A Love Letter to the Canadian Public Service Announcements That Raised (and Mildly Traumatized) a Nation (Or Why I Still Check Behind the Couch for Buzzsaws)
Everything that I’ve ever learned, I learned from television.
It’s true.
Sorry, teachers. While you were prattling on about the formation of our confederation, our history of fur trapping and fucking portaging—to the point where my hometown has even built and operates a much-celebrated canoe museum (which I always imagined has two exhibits: “Were you aware that the earliest canoe was nothing more than an oblong, hollowed-out wooden boat? And now they’re made of fiberglass. End of tour!”)—I was completely blanked out, with no more available space for knowledge to fit into the remaining chambers of my fat Irish head. All information had already been acquired and stored from an entirely different medium (which was the message!). And you know what? This particular teacher did not make me sit in the corner or chastise me for making what I truly believed were very hilarious comments during school lectures and math tests and serious discussions of the deadly epidemic known as the AIDS virus.
For example, cartoons and song taught me how an American bill was passed. A sentient rolled-up piece of paper would sing at you the entire congressional process, and I would be like, “OK. This is very important. Thank you, Bill. I totally get it. They call you Bill. On the top of Capitol Hill. Holy fuck that rhymes. I’m gonna remember this forever.”
This, of course, was followed by another Saturday-morning mind virus staple: the Future Blob.
This was an ABC “Zack of All Trades” PSA, and somehow some ABC executive roped Luther fucking Vandross possibly at gunpoint into writing and performing a jingle that would basically pre-program an entire generation of fat-faced children with the all-important life lesson of being fucking useful, all while we waited for the Snorks to return from commercial.
“Don’t pout, check it out… Zack’s gonna show you what work’s about.” That melody burrowed into our brains like a government-issued earworm and never left.
Then the blob itself appeared—a big, amorphous, vaguely threatening mass of pure existential dread that chanted:
“It’s the blob, it’s the blob
I am the future blob
Without a job, without a job
I am the future blob…”
Zack, the cheerful career-guidance cartoon, would swoop in and explain that the only way to defeat this terrifying unemployment monster was to pick a useful trade right now, kids. Sewing. Skating. Whatever. Just become a productive little citizen before the blob eats you and your entire future. Holy Christ, in retrospect, I was just waiting for the Soviet flag to slowly raise in the background and a furry little snow hat to appear on all the children’s heads as respective hammers and sickles appeared in all of their tiny, trembling hands.
Looking back, it feels less like a helpful tip and more like soft-core propaganda designed to pre-program an entire generation into being responsible, tax-paying, law-abiding, non-idle adults. The song was the delivery system. The blob was the threat. And the message was crystal clear: figure out how you’re going to be useful to society, or this formless gelatinous horror will consume you, bones and all. No pressure, seven-year-olds. Just decide your entire life path between BraveStarr and SilverHawks so the economy doesn’t collapse, and we are then forced to import millions of immigrant workers to do the jobs that we don’t want to, to the point where an entire evil government agency will need to be created in order to dispose of them some 40 years later. Oops.
It was brilliant. It was insidious. And decades later, some of us still hear that damn chant in the back of our minds as we are simultaneously and instinctively drawn to add more references to our LinkedIn accounts.
But that was America. Canada had its own PSA commercials. And that was where I truly learned how my nation worked, how it got its name, and how we subsequently lost yet another sport that we invented to fucking Americans.
Here in Canada, we got sixty seconds of pure, uncut national identity crammed between cartoons like a maple-syrup enema jammed up our unsuspecting poop chutes.
We got the commercials that didn’t just sell us a product. They sold us who we were—and, in one particularly glorious case, they sold us the terrifying truth that our arms could come off… and stay off, if we, inside some Star Wars acid trip, somersaulted through a sea of death traps. But I’ll get to that soon. First up, though: the warm-up act—Canada Vignettes and Hinterland Who’s Who.
Before the real psychological warfare began, there were the soft openers.
Hinterland Who’s Who arrived like a gentle, flute-playing serial killer. That haunting little melody would start, and suddenly you were watching an emotionally exhausted woodchuck do absolutely nothing while a man who sounded like he’d just woken up from a fifty-year coma, and stoned out of his mind on Quaaludes, listed facts in the world’s most depressed voice. “The woodchuck… is a terrestrial… day-active animal.” Long pause. The flute would cry. You would feel existential dread. Then he’d invite you to write Ottawa for more information, as if the Canadian government was just sitting there waiting for your letter about seemingly depressed rodents of the frozen tundra.
And then there were the Canada Vignettes! The Log Driver’s Waltz! A cheerful animated short about a woman who only wants to dance with a guy who balances on floating logs in a torrential river of icy death. It was beautiful. It was folk. It was also, looking back, the government’s way of saying, “Kids, if you’re not dating someone who could die in a river accident, are you even Canadian?”
These were the appetizers. The palate cleansers. The mild childhood anxiety that prepared us for the main course.
Then Came the Heritage Minutes
Oh, the Heritage Mimutes. Those glorious, melodramatic sixty-second history lessons that played like every Canadian had been given a government-funded theatre degree and just one take to get it right.
We learned that the entire country is named after a misunderstanding. Jacques Cartier points at some land, asks the Iroquoian people what it’s called, and they politely reply “kanata,” meaning “village.” Cartier, in full explorer mode, nods wisely and decides that yes, this entire frozen half-continent shall forever be known as Village. You know, before murdering all of his hosts, and taking all of their shit, and making them live in trailer parks in the middle of nowhere for the rest of their lives.
To this day, every time someone says “Canada,” a tiny part of our national soul still whispers, “…you mean the village?” and then you remember that you have to pay tax, and they don’t, and you shake your fist at the sky and cry, “Jesus Christ. It’s been 200 years, why is this still a thing?!” Anyway.
We also learned that basketball was invented because a Canadian in Massachusetts needed his peach baskets back. James Naismith looks at a bunch of restless students, hangs two fruit containers on the wall, and accidentally creates a global sport that is then immediately conquered by Black people. It’s true. Unless you’re built like a human praying mantis and able to change a second-story lightbulb from the bottom of the stairs, as a white man, you’re out of luck. I don’t make the rules.
And of course… the burnt toast. That is the most common one quoted here. A simple, four-letter expression that either signifies common memory or impending death via the complete neurological destruction of your cerebral cortex.
We learned—permanently, irrevocably—that if you smell burnt toast, you are either about to have a seizure, or Dr. Wilder Penfield is poking your exposed brain with a tiny metal stick while you cheerily announce it to the room.
“I smell burnt toast!” And part of me always hoped that it would cut away to the corner of the room where somebody buttering a toasted piece of bread yells back, “Sorry, this one’s on me!” before placing it into his mouth and crunching away.
I smell burnt toast. So familiar. Logged forever into my brain (that is luckily not having a stroke or seizure at this moment). It also became my personal sexual safe-word later in life, after I learned that “Harder,” “Faster,” and “Don’t stop” were actually poor choices.
Enter Astar, the Robot from Planet Danger
This is the one that caused the most trauma. This is the one that necessitated the most therapy.
Picture this. Saturday morning. A sudden break from G.I. Joe battling Cobra and never actually making contact with a single bullet fired. Billions of dollars invested in painting fucking tanks with tiger stripes, and they never killed a single terrorist. Ever. Anyway, there he was to greet us during this three-minute break: ASTAR, a shiny gold child-robot with the agility of an Olympic athlete and the emotional range of a toaster. And all because somebody’s idiot kid was sticking their dick in the food disposal or their arm in a lawnmower somewhere, necessitating the creation of a propaganda video that would then subsequently mortify you into perpetual safety and spatial awareness for the rest of your life. It’s true. What was created was a nightmare-fueled PSA on behalf of the War Amps, with the collective commercial budget of a fucking Christopher Nolan film.
He flipped. He spun. He dodged sparking wires and spinning gears like C-3PO auditioning for Cirque du Soleil’s industrial accident division. You watched in awe. This was cooler than anything else on television.
And then… the saw.
One moment Astar is doing the most impressive backflip in the history of public service announcements. The next moment a spinning blade appears from nowhere, and his arm is gone. Sparks. Smoke. The limb flying through the air in glorious slow motion. And all designed to warn children like me that somersaulting through a dystopian hellspire of moving blades would leave me and my 1980s brethren with the inability to “put our arms back on.”
Oh, Astar. You birthed nothing but terror in the three minutes I had to wait to see if it was indeed possible to create a terrorist leader, cosplaying in a giant military-issue king cobra outfit, made out of the stolen DNA of some of history’s vilest men and a small blob of genetic Sgt. Slaughter protoplasm. (They could!)
But that was not the entire lesson. There was more. Astar wasn’t finished. Calm as you please—he picks his severed arm back up, screws it back on, looks straight into the camera with those dead robot eyes, and delivers the line that is still etched into the collective Canadian subconscious:
“I am ASTAR, a robot. I can put my arm back on. You can’t. So PLAYSAFE.”
Kids across the country sat in absolute silence. Bowls of cereal went uneaten. Somewhere, a parent walked into the room and found their child staring at the TV with the thousand-yard stare of a Vietnam veteran who just saw their high-school best friend step on a landmine, and now you have to return his shoes to his wife stateside because that’s all that’s left.
We didn’t just watch Astar. We became Astar in our nightmares. For years afterward, every piece of playground equipment, every farm fence, every suspicious-looking ceiling fan or riding mower was a potential Planet Danger. We approached escalators like they were active war zones. We treated our father’s discreetly hidden machetes in the garage with the respect usually reserved for nuclear weapons.
It worked.
Astar didn’t just teach us to play safe. He taught us that the universe was a veritable shop class full of twirling death, and the only difference between us and a cheerful golden robot was that when our arms came off, they stayed off, and then, as a result, we had to learn to wipe our ass with our bad hand. Forever. No second chances. No convenient reattachments. Just you, your stump, and the knowledge that you should have listened to the wise, sage advice of Planet Danger’s greatest bronzed denizen.
The Beautiful Absurdity of It All
Looking back, it is almost too perfect.
America may have got “Just Say No” and smiling cartoon animals. But we got a robot who loses a limb in high definition and a neurosurgeon who treats your open-headed, exposed brain like a game of Operation.
These weren’t just commercials. They were the unofficial national curriculum. They were the source of everything I ever learned and discovered about my own nation. Including how to listen to someone who tells you that Nova Scotia is about to blow up, so you better get the fuck out of there instead of going on with your daily routines. Holy shit.
So here’s to you, Astar, and the rest.
You terrified us. You educated us. You made us weird in the most Canadian way possible.
And for that, you absolute magnificent bastards… I will remember you forever.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go perform a full Olympic gymnast routine through a jungle gym filled with power tools.
I'm Sean.
