Looking Back Revisited: Red Green Show

This is probably the best one of these to start the series off with.

The first time I did a piece on the Red Green Show, it was part of a series of Looking Back articles I was doing on largely British live-action comedies that I'd grown up watching on my local PBS station. That list included the likes of Are You Being Served, Red Dwarf, and Keeping Up Appearances. There's half a chance I'll be getting to those at some point, but for now, I'll be focusing on the Red Green Show, which was a Canadian show about a guy named Red Green, who was the leader of a “sports lodge” or mens' club sort of thing called Possum Lodge, near a small town named after a nearby lake called Possum Lake.

The major premise of the show was that there was always some oddball adventure going on at the lodge, with the end goal being to somehow improve the lodge's standing in the community. Given the difficulty it seems the crew had with that task, it's easy to understand how the lodge's reputation got as low as it was in the first place.

One of the most memorable of those adventures for me was the one where the lodge was hosting an event for a local boy scout troupe, with the main event being a big pizza feed at the end of the day. The catch was that Red and most of the lodge members were doing everything they could to get the pizza for free on account of the fact that the lodge's petty cash fund was whatever cash Red happened to have on him at the time, and in this case it was something like ten bucks and change. This was all revealed at the end of the episode when Red's nephue and producer Harold said that he'd called the pizza place and told them to send the pizza over on a boat instead of around the lake in a car because it was quicker.

Other such adventures included several instances of the lodge trying to deal with the pollution they'd caused to the area or fines resulting from said pollution. Still others involved semantics and the personal lives of various lodge members. I suppose I should get into who some of those lodge members were, since a good many of them were named characters.

The characters fell into two groups, in a structure I don't recall having seen quite the same way in any other show, in that about half the characters referenced showed up on screen and about half didn't. We'd see Red and Harold in every episode, of course, because Red was the title character and Harold was his main sidekick. Others we got to see frequently were junk-shop owner Dalton Humphries; Winston Rothschild, the septic company owner in the area; forrest service guy Ranger Gord; Bill the screwball adventure guy who was usually doing his own thing in spite of whatever else may have been going on at the time; Edgar K. B. Montrose, who was pretty much a bomb guy; a local parolee named Mike Hamar, who couldn't seem to get the hang of the whole not-being-in-jail thing, and a pair of animal control guys, starting with Garth Harville, who was always a little too gung-ho about his job until he got hurt once too often and was replaced by Ed Frid, who may well have been more afraid of the animals than they were of him.

Of the ones we only heard about, the ones I remember most were Old Man Sedgewick and Moose Thompson, but there were others I had to look in the Red Green book I had handy to get the names right. These ones include Stinky Peterson, Buster Hadfield, and Junior Singleton. These were the guys who were either off on a mission or actively causing there a mission to be off on.

There was also Red's wife Berniece, who he'd usually address at the end of the show, saying he'd be going straight home after the meeting, provided he didn't have to help clean up some mess he'd helped make. Considering how often he had to do that, Berniece must have had the patience of a saint to stay married to Red.

There's also a movie associated with the show. Titled “Red Green's Duct Tape Forever, my understanding is that it was meant mostly as a TV movie. With that in mind, I got the opportunity to see it on the big screen when it came out in 2002 because my local PBS station had exceeded a fairly substantial quota to keep the show on the air here. The plot was that the lodge had been fined once again for all the environmental damage they'd caused by way of their antics. The fine was something like $5000, and after a brief discussion of how to raise the money, Harold announces to the lodge that there's a duct tape sculpting contest just south of the border, in Michigan, I believe. The first and second prizes were both fairly substantial sums of money that would have paid the fine with decent amounts left over for other stuff, while third was just enough to cover the fine. With this in mind, our boys make a giant goose out of duct tape and set off for Michigan to win third prize and pay their fine. Naturally, our boys get their prize and save the lodge.

Along the way, there were the sort of roadblocks, shenanigans and monkey business regular viewers of the show might expect. One that stands out for me is the female cop who wanted to get into Harold's pants. This one stands out because after this point, in terms of the show, it seemed like Harold often had jobs away from the Lodge, and eventually, he got a girlfriend who he married in the final episode.

Really, the movie pretty much sums up how a typical episode of the show went, plot-wise, at least. The TV show was as much about various other segments based on gags that sometimes related to the main plot of the episode, but from what I remember, that was usually not the case. Probably my favorite segment of the show was the Adventures with Bill segment. These were usually little slapstick bits where Red would go outside and try to do something with his buddy Bill, like fishing or setting up a campsite. Things usually did not go well, with one or both of the participants getting hurt in the process. My favorite of these was the Wild Honey one they did.

They also did a word game segment where one character, oftentimes Red, would try to get another to say a certain word. There were usually silly prizes to go along with the game. For most of the series, as I remember, the contestant won the game, though there were a few early on where the player did loose. The one of these that stood out for me was one where the player did loose for making a guess that was way way off. I forget what the correct word was, but whoever was playing lost did because he guessed the word was “nuns” on account of thinking the clue was about people who went around in the bus when it was about people who went around in the buff.

There were a handful of seasons after the movie, enough to get the show to 15 seasons and 300 episodes, which was plenty, as I'm sure both fans and production staff can agree. The final episode even tried to tie up a few loose ends that I wasn't even really aware the show had until then. Even the ending “Men's Prayer” changed to “I'm a man, but I changed, because I had to, I guess.”

After the show ended, Steve Smith, the show's creator and star, retired for a few years, coming back in the early to mid 2010s with books written as Red Green and stage shows presented as lodge meetings where he could tell the sort of jokes and stories that maybe wouldn't have made it onto the television show or the movie. In 2016, I went to see the “I'm Not Old, I'm Ripe” show, which was a lot of fun for a lot of reasons, amongst which was being able to say the Possum Lodge Oath and Men's Prayer in public without getting funny looks from those around me.

I also got a copy of one of the books, titled “Red Green's Beginner's Guide To Women (For Men Who Don't Read Instructions)”. The book came with an autograph in it already, with an opportunity to get it personalized at a meet and greet that I might have taken advantage of, had I not been wiped out on cash at the time.

As of this writing, there's also another tour, being billed as what is likely the last one for Red. Now that I'm in a better place financially, I'm going to try to get advanced tickets and time off from work so I can enjoy the show properly. With any luck, I'll actually get that pulled off.

There's also a weekly live stream on Twitch on Sundays hosted by one of Smith's sons, where he talks about a set of episodes from a particular season, which are being shown in order. I watch when I can, but as of this writing, I work until about halfway through the show and don't make it on in time to watch live very often. Occasionally, Steve Smith himself will come on and cohost, though I can only remember this happening once, about a month prior to this article's writing. It's worth checking out if you're a Red Green fan, and who knows, I might even be in the live chat if I get home from work on time.

Until next time, Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati!