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These were strange, and when you look at them now, they were part of this effort in the 60's onward to create a national "Canadian" culture and identity using l
by motohagiography 5y ago
These were strange, and when you look at them now, they were part of this effort in the 60's onward to create a national "Canadian" culture and identity using little factoids like those in Hinterland Who's Who as a common understanding.
The logrider's waltz is another one, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upsZZ2s3xv8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upsZZ2s3xv8, but you have to imagine what weird places the CBC and TV Ontario would have had to have been in the 50's and 60's, where it was a mix of turtlenecked beatnicks, remittence men, old family connected bureaucrats, with influential infiltrators from french separatist and foreign communist movements, Camp X instructors, and a bunch of political idealists spending relatively unlimited public money on inventing a new national identity. In hindsight, the 1970s, Polka-Dot Door was obviously an acid fueled propaganda machine, and Polkaroo, a giant dotted ambiguously gendered kangaroo friend that nobody else could see was the beginning of intersectionality. The future was imminently revolutionary and operated by a benevolent new intellectual class on systems like a new rumored Chilean technology called Cybersyn, which I am sure we sent agents to infiltrate and steal the blueprints of this amazing technology for ourselves to give us a national advantage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn), and groups of conceptual artists formed networks that connected revolutionary politics with the young people of establishment society, e.g. General Idea (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Idea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Idea)
All against a backdrop of those earth toned rainbows, the Olympics in Montreal, from a place where the future was beige, and unlimited cigarettes, courduroy, moustaches, LSD, and money for new technologies like portable recorders, theremins and synthesizers made it basically like a Trotskyist version of Mad Men meets early Star Trek.
Canada is really, really weird. That's a show I'd watch anyway.
- cgh 5y agoThis fantastic comment accurately captures the feel of the CBC in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, when I was a small child. We had one channel growing up in the north, logically called CBC North, and I always wondered if anyone actually picked up the phone to contact the Canadian Wildlife Service to talk about beavers.