Don Cherry's Rock'em Sock'em Hockey: The Volume-by-Volume Index
Thirty volumes. Three decades. One of the best-selling Canadian video franchises of all time.
Why the franchise mattered
It is easy, in retrospect, to underestimate what Rock'em Sock'em Hockey actually did. In 1989, the NHL's own highlight distribution was thin and inconsistent. ESPN had the U.S. rights but carried a small package; the CBC's own game broadcasts were the main archive of the Canadian game, and most of them were not commercially available. Rock'em Sock'em Volume 1 — 48 minutes on a VHS, sold for roughly $20 at Consumers Distributing and Sam the Record Man — was the first time many Canadian hockey fans could own a season's highlights. That is not a small thing. That was the product.
What Cherry brought to it, beyond the existing footage, was an editorial voice. He picked the clips. He narrated the setups. He decided which hit deserved a replay and which fight got the slow-motion treatment. The Rock'em Sock'em edit became a parallel archive of Cherry's hockey worldview — the same hierarchy that ran through Coach's Corner, but with more room to linger and a different audience. Kids watched these tapes hundreds of times. They learned what a proper finish looked like, what a proper fight looked like, what "playing the right way" meant. For an entire generation of Canadian hockey kids, Rock'em Sock'em was their secondary education.
Commercially, the numbers got large. Volume 1 reportedly sold in the mid-six-figures over its first two years — staggering for a Canadian-produced sports tape in 1989. By the mid-1990s, new volumes routinely topped the Canadian home-video sales charts at Christmas. Bibliographies of top-selling Canadian video franchises generally place the series among the handful of truly dominant ones, alongside the CBC's own news and documentary collections. The total franchise sales across thirty volumes, VHS and DVD combined, are widely estimated in the low millions of units.
Volume-by-volume
| Volume | Year | Run time | Memorable content & notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vol. 1 | 1989 | ~48 min | The franchise's VHS debut. Opens with Cherry's now-iconic studio intro. Bruins-Canadiens and Oilers-Flames highlights dominate. Set the template for every volume to follow. |
| Vol. 2 | 1990 | ~50 min | 1989-90 season highlights. The Oilers' final Cup under Mark Messier gets extensive coverage. Cherry's first voice-over commentary on European players airs here. |
| Vol. 3 | 1991 | ~52 min | Mario Lemieux and the Penguins' first Cup dominate the tape. Cherry's praise of Lemieux — rare cross-archetype enthusiasm — is preserved here for anyone wanting the nuanced Cherry. |
| Vol. 4 | 1992 | ~52 min | The 1992 Penguins repeat and the early Lindros saga. Cherry's anti-instigator-rule segment is grafted into the outro. |
| Vol. 5 | 1993 | ~54 min | The Montreal Canadiens' tenth overtime playoff win run. Patrick Roy features heavily. Cherry revisits the Habs' Cup for years on Coach's Corner. |
| Vol. 6 | 1994 | ~56 min | The Rangers' 1994 Cup and the Messier guarantee. Cherry's commentary genuinely enjoys the New York story despite the expected Canadian-market bias. |
| Vol. 7 | 1995 | ~52 min | Post-lockout season. Devils Cup. Cherry's narration starts to foreground defensive hockey and neutral-zone trap criticism. |
| Vol. 8 | 1996 | ~54 min | Avalanche Cup. Claude Lemieux's hit on Kris Draper gets a full segment; Cherry's take is characteristically blunt. |
| Vol. 9 | 1997 | ~56 min | Red Wings' first Cup in 42 years. Scotty Bowman features. The tape leans heavily into the Detroit-Colorado rivalry Cherry loved. |
| Vol. 10 | 1998 | ~58 min | Ten-volume milestone. Repackaged with a retrospective montage. Wings repeat. Cherry uses the volume-10 intro to thank viewers — a rare sentimental moment. |
| Vol. 11 | 1999 | ~54 min | The no-goal Dallas Cup. Cherry relitigates the crease rule extensively. The Brett Hull skate-in-crease freeze-frame is preserved at Cherry-narrated length. |
| Vol. 12 | 2000 | ~56 min | Devils' second Cup. The volume leans into Scott Stevens hits. Cherry's Stevens commentary will age complicatedly as the head-shot conversation develops. |
| Vol. 13 | 2001 | ~58 min | Avalanche's second Cup and Ray Bourque's lift. Widely considered one of the strongest volumes emotionally. Cherry's Bourque segment is uncharacteristically quiet. |
| Vol. 14 | 2002 | ~60 min | Detroit's third Cup and Canada's Salt Lake gold. Cherry includes Olympic tournament clips — the only Olympic content in the franchise. |
| Vol. 15 | 2003 | ~58 min | The Devils-Ducks Cup. Volume ships right around the Iraq-war controversy, but the tape itself steers clear of politics. |
| Vol. 16 | 2004 | ~56 min | Calgary's unexpected Cup run. Cherry's coverage of Jarome Iginla is uncharacteristically respectful across cultural lines. The Lightning Cup win closes the tape. |
| Vol. 17 | 2006 | ~62 min | Post-lockout season. Hurricanes Cup. Cherry's response to the post-lockout rule changes (obstruction crackdown, shootout) is preserved; he hates most of them. |
| Vol. 18 | 2007 | ~60 min | Ducks Cup. The first volume where Cherry's commentary starts routinely criticizing head shots — an early signal of the 2009-2011 pivot. |
| Vol. 19 | 2008 | ~58 min | Red Wings' fourth Cup under Mike Babcock. Cherry's begrudging Babcock respect is documented. |
| Vol. 20 | 2009 | ~60 min | Penguins' Crosby-era Cup. Cherry's Crosby segment is a high point of the Crosby-championing that ran across his entire career. |
| Vol. 21 | 2010 | ~56 min | Chicago ends its drought. Cherry's coverage foregrounds Jonathan Toews. Remembered as one of the better late-era volumes. |
| Vol. 22 | 2011 | ~58 min | Bruins Cup win. Cherry openly celebrates his former team's first Cup since his coaching tenure ended in 1979. One of the most emotional intros in the franchise. |
| Vol. 23 | 2012 | ~56 min | Kings' Cup. Darryl Sutter features heavily. Cherry's 'Canadian boy' framing runs throughout. |
| Vol. 24 | 2013 | ~54 min | Blackhawks' second Cup. Cherry's commentary starts to feel shorter, tighter — Sportsnet era production begins to reshape the tape's rhythm. |
| Vol. 25 | 2014 | ~56 min | Kings' second Cup. Distribution shifts primarily to DVD; VHS is gone by this point. |
| Vol. 26 | 2015 | ~54 min | Blackhawks dynasty final Cup. Cherry's analysis of Duncan Keith deserves a rewatch — precise, measured, largely ideology-free. |
| Vol. 27 | 2016 | ~52 min | Penguins' second Crosby-era Cup. Cherry's McDavid-future segment is the tape's highlight. |
| Vol. 28 | 2017 | ~52 min | Penguins repeat. Nashville's Cup run features heavily. Cherry's appreciation of the Predators' crowd energy is a rare warm take on a non-traditional market. |
| Vol. 29 | 2018 | ~50 min | Capitals Cup. Ovechkin gets his own segment — Cherry's long-running Ovechkin appreciation, always an exception to his anti-Russian framing, is on full display. |
| Vol. 30 | 2019 | ~48 min | Last full volume. Blues' Cup. Ships months before Poppy Gate. The final Rock'em Sock'em. Nobody knew at the time. |
Runtimes are approximate and vary by regional release. A small number of compilation and "best of" volumes are omitted from the main-line count above.
The Rock'em Sock'em / Coach's Corner connection
The two products were always connected, and the connection ran in both directions. Rock'em Sock'em volumes got plugged on Coach's Corner every fall — that was the commercial launch window, and it was reliable. But just as importantly, Coach's Corner segments got echoed on the tapes. A hit Cherry praised on-air in March would often get a slow-motion Rock'em Sock'em replay in November. A fight he defended on Saturday night would get a proper big-screen framing by Christmas. The two products reinforced each other's editorial position. The tape made the on-air commentary feel inevitable; the on-air commentary made the tape feel essential.
That feedback loop was enormously commercially effective, and it was also part of why the broader cultural conversation around Cherry was so hard to shift. Criticizing Coach's Corner was one thing. Criticizing Rock'em Sock'em — a tape a million Canadian families had bought for their kids — was something else entirely. It felt like criticizing Christmas.
After Coach's Corner
The Rock'em Sock'em franchise effectively ended with Volume 30 in 2019. No new volume has been produced under the original Cherry editorial control since his firing from Sportsnet. Cherry has continued to release hockey content through his YouTube channel and the Grapevine podcast with his son Tim, but those are structurally different products — direct-to-audience, conversational, unedited — rather than the curated season-highlight tapes that defined Rock'em Sock'em.
As a cultural artifact, the full 30-volume run sits somewhere between a season-by-season NHL archive and a multi-decade portrait of a specific hockey worldview. Both readings are accurate. Anyone who grew up renting these tapes from the library or unwrapping them on Christmas morning carries a particular version of the game in their head because of them. That version is Cherry's — and that is worth looking at honestly, the way the rest of this tracker tries to look at the rest of his work.