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.

There’s this thing called baseball, for some reason. Anyway, for a long time we didn’t let black people play it with white people, until that changed. Some of that happened in Canada, so you better believe we have a Heritage Moment about Jackie Robinson. The Moment opens in a locker room of the Montreal Royals (but we don’t get to see any dongs) as team owner or manager or whatever he was, Mr. Rickey, introduces the team to Jackie, the first black man to play in whatever league of their little game they are in. Later (his first game, I guess?) Jackie is at bat, but the opposing pitcher hits him with the ball. Jackie’s teammates are upset by this, naturally, but so is the Canadian crowd (we sadly don’t get to see if the pitcher looks sheepishly at his feet while mumbling that he’s sorry). Before long (four innings, according to my research, is less than a week), the crowd is chanting Jackie’s name and Racism has to crawl back into its cave to strike another day.

First of all, I doubt that Jackie’s teammates first learned about Jackie one day when Mr. Rickey came along and said, “Hey, check out this new guy!” Probably it came up in conversation before that? I don’t know for sure, but it seems likely to me. Also, we all know that in the real world Mr. Rickey was played by Harrison Ford. The real problem highlighted in this piece though, see that sign behind Jackie saying “No Women or Children Allowed.” When are we going to let women and children into our sports team locker rooms? When will the we finally be together? Also, “No spitting”? Whatever, man.

Okay, anyway, it may have come across that I think baseball is ridiculous and pointless. That is correct. But Jackie Robinson’s story isn’t one about winning a baseball game, it’s about breaking down the arbitrary barriers that racism built up in society. If those barriers exist in some silly game, it is as important to break them there as anywhere. For that reason, I can actually care about Jackie Robinson’s story. How does the Moment do? Well, it’s a bit cheesy (Montreal Royal with Cheese?), but it tells the story clearly in the time allowed, and makes Canadians feel good about themselves by having the crowd support him. That’s what these are supposed to be for. Sadly, there’s no lines that are burned into my head (though I’d love to have Mr. Rickey’s introduction of Jackie down), and that is what PDR considers most important. Altogether, I suppose I’d have to give this Heritage Moment Four out of Six Pieces of PDR’s Reviewing System Cake.