It’s Dan Ackroyd!!! Today’s Heritage Moment is an encapsulation of the story of the Avro Arrow. That was an impressive jet plane that Canada built this one time and then didn’t build.
According to research I did a decade ago and don’t feel like re-checking, this Heritage Moment is pieced together using clips from some movie about the Avro Arrow, which explains how they got Ackroyd in there. I’m all for recycling, so I approve of their repurposing of the clips. Plus, it has the benefit of making the filmmakers aware of the fact that they probably spent two hours to tell a story that can be told in a minute.
As a side note, my most significant Avro Arrow-related memory is the time, during high school, when a fellow student angrily insisted that the program being shut down was the turning point when Canada could otherwise have been the world’s military leader. I have never cared as much as he did about Canada’s military prowess, that’s for sure.
Time to rate it: It’s certainly one of the great quotable Minutes, that’s for sure. And it’s arc is pretty sad, really: “We want to make a plane, but it is hard to do. Then we made the plane! We’re awesome. (Later we didn’t make the plane.)” This is hardly the stuff out of legend. But it has Dan Ackroyd in it. Four out of Six Pieces of PDR’s Reviewing System Cake.