Happy Wacky Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving everybody.

To celebrate the day of the big feast here's my salute to the greatest food related comedy of all time...

Acknowledgments to Norman Saunders the master artist of the Wacky Packages. 

You're a Lousy Cook Charlie Brown

After the success of A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965), and It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (1966) the next big Peanuts holiday special was A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving (1973).  Well two out of three isn't bad.  Seriously, do they even still air this one?


Nevertheless it was popular enough for Scholastic to publish a cute little picture book in 1975...

The text in the book follows the television script almost verbatim. The art looks like it came directly from the TV special as well, but it has some slight differences. For example check out the side-by-side comparisons below...

... on the left side is the book and it shows Peppermint Patty's phone as white and Charlie Brown's phone as red, but in frames on the right taken from the TV special the color of the phones are reversed.

Oh wait folks, I've just received an email...  It's from the Guinness World Record people, and because of that bit about the phone colors it seems I've won "Blog with the Most Pathetic Piece of Trivial Information." Wow, I didn't even know that was a category.

Anyways in A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving Charlie Brown has a predicament of course, and when he's advised that he prepare a special Thanksgiving meal for his friends he says...

You're damn right Chuck.  You can't cook a Thanksgiving dinner, and you can't make a kid-friendly cookbook either...

Let's get real, the recipes in the Peanuts Lunch Bag Cook Book obviously weren't written by Charlie Brown, but they were written by someone completely out of touch with what most children want to eat.  Just take take look at this "Linus Loves Liverwurst Sandwiches"...

Who even eats liverwurst much less a kid?  Hey, I'm not just cherry picking a recipe for maximum child objectionability (well, maybe a little),  the recipe before this one is "A School of Tuna Sandwiches"  (OK it's possible a kid might eat a tuna fish sandwich, but it's that weird kid who carried his lunch in the brown-paper bag that had a giant grease stain on it), and immediately following are "Some Salmon Sandwiches" and "Lucy's Crabby Sandwiches." So here we have tuna, liverwurst, salmon and crab sandwiches - how many kids are going to go for this?  If you don't understand what I'm getting at maybe watching this recent Domino's Pizza commercial will help...


As a kid, I practically lived on peanut butter sandwiches, and so one may think when I got to "Stick-To-The-Roof-Of-Your-Mouth Peanut Butter Sandwiches" I'd finally find something I'd like to try, but no, not really...

There's nothing here that improves on a simple plain peanut butter sandwich, or a PB&J. The very fist recipe calls for finely chopped celery and catsup on a PB sandwich.  I know of the famous "Ants on a Log" kids snack so I guess that's were the chopped up celery comes from, but catsup?  Did Shaggy and Scooby come up with that?  Another Shaggy and Scooby-like PB variation was the suggestion of pickle relish.  Hmmm, peanut butter and pickle relish - these don't at all seem like two great tastes that taste great together...


Now who the hell walks down the street eating straight out of a jar of peanut butter...

Variations on a Thanksgiving Theme

Norman Rockwell's iconic "Thanksgiving Painting" titled Freedom from Want appeared in The Saturday Evening Post on March 6, 1943. This was Rockwell's third installment of his famous Four Freedoms series.

Now with that bit of history out of the way, what was the first Freedom from Want parody?

I have no idea, maybe you can tell me, but there sure are a lot of them. When I saw someone post one of these parodies earlier today I thought I might try my hand at compiling a list of as many of these parodies I could find.

Although I quickly learned compiling a list of Rockwell parodies is nothing new. Other bloggers have beaten me to the punch, here on November 27, 2008, and here on November 24, 2008. So now here in 2010, I'm not only a copy-cat, but also rather late. Well imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and hopefully I can at least bring a little something new to the party.

MAD Magazine is famous for their parodies so we might as well start with them...


It looks like The Simpsons invited Barny to their Thanksgiving dinner, and told Selma to stay home. I'd guess this picture comes from one of the Simpsons calenders.


A DC Comic superhero Thanksgiving was depicted on the #54 issue of JSA.


Marvel Comics gets in on the act too with the Fantastic Four's Thanksgiving Christmas dinner.


This might be a good time to show something from talented comic book artist Joe Phillips. When he's not working for DC Comics Joe likes to draw hot young men who enjoy hanging out with other hot young men. Joe gets extra bonus points for adding ham and wine to the dinner table. Also I'm a Frank Lloyd Wright fan so I can appreciate the dining room remodeling as well...


From Disney it's the happiest Thanksgiving dinner table on earth. Although who the heck invited Br'er Bear? Isn't he sorta a villain? Oh well it's the holidays, and he's not truly evil...


And since the Muppets are a part of the Disney Company here's their Turkey Day dinner, but that ain't no turkey. It looks way under done, and probably tastes like felt and foam rubber.


I didn't want to include any non-professional or home-made works in this list (there are a lot of people out there who've done their own family photo recreations), but these next two are very good.

This next one I assume was published somewhere, but who knows. This seems like a excellent illustration for a article about non-traditional family holidays. Also is that bacon on that turkey?


Now here's someone who has Photoshoped Freedom from Want to depict a redneck Thanksgiving. It's pretty genius work even if granny's cleavage looks a little wonky. Well I guess she's not a spring chicken any longer.


Lastly here's a picture I had in mind when I decided to do this post in the first place. I hadn't seen it since I was a kid, but I thought I remembered a punk rock Rockwell parody on the cover of the National Lampoon. Luckily I was able to find that cover, but it's not really a parody of Freedom from Want. Still it's a funny and extremely well done illustration.


Happy Thanksgiving!