Heritage Minute
Heritage Minutes, also known officially as Historica Minutes: History by the Minute, are sixty-second short films, each illustrating an important moment in Canadian history. They appear frequently on Canadian television and in cinemas before movies. The minutes were first introduced on March 31, 1991 as part of a one-off heavily-promoted history quiz show hosted by Rex Murphy. The thirteen original short films were broken up and run between shows on CBC Television and CTV. The continued broadcast of the Minutes and the production of new ones was pioneered by Charles Bronfman's CRB Foundation (subsequently the The Historica Dominion Institute), Canada Post (with Bell Canada being a later sponsor) Power Broadcasting (now Power Corporation of Canada), and the National Film Board. They were devised, developed and largely narrated (as well as scripted) by noted Canadian broadcaster Patrick Watson, while the producer of the series was Robert Guy Scully. In 2009 Historica merged with The Dominion Institute to become The Historica-Dominion Institute.
While the foundations have not paid networks to air the minutes, they have made them freely available, and in the early years paid to have them run in cinemas across the country. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has ruled that Heritage Minutes are an "on-going dramatic series" thus each minute counts as ninety-seconds of a station's Canadian content requirements.
The Heritage Minutes themselves have become part of Canadian culture.
Not all of the episodes have actually aired. 74 of them are available for viewing online; the minutes about the 1972 Summit Series and Canadian peacekeepers are not available online.
Read more about Heritage Minute: List of Heritage Minutes, Parodies
Famous quotes containing the words heritage and/or minute:
“It seems to me that upbringings have themes. The parents set the theme, either explicitly or implicitly, and the children pick it up, sometimes accurately and sometimes not so accurately.... The theme may be “Our family has a distinguished heritage that you must live up to” or “No matter what happens, we are fortunate to be together in this lovely corner of the earth” or “We have worked hard so that you can have the opportunities we didn’t have.””
—Calvin Trillin (20th century)
“Nature has from the first expanded the minute blossoms of the forest only toward the heavens, above men’s heads and unobserved by them. We see only the flowers that are under our feet in the meadows.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)