For some reason the top page is NOT showing the expected clip but the one here on the comments section is. I think my browser has some gunk in it.
Okay, fixed it with a Ctrl-F5. And yes, I have seen turkeys fly as well. I got so excited about it my first thought was “Mr. Carlson was RIGHT!”
I’ve never noticed before, but it looks like both Jan Smithers and Loni Anderson came close to losing it right at the end there.
“hitting the ground like sacks of wet cement” is on the short list of funniest things I’ve ever heard.
Are you getting ‘video not available’? Try again . . .
Well, that’s weird . . . works fine, just not when it’s on CIDU. Sorry ’bout that, BUT if you copy and paste the URL, it’ll probably work. Maybe. I hope. Gobble gobble.
“I’ve never noticed before, but it looks like both Jan Smithers and Loni Anderson came close to losing it right at the end there.”
Well, wouldn’t you? The video I posted mentions that it was the most difficult episode to rehearse ’cause everyone kept breaking up, even tho they knew what was coming.
Some interesting background on this episode:
Still one of the best lines in TV Dialogue.
I just watched it for the first time in years. It was as good as I remembered.
I also noticed that Gary Sandy almost lost it when Mr. Carlson and Herb walked in for the last scene. And I’d forgotten that this also contains my favorite Carlson/Johnny interaction ever: “Do I hear dogs on that record?” “Well, I do.”
Yay! I was eagerly awaiting this. It has brought me much joy.
I’ve been away from CIDU for a while, but I just saw this on TV and thought of you all. Happy Thanksgiving.
@ Mona – Welcome back!
A happy Usonion Thanksgiving to all CIDU’s Usonians. May it be better than your last and not as good as your next.
@ Andrea – Why is the man in the red jacket speaking out of turn? In Whamond’s world, mansplaining is normally done by the squirrel.
P.S. The word should be changed to “squirrelsplaining”, with infractions to be covered by the post-meltdown URL.
The man in the red jacket’s speech bubble strikes me as a good second joke, rather than an “explanation.” The comic works OK without it, but I like it better with it.
I think the comic was written around the red shirt guy’s comment, the famous quote from the WKRP gag.
I was so happy to see you kept up the tradition of posting this scene. It will never, ever, not be funny.
@ Susan – This is actually CIDU Bill’s original post (from 2018) which he then post-dated so that it would re-appear in 2019, and then after that he did again for this year. Nevertheless, I agree with the premise that we should encourage the Editors to republish this every year.
And indeed this is that same post from CIDU Bill, with comments from recent years intact. Enjoy!
What’s always tripped me up when I try to quote this is the odd wording. Even the versions in here can’t decide on “As God as my witness” or “As God IS my witness.” I always thought it was “WITH God AS my witness.” But that is clearly not what he said.
“As God’s my witness” is a standard expression… just perhaps not in the whole anglosphere.
Always figured that the line was borrowed from “Gone with the Wind” in which Scarlett says “As God is my witness I am never going to be hungry again.” As it was supposed to be that big a deal to him when he says it. So it would “is” not “as” in that case.
Here’s another Whamond “Reality Check” based in this same line:
Thanks again to our Editorial Team for being able to revive and redate Bill’s traditional Turkey Day post.
This Bliss/Martin panel seems to me to be intended as a period piece. The calender on the wall shows us it’s November (in case we couldn’t place it as a Thanksgiving Dinner??) but not the year.
And this isn’t the usual Bliss man, but do seem to be the usual Bliss cat and dog. They are becoming closer and closer to being sentients..
Here’s the color version of that Bliss panel. The colorizers have certainly tried to enhance the moodiness.
I’m unsure whether to agree with Mitch that it’s a period piece. The pawn shop outside, the bare radiator, and the aging furniture, could all be contemporary but signs of modest living and the character of the neighborhood. The man’s suspenders do seem pretty retro though.
@ Danny – Given the origin of the holiday, sometimes “retro” is just right:
P.S. While I was looking up the suspenders link, I also discovered proof that some turkeys do fly:
Not going to look it up on the Splat Calculator, but I’d bet even the best large birds couldn’t compete with being ejected (released?) at 2000 feet, even from a hovering helicopter. The tumbling and air resistance alone would be harrowing, but how bizarre for the birds, “And what’s this thing coming towards me very fast…I wonder if it will be friends with me? Hello!…” (H/T Douglass Adams)
Another turkey-themed comedy clip that is making the rounds today.
And here is another version of the same idea, but with a different subset of Stooges, and approximately the same series of gags.
Also . . .
ohforglobssake: Thanks for citing the Adams bit. It does seem like the airplane release would discombobulate a bird, but I’ve seen falconers or pigeon racers throw their bird up into the air, which would seem similarly discombobulating.
Re the Bliss panel, from various elements in it I suspect it was intended to resemble Rockwell’s style; whoever did the colorization missed this entirely. Redoing the colorization to match might be interesting if anyone has the tools and skills.
On acompletely unrelated topic (which was addressed elsewhere just recently), we need to add Deering’s “Strange Brew” to the list of comics with manually applied, authorial colors. I’ll take scribbled pastels or pencils over the syndicate’s “Paint & Fill” every day of the week.
@ Dave – I think the artwork was purposely intended to be not “Rockwellian”. The somber colors help emphasize that it’s a tawdry flat in a run-down neighborhood. Painting it with the bright, cheery colors of the antecedent would have obscured the “point of light in the middle of dispair” atmosphere.
Now that this thread has ten embedded YouTube frames, I find that the post takes a very long time to load in the web browser (both with Firefox and Safari for iOS). Is this happening to anyone else, or is it just me?
I generally don’t read the site with my iPad, so I can’t really comment on the experience. It’s old and slow in general, so it probably wouldn’t be great. With my desktop I don’t have much lag in loading.
When I open this site, I go down the list, right-click on every “number of comments” link and click “open in new tab”. That gives me about ten tabs. By the time I’m done, the first one has loaded and by the time I finish reading the comments, the rest have loaded. Usually.
I do basically the same thing fro LarK’s site. There I can tell which is the last one I had opened because the link will be grayed.
I’ll just leave this Barney & Clyde here, so that everyone will see it next year:
Kilby: Maybe. Also, maybe the idea was to do just the centerpiece that way and the colorist didn’t have the skills to pull it off.
Unfortunately I myself definitely don’t have the tools and skills to experiment.
Robert and I have had some Thanksgivings which were not Norman Rockwell also. In particular, my mom’s sister- in-law kept Kosher so Thanksgiving dinner was (which was the only holiday we celebrated with them) was at a Kosher deli. The waiters would get upset when my sisters and I ordered corned beef sandwiches instead of turkey dinner. Mom cooked turkey at home during the year, but a corned beef sandwich was rare for us. Robert’s family used to eat at a normal restaurant – he was not happy. Thanksgiving being unrelated to either Christianity or Judaism – it was the only family dinner type holiday that both families wanted us for. We took it over – first dinner in our little apartment – 2 long folding tables the length of the living room. There was no ravioli, no kugels – just traditional American dishes. Even had dinner in our house less than a month after we moved in. This ended about 10 years ago. Now I make the same sort of dinner for the two of us and “make” him eat in the dining room, something never done in his family. (In addition to it being holiday and that is what dining rooms are for – we need the small kitchen table to carve the turkey and get everything else ready. Froze the leftover turkey a couple of days ago and I think he will have his last piece of pumpkin pie tonight for snack.
Robert and I had our first date at an arty movie theater called “The Mini Cinema” here on Long Island back in November 1973. (It is a now a church – I hope they got the pot smell out of it before the switchover). Since then, barring illness or really bad weather we have gone to the movies at least weekly since then.
When the pandemic came along it became watch a movie Saturday night – at first on our kitchen TV and earlier this past year he talked me into a small big screen set. (He had decorated the living room in what is called “Colonial revival” – aka “if it looks colonial it is okay” and whenever I found something which did not match same, we could not have it. BUT – we now have this TV in our living room sitting on a Parson’s style table from Ikea which sits over and around a large wooden blue chest which looks like a “hope chest” – except instead of the top lifting, pull on the “key in the lock” and the front pulls down and there are drawers to store DVDs in it. (He made the chest.) (Unfortunately this is where our big, main tree normally goes for Christmas so there will be changes in much of the first floor to the setup. Box is on wheels and normally would be pushed into the dining room – instead coffee table from back of room moving and tree going there.
But back to the movies. About a month or so he came up with an idea – we need to go to the Friday night midnight movies as we used to do. (Used to go in addition to Saturday night date movie.) So we started with the ever popular “Rocky Horror Picture Show” – throwing all the audience lines at it. This was followed by a few weeks of Marx Brothers movies. And last week, of course it was “Alice’s Restaurant”! (Sunday afternoons he watches James Bond movies in the living room by himself as I have things to do – like weekly call to my 94yo mom.) By the way – Arlo Guthrie is online and has a large following. He will answer questions about the movie, etc – Robert is follows him online. We did meet Arlo once. He was performing at local venue which was a nightclub setup. What really confuses both of us is that we both remember him coming over and sitting at our table with us after his set while others were performing and was very friendly and nice – though this memory makes no sense to either of us in the world of logic.
So Arlo [Guthrie] is online? So is Janis! [Janis Ian]
So many comics and general Internet commentary about political arguments at the Thanksgiving table, but yesterday’s XKCD cites a poll that says most families don’t argue politics on this day.
Thanks for the helpful comment, DemetriosX. Since it seems more applicable to the earlier post today (we have multiple Thanksgiving posts going on), I’m going to try to copy it over there.
Thanks for that fun link. Wondering why this would be a thing in Hamilton, I confirmed that Hamilton is not far from Cincinnati.
“”””
Hamilton is a city in and the county seat of Butler County, Ohio, United States. Located 20 miles (32 km) north of Cincinnati, Hamilton is the second-largest city in the Greater Cincinnati area and the tenth-largest city in Ohio. The population was 63,399 at the 2020 census.[6] Most of the city is served by the Hamilton City School District.
“”””
I’m not sure if that would put it in the WKRP broadcast area. But probably yes, if the station was supposed to be AM-band radio.
@ Phil (56) – Unfortunately, the WLWT website is blocked in Germany (and probably the rest of Europe), so I cannot read the article at all. If the text is short, could you paste it in as a comment?
‘Hamilton Turkey Drop’ remembers iconic ‘WKRP’ episode when turkeys fell from the sky
Updated: 6:50 PM EST Nov 22, 2023
Matthew Dietz
HAMILTON, Ohio —
An event in Hamilton on Wednesday evening paid tribute to an iconic episode from “WKRP in Cincinnati” called “Turkeys Away.”
Hamilton businesses, the Hamilton Fire Department and fans of the old show got together in a clever tribute to the episode, dropping 120 rubber ducks dressed as turkeys from a fire truck, to simulate them falling out of the helicopter like in the TV show.
The American sitcom aired from 1978 through 1982, featuring the misadventures of a Cincinnati radio station. And the “turkey drop” episode is by far the most iconic, first airing on Oct. 30, 1978.
Forty live turkeys were dropped from a helicopter onto an unsuspecting Cincinnati shopping mall below. In what was supposed to be a Thanksgiving giveaway promotion, the station’s hapless manager — Arthur “Big Guy” Carlson — decided to drop live turkeys from a helicopter.
Les Nessman, the station’s newsman, provided the play-by-play as the carnage unfolded.
“One just went through the windshield of a parked car. This is terrible. Oh, the humanity!” Nessman recapped.
The fiasco ends as Carlson, covered with feathers, returns to the station and mutters the iconic line, “As God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.”
The rubber ducks were $10 each, with half of the money raised supporting the Butler County Veterans Memorial Wall. The other half went to the person whose duck came closest to the target upon landing.
The event was held at the Casual Pint Hamilton parking lot at Riverfront Plaza.
Comics I Don't Understand 
Except that wild Turkeys can fly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGnzyap_G9A
Happy Thanksgiving
For some reason the top page is NOT showing the expected clip but the one here on the comments section is. I think my browser has some gunk in it.
Okay, fixed it with a Ctrl-F5. And yes, I have seen turkeys fly as well. I got so excited about it my first thought was “Mr. Carlson was RIGHT!”
I’ve never noticed before, but it looks like both Jan Smithers and Loni Anderson came close to losing it right at the end there.
“hitting the ground like sacks of wet cement” is on the short list of funniest things I’ve ever heard.
Are you getting ‘video not available’? Try again . . .
Well, that’s weird . . . works fine, just not when it’s on CIDU. Sorry ’bout that, BUT if you copy and paste the URL, it’ll probably work. Maybe. I hope. Gobble gobble.
“I’ve never noticed before, but it looks like both Jan Smithers and Loni Anderson came close to losing it right at the end there.”
Well, wouldn’t you? The video I posted mentions that it was the most difficult episode to rehearse ’cause everyone kept breaking up, even tho they knew what was coming.
Some interesting background on this episode:
Still one of the best lines in TV Dialogue.
I just watched it for the first time in years. It was as good as I remembered.
I also noticed that Gary Sandy almost lost it when Mr. Carlson and Herb walked in for the last scene. And I’d forgotten that this also contains my favorite Carlson/Johnny interaction ever: “Do I hear dogs on that record?” “Well, I do.”
Yay! I was eagerly awaiting this. It has brought me much joy.
I’ve been away from CIDU for a while, but I just saw this on TV and thought of you all. Happy Thanksgiving.
@ Mona – Welcome back!
A happy Usonion Thanksgiving to all CIDU’s Usonians. May it be better than your last and not as good as your next.
@ Andrea – Why is the man in the red jacket speaking out of turn? In Whamond’s world, mansplaining is normally done by the squirrel.
P.S. The word should be changed to “squirrelsplaining”, with infractions to be covered by the post-meltdown URL.
The man in the red jacket’s speech bubble strikes me as a good second joke, rather than an “explanation.” The comic works OK without it, but I like it better with it.
I think the comic was written around the red shirt guy’s comment, the famous quote from the WKRP gag.
I was so happy to see you kept up the tradition of posting this scene. It will never, ever, not be funny.
@ Susan – This is actually CIDU Bill’s original post (from 2018) which he then post-dated so that it would re-appear in 2019, and then after that he did again for this year. Nevertheless, I agree with the premise that we should encourage the Editors to republish this every year.
And indeed this is that same post from CIDU Bill, with comments from recent years intact. Enjoy!
What’s always tripped me up when I try to quote this is the odd wording. Even the versions in here can’t decide on “As God as my witness” or “As God IS my witness.” I always thought it was “WITH God AS my witness.” But that is clearly not what he said.
“As God’s my witness” is a standard expression… just perhaps not in the whole anglosphere.
Always figured that the line was borrowed from “Gone with the Wind” in which Scarlett says “As God is my witness I am never going to be hungry again.” As it was supposed to be that big a deal to him when he says it. So it would “is” not “as” in that case.
Here’s another Whamond “Reality Check” based in this same line:
Thanks again to our Editorial Team for being able to revive and redate Bill’s traditional Turkey Day post.
This Bliss/Martin panel seems to me to be intended as a period piece. The calender on the wall shows us it’s November (in case we couldn’t place it as a Thanksgiving Dinner??) but not the year.
And this isn’t the usual Bliss man, but do seem to be the usual Bliss cat and dog. They are becoming closer and closer to being sentients..
A more complete version . . .
AND FROM 1979 –
Here’s a relevant quip from Stahler:
Here’s the color version of that Bliss panel. The colorizers have certainly tried to enhance the moodiness.
I’m unsure whether to agree with Mitch that it’s a period piece. The pawn shop outside, the bare radiator, and the aging furniture, could all be contemporary but signs of modest living and the character of the neighborhood. The man’s suspenders do seem pretty retro though.
@ Danny – Given the origin of the holiday, sometimes “retro” is just right:
P.S. While I was looking up the suspenders link, I also discovered proof that some turkeys do fly:
Not going to look it up on the Splat Calculator, but I’d bet even the best large birds couldn’t compete with being ejected (released?) at 2000 feet, even from a hovering helicopter. The tumbling and air resistance alone would be harrowing, but how bizarre for the birds, “And what’s this thing coming towards me very fast…I wonder if it will be friends with me? Hello!…” (H/T Douglass Adams)
Another turkey-themed comedy clip that is making the rounds today.
@ Mitch – The original post for the Three Stooges clip (which Bill said was a repeat) showed up here in the new “related posts” feature.
And here is another version of the same idea, but with a different subset of Stooges, and approximately the same series of gags.
Also . . .
ohforglobssake: Thanks for citing the Adams bit. It does seem like the airplane release would discombobulate a bird, but I’ve seen falconers or pigeon racers throw their bird up into the air, which would seem similarly discombobulating.
Re the Bliss panel, from various elements in it I suspect it was intended to resemble Rockwell’s style; whoever did the colorization missed this entirely. Redoing the colorization to match might be interesting if anyone has the tools and skills.
On acompletely unrelated topic (which was addressed elsewhere just recently), we need to add Deering’s “Strange Brew” to the list of comics with manually applied, authorial colors. I’ll take scribbled pastels or pencils over the syndicate’s “Paint & Fill” every day of the week.
@ Dave – I think the artwork was purposely intended to be not “Rockwellian”. The somber colors help emphasize that it’s a tawdry flat in a run-down neighborhood. Painting it with the bright, cheery colors of the antecedent would have obscured the “point of light in the middle of dispair” atmosphere.
Now that this thread has ten embedded YouTube frames, I find that the post takes a very long time to load in the web browser (both with Firefox and Safari for iOS). Is this happening to anyone else, or is it just me?
I generally don’t read the site with my iPad, so I can’t really comment on the experience. It’s old and slow in general, so it probably wouldn’t be great. With my desktop I don’t have much lag in loading.
When I open this site, I go down the list, right-click on every “number of comments” link and click “open in new tab”. That gives me about ten tabs. By the time I’m done, the first one has loaded and by the time I finish reading the comments, the rest have loaded. Usually.
I do basically the same thing fro LarK’s site. There I can tell which is the last one I had opened because the link will be grayed.
I’ll just leave this Barney & Clyde here, so that everyone will see it next year:
Kilby: Maybe. Also, maybe the idea was to do just the centerpiece that way and the colorist didn’t have the skills to pull it off.
Unfortunately I myself definitely don’t have the tools and skills to experiment.
Robert and I have had some Thanksgivings which were not Norman Rockwell also. In particular, my mom’s sister- in-law kept Kosher so Thanksgiving dinner was (which was the only holiday we celebrated with them) was at a Kosher deli. The waiters would get upset when my sisters and I ordered corned beef sandwiches instead of turkey dinner. Mom cooked turkey at home during the year, but a corned beef sandwich was rare for us. Robert’s family used to eat at a normal restaurant – he was not happy. Thanksgiving being unrelated to either Christianity or Judaism – it was the only family dinner type holiday that both families wanted us for. We took it over – first dinner in our little apartment – 2 long folding tables the length of the living room. There was no ravioli, no kugels – just traditional American dishes. Even had dinner in our house less than a month after we moved in. This ended about 10 years ago. Now I make the same sort of dinner for the two of us and “make” him eat in the dining room, something never done in his family. (In addition to it being holiday and that is what dining rooms are for – we need the small kitchen table to carve the turkey and get everything else ready. Froze the leftover turkey a couple of days ago and I think he will have his last piece of pumpkin pie tonight for snack.
Robert and I had our first date at an arty movie theater called “The Mini Cinema” here on Long Island back in November 1973. (It is a now a church – I hope they got the pot smell out of it before the switchover). Since then, barring illness or really bad weather we have gone to the movies at least weekly since then.
When the pandemic came along it became watch a movie Saturday night – at first on our kitchen TV and earlier this past year he talked me into a small big screen set. (He had decorated the living room in what is called “Colonial revival” – aka “if it looks colonial it is okay” and whenever I found something which did not match same, we could not have it. BUT – we now have this TV in our living room sitting on a Parson’s style table from Ikea which sits over and around a large wooden blue chest which looks like a “hope chest” – except instead of the top lifting, pull on the “key in the lock” and the front pulls down and there are drawers to store DVDs in it. (He made the chest.) (Unfortunately this is where our big, main tree normally goes for Christmas so there will be changes in much of the first floor to the setup. Box is on wheels and normally would be pushed into the dining room – instead coffee table from back of room moving and tree going there.
But back to the movies. About a month or so he came up with an idea – we need to go to the Friday night midnight movies as we used to do. (Used to go in addition to Saturday night date movie.) So we started with the ever popular “Rocky Horror Picture Show” – throwing all the audience lines at it. This was followed by a few weeks of Marx Brothers movies. And last week, of course it was “Alice’s Restaurant”! (Sunday afternoons he watches James Bond movies in the living room by himself as I have things to do – like weekly call to my 94yo mom.) By the way – Arlo Guthrie is online and has a large following. He will answer questions about the movie, etc – Robert is follows him online. We did meet Arlo once. He was performing at local venue which was a nightclub setup. What really confuses both of us is that we both remember him coming over and sitting at our table with us after his set while others were performing and was very friendly and nice – though this memory makes no sense to either of us in the world of logic.
So Arlo [Guthrie] is online? So is Janis! [Janis Ian]
So many comics and general Internet commentary about political arguments at the Thanksgiving table, but yesterday’s XKCD cites a poll that says most families don’t argue politics on this day.
https://xkcd.com/2858/
Thanks for the helpful comment, DemetriosX. Since it seems more applicable to the earlier post today (we have multiple Thanksgiving posts going on), I’m going to try to copy it over there.
A real life tribute:
https://www.wlwt.com/article/hamilton-turkey-drop-wkrp-episode-rubber-turkey/45922268#
Thanks for that fun link. Wondering why this would be a thing in Hamilton, I confirmed that Hamilton is not far from Cincinnati.
“”””
Hamilton is a city in and the county seat of Butler County, Ohio, United States. Located 20 miles (32 km) north of Cincinnati, Hamilton is the second-largest city in the Greater Cincinnati area and the tenth-largest city in Ohio. The population was 63,399 at the 2020 census.[6] Most of the city is served by the Hamilton City School District.
“”””
I’m not sure if that would put it in the WKRP broadcast area. But probably yes, if the station was supposed to be AM-band radio.
@ Phil (56) – Unfortunately, the WLWT website is blocked in Germany (and probably the rest of Europe), so I cannot read the article at all. If the text is short, could you paste it in as a comment?
‘Hamilton Turkey Drop’ remembers iconic ‘WKRP’ episode when turkeys fell from the sky
Updated: 6:50 PM EST Nov 22, 2023
Matthew Dietz
HAMILTON, Ohio —
An event in Hamilton on Wednesday evening paid tribute to an iconic episode from “WKRP in Cincinnati” called “Turkeys Away.”
Hamilton businesses, the Hamilton Fire Department and fans of the old show got together in a clever tribute to the episode, dropping 120 rubber ducks dressed as turkeys from a fire truck, to simulate them falling out of the helicopter like in the TV show.
The American sitcom aired from 1978 through 1982, featuring the misadventures of a Cincinnati radio station. And the “turkey drop” episode is by far the most iconic, first airing on Oct. 30, 1978.
Forty live turkeys were dropped from a helicopter onto an unsuspecting Cincinnati shopping mall below. In what was supposed to be a Thanksgiving giveaway promotion, the station’s hapless manager — Arthur “Big Guy” Carlson — decided to drop live turkeys from a helicopter.
Les Nessman, the station’s newsman, provided the play-by-play as the carnage unfolded.
“One just went through the windshield of a parked car. This is terrible. Oh, the humanity!” Nessman recapped.
The fiasco ends as Carlson, covered with feathers, returns to the station and mutters the iconic line, “As God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.”
The rubber ducks were $10 each, with half of the money raised supporting the Butler County Veterans Memorial Wall. The other half went to the person whose duck came closest to the target upon landing.
The event was held at the Casual Pint Hamilton parking lot at Riverfront Plaza.