How Chee!

From 1996 to 1998, a shoestring-budget television commercial for Saskatoon’s Great Buffet of China aired relentlessly. It centers on a Caucasian pitchman introducing the catchphrase How Chee and a chorus of amateur young actors repeating it, and it became infamous. Some viewers laughed; others cringed. Many called it the worst commercial ever made. Thirty years on, it still resurfaces — at one point even going viral in China. How Chee! traces the unlikely origins of the ad, the friendship between an immigrant restaurant owner and the professor who attempted to help save his business, and the now-adult actors who became locally famous long before the era of viral fame.