St. Remedius Medical College: Fissures in the Mandela Effect
Just why do thousands of Canadians remember the Irate Ian movie series?
(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes a cigar is actually a VibroMaster 9000 with the optional AC adaptor attachment and kick-starter. While understanding of the false memory phenomenon known as the Mandela effect can explain many issues in pop culture, such as thirty years of people walking up to filmmaker George Romero to yell “Braaaaains!”, the backstory of the Irate Ian films directly involves the Temporal Studies team at St. Remedius Medical College to this day.
For Canadians of a certain age, at least age 40 as of 2024, sitting down in a bar in rural Newfoundland or Alberta and hearing the words “Irate Ian” sets off boisterous reminisces of a favorite movie series from their childhoods in the 1980s. Everyone will admit that the first, the obviously titled Irate Ian (1980), was a cheap homebrew attempt to cash in on the success of the Australian film Mad Max, shot in rural Manitoba and Ontario on a shoestring, but the story of a lone explorer on the edge of the solar system when global thermonuclear war on Earth forces him to return to rebuild civilization touched a chord. A new set of directors and writers turned subsequent installments into blatant comedies mocking Canada’s perilous spot between the Cold War United States and Russia, with most enthusiasts arguing deeply and passionately between Irate Ian 2: The Hamster Brigade and Irate Ian 6: Assault on Vancouver being the best of the series. Many enthusiasts recall seeing the whole series in theaters, while others have fond memories of watching each installment on television just after Hockey Night In Canada on Saturday nights. Even others will relate the extensive collections of action figures, T-shirts, and posters that their parents threw out when they moved from home, with many getting nostalgic about how they can’t find a replacement for the Irate Ian-branded Jet-Disc gun they wore out or had confiscated in grade school. Everyone, though, remembers how all nine of the movies were stalwarts on late-night satellite television all the way to 1991, and how heartbroken they were when star Leslie Andrews died in a motorcycle crash on Trans-Canada Highway 1 between Banff and Calgary in 1993. Some Americans, particularly those living close enough to Canada in Michigan and New York to get CBC broadcasts, have similar memories, to the point of suggesting starting an Irate Ian convention to gather fans from around the world. The films were even parodied in Canada’s second-top-grossing movie of 1983, although most agreed that it lacked the low-budget charm of that year’s top film, Irate Ian 3: Beware Antigonish.
These conventions always fall through for one reason, though. Any attempt to rent 35mm prints of any of the Irate Ian films falls through because no film distributor has a copy, in any condition. None of the films are available in any video format, either VHS, Betamax, or DVD. They do not appear in the IMDB in any form, nor in any contemporary film or cult movie guide from the time. None of the stars appear in the IMDB, either, and the cemetery in which Andrews was allegedly laid to rest in Mississauga, Ontario has been the site of a Tim Hortons doughnut shop since 1975. The merchandise, ranging from “Ian’s Spaceship” playsets to the “Morden of Manitoba” chainsaw sword toy that viewers swore they received for Christmas from Canadian Tire, is not available through any vintage toy shop or on eBay. No preview trailers hidden in film distributor archives has ever turned up, no proofs of theatrical posters, or even a single copied station ID ad. By all indications, the Irate Ian films constituted the greatest case of false memory on human record, or at least within pop culture.
This is where things would have ended were it not for strange artifacts that turn up occasionally that may be sophisticated hoaxes and might be more. A television guide in the Brantford Expositor from June 2, 1984 has a reference to that night’s showing of Irate Ian 4: The Battle of Rankin Inlet, and the April 1998 issue of the media magazine Sci-Fi Universe contained a quip about the series in its “Rant” column. Enthusiasts bring up ticket stubs they retained from childhood that allegedly came from a screening, but the only one that might not have come from another movie was a badly damaged stub that may have come from a screening of Irate Ian 6: The Liberation of Dieppe or possibly from a screening of Kiss of the Spider Woman. Other than these, no traces of any Irate Ian film exist, at least in our reality.
The official position from St. Remedius’s Temporal Studies team is inconclusive barring further evidence either disproving or proving the existence of the Irate Ian movies. Unofficially, rumors keep coming as to the St. Remedius faculty New Year’s Eve parties starting with a special screening of the Irate Ian Holiday TV Special from 1988, complete with cameos from Patrick McKenna and Peter Keleghan as Ian’s long-lost identical twin brothers. As with the films themselves, these rumors could not be confirmed by publication time.
Essential Reading
Didn’t You Kill My Mother-In-Law? by Roger Wilmut and Peter Rosengard (Methuen London, 1989)
Lost In Space: The True Story by Ed Shifres (Windsor House, 1998)
Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. And feel free to pass on word far and wide: the more, the merrier.