BOOTLEG FILES 887: “B.C.: The First Thanksgiving” (1973 animated television special).
LAST SEEN: On YouTube.
AMERICAN HOME VIDEO: On a VHS video release.
REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: It fell through the cracks.
CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: Probably not.
The transition from newspaper comic strip to film or television production is not an easy journey. For every “Popeye the Sailor” or “Peanuts” that seamlessly moved from the funny pages to the screen, there are too many comic strips that tried and failed to make the jump.
One of the more intriguing comic strips that stumbled in this passage was Johnny Hart’s “B.C.” Begun in 1958, Hart used a prehistoric setting where silly cavepeople cohabitated with talking animals and dinosaurs. Hart’s characters worked best in droll observational humor, often with intentional contemporary anachronisms. And while “B.C.” was never truly laugh-out-loud material, it could be relied upon as being a pleasant distraction.
In the early 1970s, Hart’s characters began to show up in animated shorts, starting with the standalone “B.C.: The Shadow” that aired on ABC’s “Curiosity Shop” and then in a series of public service announcements to promote ACTION, a Nixon-era initiative designed to centralize the administration of federal domestic and international volunteer agencies. As a result of these endeavors, Hart was encouraged to write a script for a half-hour television special – and since holiday-themed shows always attracted an audience, he opted to put B.C. and his friends in a romp around Thanksgiving.
There are no Pilgrims in “B.C.: The First Thanksgiving,” nor is there Plymouth Rock. But there are lots of rocks, which are the key ingredients in the rock soup that Fat Broad is making. As her politically incorrect name would suggest, she is generously proportioned and rather on the crass side – she orders the cavemen to get a turkey needed to add flavoring to the rock soup, and much of the production involves the cavemen chasing the turkey endlessly around the barren prehistoric landscape.
For the most part, “B.C.: The First Thanksgiving” is a plotless series of vignettes designed to play off the eccentricities of Hart’s characters. The best part of the special is the introductory segment, which is a dialogue-free sketch of B.C. accidentally discovering fire and repeatedly burning his hand in the process – the fired-up caveman slowly walks out of the viewer’s range to wail in agony over his fried fingers. Another amusing segment involves the human and animal characters plus Gronk the dinosaur making an extremely noise use of a narrow river for drinking and bathing, but the growing cacophony of riparian noises awakes and angers the grouch peglegged caveman Wiley, who yells at all gathered to be quiet.
And that’s the weirdest element of “B.C: The First Thanksgiving” – when the characters’ actions slowly unfold without dialogue, it is amusing. Indeed, there is almost a Tatiesque element of slow growing yet focused comedy during these segments. But when the production involves in-depth dialogue or engages in anvil-heavy slapstick chases with the turkey, it falls flat. The dismally ham-fisted nature of the chase segments is understandable since the production was helmed by Abe Levitow, who directed one true animated classic (“Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol”), one near-classic (“Gay Purr-ee”) and a lot of mediocre shorts (including some of the 1960s-era Tom and Jerry titles) that were weighed down by uninventive chase sequences.
But why were the dialogue-driven scenes so uninteresting? Hart’s screenplay made a couple of half-hearted efforts to be contemporary – B.C. breaks the fourth wall several times to address the viewer with a voice and mannerisms meant to recall Jack Benny, while there is a thudding one-liner where the turkey’s appearance is compared to Barbra Streisand. At one point, the turkey and Fat Broad also take on Laurel and Hardy’s voices – don’t ask why. There is also a much-too-long scene with B.C. slipping into his masked alter ego persona of The Midnight Skulker to answer a call from a tree-based telephone. Daws Butler, Don Messick and an uncredited Mel Blanc were among the voice performers, but their talents were wasted with dull dialogue.
Ultimately, Hart may have erred by putting “B.C.” into an extended production rather than keeping the concept in short films – the old axiom of achieving more with less. Although this special was seen on NBC on November 19, 1973, and would win the Best Feature Animation Award from the National Cartoonist Society, it failed to register with audiences. Eight years would pass before a second and final television special based on “B.C.” turned up, this time on HBO as a Christmas special.
“B.C.: The First Thanksgiving” turned up on VHS video in 1984, but to date there is no DVD or Blu-ray release. A decent copy of the production is on YouTube – and while it is not essential viewing, it is an interesting curio with a few funny moments.
IMPORTANT NOTICE: While this weekly column acknowledges the presence of rare film and television productions through the so-called collector-to-collector market, this should not be seen as encouraging or condoning the unauthorized duplication and distribution of copyright-protected material, either through DVDs or Blu-ray discs or through postings on Internet video sites.
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