TV URBAN LEGEND: “How I Met Your Mother” created an actual Canadian Sex Acts website.
Like many other sitcoms, the longer “How I Met Your Mother” remained on the air, the more pieces of continuity and little in-jokes it collected. However, the comedy’s creators, Carter Bays and Craig Thomas, along with their writing staff, seemed to have a greater affinity for in-jokes and hidden details than most series. We previously covered how they worked in an insult of star Jason Segel, and how they hid a wedding proposal in an episode. However, they devoted a lot of attention to websites. Did the show seriously create a website explaining various Canadian Sex Acts?
The whole thing began in a late third-season episode called "The Bracket," where someone is sabotaging attempts by Barney (Neil Patrick Harris) to seduce women. His friends go over his past flings to see assemble a list of suspects, creating an NCAA Tournament-style bracket (the 2008 episode debuted on CBS during March Madness). One of the top candidates is a woman Barney told that his name was Ted Mosby, actually the character played by Josh Radnor. She launched a website called tedmosbyisajerk.com, so the show created a real site written from the perspective of the character, detailing all of the bad things “Ted” did to her.
The show made a real website at that address from the perspective of the character on the show, detailing all the bad things "Ted" did to her. The website tedmosbyisajerk.com is still live -- as is Ted's response website tedmosbyisnotajerk.com.
The gag went over well, so the show created a number of websites in the fourth season, which brings us to the episode "Old King Clancy." It centered on Robin (Cobie Smulders) once having been propositioned by a Canadian celebrity to come to his home to look at the unique items he collected. Once there, he asked her to perform a strange sexual act. So the rest of the episode, her friends try to figure out the identity of the celebrity, the contents of his collection and, of course, what the sex act was. As The Chicago Tribune reported, the idea had roots in actual events:
Having been told the story -- about a real (American) celebrity with a strange collection and also a strange sex proposition -- the writers spent days using a white board trying to figure out who it was, what the person collected and what the sex act was. "After not getting work done for all this time, it was like, 'Wait, why don't we do this?'" as an episode of the show, Thomas said.
In the episode, Barney goes online to canadiansexacts.org, and the gang starts making suggestions for which sex act the celebrity used. It turns out to the celebrity was a fictional Canadian wrestler who collected fast-food trays. And the sex act? “Old King Clancy,” which is a “Sacramento Turtleneck,” only involving maple syrup. After the episode ends, however, we flash back to the actual incident and learn it was Robin who propositioned the wrestler (she had a bottle of maple syrup in her purse).
So did they really create a Canadian Sex Acts website?
Yes, but not in the way that you might think. canadiansexacts.org exists, and it presents itself as an "Adults Only" website. However, once you get inside, if you click on any of the terms, like Reverse Rick Moranis, Montreal Meatpie, Saskatoon Totem Pole or Musty Goaltender, you get an error message. The error messages are all photos of Canadian celebrity Alan Thicke (who appeared a number of times on “How I Met Your Mother”) in humorous scenes.
The legend is...
STATUS: True
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