Hinterland Who's Who - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

These announcements became a widely recognized and often-parodied feature of Canadian pop culture.

• SCTV episode 142 featured a spoof of the Hinterland Who's Who "Woodchuck" episode, voiced by John Candy. The woodchuck also makes a brief appearance in episode 143.

• A spoof Hinterland Who's Who episode entitled "The Wood Spider" credited to "First Church of Christ, Filmmaker" was released on YouTube in 2006 and has garnered over 26 million views as of early 2012. The video purported to show the behavior of wood spiders given various drugs, such as alcohol, caffeine, and THC, a mocking reference to the 1940s research of Dr. Peter N. Witt, who showed that giving drugs to spiders alters their web building behavior.

• The Double Exposure (comedy series) on CBC Radio repeatedly sent up the series with a number of 'Political Hinterland Who's Who' sequences in the late 1980s and 1990s. With no visuals, the narrator's elaborate punning compared bureaucratic affairs to the struggle for survival in nature. "On the depression north of Lake Ontario, the Great Blue Harris, or in Latin, Attila Foraqueensparkicus, has stirred up a hornets' nest with its fellow creatures living off a diet of bologna and tuna. The Great Blue Harris, not concerned with the welfare of others, has stirred the left wing back into full flight."

• The PSA "House Hippo" by Concerned Children's Advertisers was a parody of the series. It features a voice over and footage of a small hippo. The narration was similar in style to "Hinterland Who's Who".