Okay, this time we have some people voting in the Frenchlands. Some guy rolls up with his crew and they want to vote. That’s when the trouble starts. Later, the trouble is over, so the guy goes to Englshton, and everyone is quite impressed by the idea of a Frenchman running for office in a place where everyone thinks he talks funny. C’est la vie!
Here’s something: Apart from a tingle of familiarity over the last couple lines, I don’t recall this one from the indoctrination during my youth. Is it a newer one? The quality doesn’t seem to suggest that. Did they just not play it as much as the others? Well, it does have an awful lot of French, maybe it played more prominently in the Frenchy parts of Canada than it did here. I don’t know.
I don’t get much information from this one. Apart from being called a “lousy rebel” I don’t know the cause of the strife. I appreciate the callback to the Responsible Government Moment, and I like to commend anyone who doesn’t resort to violence to make his political point, but I just don’t get much from this spot. I give it Two out of Six Pieces of PDR’s Reviewing System Cake.
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.
Étienne Parent is this guy who wrote that French and English could probably get along without armed conflict. Nobody wanted to hear that, so he got put in prison. That did not stop his writing, though. Here we see him smuggling editorials out of his cell under a pie while a guard fails to catch them.
This guard is apparently concerned enough about Parent’s writing that he’s willing to ruin a pie, but he isn’t bothering to check the guy’s pockets, or even to look into the cell to see if Parent is writing. I don’t consider this guard exceptionally good at his job.
Why is the pie going out of the cell? Certainly Parent is not baking pies and sending them out into the world. Is he just being given pies and straight-up not eating them? Dude deserves to be in jail. Three out of Six Pieces of PDR’s Reviewing System Cake. There’s nothing to be quoted and the pie desecration is the only truly memorable bit.
We join Emily Murphy mid-conversation apparently. She is reminiscing about her early days when she was to be Senator, but under Canadian law, women weren’t people. Uh oh! Anyway, later they fixed that.
The primary problem with this Heritage Moment is how little there is to it. Emily Murphy just remembers this time when there was a problem, then reminds us that it was fixed. There’s no sense of the struggle. We don’t get to see Murphy struggling with the problem like we do the early women in medicine. We don’t get to see her petitioning the “noble lords of the privy council” or whatever. All we get is a gentle reminiscing and we’re done. There’s no style to the soliloquy like John Matheson’s.
“I was not a person” has a bit of quotability, but it isn’t enough. I would be lying if I gave this Moment anything more than Two out of Six Pieces of PDR’s Reviewing System Cake. Having seen how much can be crammed into a minute, this little lesson in Canadiana simply does not make the most of its time.
Here’s one of the big Heritage Moments. A woman is in her kitchen and smells burnt toast, then has a seizure. Good old doctor Penfield says “Hey Guys, if we can find the Burnt Toast Lobe of the brain, we’ll know what is causing the lady’s seizures” and then he pokes her brainparts until he accomplishes just that. The woman then gets to narrate the fact that Penfield was known as “the Greatest Canadian Alive”.
Wikipedia tells me that Penfield lived from January 26, 1891 to April 5, 1976, which means that his life has definitely overlapped with several of the other Heritage Moment stars. But Penfield trumps those chumps because he is the Greatest. Contest over. This man is tops and everyone else was a fool for trying. That said, I don’t know the intricacies of brain poking as much as I would like to, but if this commercial is accurate I have to say that Penfield is more than a little bit lucky that the burnt toast brain-part was right there on the surface of the brain. That’s pretty handy.
Almost everything the lady with the seizures says in this commercial is quotable gold. I’m confident I’ve even heard Americans reference the “burnt toast” bit, which I can only assume means they learned it from the Internet and not the commercial directly (I’m more partial to the “did you pour cold water on my hand” line personally). Having burned its message into my brain, I have to give it credit for doing its job. It is worth noting, however, that up until writing this very review I had assumed the doctor’s name was Walter Penfield. Now that I know better I can clearly hear that “Wilder” is the name said, but I just never got it before. I like old-timey given names that don’t happen anymore. I’m going with a Five out of Six Pieces of PDR’s Reviewing System Cake here.
