A Mockery of our National Anthem

No, not “Oh, Canada!”, “Hockey Night in Canada.”

As you may have heard, Canada’s most important theme song went through a bit of a controversy recently. After CBC refused to pay the $2 million requested by the royalty owner, CBC/TSN picked up the “perpetual royalties” to save the song. To any Canadian reading you understand that this was really big news in Canada: after many decades Hockey Night in Canada on CBC is going to to have to get a new theme song!!!

Being the resourceful people they are, CBC decided to run a contest for the new “Hockey Night” theme song. Great idea, until the part where they decided that entries could be submitted on the Internet and voted upon by people online.

Which bring us to SomethingAwful.com – the people who brought you “All Your Base Is Belong To Us,” among other Internet memes. Nothing good can come of this.

Enter “Hockey Scores,” the brilliant theme created by one of the SomethingAwful message board members. A fine mix of animal sounds an crying babies described as “A beautiful theme encompassing the heart of hockey.” Go ahead, listen to “Hockey Scores” here. Here’s the original thread about it at SomethingAwful.

So, of course, the  monkeys over at SomethingAwful go over to the CBC anthem site and vote it up, and it’s currently the highest rated entry with almost 100,000 views.

It was temporarily removed from CBC’s site (I guess somebody though it was a joke? no way), but was put back after vicious oposition from Internet netizens and protest videos on YouTube.

But it gets better: last week CBC television ran a news piece about the anthem contest and featured the “Hockey Scores” composer:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYeQCyTQFGA]

I don’t know how he managed to keep a straight face through this interview. “If you think this is one big joke, you’re wrong.” Pure comedy gold.

Thankfully CBC were smart enought to state in advance the anthem content is not a popularity contest: their judges will choose the winning theme.