Tuesday, 1 July 2025

A Patriotic Celebration Of Obscure 90s Canadian Nostalgia (Street Cents)

Hey, kids! Happy Canada Day! Assuming I got this right and banged out all these words on time, it should be the start of July and thus the celebration of my funny little maple leaf country. 158 years of Canadian sovereignty, yay! Have some maple syrup, a donair, a poutine, a Nanaimo bar, whatever! We are going to celebrate here, in my own way. It's a party at this coffee shop we call a blog, and you are invited. So, let me set the scene. As of last weekend, I finished a work of media that has absolutely shifted my internal landscape in new and exciting ways, a work with such pure power and symbolism as to rival Twin Peaks and the work of David Lynch. It's gonna be a whopper to untangle in my mind, but I will do it and write about it.


This is not that post. We're not ready for that yet. Instead, I want to talk about something I watched in tandem with this work. I watched that thing in the mornings, but in the evenings? I was playing about with pure Canadiana nostalgia... and it being so close to Canada Day, I decided, what the hell? Let's talk about it. That's what we're gonna do here today, then. We're going to talk about a show I watched up here in Canada in the 1990s. It is a show that has slipped through the cracks, so to speak, but I remember it and am here to discuss it on this auspicious day. Start blasting your Rush or Shania Twain or whatever, and let's get Canadian.


Buckle up, because this one is going to get weird. Let's talk after-school TV for kids and teens in Canada. Ask most Canadians about this subject and they will wax nostalgically about YTV's The Zone, which would air primarily American imports: your Power Rangers, Pokemon, Spongebob, et al. I, on the other hand, was watching the CBC on the weekdays after school. The primary draw for me was a similar American import, as they would air syndicated reruns from the golden age of The Simpsons. There's a bit of secret history for you; between the years 1995 and 2004 or so, I was an absolute fanatic for The Simpsons. I even have fond memories of the late 90's and early 2000s period, when it became (gasp) Not As Good As It Once Was. I could talk your ear off about how every line of The Simpsons is seared into my brain, but we are here to talk about Canadian nostalgia. The Simpsons is just the foot in the door, and while I was there watching the CBC in the afternoons I was watching other shows in this programming block. They had a teen talk show called Jonovision that we could talk about, but also airing in this block was a little show called... Street Cents.


What was Street Cents? It was a consumer awareness show for the young people of Canada, which ran on CBC TV from 1989 to 2006. Kids and teens would be interviewed in the street about their opinions on things, get to submit their complaints about products and services, and test out various items to see what gave the best bang for your buck. Sounds like a real thrill ride of a television program, doesn't it? I am selling Street Cents a little short, but only to accentuate the impact of what happened to me here in June of 2025. I remembered, one day, this little programming block, and I will tell you the specifics of how I remembered it because I am never going to get to talk about something this gonzo again. The thing that made me remember this CBC afternoon block was a set of bumpers in between shows called Studio Coquette. Studio Coquette is a segment in which a 90s CGI-animated French-Canadian bulldog introduced the next show, answered viewer letters, and basically filled a bit of time. This kind of a thing sticks in your mind, you know? So I remembered that, and it made me remember Street Cents. That made me go on a merry little Google for any footage of the show, and I found a whopper. Some thoughtful person had broadcast tapes of the entire second season, which aired from September 1990 to March 1991. So it was that I went on a merry little nostalgia binge.


I did not emerge the same.


Street Cents is more than just a "hey kids, here's how not to waste your money" awareness show. Street Cents is youthful. Exuberant. Energetic. Chaotic, absurd, absolutely batshit crazy unhinged. It truly feels like a show in perfect harmony with its youth audience, and one which manages to keep and evolve that harmonious energy all throughout its run. What particularly fascinated me, watching through the second season? The side effect of being on the pulse of youth culture in 1990 means that this show is drenched in 1990s vibes, and specifically in this case that strange liminal stretch where the 80's were becoming the 90's. The Street Cents of this era is stuck between those two poles, and combined with that youthful energy, you have something unforgettable. Let me show you. Let me show you the moment I truly fell in love with this show. On paper, it's a simple enough segment. The kids go to a Canadian theme park to see if the prices for admission and the rides are worth it, and goof around in the park before riding a roller coaster. Sounds fine. Now look at it.





Oh my god. The editing. The filters. The Madonna over the montage. These. Are. VIBES. This is a reason why you'll likely never see this on CBC's streaming services; all the licensed music of the time. Madonna shows up a fair bit, as do the New Kids On The Block, Vanilla Ice, Peter Gabriel, and a slew of other popular tunes from the time. The clothes and fashion of not just the hosts (though Benita Ha pulls off some incredible 90's girl outfits in this), but the regular Canadian kids who get involved with the show, are next level aesthetic. This show is a time capsule to a moment in Canadian youth culture, preserved under the guise of teaching these kids stuff like which deodorants are best and how much it costs for a full set of snowboarding gear. Street Cents is perfectly attuned and on the pulse of Canadian youth culture circa the dawn of the 1990s, and more that it involves these kids and gives them a voice. The interviews and the product tests are all done by real kids, as well as a segment called What's Your Beef where kids directly get to submit their complaints to the show. This show is not just for kids, but by them in a lot of ways, and being able to see their voices and aesthetic preserved in amber on old VHS rips was a great little throwback. It presents what could be dry educational treatises on saving money and being consumer savvy with pure style and energy. As an example, let's talk about another recurring segment called Fit For The Pit.


On paper, it's simple. We discuss a product or service, go over what it offers, and then gain some clarifying information that proves that said product or service is subpar and not worth your money. One memorable one to me is a game called Quicksilver, which is a little maze in a clear plastic shell with the goal being tilting an object through the maze to win. The object in question, given the name, is a bead of liquid mercury. I shouldn't have to tell you how goddamn irresponsible that is as a kid's toy, but our hosts do it as a public service for the kids, including stepping on the thing to show how fragile that plastic is and how easy it would be for one careless mistake to let liquid fucking mercury out. All well and good, but what gives the segment its name? The final judgment of products like Quicksilver by the hosts is that they are, indeed, Fit For The Pit, at which point a manhole cover in the studio is opened while the theme from Phantom Of The Opera plays, the object is hurled into the pit, and a little pyrotechnics explosion rumbles for it as a transition to the next scene flies out of the exploding pit. It has to be seen to be believed. Any consumer awareness show can tell you why a product like Quicksilver sucks. Only Street Cents could hurl it down into a pit.


If that were all, we could wrap it up here. I haven't even gotten started, though, because the most batshit unhinged thing about Street Cents is its storyline. Yes, this thing actually has a semblance of cohesion to its wraparound segments. In the full season I watched, this amounts to our three hosts (Jamie Bradley, Benita Ha, and Jonathan Torrens) coming into constant friction with their landlord Ken Pompadour (played by actor Brian Heighton). Ken is not just a scuzzy landlord, but a sleazy yuppie businessman shilling for a fictional shoddy company known as BuyCo. Every week he tries to pull his get-rich-quick schemes, hawk some shitty BuyCo product, or get one or all of the hosts involved in his utter shenanigans. It's here that Street Cents enters its most ridiculous things, and here that I spent my evenings staring in awe at the madness which unfolded across the screen in between segments of kids testing stuff out. Let me just tell you about some of these and interrupt the proceedings to bring you...


5 ACTUAL THINGS WHICH HAPPEN IN THE SECOND SEASON OF STREET CENTS


1) In the Halloween-themed episode, Ken Pompadour uses voodoo dolls to control our hosts, making them dance around before eventually making them doi the Tequila dance from the first Pee-Wee movie, except instead of tequila they say BuyCo.


2) A December episode has them wanting to do a Christmas episode, but they are worried that it will not play well during summer reruns. Their solution is inventing an entire Christmas-esque holiday called Skagmar, whose Santa equivalent is a dude in neon green wearing sunglasses with a pink mohawk.


3) An episode all about saving money has the teens wonder how they can save money making this episode. Ken suggests the old standby of using flashbacks to make a clip show. They do so and we see many clips from the show prior, but the teens become addicted to flashbacks. Ken snaps them out by, in desperation, flashing back to the voodoo doll thing. When they all wake up, he then sighs in relief before saying "there's no place like home" as Somewhere Over The Rainbow from The Wizard Of Oz plays and we pan down to see Ken clicking together ruby slippers.


4) An episode about saving time has Ken unveil the BuyCo Time Saver 2000. This device malfunctions, first pulling an M. Night Shymalan 35 years early as everyone becomes old, then reversing the process too far as everyone is now played by little kids. Everyone turns back to normal and then, with one final malfunction, Ken is caught in a time loop.


5) An episode about space (both outer space and the concept of making good use of physical space) has Ken using a similar BuyCo product, the Space Saver 2000. All this device does is shrink Ken, such that he is a foot tall and CSOed atop a desk. He later falls into a fish tank and the reaction shot of this is clearly a small doll.


I could go on, but I trust you get the idea. That anarchic youthful energy is let loose upon this show as it marinates in 1990 vibes, and it made watching the full second season an absolute blast. Pretty much any episode from that season has at least one absolutely gonzo 90's kids show thing happening in it, and it rules. I could stop here, with the completion of the second season, and have a good celebration of Canadiana. What follows, however, is a strange journey of discovery and growth for the show. Street Cents is not lost media, but it is unavailable media. I'm sure all of it exists in some CBC archives somewhere (and I did see a Jonathan Torrens interview implying he had a whole collection of VHS tapes of his time on the show), but I can't just click a website twice and have all of it at my fingertips. That someone not only got their hands on broadcast masters of all of the second season, but uploaded it onto Internet Archive for the viewing, consists of a small miracle. The only other way for Street Cents to manifest is for people who have tapes of it to rip and upload them. Some people have done that, and over the rest of the 1990s I was able to find nine more complete episodes, half of another, and random assorted clips. Let's talk about this for a bit, because what happens next is fascinating.


I have little to say about the lone episode I found from 1993, as it feels more in line with the 1990 season, only a little more 90's. It has a more 90's opening sequence, and one of the tests is one of those wearable feedback speaker things for video games which gets tested with Mortal Kombat. 1994 is when things change. As I said, Street Cents is in perfect harmony with Canadian youth culture. What happens when that culture and aesthetic changes? Street Cents evolves right along with it. If the 1990 season is pop with Madonna, then 1994 begins the alt-rock era of Street Cents. Jamie Bradley is out and in his place is Anna Dirksen, a cool dark-haired girl with a bit of an edge and attitude who plays the drums. Of the five episodes I found from this new alt-rock era, two of them have her jamming in a band with a friend of hers.(INTRUSION FROM THE FUTURE: It was only looking back at the uploads for this era that I realized three of them were actually uploaded by this guy, Brian Ling. At least two other segments of other episodes on Youtube also appear to be uploaded by the people who were in said segments.) Ken gets a glow-up as well, going from a pathetic yuppie to the black trenchcoat-wearing CEO of BuyCo, menacing and imposing with shades and a goatee. Benita Ha leaves during this era as well, in a rather meta way. Her departure is a mystery, and the wraparound segments become an extended X-Files pastiche trying to uncover the conspiracy of her disappearance. It turns out that Benita Ha left Street Cents to pursue an acting career, and one of her first jobs was as an extra on the actual X-Files series.


1995 is the most represented year of this era of random VHS rips, having four episodes available, the X-Files parody I just mentioned being one of them. Lest you think the alt-rock era of Street Cents is bereft of batshit, let me tell you about the episode in which Ken gets hypnotized into regressing back to his teenage self from the 1970s. Street Cents is still Street Cents, as ever. It still does product tests, still gets the opinion of average Canadian kids and teens, still throws things down a big pit. What fascinates me is how it evolves its style and taste to go right along with it. I don't have every episode to see this happen, of course, but I have enough of this era to see that this new edgier 1990s style is consistent. This is the youth market they were appealing to, and it is a big strength of what little Street Cents I can see from this time. It is able to adapt and mold itself as a perfect reflection of what the kids of the time were into, and thus always serves as a perfect time capsule of Canadian youth culture of its age, nostalgia bombs preserved only by fuzzy analog and a prayer.


We have to talk about the end of the seventh season, however. This is the departure episode of the last of the original three hosts from the full 1990 season, Jonathan Torrens. The name might perk up to you, as he later went on to be a supporting character on Trailer Park Boys (In fact, the creator of that worked on Street Cents in some capacity). In the late 90's, however, Torrens left Street Cents to become the host of his own teen talk show called Jonovision, which actually aired in that weekday afternoon slot alongside Street Cents and those Simpsons reruns at the top of this piece. Serendipity. What absolutely shocks me about this episode is how emotionally resonant and poignant it is. Yes, really. The show about how 90's kids can save money managed to tug at my heartstrings a little. There is a gravity to the departure of Jonathan Torrens. He had been on the show for seven years at this point. It's not quite up to the level of Tom Baker and Logopolis, but damn if I am not impressed.


Of course, this being Street Cents, it is absolutely wild. I fear I have to summarize it, so here goes. Jonathan attempts to announce his departure from Street Cents, only for the episode to cut to the end credits before he does. The two remaining hosts are confused by this, but they and Brian Heighton, out of character from Ken and playing himself, go to the airport to get Jonathan back to announce it on the show proper since the tapes were wiped. It turns out that the character of Ken Pompadour has gained sentience separate from Brian the actor (shown via both Brian and Ken in the same shot with that splitscreen technique like in Back To The Future) and is using his newfound power to edit and retcon the show to keep Jonathan on it forever. Ken is even playing clips from old episodes on his TV, including one from the second season that I'd just watched. The hosts try various stunts and silly endings to write Jonathan out of the show, only for Ken to retcon them all.


What follows, then, is Jonathan going to Ken's office as more of those old clips play, and just having an honest heart to heart with him. Telling him that Street Cents meant so much to him, that the bonds he formed here meant so much to him, even and especially his bond with Ken. He calls the man his friend, and pleads with him to be his friend and let him fly free to pursue his further career. Ken relents, Jonathan is allowed to announce his departure, and he shuts off the lights to the studio and bids Street Cents a heartfelt farewell. It moved me. It really felt like the end of an era, and in some ways it is. Brian Heighton had only one more season on the show, and then he left to go forth with his own career. After that, the silly skits and unhinged inventions left the show, and Street Cents became more grounded. It still reflected the youth culture, but losing that sense of play may have hurt Street Cents. I don't know, as there's only one episode post-Ken available from 1999... but there's not much to it beyond the nostalgic pleasures of seeing the late 90's. 


Those final two episodes I have, one from 1997 and one from 1999, evolve the aesthetic again. Funny enough, this is my era of Street Cents, so to speak. These are what would have been airing when I was a teenager, and I was astounded watching the 1999 episode to find that I remembered the funny little bumpers they did. We'll call it the rave era of Street Cents. It was a fun little throwback, even if the earlier episodes had weirder stuff happening. If you want unhinged nonsense though, that's where the half an episode from 1996 comes in. Ken, now a cable TV executive, attempts to replace the Street Cents hosts with puppets. They proceed to run rampant. Now this is the kind of shit I am here for, y'all. As for 1999, it is as I said filled with aesthetic signifiers only. None of that weird shit. I kind of miss that strange unhinged youthful energy at play, but maybe I would gain an appreciation for turn of the millennium Street Cents if I had more of it to look at. 


That consists of all the full episodes I can find, and clips become scarce from this point. There's a brief retrospective from 2002 where a host catches up with some former hosts. There's an intro sequence from 2004, which teases an episode that judges whether or not the original Nintendo DS is worth it or not. Sobering, but we won't delve into that because of the latest clip I could find, from 2006, in which a teen garage band reviews Guitar Hero for the PS2. There are two fun facts about that which make me turn to dust. The first is that these teens were infants when that full season of Street Cents I watched aired. The second is that they would currently all be about 35 years old. 2006 was the end of Street Cent's televised run, and if Wikipedia is to be believed, the end of youth and teen programming on the CBC. I had long since bailed from Street Cents, Jonovision, and Simpsons reruns (okay, maybe in 2006 I was watching my Simpsons DVDs, BUT STILL) and so those things were left in the past. That should be where the story of this scrappy little Canadian show ends.


Except, it came back.





In 2022 Street Cents returned, in a new form for these changing times: the social media short. A new trio of Gen Alpha teens are off making Tiktoks and Youtube shorts to teach the kids of today how to use their money wisely. Most of these entail lunch challenges where someone will go out into the city to find the best deal for a small amount, but they have funny little skits and shorts as well. This is the perfect evolutionary form factor for something like Street Cents, something for a teen of today to come across in the middle of their scrolling and learn from. In these crazy times, it's more important than ever to learn good financial skills, and I can only hope that the new Street Cents is helping the kids of today to do just that. Keep that youthful energy alive.


That's where we leave Street Cents, then, and this Canada Day celebration which really got out of control (we're at something like 4000 words). My ode to a strange and weird piece of 90's Canadian children's ephemera which, while not totally forgotten, is somewhat obscure. My dues paid to this bizarre show with its bizarre things, half of which I didn't even touch on. The whole second season is on the Internet Archive, and a Youtube search of Street Cents will unveil both the shorts for the modern kids as well as the fuzzy VHS rips of when the show was for millennials. If you're Canadian, or just curious, give it a spin. With my Canada Day duties done, it's time for me to shift gears and work on something else. Next time is a whopper, kids. Oh god. Be ready.

2 comments:

  1. Oh gosh, this was a wild ride! I remember some shows kind of like this, by-kids-for-kids, but the way it seems to have kept both a manic energy and sincerity at the same time made ME feel nostalgic for something I just learned about. :) And a Trailer Park Boys connection, that's something even a Yankee like me can appreciate.

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  2. This sounds amazing. And I'm a sucker for what are very probably Video Toaster effects.
    This is not the first CBC educational show I've heard of that's ended up unavailable for rights reasons. I've read that the licensing issues for CBC youth programming was a mess even compared to other local programming in the pre-internet era. It's possible those clips were uploaded by the presenters because technically they're the ones who hold the rights; apparently EVERYONE who worked on shows for the CBC ended up with some level of ownership of the specific things they did, making commercial releases of stuff like this literally impossible, barring seances.

    My dad had a little container of mercury and would sometimes let me play with it, but was always very insistant that I wash my hands throughly afterward. The 80s was a very different time.

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