Certain holidays get the love when it comes to our popular culture.
Christmas, obviously. Halloween, for the kids and the cosplayers. 4th of July. Easter. Flag Day (Happy Birthday MOM!)
Which is the pity of it for some of the other big holidays that, well, just don't have the cultural impact that those primary holidays have. Thanksgiving, for one.
Oh, it's a big holiday to be sure. One of the few nationally sanctioned by the government and yet treated as more than just some bank or school holiday. Tied in with our historical heritage of the Pilgrims giving thanks for a successful harvest in the earliest days of our nation's founding (and our subsequent march across to the Pacific to ensure our Manifest Destiny, yeah the Sioux and the Mexicans are still thrilled about that), Thanksgiving is meant as a time for family, for gathering, for eating large amounts of food (well, for the half of us not living on unemployment benefits). Oh, and there's the Macy's Parade and three (used to be two, but Detroit and Dallas don't always have good teams to encourage viewing so...) NFL football games for the guys to watch while Mom burns her fingers off getting the turkey out of the oven.
But Turkey Day, I mean Thanksgiving, doesn't have a lot in terms of entertainment. There's not a lot of movies celebrating it: most holiday gathering flicks tend to go with Christmas. There's very few television specials and just one off the top of my head: Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, but this is considering they've made specials for ALL holidays (for the Love of Snoopy, there's an Arbor Day special!). Other than Adam Sandler, there's no songs celebrating Thanksgiving and the turkey delights.
Ah, but then, back in 1978, a then-new sitcom called WKRP in Cincinnati broadcast an episode called "Turkeys Away."
This episode has been as close to universally hailed as the best episode ever for one of the best sitcoms ever. (this link btw takes you to a blog that reviews a lot of WKRP episodes and delves into a lot of the show's history and struggles with music copyright. Read through please)
Adding a link to video: (looks like it's the whole episode, better sit here for 25 minutes, but it's worth it!):
Hope the link showed. Damn I hate this embed stuff.
Anywho. Best. Turkey. Episode. Ever.
That they don't run a WKRP marathon on Comedy Central every Turkey Day is a sin.
"As God is my witness... I thought turkeys could fly!"
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