What is the best Canadian TV comedy of all time?
Is it SCTV? The Kids in the Hall? Corner Gas? The Trouble with Tracy?
OK, that last one was an inside joke for Canadian TV nerds. But I would sincerely like to add one more show to the all-time Canadian comedy list –The Littlest Hobo.
The Littlest Hobo was a Canadian series, based on the preposterous proposition of a German Shepherd who, according to the theme song lyrics, “rambled around from town to town.” The original iteration, the one from my childhood, ran in syndication from 1963-65. The second more successful series aired on CTV for six seasons from 1979-85. I was already an adult by the time the new Hobo aired, so I never watched it. Apparently, a different generation (Gen X? Millennials? Who knows?) watched it, remembering it at least for the new theme song. Seth Rogan, Canada’s superstar pothead producer/writer/actor, has announced plans to bring the show back for a third iteration. [Look for it on Crave sometime in the 2026-2027 season.]
This summer, CTV2 airs the 1980s Hobo episodes three times a day on weekdays. I checked out a couple of episodes recently, and I’m hooked. The Littlest Hobo is inadvertently, accidentally hilarious.
Hobo is a time tunnel. Watch an episode, and you will be transported back to the 1980s, when Canadian TV was immediately identifiable by its terrible production values. The writing was often stilted and hokey, the acting comically overwrought, the production values cheap in a community-cable kind of way (Hobo was recorded on tape, not film, which adds to its chintzy aura). The hair was big, the clothes tight, and the cars were American.
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To be fair, it was impossible to make a credible show based on the concept of The Littlest Hobo.
Hobo was a loose dog, who simply wandered from town to town, city to city, injecting himself into the lives of strangers. Nobody seemed to find it odd that a full-grown German Shepherd was wandering, unattended, frequently on the streets of Toronto. No one seemed to bat an eye when Hobo jumped into their car or walked into office buildings or homes. Mind you, Hobo was no ordinary dog. Hobo could not only intuit feelings, it also appeared he knew how to read, regularly picking up clues that only a literate human could decipher. When Hobo performed his magic, solving crimes or just saving lives or making lives better, he immediately left town for his next adventure.
One of the joys of watching Hobo from the 1980s is the remarkable list of guest stars, who I can only assume were finding work hard to find. A partial list includes DeForest Kelly (Star Trek), Patrick McNee (The Avengers), Ray Walston (My Favorite Martian) Morey Amsterdam (The Dick Van Dyke Show), Abe Vigoda (Barney Miller), Vic Morrow (Combat!) and many others. (I wonder how many of these actors fired their agents after their Hobo experience.)
Familiar Canadian faces pop up everywhere: Louis Del Grande, Jayne Eastwood, ballerina Karen Kain, tennis player Carling Bassett, Al Waxman, John Vernon, Billy Van, Megan Follows, Leslie Nielson, and even a very young Mike Myers.
Nothing was too preposterous for a Hobo episode. Consider this synopsis for an episode titled “Mystique.”
Hobo is shown wandering down a city street, unattended as always. He sees an attractive woman and a man walking out of a building. We cut to the villain, a Dr. Henshaw, (we can tell he’s the villain because the music becomes ominous), who is watching the woman leave the building. “It worked even better than I hoped,” he tells someone on the phone. “I planted a new suggestion today. I have a feeling it’s going to work.” He reaches down to a camera and clicks the autoshutter.
Meanwhile, the outside guy recognizes the attractive woman. “Hey, aren’t you Heather Atkinson, the model?” he says, asking if he can take some pictures. She agrees (it was a different time), but when the shutter clicks, she stops smiling and becomes confused. She drops her bag, which gives Hobo his chance to get involved. Hobo picks up the bag and jumps into a cab with Heather. She is not the least bit concerned that a large German Shepherd is in the cab. In fact, she thanks the dog for “rescuing a damsel in distress”.
Heather is in the running to be the next model for Mystique perfume. She attends a photo shoot along with another, clearly evil model named Shelly (and Hobo, who is welcomed into the building). But when the shutter starts to shutter, Heather again becomes confused and unsmiling, while a watching Shelly raises one eyebrow in the classic evil woman pose. Heather, in a daze, almost falls off the stage, but Hobo rescues her. Another unnamed character, apparently with Mystique perfume, takes a liking to Heather and gives her his card.
So what is Heather’s problem? It turns out that the doctor, a hypnotherapist, has conditioned poor Heather to become sick and confused when she hears a camera shutter (not good for a model), guaranteeing his gal, the evil Shelly, gets the Mystique job.
Heather attends another session with Dr. Henshaw, accompanied by Hobo, who instantly gloms onto the plan. The evil doctor makes a cassette tape of his session and tells Heather to play it regularly. She goes home and pops in the cassette (it’s the ‘80s, remember). Hobo, however, stops the tape. Twice. Frustrated, Heather removes the tape and goes upstairs to phone the evil doctor to tell him the tape doesn’t work. But Hobo has disconnected the phone. He then grabs the tape, leaves the apartment, and travels across town to a place he’s never been, and drops the tape through the mail slot of the Mystique guy, whom he has never met.
Hobo then finds Dr. Henshaw’s office and finds a crafty way to get in. Dr. Henshaw returns and, sensing Hobo is no ordinary dog, locks Hobo in his office. However, Hobo escapes when he tricks the cleaning lady into opening the door. Before escaping, Hobo grabs a photo of the evil Shelly that just happened to be on Dr. Henshaw’s desk. He carries it across town and drops it off at the house of the Mystique guy to whom he previously dropped off the cassette and hitches a ride with him to the photo shoot.
At the shoot, Hobo conspires to shut off the background music and get the hypnotic tape put into the stereo system. When everyone hears the doctor’s tape, the Mystique guy immediately catches on, and Dr. Henshaw runs away, only to fall into a pond. He and the evil Shelly are arrested, and Heather gets the contract. Hobo, job done, leaves town, ready for another adventure.
OK, Seth Rogan. Beat that, smart guy.
