Done With Turkeys on Thanksgiving
You don’t expect turkey liberation movies aimed at young children. Yet that is the improbable pitch for the latest computer animated A-minus list mashup Free Birds.
Given director Jimmy Hayward’s background in animation, it comes as no surprise that the movie has good visuals. Given that his last directorial effort was Jonah Hex, it’s also no surprise that the movie is a conceptual, dramatic and, yes, historical disaster. Deft comic voicework by Owen Wilson, Woody Harrelson, Amy Poehler and George Takei could not save their turkey of a film.
Hayward’s problem, as the film acknowledges a few times, is the fowl themselves. Many species in the animal kingdom are relatively easy to sympathize with. Turkeys are not high on the list. The birds are exceedingly stupid, a fact that even the story’s protagonist, presidentially pardoned turkey Reggie admits. “Let’s face it, turkeys are dumb,” says Wilson. They are also loud, ugly and (unavoidable pun alert!) foul smelling.
The “turkey drop” episode on the late 1970s-early ‘80s sitcom “WKRP in Cincinnati” is considered one of the funniest moments in TV history. For a promotional event, the radio station rents a helicopter and flies a bunch live turkeys over a crowd. Several birds are dropped on the crowd from a great height. Carnage and chaos ensue. Authur Carlson, the shaken manager of the radio station leaves us with the immortal punchline, “As God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.”
Try that with other species and it’s not nearly so funny: “… I thought kitties could fly. … dolphins could fly. … koala bears could fly.” Even if you restrict it to other flightless birds, it doesn’t really work very well: “… I thought kiwis could fly. … penguins could fly. … emus could fly.” “Ostriches” is marginally more amusing to those of us who remember “Leonard Part 6.” Turkeys plummeting to their deaths is funny because we have very little use for the modern-day gobblers other than as a supply of white and dark meat and a good place to cook stuffing.
Eating is about all domesticated turkeys are good for. National Journal recently published an article with the darkly comic title, “Soon, President Obama Will Pardon a Thanksgiving Turkey. Then, It Will Die.” Authors Matt Berman and Brian Resnick reported that all eight of the birds Obama had pardoned thus far had died. Only one lived to see a second Thanksgiving.
This wasn’t bad luck on Obama’s part. The real problem was with the turkeys, which “are not bred for living but for eating.” The gobblers “are so fat that without human intervention, the domesticated turkey would go extinct,” because their size renders them incapable of mating. They must be artificially inseminated by humans.
What that means is that if all domesticated turkeys were released today, they would every one of them die off in 18 months, tops. Most would expire well before that, lacking easy food and making great, meaty targets for predators. No heirs would survive them.
Free Birds tries to get around this by use of an intelligent time machine named Steve, voiced by Takei. Reggie is kidnapped by a borderline psychotic huge turkey named Jake (Harrelson) who received instructions from a mysterious figure called “the Great Turkey” where they might find an U.S. government-created time pod, all powered up for its trial run. They journey to the time of the First Thanksgiving, at Massachusetts’s Plymouth Plantation in 1621 to keep gobblers off the menu.
Best not to give more than that away, in case readers inexplicably still want to see the movie. Still, it’s worth pointing out that, from a historical perspective, Reggie and Jake are wasting their time machine. The Pilgrims and Indians ate “fowl,” to be sure, but some revisionists stridently insist turkey wasn’t even on the menu. That’s probably going too far. It’s possible the First Feasters cooked a turkey or two. But pheasants, geese and duck were more likely present in much greater abundance.
One half wishes either that the misguided turkey liberationist Free Birders would win this argument or that Americans would recover the Pilgrims' non-Turkey-centric view of Thanksgiving. Amy Traverso, writing in Yankee Magazine, came up with a list of things likely on their menu.
These foods included venison, better-tasting birds, onions, herbs, cranberries, currants, watercress, walnuts, chestnuts, beechnuts, sunchokes, shellfish, beans, pumpkins, squashes and corn "served in the form of bread or porridge." It’s enough to make one’s mouth water, and to wish that all those dry, boring turkeys would just fly away.
