I've been rewatching the BBC Robin Hood series, and, for those of you who haven't seen it (and, why, may I ask, haven't you?) it's all very life-and-death, end-of-the-world, larger-than-life legendary stuff and I find myself thinking...Who is our Robin Hood? Where is our show? Where's the TV show about the Canadian legend? But...do we even have a Robin Hood equivalent? I mean, all I can think of are Laura Secord and Louis Riel. Would I really watch 3 seasons of Louis Riel? (well, if he was played by this guy, I would). And the Laura Secord story takes place over, like, a single night, right? Which is great for the pilot episode, but what comes after?
Do we have them and I'm just drawing a complete blank? I mean, most of my knowledge of Canadian history comes from the Heritage Moments, and I don't think those covered this. So rather than wait for the flood of comments this post is sure to elicit, I looked on Wikipedia, and whoever wrote that didn't come up with any more Canadian folk heroes than I did, although we do apparently have our own variant of Paul Bunyon named "Taylor Bradshaw" (speaking of, what's the deal with Bunyon. Was he just a really big lumberjack, or did he actually do something?)
I wonder why we have such a paucity of folk heroes. Is it because we never suffered the kind of oppression that breeds them? Or that we just brought the old ones with us from our various homelands and didn't invent new ones? Is it just because our country has such a short history relative to the old world? Did we not need folk heroes?
In my internet search for heroes I came across this site selling figurines of three different Canadian legends. If you click on the link to look at the latest photos it mentions that they've recently re-sculpted the head of Sir Wilfred Laurier. Awesome!
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