Hinterland Who’s Who marks 50 years
Iconic nature program considers returning to flute-music roots
Fifty years after it first showed Canada’s wilderness on television, Hinterland Who’s Who is considering a return to its musical roots.
Anyone with a TV knows the slow flute music that introduced four animals in 1963, and many more since. It’s dreamy and peaceful, and when Hinterland Who’s Who wanted to make new videos in 2003 after a long gap, their focus groups hated it.
The music was not loud enough, high school students told them. Dull. Slow. Awful.
The classic beaver video even has an incredible 15 seconds without music or narration. Just an animal. Imagine.
HWW, as the series calls itself, kept a bit of the tune but did a rewrite to quicken it up, and added non-stop percussion. They also changed the message to push conservation harder, and the series has a vigorous second life since then.
The original Hinterland vignettes showed and described animals on their own; the modern ones all focus on human impact and the danger to animals.
This week, the Canadian Wildlife Federation and Environment Canada are celebrating 50 years during which chipmunks, bighorn sheep and the rest never stopped appearing on TV, and later on YouTube. A former Canadian Wildlife Service employee named Pat Logan kept them available to TV for years after they went out of production.
From the glory days of the original four National Film Board productions (the moose, beaver, loon and northern gannet), the series has grown into 61 vignettes.
Some are still about individual species, but others are about habitats such as peatlands, a video shot partly in Ottawa’s Mer Bleue bog.
It even attracts parodies, often showing the odd habits of politicians or sports teams.
“We’re probably the most recognized wildlife program in Canada,” says Annie Langlois, a biologist with CWF.
There’s a list of anniversary celebrations, especially asking people to nominate their favourite animal for a future video.
The videos were produced from 1963 to 1977, and again since 2003.
Now the style may change again.
“We’re actually thinking about reverting back to the old music. We’ve had a lot of comments on that,” Langlois said. The music is called Flute Poem, by John Cacavas.
But the faster narration and a modern message will stay.
The original Hinterland vignettes showed and described animals on their own; the modern ones all focus on human impact and the danger to animals. They are, after all, funded by the section of Environment Canada that is responsible for the Species At Risk List, so some pessimism and preaching are to be expected.
And the 50th anniversary has brought fresh discoveries, as staff have tracked down all four of the original English vignettes and some of the French ones.
“No one had kept them officially,” Langlois said. They showed up in odd archives, and in one case in the attic of a woman whose father helped produce them. These are black and white versions; the NFB filmed with 16-mm colour film but made black and white copies for the 1963 TVs.
The French versions especially sound odd to modern ears, she says. “It’s very much representative of the old style of talking for teachers — or priests, even.”
Langlois now helps produce scripts for new videos, and the longer fact sheets that go with them.
“The hardest part for me is to find what are the utmost coolest things ever about this critter or place, that you can feature in one minute,” she said.
“I work with a lot of scientists on these scripts and I ask them, ‘ What are the musts?’ It’s always hard to choose.”