Story of O (Canada)

Earl Fowler

It’s a well-established maxim of sociology that while our bodies grow steadily older and feebler, our tastes are molded (some would say moulded) in adolescence and cemented in early adulthood.

For the several generations now who like to grumpily sniff about the good old days when Saturday Night Live was still funny, for example, their favourite casts are inevitably those that were in place when they were in high school.

Even through hearing aids, the hit parade of our youth is the music that soothes our sagging breasts. And who ever enjoyed pepperoni pizza, Dr Pepper and heavy petting more than when we were young, gifted and smoking in the bushes near a van down by the river?

Remember how we laughed away the hours? Thought of all the great things we would do?

Then the busy years went rushing by us. We lost our starry notions on the way. But not, hélas, the default settings established in those formative years, when bliss was it in that 7-Eleven to be alive.

Sucking on a Slurpee.

One of the enduring legacies of growing up raw in the Great White 51st in the 1960s and ’70s, when Canadian content regulations still had teeth, was the lamentable loss of whole chunks of our brains to the lyrics of Edward Bear and Gino Vannelli and René Simard and like that. (If you’re reading this in Mexico, feeling free as the air, here I am stuck in the hippocampus, still going nowhere.)

Which brings us to le sujet qui nous occupe aujourd’hui, as Ginette Reno used to say. Je me souviens de toi.

It’s not a pressing topic — at least not as literally or corporeally as back when those were the days, my friend. But it occurs to me that those self-same content diktats clearly influenced (some would say aroused) the predilections, hankerings and inclinations of today’s Canadian golden ager set with respect to Twitter Twitter Twitter flicks.

Twitter Twitter Twitter flicks? By that, I mean the movies formerly known as those sordid XXX VHS and Betamax rentals from the curtained-off adult section of pre-Blockbuster mom and pop video stores, where you once tried to conceal a DVD of The Bikini Carwash Company between discs of Lawrence of Arabia and The Remains of the Day.

That’s the way, uh-huh, uh-huh, you liked it. Putting the blue in Blu-Ray, as it were.

Make you a deal. We here at Taboo Adult Video promise to waive the late fees on La Complainte du What the Phoque en Alaska if you can wend your way through the following top 10 list of classic Canadian sexploitation films.

We’re also proud to report that none involve Hart Pomerantz’s patriotic portrayal of the aggrieved Canadian Beaver on The Hart and Lorne and Terrific Hour or a single Jackie Shane Heritage Minute. Cooo, loo, coo, coo, coo, coo, coo, coooo! Cooo, loo, coo, coo, coo, coo, coo, coooo:

10. The Overfriendly Giant. You might need a copy of Alex Comfort’s 1972 bestseller with the creepily hairy drawings, The Joy of Sex — suggested alternate title: Hirsute Pursuits — to decipher precisely what barnyard concert jazz cats Angie and Fiddle are up to in the chair for two more to curl up in. Hint: Those are not two pipes and a bassoon. Look up. Look wayyyyyyy up! (Sequel to Behind the Green Polka Dot Door and Tickle Trunk Surprise: Casey and Finnegan Put the Fuddle in Duddle.)

9. Sons and Elwood Glovers. Marg Osburne and Charlie Chamberlain certainly got their dancin’ boots off, doffed their Sunday best, goin’ to the barn dance that night. Blink during a closeup on Don Messer’s mischievous leer and you’ll miss a cameo by Stompin’ Tom Connors as Bud the Stud before he rocketed to worldwide fame on a Sudbury Saturday night with 1958 Playmates Debbie Lori Kaye (Debbie Lori Kaye Does Dallas) and Charlie Farquharson (Yer Darn Tootin’ I’m a Dusty Old Hoochie Coochie Man) in I Am a Travellin’ Gland.

8. Bob Stanfield & Carol & Ted & Alice (& introducing Bruce Marsh, a graduate of Lorne Greene’s Academy of Radio Arts, as the beefcake stickman “Kraft Velveeta”). Grizzled but randy aficionados can’t fail to notice the similarity to Last Train to Clarkson: Take Thirty Talks Dirty to Me, which peaked two years before. The ensuing lawsuit launched by outraged Timex pitchman Bill Walker was the source of the catchphrase popularized in the ’90s by the salacious CBC radio show Double Exposure: “I’m Adrienne Clarkson and you’re not. Getting any.”

7. Duffy Dancing. Avaricious and unbearably pompous former senator and media personality learns the hard way that nobody puts Tequila (“I’m Nobody’s Baby”) Sheila in the corner. (Sequel to Betty Kennedy’s Bublé Nights; prequel to Duffy’s degrading roles in Molly’s Insatiable Reach and Yes Minister, Yes, Yes, Yes!)

6. Wayne and Shuster Make a Porno. Tired CBC “high-brow” Shakespearean adaptation (first seen on The Ed Sullivan Show) in which East German spy Gerda Munsinger gets a sliver in her keister that (spoiler alert) turns out to be the whole damn cabinet. Sunnyvale supervisor and disgraced ex-cop Jim Lahey staggers around with a bag over his head in the role of notorious roué Igor Gouzenko. Prequel to both Sandra Oh Calcutta! and Judy LaMarsh Wore Blue Velvet (in a Gilded Cage).

5. Non, Plouffters! Pardon my French, but this is vintage Boom Boom with a view. (Purely of masculine interest. Widely panned as director Earl Camembert’s man’s bridge too far after his phenomenal success with Body Hees, this is the picture that cost Pee-wee his career, Jacques Plante his tuque and earned Howie Mandel a stern talking-to by Olive Diefenbaker, who confiscated the fledgling television personality’s Dudley Do-Right Mountie “balloons.”

4. Mike, Mark and Jack: The Rhythm Pals. Prequel to Talking Union, in which Allan Blakeney and Howard Pawley chop wood with their shirts off during Lawn Ornament Weekend at Tex and Edna Boyles’ Prairie Warehouse and Curio Emporium. (Also of very little interest to the distaff side, except for Gordie Tapp fanciers and anyone old enough to remember Dollar 49 Day or the phrase “It’s hard not to think of the Bay.”) Shakily reshot by former Canadian Alliance leader Stockwell (Burt) Day, in a revealing wetsuit while standing on a personal watercraft, as I Tanned on Guard For Thee.

3. Runaround Ti-Suzie. Chez Hélène’s adorable anglophone mouse brings Howard the Turtle out of his full-frontal shell with a little song, a little dance, a little seltzer razzle dazzle in Al Hamel’s pants. Oh la la! Prequel to Howards End, featuring Robertson Davies, Super Dave Osborne, a pile driver and outtakes from Pat Marsden’s physical altercation with a well-liquored Johnny Esaw in a men’s washroom at the 1977 Schenley Awards Ceremony honouring Tommy Joe Coffey and Angelo Mosca. “So that’s why they call you Oskee Wee Wee,” Esaw was heard to exclaim while standing next to Marsden at a urinal, sparking the brouhaha and planting the seed for what evolved into the reality entertainment series Wide World of Spurts, hosted by Ernie Afaganis and Erica Ehm. Ed the Sock, whose short-lived “auteur” phase began and ended with the erotically charged I Dreamed I Saw Joe Clark Last Night, had not returned our calls by deadline.

2. Chalk on the Wild Side. Affable weatherman Percy Saltzman teams with revolutionary communications theorist Marshall McLuhan, Joe Two Rivers, Nick Adonidas, Terry David Mulligan and polymath Lister Sinclair in this previously unreleased episode of The Forest Rangers, best known for its oft-quoted “Rosebud” reveal: “So that’s why they call you Chub!” Inspiration for Netflix road series I Am Curious (Dildo) as well as Northrop Frye’s niche porn magazine for amputee fetishists called Stump Love: A Fearful Asymmetry. (A bimonthly publication intended for defrocked priests called Let Me Preordain You never made it past the “concepts of a plan” stage, despite considerable interest in Nunavut.)

1. The Last Thong I’ll Ever Wear for You. Edward Bear (When Harry Rosen Met Sally) joins fabulously frugging Flora and Fondle Macdonald to put the “rrrrrrrr” in Red Tory. Karlheinz Schreiber drops by with a thick wad for Muldoon. (Of crisp hundred dollar bills, just to be clear.) In the words of Sir John A. at the breathless height of the Pacific Scandal, “I’ll have what he’s having.”

COMING SOON TO (AND QUITE PROBABLY AT) A THEATRE NEAR YOU: Carney Knowledge, a remake of 1973 “art film” Carnal Knowlton Nash, best known for its gnarly elbow closeups of the veteran newsman with the rolled-up sleeves and inadvertent footage (purportedly due to sloppy, cocaine-fuelled editing  by Harvey Kirck and Charles Lynch) of Margaret Trudeau, Margot Kidder and Maureen Forrester slipping out of Ronnie Wood’s room early one morning at a Super 8 in Châteauguay. (According to witness affidavits at the time, Madame Benoît was spotted about an hour later entering the establishment. Was that a tourtière in her purse or was she just happy to see him?)