#but woe unto you for never getting to hear about#The Shane Hollander Heritage Minute#and it's meme catchphrase “Stay away from my Dad!”
wait hold on wait please I need to hear about this. please I promise I'm Canadian please I can prove it I have a house hippo making kit I can sing the "don't you put it in your mouth" song I watched polka dot door on TVO I need the Shane Hollander Heritage Minute
Ah ok, but for your eyes only, and credit also to @phneltwrites who I workshopped this idea with.
We already have a Heritage Minute for discrimination in Hockey and the Best Player to Ever Do It Until the Next Best Player Came Along to Do It Once Again, With Feeling, the one for Maurice Richard. Now, key to this example, the Heritage Minute does not go into depth about the racial discrimination faced by French players on the French Team that was owned and operated solely by English Dudes, or how the experiences of the Montreal Canadiens players became a figurehead for the wider treatment of French Canadians by English Canadians as a whole. It shows all of that through subtext, Maurice speaking French with his family but heavily accented English on the phone with probably the GM, the fact that he wanted the day off to move into a new house, was told he could have that day off, and then was called in to play anyways. That he played hurt, and outperformed everyone, because he didn't want to let his French team mates down. You could be mistaken for watching that Heritage Minute and assuming Maurice Richard was a legend for playing hockey, but actually, what makes him worthy of a Heritage Minute is that he used his ability to play a sport really well to advocate for worker's rights and equality for French Canadians. (There is a similar subtext in the Heritage Minute for Jacques Plante, but he was a goalie, and we're used to them being weirdos, so it doesn't hit as hard). Most Heritage Minutes, at least, the OG ones, are like this, they have an economy of storytelling that necessitates a lot of subtext on the part of the viewer, because they are of course, only a minute or so long. It's notable that the Maurice Richard or Jacques Plante Minutes feature a memorable image (Maurice's Crazy Eyes, and Jacques sitting silently in the doctor's office, face covered in gauze and tape, but chin lifted), instead of what makes a Heritage Minute culturally popular, a weird catch phrase, both of which are usually employed for impact in such a condensed story.
So, knowing what we know about how Heritage Minutes are constructed, and also why a Hockey personage is selected for a Heritage Minute (a wider contribution to societal change beyond hockey), we also have to consider a third thing, which is that Canada Post would absolutely not depict overt homophobia or use inappropriate language on TV in a one minute segment that usually airs during afterschool programming. A message from concerned children's advertisers indeed. So if they did have to depict someone saying something untoward to Shane, it would have to be the mildest, and therefore, most hilarious phrase of all time. Thus I present:
A shot of Actor Portraying Shane Hollander, pulling on his FakeTeam Ottawa jersey in the FakeTeam Ottawa locker room. There would be Classic Arena Sportscaster With Microphone sounding Voiceover about Hollander's first game, or the fact that Ottawa is playing Montreal.
Maybe a cut of him walking out of the tunnel and onto the ice to warm up, with crazy cheers and rainbow flags in the background so we know the crowd loves him and also that he is Gay Representativing at the Hockey Night in Canada.
Maybe some smash cuts of the game highlights with more voiceover about the gameplay being rough. There would be at least two shots of a ref blowing a whistle with his arm in the air.
Now. Shane sitting on the bench (chewing his mouthguard, because they are always chewing on their disgusting mouthguards), and the coach leaning over like "Can you go?" Shane would nod, do the gross lip gymnastics of sticking his mouthguard back in properly, and jump the boards in a change on the fly. He will get the puck, because he is Shane Hollander and this is his Heritage Minute. In my mind this is a dump and chase situation and so Shane has gone into the corner, or behind the net to retrieve the puck in the offensive zone and there faces an Ergregious Penalty upon his Person, maybe cross checking or a trip, but most likely an illegal hit by one or two of Montreal's players, in which they leave their feet to hit him. It is clearly targeted and he will go down hard because we have in-canon evidence that Hollander collapses like a heap of bricks when he's just sailing like a ballerina his way through life and not expecting a hit.
Enter la piece de resistance, the memeable catchphrase. The Montreal player will shout "Stay away from my dad, Hollander!" because this has enough subtext to be vaguely homophobic while not really being overtly homophobic, is a safe chirp for kids TV, and is so hilariously toothless compared to what players in the NHL actually say to one another that I had to lie down on the floor for two minutes after I thought it up. I had to give myself a minor penalty.
This will cause a large, several player fight. Probably the goalies also fight because that is fun and seems to be a thing that happens more regularly in the NHL now, according to my brother and male cousins.
Shane will skate to wait calmly at his own bench (because his Montreal Friend with Thirteen Kids is obviously not going to fight Shane, and they are the only two players left) while fights are deescalated and penalties are handed out, and another player will calmly climb over the boards behind him. Despite us not being able to see his name or number, we be able to deduce that this person is Ilya Rosanov because the Actor Portraying Ilya Rosanov will look Very Russian. They do not touch or speak to one another, they are just two hockey players who are waiting for the penalties to be announced because they are going to be on the Power Play together, because stacking the power play is just as important as pulling the goalie, though usually 100 times more effective. They also don't speak to each other because the Heritage Minute Narrator Voiceover will kick in to be like "After his trade from the Montreal Metros, Shane Hollander would lead the league in scoring and take the Ottawa FakeTeams to two Not Stanley Cups, paving the way for the game we know today," as the camera slowly pulls away from them to show more of the goalie fight and also the rainbow flags in the crowd.
A PART OF OUR HERITAGE, etc.
And there you have it, bb!
xoxo,
kakikaeru
origamiaround
tangentwithtanner
janainaart
theartofmadeline
2087
baratheonpilled
blakekathryn
