First, I want to apologize to my loyal readers for the unexpected break in posting over the last month. Unfortunately, my day job as a software architect meant that I was put on a project that consumed most of my free time. Free time where I would’ve normally been scanning ephemera and writing blog posts.
The lack of free time also meant that I didn’t have time to watch as many films as I am accustomed to. However, now that things have started to slow down, I’ve started consuming more feature-length medias (media? mediums?).
I was recently reminded of the Disney Channel…something I admit that I hadn’t really thought of in ages. Specifically, that it had launched in 1983 and we’d subscribed not too long after that when it was available in our town.
My memories of Disney Channel content in those early days consists mostly of shows that were aimed at kids younger than me, such as Welcome to Pooh Corner, which, despite its title, isn’t a show about perfectly position a cat box. I also have distinct memories of repeatedly watching The Black Hole and Tron.
One other film that they seemed to run a lot but that held no interest to my eight-year-old mind was Never Cry Wolf, based on the book of the same name about Farley Mowat spending time in far north Canada observing wolves and whether or not they were the cause of declining caribou populations.
Upon remembering this film, I decided that I should watch it to see if it was as disinteresting to me in my mid-Forties as it was when I was eight.
The weirdness for me came a couple of minutes in when I had the weirdest sense of déjà vu…a scene of the main character and narrator sitting outside a train station in the fictional (maybe?) town of Nuutsak (I’m assuming the spelling here, as it sounds like he’s saying “nutsack” but I have to assume that it’s an Inuit word rather than someone actually naming their town after scrotal slang) seemed strangely-familiar to me.
I was certain I’d seen that setting before. Not in another film, but in real-life. Considering it for a moment, it came clear in my mind…this was clearly filmed in the small Yukon town of Carcross…which I visited several years back while exploring the Klondike.
In fact, I have a photo from near that same vantage point:
To confirm my certainty, I enhanced and cropped the screencap above, and it’s clearly the same railroad bridge:
Things changed a bit between when the movie was filmed in 1982-ish and when I visited in 2013, but it’s interesting that the buildings in the background are still there, just maybe a bit-more-ramshackled.
Finding stuff like this is always a surprising treat when watching a movie or TV show. One thing my wife and I enjoy doing when there’s nothing else on TV late on Friday or Saturday nights is to find a channel running old Cheaters reruns. Since the show was primarily filmed in Dallas and we’ve lived in the Dallas area most of our lives, we love trying to figure out the locations.