When it comes to Canadian stereotypes, a few things always come to mind. People think that Canadians always say “sorry.” They think that all Canadians are polite. They think Canadians drink beer and maple syrup in almost equal, excessive quantities. They think Canadians say “aboot” instead of “about.” All of these are true to a certain degree. The one that feels the truest, as a Canadian living in Canada, is the passion that the country has for hockey.
Canada has two national sports, one for the summer and one for the winter. The summer sport is lacrosse and the winter sport is hockey. So, yeah, hockey was baked into our genes. Some of the biggest television events in Canadian history were hockey games. The Summit Series, eight games played between Canada and the Soviet Union in 1972, was a huge event. The final game of that series had an estimated 16 million Canadians watching it, out of an approximately 22-million-person population. Hockey Night in Canada has been an institution on Saturdays for decades. There are currently seven Canadian teams in the NHL, the most for any of the major sports leagues based out of the USA. Hockey is pretty big in Canada.
The Canadian film industry picked up on the country’s interest in hockey. Many Canadian movies feature hockey in some way. Considering that a lot of the funding comes from the government, and the government likes to promote Canada as much as they can in productions, that makes sense. Hockey is one of those things that feels very Canadian. Incorporating that into a movie will more likely get some government grants for Canadian content, which is why so many Canadian movies feature hockey.
Goon and Goon: Last of the Enforcers were two of the simplest hockey movies. They were hockey movies about hockey. They were specifically about a fighter in Canadian minor league hockey and the lengths he went to so that his team could win. There wasn’t a deeper story to tell. Sure, there was a little bit of romance, and the main character lifted the spirits of his teammates so that they could be a winning team, but the story was the hockey. The story was the fighting.
Score: A Hockey Musical took the opposite stance but did it with a twist. The movie was about hockey. It was about having fun with the skill of the sport, instead of the fighting. There was a little bit of romance, as always in movies, but it was about the hockey. The twist was that it was a musical. The characters sang songs while playing, practicing, or arguing. Everything still revolved around hockey. All the songs revolved around hockey, or the romance that was being broken apart by hockey. It was a hockey movie through and through.
Most Canadian hockey movies weren’t about the hockey, though. The hockey was a big part of things, but other stories were told through hockey. Hockey Night was a CBC television movie from the 1980s about a girl joining a boys’ hockey team in Parry Sound. That might sound like a hockey movie, and it was, but there was a depth to it. The movie tackled gender issues of the time. The town didn’t want a girl on their boys’ hockey team. They thought it made them look weak. The coach and the team knew she was good, though, and fought for her. The movie was tackling toxic masculinity in junior hockey.
Chicks with Sticks did a similar thing, only in adult hockey. A single mom put together a team of women to play against the men because the men’s team thought that women could never play the same level of hockey as them. She wanted to prove them wrong. She was fighting for gender equality on the ice. She was fighting against misogyny between the blue lines. Hockey was the backdrop for a more important story about gender politics.
On a different topic, there was Face-Off. The movie was a romance set to a hockey backdrop. It wasn’t a hockey movie with romance. It was a romance with hockey in it. An up-and-coming hockey player fell in love with an up-and-coming musician. Their different paths in life put a strain on their relationship. The most important detail was that it included real hockey players as themselves. The main character joined the Toronto Maple Leafs, and many of the players at the time were in the movie. The Canadiana got the spotlight as one of Canada’s biggest hockey teams took the spotlight.
Then, of course, Canadians made movies about their hockey heroes. Going back to Goon, it was based upon the career of Doug Smith, a real-life hockey enforcer. The Rocket was a movie based on the career of Maurice Richard, one of the most popular Montreal Canadiens players of all time. Mr. Hockey: The Gordie Howe Story was a television movie about Gordie Howe. Terry Sawchuk also had a movie made about him, called Goalie. The love that Canadians had for hockey meant a love for the people involved in the sport. That also explained a popular Canadian donut and coffee shop called Tim Horton’s.
But it wasn’t just movies about hockey that showed how engrained the sport was in the Canadian mindset. Sure, there were many Canadian movies made about hockey or the people involved in the sport. A bunch of them were just mentioned. That wasn’t all the influence that hockey had over Canadian films. Other movies that weren’t sports movies also involved the sport. Hockey became an important part of the plot, though the stories weren’t about the hockey.
Take one of the most successful Canadian movies, Bon Cop, Bad Cop, for example. The movie was a murder mystery. A murder happened on the border of Ontario and Quebec, so the provinces had to share the jurisdiction. An English-speaking Ontario officer and a French-speaking Quebec officer teamed up to solve the murder, uncovering a deep connection to the professional hockey league. It was about the murders, but the murders were within the hockey world. It wasn’t a hockey movie, but hockey was an essential part of the story.
A little less essential was Strange Brew. The movie was a feature length adaptation of the Great White North sketches from SCTV that also worked as a modern (in the 1980s) Canadian retelling of Hamlet. It played on many of the stereotypes of Canadians. Bob and Doug talked like stereotypical Canadians. The story revolved around a brewery. They went to Oktoberfest in Kitchener-Waterloo. There was even a hockey scene used to reveal the mind control capabilities of the brewery. Even a story that wasn’t about hockey managed to utilize hockey as an element.
Somewhere in between those two uses was Another WolfCop. Lou Garou (Leo Fafard) was back. He teamed up with Sergeant Tina Walsh (Amy Matysio) and Willie Higgins (Jonathan Cherry) because the alien shapeshifters had returned to town with a new plan. They were going to use a brewery to inseminate the people of Woodhaven with alien shapeshifters in order to populate the Earth. The trio of heroes had to stop the alien shapeshifters, who were led by the charismatic Mr. Swallows (Yannick Bisson).
There was no hockey in that description. That was because the conflict wasn’t about the hockey. There was some hockey involved in the story, however. The brewery that Swallows used was in a hockey arena. The moment when the shapeshifting aliens planned on birthing their new offspring was during the opening hockey game. The big action scene at the end was set at the same hockey game. The opposing team consisted of mind-controlled, body-altered bad guys built by the alien shapeshifters. Hockey became an important part of the movie.
As you can see, Canadian movies liked to infuse hockey into the story. It could have been that the movies revolved around hockey or hockey players. There were many movies about hockey and hockey players. There were also movies that weren’t about hockey or hockey players, but hockey ended up having a large influence on the story or part of the story. It could have been the motivation behind a murder mystery, the front for a villain’s evil plan, or an important scene that moved the story forward in a big way. The case didn’t matter. What mattered was that hockey had a hand in how things played out.
There are many stereotypes of Canadian culture that aren’t nearly as true as what people would believe. We don’t all live in igloos. We don’t all say “aboot.” We don’t all own a moose as a pet. Those things aren’t true at all. When it comes to our love of hockey, though, that one is almost as true as people think. Canadians, for the most part, enjoy hockey. We will support the Canadian teams. We will watch the big games. And we’ll bring hockey into our scripted entertainment. That’s just how we are, and it makes for some interesting movie watching.
These notes should be interesting, too:
- Lowell Dean directed Another WolfCop. He also directed WolfCop (week 121).
- Another WolfCop was Jonathan Cherry’s third Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance after House of the Dead (week 59) and WolfCop (week 121).
- Eight people were in both WolfCop (week 121) and Another WolfCop. They were Laura Abramsen, Brian Dueck, Leo Fafard, George Grassick, Noush Habeebkutty, Victor Lam, Amy Matysio, and Jay Robertson.
- Another WolfCop featured three actors from Manborg (week 338). They were Adam Brooks, Matthew Kennedy, and Conor Sweeney.
- Michael Cleland was in both Ice Soldiers (week 71) and Another WolfCop.
- Kevin Smith returned to the Sunday “Bad” Movies in Another WolfCop. He was previously featured in Vulgar (week 269).
- Finally, Ben Reimer made a quick turnaround. He was in Pixels (week 407) and Another WolfCop.
- Have you seen Another WolfCop? Have you seen any of the movies I mentioned? What did you think? Are there other Canadian movies with hockey that I should have mentioned? Let me know on Twitter or in the comments.
- I’m currently working on the next chunk of the Sunday “Bad” Movies schedule. I’d be very appreciative of suggestions. Tell me on Twitter or in the comments what movies I should be checking out for the blog.
- The Instagram account for Sunday “Bad” Movies is still going strong. Head on over there, give it a follow, enjoy.
- That leaves one final thing for this post. What will be coming up next week? I’ve visited many Charles Band movies before, whether they were directed by him or produced by him. Next week, I’ll add another to the list. It’s one of the biggest franchise starters in his career. I’ll be giving a watch to Puppet Master. I hope you’ll join me for that post when I return next Sunday.
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