The Woodchuck...

Hinterland Who's Who, the homepage. Featuring the original theme music, plus clips and other info.

For those who aren't familiar with Canadianarcana, "Hinterland Who's Who" was a series of one-minute films produced by the National Film Board; they ran during commercial breaks on the CBC and elsewhere. They consisted of grainily-photographed films of various woodland creatures, faux-impressionist flute music on the soundtrack, and a friendly-voiced narrator giving us a few basic facts about how the creatures live. The films were so cheap-looking that even the captions couldn't keep steady on the screen, and the point of them always eluded us, since it didn't tell us a whole lot we couldn't learn by watching Hammy the Hamster, but the music was kind of hypnotic.

SCTV did a parody of the Hinterland Who's Who, part of an episode filled with CBC and NFB parodies, a way for the Second City comics to strike back at the CBC for never hiring them. The payoff comes when the friendly-voiced announcer appears on a CBC show as a "famous Canadian actor" that none of the guests have ever heard of. The parody, along with some real Hinterland Who's Who segments included as extras, is on SCTV Volume 4.