Concerned Children’s Advertisers: Fabricating a Folklore for Millennial Canadians
The other day, I was perusing the delightfully dubious Villains Wiki. I found myself on the page for “The Pusher” — the name the wiki had given to the antagonist of the 1993 PSA (public service announcement) “Hip Choice”. For those not in the know, “Hip Choice” is an anti-drug PSA whose defining trait is the drug-dealing puppet’s (The Pusher’s) gouged, yellow eyes, which appear at the end of the ad. Allegedly, the eye reveal was so terrifying to viewers that the producers, CCA (Concerned Children’s Advertisers), eventually replaced the shot altogether. (Ah, Wikipedia, you oral-history repository, you.)
I read through the page. It was… fascinating. From labelling The Pusher a capital-S “Sadist” to asserting that he could be a teenager or a senior, the entry is truly something to think on. Mostly, I was bothered by the claim The Pusher was speaking Yat, when he was so clearly speaking in an Eastern/Atlantic-Canadian accent. I went off, pestered my bestest-of-besties about it, and left the affair alone for a few days.
Something in the entry really piqued my brain, though: it said, full sic in play here, “One would argue that the Pusher was trying to teach the two children [who appear in the PSA] to say NO to the drugs, as he tells them that the choice is theirs.”
It was something that brewed in my mind like a pot of Timmie’s coffee. The idea that The Pusher is not some sort of wholly malevolent entity but instead a being who exists as a gatekeeper of fates interested me. It reminded me of Baba Yaga.
If Baba Yaga is as foreign to you as The Pusher, know that she’s a Slavic folklore figure known for eating children and chasing them in her house that has chicken’s feet — which are also her feet. All of the accounts I read and heard of her growing up featured Baba Yaga as a villain. When I grew older, though, I learned this interpretation of the character was not the only one. To quote Wikipedia, “According to Vladimir Propp’s folktale morphology, Baba Yaga commonly appears as either a donor, villain, or may be altogether ambiguous.”
Maybe The Pusher is a Canadian Baba Yaga.
He would not be the only example of a mythical being birthed by CCA: the House Hippo occupies the highest rung in the Pantheon of the Millennial Canadian mythos. Their eponymous PSA was created in 1999 and has been aired well into the 2010s, and with good reason: ask any Canadian who was a child at the turn of the millennium about the ad, and you’ll hear stories of disappointment over learning of the non-existence of the House Hippo. If you were paying attention to the ad, you’d know that was the point. How can you blame children, though, for not caring about that part when you’ve got this whole story about tiny hippos that live “throughout Canada and the eastern United States”!? Who wouldn’t want to find their house’s hippo? I want a House Hippo, even though I am a grown adult and knew from the get-go that they didn’t exist.
CCA were doing more than merely trying to push some (profitable) social good on YTV: they were creating a folklore for a generation of Canadians.
Not all CCA productions presented legendary creatures or drug-addled donors. Some of their ads were planted in our reality — take, for instance, the “Stay Fit, ’Cause You Never Know” series. Those, like many other CCA PSAs, were mundane. Other CCA productions, though, presented to us a mystical lore set in Canada and made for Canadians. There was overlap between the mundane and the mythical in the CCA lore, too. “Smart As You” is an otherwise “normal” PSA whose focal point is a talking television. More boldly, the mice of the “Trap” PSA also appeared on The Big Comfy Couch. While the puppets’ appearances on the latter were treated as disparate from the former, there was still that inevitable link between the two. If creatures from the far-out land of CCA could cross over into the more down-to-Earth sensibilities of Loonette’s world (which was, in essence, our world), then what did that mean for us? It draws the mythology a little bit closer to our realm.
CCA rebranded itself as Companies Committed to Kids in 2014. Three years later, the organization dissolved completely. One part of me is a bit nostalgic for CCA, but another part of me is convinced that they’d done their job. Millennial (and, to an extent, Gen-Z) Canadians have this mythical culture that is centred around them. Having the stories contextualizes us; they give us something to learn from and fantasize about. Familiarity was taken and spun into something wondrous. Where there is wonder, there is truth. At the very least, there are House Hippos — and strange men in alleys.
