TV You Forgot About #8: B.C. The First Thanksgiving (1973)

 

Welcome back to the column where I discuss a tv series, tv special, tv episode that you forgot about. One that makes you go "They MADE this shit!?". So far it's really been about tv specials based around holidays. Can I say that Thanksgiving may be the most boring holiday. You can do a lot with most other holidays but with Thanksgiving you can have the Thanksgiving holiday get messed up. Or maybe turn the cast into turkeys or something. Despite this you'd be flabbergasted by the insane amount of Thanksgiving episodes and specials out there. Ones I forgot about even! Still I found four the most "wait what" Thanksgiving specials that I hope to get to before the end of the year. Yes, I know it's November 3rd and Thanksgiving is until the end of the month but I really want to show these four crazy messes to you.

So you might be wondering what B.C. is because you are a filthy monster who doesn't read the newspaper and were born in 1997. I don't hate young people it's just everything you do confuses me. Sometimes enrages me. I am an old man and I will never stop talking about newspapers and video rental stores! Newspapers from Saturday was a great time. You'd read the funnies (the ones in our newspaper were mostly not great.) and enjoy Calvin and Hobbes then you'd see what was on the weekend, even though you'd have the TV guide from your area (mine was The Newfoundland Herald, it had Spider-Man and Garfield in the comics section!) but I'd still check out the newspapers what was on thing. I was and still am a bizarre person who does pointless things.

Okay, now I can finally just finally tell you about B.C. it was a comic strip created by Johnny Hart (1935 - 2007). It was a comic strip that was based around cavemen and puns. And goofy jokes. A lot of goofy jokes. My love of dumb goofy dad jokes probably came from these comic strips. I would read B.C. and Hart's other co-production The Wizard of Id (which of the two is a better comic). No these didn't hit the top tier of comic strips like Peanuts, The Far Side, Calvin and Hobbes, Bloom County or Garfield. but B.C. is still a pretty enjoyable mid-tier comic. It's far superior to The Lockhorns (ho ho ho I hate my wife/husband and being married to them is a horrible arduous affair and I want to die) or The Family Circus (quite possibly the most boring thing ever invented by human beings and the fact I'm going to somehow have to discuss it's Christmas special this year makes me very sad). 

I still have to mention several things about B.C. that despite happening doesn't ruin it as a mid-tier comic because it shows how many bad comic strips have existed. Johnny Hart became a born again Christian in 1984 and well he used his comic strips about Cavemen to talk about Jesus. (Yes yes I know they made jokes about things that weren't around in Caveman times but it still feels weird to talk about Jesus in a Caveman comic. Or any comic that wasn't The Family Circus.) and well trashed other religious, like having a Hanukah candle set turn into a cross. Or have a caveman go into a outhouse and have the panel of SLAM drawn as a big I and have him go THIS STINKS. Yeah people argued about that and I'm still not sure if it was a weird bad joke or an old man being old. Despite this it had a Colecovision game which proves people liked it more than The Family Circus. Only the biggest sunday school religious nerds liked that or big goobers. I imagine Gene Siskel was a very big fan of The Family Circus.

So, now we can finally get into discussing the actual special that was put out into our world in 1973. November 19, 1973 to be exact. It was made by Abe Levitow who worked on Looney Tunes cartoons with Chuck Jones and UPA (they were most famous for Mr. Magoo.) He passed away two years later in 1975 at the pretty young age of fifty two. The voice acting in this special is pretty good, first off you got Daws Butler and Don Messick. I'm sure even portnoyd couldn't trash their skills. These men worked for Hanna-Barbera but still worked every where else too. They were incredibly good at voice acting. The kinda guys that could have a conversation with themselves and you'd never realize the voice was the same guy. Bob Holt, a guy who seemed to be a voice on every Dr. Seuss special that existed, except the Grinch. Joanie Sommers, a music lady who voices Fat Broad. You see she's fat and also a broad therefore the name Fat Broad. 

This special opens up, well, the YouTube video I watched opens up with a lady excitedly telling us about B.C. and Flip Wilson. Actually she seems to be the most excited for the late night movie Cotton Comes to Harlem starring Redd Foxx. Frankly I think she made the right choice. Of those 3 things I would be most excited for Redd Foxx. Nothing against B.C. or Flip but really would you choose any differently. Port probably would just to be a dickhead. Anyway the opening of the special is very cheap. B.C. gets run over by the gang of cavemen chasing a turkey and makes a bad joke. Then gets run over again and the opening ends. I can already tell this is going to be a doozy of a pickle.

So the special is uh already something, it starts out with B.C. sleeping and a tree gets hit by lightning. B.C. sticks his hand in the fire and it hurts. They do the usual "delayed reaction to pain" joke you've seen in 82,000 cartoons. It was done better in at least 81,966 of those cartoons. They literally take way to long for B.C. to actually react, and he goes back into his cave for some reason. I guess they didn't have enough money for a reaction shot. Or B.C. is shy. He gets his club and knocks out the fire and then the fire burns the club and we do the "delayed reaction to pain" joke again. It wasn't done any better the second time around. He sniffs the burning wood and sneezes fire, and yes they do this joke twice.

He uses his club as a torch and does a weird little dance number before seeing a volcano. He goes up there and sniffs the volcano but for whatever reason does not sneeze. He then sniffs it again and doesn't sneeze. He walks back down from the volcano. I do not get this. I expected this to be stupid but this is stupid beyond words. B.C. then goes back to sleep. Volcano sniffing is hard work I guess?  Oh NOW he sneezes and the Volcano does something. Yeah the comedic timing is really really off on these jokes, and I'm being very nice calling these jokes. We then get some dumb joke involving a turtle that blesses B.C. after his sneezing. B.C. then wakes up and I consider Daws Butler to be really good at voice acting but he clearly doesn't care here and you can easily tell when he gives up on the Jack Benny like voice for B.C.

Now it's time for some goofy comedy involving a bird and a turtle. They would show up in the comic strip from time to time, along with some ants. They were actually my favorite part. I enjoyed seeing them show up. They aren't very well done here and I guess are shoe horned in. Now we see Thor and this is the worst part of the special, all of the cavemen look alike except for the grumpy one with a hook for a hand for some reason. Not much variety behind these guys.  Thor wakes up. Cute Chick wakes up (yes thats her name) and drinks Fat Broad wakes up and smashes a snake against some water. A dinosaur wakes up and drinks some water. Grog wakes up and drinks some water. They all do some silly thing and you like me are wondering when the fucking hell the Thanksgiving part is  going to come into this Thanksgiving special. This is the fifth damn paragraph about what happens in the special and I've only mentioned turkey like twice! Oh and the wacky jokes aren't done yet. One is scared by Grog out of the water so he goes to lick some sand (no e he just licks sand for what seems to be 82 years). Then another cavemen comes out on his wheel and get this.......DRINKS SOME WATER. JUST LIKE EVERYONE ELSE

The crazy caveman that I thought had a hook for a hand (I swear he did but memory is a weird fucker like that) actually has a peg leg and he was my favorite caveman character as a kid. He uh yells and everyone shits their pants and goes away. He does not like the water drinking apparently waking him up? I know Port is going to go B.C. IS DUMB AND BAD AND EVERYTHING RELATED TO IT WAS SUPER AWFUL but I'm certain that the actual comic strip made jokes and not whatever the hell these things are. B.C. does his sniffing sneezing fire act again and I think the caveman known as Thor comes by and he has a Humphrey Bogart impression for a voice. He goes to Fat Broad who yells at him to put the fire on the sticks. She's cooking rock soup. Yep. tasty ass rock soup!

Now a turkey comes by and sniffs the rock soup. Yep we finally get the actual plot of this special......the caveman chase a turkey around for the next ten minutes. No I'm not joking that's the plot. So one joke has Thor ask Wiley the crazy peg leg caveman what a turkey is and he make some attempt at a joke involving Barbera Streisand. the turkey then sings one of her songs. They chase the turkey around a volcano and into the river and all get boners over Cute Chick (including I'm assuming the turkey.) then B.C. pretends to be a turkey and the turkey comes by and says "If your gonna do it, do it right!". This was the only time I even smiled during this special. The turkey gets stuck in a tree telephone that appeared in the comics. It wants to talk to the Midnight Stalker which was some superhero B.C. became. This just feels like forced fanservice. HEY GUYS LOOK IT WE CLEARLY CARE ABOUT THIS PRODUCT. I'd rather not see the big fanservice if you're just gonna jam it in there outta no where.

Now this thing is finally finally over. Sweet good god it's finally over. I'm disappointed now but I imagine how angry little baby claw who liked this comic strip would have thought. It would have been very not nice. I was even more positive about all the dopey crap I liked as a kid and I would have thought this was poop soup. speaking of soup, I didn't mention it but a dinosaur just randomly comes by and drinks the soup and doesn't like it. I didn't think it would actually come back up at the end of the special but hey they did something with it. They complain about how the turkey got away, there's no fire on the soup (did B.C. forget his fire sneeze power?) and all thats left is some rocks. Fat Broad then gives them the rocks to eat. Then she's like WE HAVE TO GIVE THANKS and they do. This fucking thing finally ends, but not before the turkey starts the chase up again. In a hilarious (not) fashion. Then it finally ends with him talking to Fat Broad, whos so fat she actually eats a rock! 

FINAL VERDICT: This thing fails for a lot of reasons. The biggest is that while I do like B.C. it was mostly a bunch of silly jokes. It was never something that had any really big stories to take from (there was like one story where Peter the inventor caveman went to find the new world, which has nothing to do with Thanksgiving). It was just silly nonsense, that's fine for a comic strip. It's not so good for a special. You could have probably done a better special involving the Wizard of Id crew (thankfully Jim Henson did them as puppets! I'm sure I will talk about that one day too!). The second problem is the budget. This thing clearly had a very small one and you can tell.  A lot of reused stuff appears in this one. I now want to watch more of Abe Levitow. He seemed to be very big in the animation scene, you just don't get to be a part of the Chuck Jones unit when they were making the best Looney Tunes if you don't have talent, but this certainly doesn't show his talent. Weird gags that just don't work and the usual gags fail because they clearly had no money and the timing is very off. Personally I should have gone and watched Cotton Comes to Harlem. Sadly, I watched this. I don't expect very much from the other Thanksgiving specials I hope to cover but I know for one thing they have to be better than this. Now if you don't mind I'm going to find a corner to huddle against and be sad that this thing exists.