Thanksgiving rental roundup

A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving

I’ve reviewed the Peanuts gang’s activities from Christmas and Halloween already, so I may as well get this list rolling with my favorite special.

I’m not kidding. While the iconography of Charlie Brown’s other holiday shows have become inseparable from Halloween and Christmas, A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving hasn’t left the same impression on pop culture.

Personally, I love it for the great physical comedy routines with Snoopy and Woodstock. I also like how there’s a very unpreachy moral to the story, even if the last-second bail out was a little too cute.

I even like the cooking scenes. The age-appropriate attempt at making a feast for the other kids was totally something I would have loved to pull off as a young lad. And I would have been ecstatic if one of my friends was pulling it off as, unlike Peppermint Patty, I understood that cooking a turkey was well outside a child’s range. Heck, plenty of adults can’t pull that off.

So yeah, Thanksgiving was all about not trying to make something out to be what it isn’t, and stopping your moaning about what you don’t have long enough to appreciate the good in what you do have. It’s a relatively deep message for the simple delivery, but that’s what Peanuts always excelled at. That’s why I call this the best Peanuts holiday special: it’s the one that delivered best on the strengths of the franchise.

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A Garfield Thanksgiving

While Garfield’s Halloween and Christmas specials can go toe to toe with those of its rival (in my headcanon) comic Peanus, Turkey Day pits their best against the orange cat’s worst.

While there are a couple of notable bits — like Grandma Arbuckle’s appearance — the special plods along so horribly slowly without much really going on. I think that the reason for that is because it’s Jon who is driving the plot forward rather than Garfield.

What else is there to say, really? It’s the second and final appearance of both Dr. Liz Wilson and Grandma in the specials? It’s the only appearance of Jon’s dining room? It does have a truth-in-television moment about how not to cook a turkey, though, so at least it’s educational.

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The Mouse on the Mayflower

Finishing your traditional holiday hat trick of Garfield, Charlie Brown and Rankin/Bass, I suppose The Mouse on the Mayflower is at least educational too. Kind of. Trust me, it went better than The Mouse on the Speedwell.

What we have here is a heavily fictionalized story of The Pilgrims’ voyage and settlement of the Massachusetts Bay colony, as told from the perspective of a mouse. Who is also a Pilgrim.

It also seems to be part of the same universe as ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas, as talking anthropomorphic mice peacefully co-exist with humans and openly participate in human society.

If you’d rather not see how 1960s animators designed Native Americans (and Native American mice), this probably isn’t your cup of tea. But if Rankin/Bass’s typical animated quirks entertain you, there are plenty to find here. I especially like the whole-and-a-half-assed dramatic delivery by Eddie Albert contrasting with most of the people he’s playing against.

While we’re dropping names, I should make a big deal about Tennessee Ernie Ford starring as that mouse Pilgrim, but us kids today probably could only know him as the guy singing the song on the jukebox in when Marty McFly first enters the diner in 1955.

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Planes, Trains and Automobiles

Best known as the only answer you can think of to the question “Are there any movies that take place on Thanksgiving?” but only because that part sticks out so much.

Planes, Trains and Automobiles pits all-time comedy titans Steve Martin and John Candy against each other on the unplanned road trip from hell trying to get home in time for Thanksgiving Dinner.

While their misadventures go from incredible event to incredible event, it’s a John Hueges film, so it has some heart at its core. It finishes with a proto-Shamalanian twist shown in such a way that I wouldn’t have been surprised if the scene and its buildup was an inspiration for The Sixth Sense. Fortunately, the movie doesn’t spin on that telegraphed surprise, so it’s actually worth watching repeatedly.

Watching Planes, Trains and Automobiles today really underscores how filmmaking has changed. The opening scene of the movie conveys so much without a single word being uttered. You’ll also see Steve Martin use nothing but his face to convey entire thought processes repeatedly. Not many people today seem willing to commit the acting skill or scene length to that kind of work. It’s a shame, because it’s damn impressive in action.

I suppose my only complaint is that Laila Robins isn’t given much of a role in this (hint: if it were cast today, the role would go to Liv Tyler), and her making damn sure to wring everything she can out of it really makes her performance so out of place with the rest of the movie.

The movie was rated R, but only because a minute-long scene in which “Fuck/Fucking/Fucked” is said about 20 times or so.