Gobble Project '24 : a Garfield Thanksgiving

I vividly remember watching "Here Comes Garfield", the first Garfield special ever, while in elementary school in the YEAR OF OUR LORD 1982. 

What a year that was, man.  I'm going to go into 1982 in depth later, but if you're looking for an actual fucking documentary on that year, there's this damn thing, and I recommend it 100 percent.

                

Anyway, the special contained the slick animation of Jim Davis' character, some snappy voice work, including the sublime stuff from Lorenzo Semple as the big cat himself.  Being an owner of several of those oblong Garfield strip collection books you could get from scholastic and reader of the daily Davis pieces in the newspaper, I remember being fairly excited to see old Garfield in motion.  TV was a miracle, wasn't it?

By the time the Thanksgiving special came out, it was 1989.  I was in high school, and I wasn't really getting the warmth from new holiday specials anymore, let alone old ones.  This was thanks to the daily battles of trying to fit into a community I'd only lived in for about a year and a half, and prepping to move back into the old one I had lived in for 6 months, that I moved to after two years in Texas.  Got that?

So, I watched it on streaming last night.  It wasn't bad.  You still got Semple's voice, nifty songs by Lou Rawls and Garfield's abusive behaviors toward his owner Jon, and his life-mate Odie. Two things happen here, one is a trip to the vet (whom Jon is in love with, and his persistence probably needs a smackdown from the #MeToo movement. Fuck's sake) and Thanksgiving is the next day.   Jon successfully gets the vet to come over to his house for Thanksgiving dinner (weird that there's no family get together here) which he manages to destroy before he's even began, because he didn't do the research. 

So, our hero Garfield gets Jon to call his grandmother after practically having to use smoke signals to drive the point home to do such, and she comes over and creates a beautiful meal behind the scenes while Jon spews a history of Thanksgiving to Liz that puts her to sleep.  Seriously, this rundown of the holiday puts Linus' Miles Standish routine from Charlie Brown Thanksgiving to shame.  

Everyone is shocked by the gloriousness of Grandma's meal as she slips out the back door creating the lie for Liz that Jon is a great chef, and Jon, Liz, Garfield, and Odie sit down and enjoy a spare but rather sweet Thanksgiving meal together. 

Liz leaves, and I hope to god, other than future vets visits, will never be seen by Jon again. 

Seriously, this guy is actually a creep and Garfield deserves better than this putz. 

                                 

Gobble Project '24: A Disturbance in the Force

As I wrote about here, the Star Wars Holiday Special of 1978 was a bizarre affair that my mind mostly blocked out.  It was not really Star Wars, it was a variety show.  Not a good combination.  Those of us who survived it, know the whats, it's the whys that have kept us perplexed all these decades.

Thanks to last year's A Disturbance in the Force, those questions are answered. 

The thing aired just before Thanksgiving in 1978, and I remember it didn't go over well that night, nor did it hold up (minus Nelvana's Boba Fett sequence, which is the only thing Lucas approved of, and can be streamed on Disney+) to any extent, in any form or fashion. 

So why??

All the folks involved get their say here, and the main purpose was to keep Star Wars alive in the eyes of the zeitgeist until The Empire Strikes Back could appear and do its thing. If the folks behind Star Wars knew how big the film would turn out to be, how embedded in the culture it would become, this thing probably wouldn't have been necessary.  

Lucas apparently wrote a 5 page treatment that showed how seriously he took the thing before departing to work on Empire, and it appeared to be a quasi-sequel of sorts.  The network, CBS,  handed it off to what really were a bunch of folks who worked on variety television (the mainstay of network TV at the time) and it eventually evolved into something it was never intended to be.  Much like that Donnie and Marie Star Wars dance a thon with Kris Kristofferson as Han Solo (!) and Mark Hamill's dancin' appearance with Bob Hope.  To the Holiday Special's credit, these things were far more embarrassing. 

I don't want to give away a whole bunch, as you learn some great stuff, much of which is a bit shocking. The details here are often laughable, and at times during the testimonials, kind of fuckin' sad.  Let's just  say you feel for all involved, you really do.  Again, this was an example of something that was done truly for marketing purposes to keep Star Wars alive while America waited for the sequel, and it eventually became an inside joke; Bea Arthur, Art Carney, and Harvey Korman included.  It was done before Star Wars became cemented as Star Wars and no one thought it silly at all, especially at that time. 

That would come later. 

With all the people speaking here, from its creators to those who get a laugh or a warm fuzzy from it now, you find yourself growing a bit sentimental towards it, and that's a good thing. 

It may not be the best example of Thanksgiving (or Life Day) television, but it certainly is the weirdest. 

Samhain Project '24: Full Circle

 

If you've been reading this thing for the last 4 years, you'll know that November 1st is what the Celtic called Samhain (or Sow-in).   End of summer.  Beginning of the dark part of the year.  And the night when the membrane between the living and the dead is at it's most easy to penetrate.  Today is that day.

Ain't no secret to any readers that as a kid my face was frequently buried in comic books.  Some of my fondest memories lay in deposits of four color artwork pressed into newspaper substrate.  This may be my age calling, but I'll take the dulled out vintage color over today's glossy hyper-brite, over-detailed stuff that exist today in the format.  

Yes, my comic book life blood is known as "The Bronze Age".

Almost as much as I loved the tales of my superheroes and other characters, I adored the advertisements.  Especially the seasonal ones.  Like legendary artist Jack Davis' Dracula and Wolfman snappin' into a Slim Jim that came around in the fall of 1977's comics.  That was the good stuff, folks.

There was one ad that bugged me a bit as an 8 year old though.  It was for the horror comic known as Unexpected.  It featured a woman performing on stage while half of her face is melting off, and staring from behind her appears to be the individual responsible for it with a twisted, evil grin on his face.  I guess it's disturbing in general, but as young as I was, it really weirded me out. 

I was never a reader of horror comics minus this issue of House of Secrets that was part of a past Samhain Project.  Click on the title, and flash back if you wish to.  Otherwise, I subscribed to the philosophy of Sammy from The Lost Boys, and pretty much avoided horror comics as a whole. But this image really got under my skin.

A couple of months back I was at a mercantile, digging through a gentleman's wares which consisted of wall art, vinyl albums, and a handful of longboxes of comic books.  And there, in the box farthest to the right, adjacent to a cabinet with slews of Lego mini-figures I found it. 

And there it was. 

That old familiar inhale of nostalgia.  The vibe absorbed when seeing something you once saw so often, but hadn't in decades.  That feeling is quite a rush when you grew up with the interests that I had.  This particular issue of Unexpected was $1.00 in it's day, some 45 years ago, and the tag on it now only asked for $3.00.  It seemed really stupid not to make the purchase.  So I did.  

However, I still haven't popped it open to read the story behind that stupefyingly creepy imagery.  It's not that I'm afraid to, but part of me feels as though I may ruin something by removing the mystery.  Maybe I'll peel back the tape and pull the book out of its bag and board for next Halloween. 

Anyway.  It's November 1st, and it's Samhain.  So, as depressing as it is for me to say goodbye to what many are now calling Spooky Season, (and lord knows, I did all I could to hold on to it and make it last as long as it possibly could) I can look forward to possibly reviewing it for next year's Samhain Project. 

And what better way to rock in November and Fall, then with Glenn Danzig and Samhain.....