These days, of course, we're accustomed to high-tech CGI manipulations of live-action animals -- or straight-out, full-CGI animals, such as in Finding Nemo -- such that their mouths appear to be actually moving in synch with their speech. Still, there was something weirdly expressive about seeing a full-frame shot of a hamster staring into the camera, doing nothing particularly special -- just, y'know, being a hamster -- while his "voice" discussed the often deeply philosophical questions of the show: Life, death, friendship, love, food, frogs.
The lid really blew off during the action sequences. G.P. would regularly build model airplanes, hot-air balloons, or diving bells, and somehow convince Hammy -- a pretty nervous guy -- to go for a ride, which would inevitably end in near disaster. The sight of a hamster and guinea pig shoved into the cockpit of a model airplane was, initially, simply too bizarre for the CBC, and the executives initially turned down the show when it was first produced in 1959. (The only network that would show it was the BBC.) But eventually it made it to Canada, where my teenaged friends and I would watch it in total hysterics after school. As the CBC arts piece notes:
Hampsters typically look pretty vacuous. Consider how intelligent the hamster's face looks when anthropomorphized. Now you gotta wonder, how much do we attribute intelligence and emotional subtlety on the grounds of a face.
Posted by: J. Wallace at February 3, 2005 1:39 PM
Clive - don't think I knew you were a fellow Canuck - this was a show that my younger sister would watch and I would get annoyed because I wanted to watch videos on Toronto Rocks or something. Between this and Dr. Snuggles and Barbapapa, I got exposed to a lot of annoying-to-a-teenage-boy TV. I don't know if I got irony the same way back then.
But I used to find the show somehow cruel - they'd slam the poor creatures into these ridiculous prop vehicles and the damn thing would be wiggling around and sniffing and then some voice over artist would be trying to match the dialog to the furtive movements, including lots of slightly-behind-the-beat catchups such as "Oh, well, um, I guess I'll go look at this then, yes?" as the mostly untrained rodent would scurry wherever it wanted. There was no illusion for me, it just seemed crappy, and therefore annoying.
And I don't know if I noticed the Six Feet Under inclusion, because I woulda freaked.
Thanks for bringing this to our attention!
Posted by: Steve Portigal at February 3, 2005 3:36 PM
This reminds me of "The Green Forest", another show of the same era, possibly Canadian too, though I'm not sure. I always found it strangely creepy and ominous... Maybe it was the song, "The greeeeen forest, the greeeeen forest..."
Another old-school ghetto cartoon worthy of note:
Rocket Robin Hood
Posted by: brian at February 3, 2005 3:43 PM
Yes! Both those! I couldn't make it past the opening song of Green Forest (another younger sister fave I suffered through) but I did kinda enjoy Rocket Robin Hood - despite their penchant for reusing the same bit of animation over and over. It was definitely cheesy.
Posted by: Steve Portigal at February 3, 2005 3:54 PM
Oh, God. I'm guilty of turning this into a "hey, remember XXX? Hah! Remembering stuff we liked when were younger is COOL!" thread. Sorry.
I will say it's interesting telling others about these shows when it's NOT a common point of reference (i.e., for any Canadians living in the US) because it forces you to try and describe the essence of it in a way that somehow has an impact. Getting past the blank stare effect when talking about Hammy or Hinterland Who's Who is a storytelling challenge.
Posted by: Steve Portigal at February 3, 2005 3:56 PM
I never knew it went by the title "Once Upon a Hamster"...I only ever knew it as "Tales of the Riverbank". In a way, this show was miles ahead of most of the crap in its day. It had cool minature contraptions, bit characters, and enough plot twists to rival your average episode of Southpark (ok maybe not).....
....hey do you remeber the time when Hammy, Matthew and GP came across a hidden patch of peyote cacti?....GP got all excited and decided to....ah, (chuckle) but that's another story
Posted by: Uncle Rob at February 3, 2005 9:51 PM
Admit it, Clive: you and your friends were baked when you watched it. We were.
Posted by: George at February 3, 2005 10:23 PM
No, I was a ridiculously straight-arrow kid until my last 1.5 years of high-school. Plenty of speed metal and glowering, but shockingly little mental alteration. I was too busy spending like 70 hours a week practicing the french horn.
Sad but true.
Posted by: Clive at February 3, 2005 10:39 PM
Hammy Hamster was also broadcast in Australia in the late 60s and 70s. I remember he had a rather fetching boat.
I couldn't find a hamster in the Australian bush. But there was an abundance of rabbits. I spent quite a bit of time trying to make rabbits take boat trips on dams built for watering sheep and cattle.
Despite growing up with only two television stations, I managed to view the cream of Canadian television - Hammy Hamster The Beachcombers, The Littlest Hobbo, and later Dagrassi Junior High.
I always thought they were English - everything else was.
Posted by: james_b at February 3, 2005 11:47 PM
Allow me to step up to the role of "Creative Commons Drumbeater" for a moment and suggest how amazing it would be to get the original footage of Hammy Hamster's escapades and re-dub entirely different stories.
Think live-action South Park...
Posted by: brian at February 4, 2005 9:26 AM
Hammy is solid, no doubt about it, but I think Canadian television reached it's high point just last week when CBC's Bob McKeown had to tell Ann Coulter that we didn't send troops to Vietname. He had to tell her SIX times. Priceless video here:
http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/001901.html
Posted by: Ann Coulter at February 4, 2005 9:59 AM
Well, I suppose there's no reason why we (the internet public at large) couldn't film our own generic "hamster-and-guinea-pig-crammed-in-toy-vehicle" footage and release it under a CC license for people to mashup.
All we need is an acronym, preferably recursive (something like HAMSTER - The HAMSTER Animal-Manipulation Story/Tale Electronic Repository) and a page on sourceforge and we're in business!
Posted by: marc at February 4, 2005 10:08 AM
"Clive - don't think I knew you were a fellow Canuck"
I've seen him drinking Budweiser, so he might have renounced his Canadian citizenship. :)
Posted by: Jeff Liu at February 4, 2005 10:24 AM
For those who feel compelled to recreate the Hammy Hamster series, I've got a little suggestion...
I never saw the show, but I had a hamster for a while when I was a kid. I found that if you put him on top of a speaker playing loud rock, he would "dance." I'm pretty sure it was just the overtweaked rodent nervous system responding to vibrations coming through an overtaxed, cheap stereo speaker, but maybe some of the more enterprising readers here would like to try an all-rodent American Bandstand. Maybe Soul Train?
Posted by: john t unger at February 4, 2005 10:49 AM
The real-life "hamster dance"!
I *love* the idea of redubbed Hammy shows.
Oh, and that Ann Coulter thing was just hilarious.
Posted by: Clive at February 4, 2005 2:04 PM
Awesome! I used to watch Hammy Hamster when I was a wee lad and enjoyed it immensely. Also Green Forest and Rocket Robin Hood, and so many other superb shows of a calibre just not seen often these days. Dr. Snuggles was a big favorite. Can't wait for the complete DVD sets of all these shows to become available.
They must put it on dvd. MUST.
Posted by: Mentat at February 4, 2005 2:23 PM
I also assumed this was British and called "Tales of the Riverbank".
I just saw the name of the company the own the rights is called "Hammytime" - Now this show and the image of an overtweaked hamster is disturbingly linked in my mind with MC Hammer.
Stop - Hammytime!
Posted by: bob at February 6, 2005 7:33 AM
I've never seen this show, but having grown up on the Canadian border I saw a lot of CBC. My favorite TV show of all time ran for two non-consecutive seasons and 13 episodes on the CBC in the late 90's. Don McKellar's Twitch City was such a great show. I'll never forget the episode where the world is taken over by millions of ultra-intelligent cats. Or the episode where the agoraphobe Travis (Don McKellar) rents his spare room to a pair of shady Japanese businessmen who then immediately fill the room floor to ceiling with boxes of cookies.
McKellar's work in Twitch City always seemed to me delightfully poignant and absurd.
Posted by: Dustin at February 7, 2005 2:28 AM
They're wrong about this not being broadcast in the U.S. until the nineties. I saw this as a kid on, I think, "Captain Kangaroo", who would show bits of it. I kind of thought I had dreamed it until I saw this story. I totally remember the voiceover and the hot-air balloon adventure, and I would have seen this in California in the 1960s.
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Hampsters typically look pretty vacuous. Consider how intelligent the hamster's face looks when anthropomorphized. Now you gotta wonder, how much do we attribute intelligence and emotional subtlety on the grounds of a face.
Posted by: J. Wallace at February 3, 2005 1:39 PM
Clive - don't think I knew you were a fellow Canuck - this was a show that my younger sister would watch and I would get annoyed because I wanted to watch videos on Toronto Rocks or something. Between this and Dr. Snuggles and Barbapapa, I got exposed to a lot of annoying-to-a-teenage-boy TV. I don't know if I got irony the same way back then.
But I used to find the show somehow cruel - they'd slam the poor creatures into these ridiculous prop vehicles and the damn thing would be wiggling around and sniffing and then some voice over artist would be trying to match the dialog to the furtive movements, including lots of slightly-behind-the-beat catchups such as "Oh, well, um, I guess I'll go look at this then, yes?" as the mostly untrained rodent would scurry wherever it wanted. There was no illusion for me, it just seemed crappy, and therefore annoying.
And I don't know if I noticed the Six Feet Under inclusion, because I woulda freaked.
Thanks for bringing this to our attention!
Posted by: Steve Portigal at February 3, 2005 3:36 PM
This reminds me of "The Green Forest", another show of the same era, possibly Canadian too, though I'm not sure. I always found it strangely creepy and ominous... Maybe it was the song, "The greeeeen forest, the greeeeen forest..."
Another old-school ghetto cartoon worthy of note:
Rocket Robin Hood
Posted by: brian at February 3, 2005 3:43 PM
Yes! Both those! I couldn't make it past the opening song of Green Forest (another younger sister fave I suffered through) but I did kinda enjoy Rocket Robin Hood - despite their penchant for reusing the same bit of animation over and over. It was definitely cheesy.
Posted by: Steve Portigal at February 3, 2005 3:54 PM
Oh, God. I'm guilty of turning this into a "hey, remember XXX? Hah! Remembering stuff we liked when were younger is COOL!" thread. Sorry.
I will say it's interesting telling others about these shows when it's NOT a common point of reference (i.e., for any Canadians living in the US) because it forces you to try and describe the essence of it in a way that somehow has an impact. Getting past the blank stare effect when talking about Hammy or Hinterland Who's Who is a storytelling challenge.
Posted by: Steve Portigal at February 3, 2005 3:56 PM
I never knew it went by the title "Once Upon a Hamster"...I only ever knew it as "Tales of the Riverbank". In a way, this show was miles ahead of most of the crap in its day. It had cool minature contraptions, bit characters, and enough plot twists to rival your average episode of Southpark (ok maybe not).....
....hey do you remeber the time when Hammy, Matthew and GP came across a hidden patch of peyote cacti?....GP got all excited and decided to....ah, (chuckle) but that's another story
Posted by: Uncle Rob at February 3, 2005 9:51 PM
Admit it, Clive: you and your friends were baked when you watched it. We were.
Posted by: George at February 3, 2005 10:23 PM
No, I was a ridiculously straight-arrow kid until my last 1.5 years of high-school. Plenty of speed metal and glowering, but shockingly little mental alteration. I was too busy spending like 70 hours a week practicing the french horn.
Sad but true.
Posted by: Clive at February 3, 2005 10:39 PM
Hammy Hamster was also broadcast in Australia in the late 60s and 70s. I remember he had a rather fetching boat.
I couldn't find a hamster in the Australian bush. But there was an abundance of rabbits. I spent quite a bit of time trying to make rabbits take boat trips on dams built for watering sheep and cattle.
Despite growing up with only two television stations, I managed to view the cream of Canadian television - Hammy Hamster The Beachcombers, The Littlest Hobbo, and later Dagrassi Junior High.
I always thought they were English - everything else was.
Posted by: james_b at February 3, 2005 11:47 PM
Allow me to step up to the role of "Creative Commons Drumbeater" for a moment and suggest how amazing it would be to get the original footage of Hammy Hamster's escapades and re-dub entirely different stories.
Think live-action South Park...
Posted by: brian at February 4, 2005 9:26 AM
Hammy is solid, no doubt about it, but I think Canadian television reached it's high point just last week when CBC's Bob McKeown had to tell Ann Coulter that we didn't send troops to Vietname. He had to tell her SIX times. Priceless video here:
http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/001901.html
Posted by: Ann Coulter at February 4, 2005 9:59 AM
Well, I suppose there's no reason why we (the internet public at large) couldn't film our own generic "hamster-and-guinea-pig-crammed-in-toy-vehicle" footage and release it under a CC license for people to mashup.
All we need is an acronym, preferably recursive (something like HAMSTER - The HAMSTER Animal-Manipulation Story/Tale Electronic Repository) and a page on sourceforge and we're in business!
Posted by: marc at February 4, 2005 10:08 AM
"Clive - don't think I knew you were a fellow Canuck"
I've seen him drinking Budweiser, so he might have renounced his Canadian citizenship. :)
Posted by: Jeff Liu at February 4, 2005 10:24 AM
For those who feel compelled to recreate the Hammy Hamster series, I've got a little suggestion...
I never saw the show, but I had a hamster for a while when I was a kid. I found that if you put him on top of a speaker playing loud rock, he would "dance." I'm pretty sure it was just the overtweaked rodent nervous system responding to vibrations coming through an overtaxed, cheap stereo speaker, but maybe some of the more enterprising readers here would like to try an all-rodent American Bandstand. Maybe Soul Train?
Posted by: john t unger at February 4, 2005 10:49 AM
The real-life "hamster dance"!
I *love* the idea of redubbed Hammy shows.
Oh, and that Ann Coulter thing was just hilarious.
Posted by: Clive at February 4, 2005 2:04 PM
Awesome! I used to watch Hammy Hamster when I was a wee lad and enjoyed it immensely. Also Green Forest and Rocket Robin Hood, and so many other superb shows of a calibre just not seen often these days. Dr. Snuggles was a big favorite. Can't wait for the complete DVD sets of all these shows to become available.
They must put it on dvd. MUST.
Posted by: Mentat at February 4, 2005 2:23 PM
I also assumed this was British and called "Tales of the Riverbank".
I just saw the name of the company the own the rights is called "Hammytime" - Now this show and the image of an overtweaked hamster is disturbingly linked in my mind with MC Hammer.
Stop - Hammytime!
Posted by: bob at February 6, 2005 7:33 AM
I've never seen this show, but having grown up on the Canadian border I saw a lot of CBC. My favorite TV show of all time ran for two non-consecutive seasons and 13 episodes on the CBC in the late 90's. Don McKellar's Twitch City was such a great show. I'll never forget the episode where the world is taken over by millions of ultra-intelligent cats. Or the episode where the agoraphobe Travis (Don McKellar) rents his spare room to a pair of shady Japanese businessmen who then immediately fill the room floor to ceiling with boxes of cookies.
McKellar's work in Twitch City always seemed to me delightfully poignant and absurd.
Posted by: Dustin at February 7, 2005 2:28 AM
They're wrong about this not being broadcast in the U.S. until the nineties. I saw this as a kid on, I think, "Captain Kangaroo", who would show bits of it. I kind of thought I had dreamed it until I saw this story. I totally remember the voiceover and the hot-air balloon adventure, and I would have seen this in California in the 1960s.
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