run in the 20th century and were revived and revamped in the 21st.) The basic idea is to familiarize people with Canadian flora and, especially, fauna that -- because so much of Canada's population lives in urban areas fairly near the southern border -- we may not have encountered in our daily lives.
Many of us learned about amazing creatures like the burrowing owl and the wolverine from HWW. Most of us recognize the HWW theme music, which I just learned from Wikipedia is called "Flute Poem" and was composed by John Cacavas.
You can now find a whole library of Hinterland Who's Who videos on their very own website.
All three of these iconic Canadian TV Things (tm) have also been parodied and merchandised over the years, in much the same way that American culture has treated, for instance, those "Only YOU can prevent forest fires" spots by the National Parks Service: They're all so instantly recognizable across so many generations that the jokes almost always land.
HWW actually has a "Spoofs" section on their website, which you can find here. (Several of them are about American hockey teams. Who's surprised?)