Poor Thanksgiving. All sad and sandwiched in between Halloween and Christmas. Stores don’t decorate for it, and then to add insult to injury, they start their Black Friday sales at 6 pm Thursday night, forcing their employees out the door, pie undigested, back to work. Even TV can’t be bothered. Lady Gaga notwithstanding, who goes out of their way to mount a Thanksgiving-themed TV special anymore? You’re lucky to get a mediocre sitcom’s attention if you’re not Christmas (the long lost 1999 Puritan-themed sitcom Thanks being a notable, extremely strange, exception). It’s somewhat unfair.
But there is turkey-themed entertainment out there — the good, the bad, the weird, the sad. And you should watch it in the following order…
Mrs C. (Marion Ross) is so angry that her family would rather watch a football game on TV than help her in the kitchen on Thanksgiving Day that she unplugs the set and forces them to listen to her history lesson about the origins of the holiday. A time-traveling dream sequence commences, in which the entire cast invents Thanksgiving, and adds the olden tyme suffix “-eth” to a lot of words. Fonzie rides a foot-powered wooden motorcycle and absolutely nothing funny happens. It is, however, deeply ahistorical and stupid, so it’s got those qualities going for it.
When we talk about Mad Men, this is the episode we talk about. And it’s based around a Thanksgiving where Don Draper (Jon Hamm) ignores his family in favor of work. Grinding out a pitch for Kodak’s new circular slide projection device, Draper conducts a masterful monologue about loss, nostalgia, and longing so diabolically evocative and moving, so ready to rocket-fuel the sale of Kodak slide projectors, that it’ll have you cursing every tear-jerking Hallmark commercial that followed in its fictional wake. That it also brutally interrogates the character delivering that monologue is just another example of this show’s brilliance. Trigger warning: a serious bummer.
This is the family Don Draper was talking about in his Kodak “Carousel” pitch. What’s interesting about this squeaky-clean, real-life army of blond song warriors is how total their domination of the culture was back in their era, and how not-discussed they are now. What happened? Are the Baby Boomers embarrassed they watched and genuinely enjoyed this truly happy bunch dance and sing all over television? Granted, the Kings weren’t exactly cool then, either, but they stayed on message and delivered. Even while dancing to “Turkey In The Straw” in Bob Mackie costumes. Even while selling a number about the joys of group-milking a cow. Just released on DVD, you need to see this; these folks were having a kind of bizarre fun that eluded even the most far-out of hippies.
Bullied into preparing a Thanksgiving Day meal for his friends by Peppermint Patty, the perpetually-tormented Charlie Brown lovingly does his best to keep everyone happy by planning a menu of toast, popcorn, pretzels, and jellybeans. How a 7-year-old wrangles that many toasters remains a mystery, but that’s not the point — this remains a lovely animated lesson in manners, graciousness, and togetherness. Just ignore the last bit where Snoopy serves Woodstock roast turkey and Woodstock happily cannibalizes his fellow bird. It was a simpler time.
Dave White is the film critic for Movies.com and co-hosts the Linoleum Knife podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @dlelandwhite.
