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Oh Bob! Thanks for pointing me to this website containing every episode of perhaps the most significant Canadian television series ever produced. That’s right: Hinterland Who’s Who.

In the 1960s and 1970s there were two major changes in Canadian society. First, more and more of the country was becoming urbanized and fewer people had experiences with the creatures of the wilderness. This was resulting in Canadians losing touch with the wildlife that was supposed to be one of our defining features.

THe other major trend was the spread of television. As Canada is a very very big country, we pioneered satellite TV and by the 1970s with the launch of the ANIK satellites, we became very more and more electronically connected to one another.

These two trends prompted the Canadian Wildlife Service to produce a series of 40 one minute vignettes about different wildlife species of our hinterlands. With a warbling Erik Satie-like solo flute theme, sparse text delivered with a detached smokey-voiced commentary and amazingly unspectacular footage (60 seconds of a chipmunk eating seeds), the series became a fixture of Canadian television during my childhood. It was often imitated and mocked (notably by CBC Radio’s comic duo Double Exposure who ran “Political Who’s Who” featuring the “Bob Rae” of southern Ontario), but always lovingly.

And now I can see these pieces again. It take me right back to being 5 years old again, watching Mr. Dressup and seeing the creatures of our huge country doing everyday things, piped straight into the rec room.