YMMV / Canadian Bacon

• Broken Base: Opinions are mixed on whether this was a disappointment for one of John Candy's last movies, or generally okay in its own right.
• Fisticuff-Provoking Comment: Never say that Canadian beer sucks.
  • Of course, them's fightin' words no matter what country's beer you're talking about.
• Fridge Brilliance: The trio bumbling the lyrics to "Born in the USA" comes off as just a silly joke, but it was a recurring element of the '80s that people praised the patriotism of the song based on nothing more than the chorus. The rest of the song is about the fallout of The Vietnam War.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • One of the greatest and darkest examples in any medium.
    Secretary of State: We were thinking, what could be a bigger threat than aliens invading from space?
    General Panzer: Ooh boy! Scare the shit out of everyone. Even me, sir!
    U.S. President: Jesus, is this the best you could come up with? What about, ya know, international terrorism?
    General Panzer: Well, sir, we're not going to re-open missile factories just to fight some creeps running around in exploding rental cars, are we, sir?
  • It has never been fully explained what the original ending was, but apparently, after the death of John Candy, it ran close enough to the bone that Moore chose to reedit it to prevent this.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • At one point, Bud Boomer attempts to Bluff the Impostor by asking a man who claims to be American who the quarterback is for the St. Louis Cardinals. The man says he doesn't know, so Bud mentions that they moved to Phoenix. Since there are people today who know that there's a baseball team called the St. Louis Cardinals but don't know there was a football team with the same name, the question would seem to them not like testing if they know the football Cardinals moved but if they know the Cardinals are a baseball team, like asking if they know who the quarterback for the New York Yankees is.
  • The epilogue at the end of the film states that Canadian Prime Minister Clark MacDonald was still "ruling with an iron fist". Real Life Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, who was still in his first term when the film came out, would win re-election two more times and serve for eight more years, effectively ruling the country with an iron fist thanks to an incredibly fragmented and ineffective opposition. The epilogue also states that Alan Alda's President would lose reelection to Oliver North in the biggest landslide loss in American history. Bill Clinton would easily coast to reelection in 1996 and leave office at the end of his second term with the highest end of term approval rating in American history.
  • A throwaway line at the beginning of the film mentions the Canadian flag and the maple leaf's resemblance to "weed". Guess what Canada was the second country to legalise?
  • The Secretary of State suggests that the enemy in their cold war should be aliens invading from space, which General Panzer thinks would be a great idea. This is something Pazer's actor (Rip Torn) would later deal with in Men in Black.
• Unintentional Period Piece: This is a mid-'90s film, so this is a give.
  • This film was made smack in the middle of the "honeymoon" period between Russia and the United States, and it shows. An American President welcoming (read: begging for another Cold War with) a Russian President isn't something you'd see nowadays.
  • A plot point is the devastation of the local economy of Upstate New York after the downsizing of defense history, which would fit the immediate aftermath of the Cold War but wouldn't fit anything set after 9/11.
  • There is also the Long List of Canadian entertainers in the Attack of the Political Ad branding them infiltrators, several of which (such as Alex Trebek, Leslie Nielsen, Lorne Greene and Ivan Reitman) are dead or retired now.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The US propaganda being used against Canada is ridiculously limited: There are practically no true historical examples of conflicts that Canada has had with the USA, such as War of 1812, an actual shooting war against the forerunner colonies that would become Canada. There are no attempts to smear Canada with its differing policies such as maintaining diplomatic ties with communist Cuba in defiance of the decades-long American embargo, or how Canada recognized communist China years before Nixon went, or its public health system.

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