The internet is forgiven

In 2001 or so I saw a short on Cartoon Network's O Canada and while it impacted me deeply, I managed to not take note of the title. It, along with Kenna's Hellbent video got a shout-out on my "quests" page on the very first website I ever had.

Tonight I started searching again, and after finding this description on the teleportation page of TVtropes

A Canadian cartoon, spotlighted on the extinct Cartoon Network show O Canada investigated the philosophical issue of teleporters. In it, a scientist shows off to a crowd a teleporter that functions by making an exact copy of someone elsewhere then destroying the original. A woman in the crowd, horrified by this, suggests to the scientist that he test the moral ramifications of the process by stepping through himself, and delaying the destruction of the original by five minutes. Thus, the scientist has an exact clone. They find this wonderful and exciting, until it comes time for one of them to be destroyed, whereupon each claims to be the copy. After the issue is resolved and one scientist is zapped into nothingness, the scientist changes his mind about the usefulness of the teleporter. The woman feels guilty for possibly impeding scientific progress, and atones for this by stepping through the machine herself, claiming that her new copied self is free of guilt for what her original had done.

decided to Ask MetaFilter if the hivemind knew the title or director. I get insecure about asking stupid questions, though, so held off and tried once again to see if my google-fu could pull me out of the jam.

Lo and behold! The next search got me a result of "I think it was called 'To Be'" and two searches later I was at an IMDb message board that not only confirmed the title and gave me John Weldon's name, but included a youtube link:





It's a philosophical 10 minutes I happily spend over and over and over again.

And me helping the internet?

I went back and added John Weldon's name and the title of his short to the TVtropes page that mentioned it. :)