Tuesday, November 10, 2020

A MarkInTexas Made-For-TV Thanksgiving Dinner: Intergalactic Thanksgiving, or Please Don't Eat the Planet (1979)

 


In the late 1970s, a relatively new Canadian animation studio began producing half-hour specials for distribution on Canadian TV networks, followed by syndicated runs on U.S. stations.  One fan of Nelvana's work was George Lucas, who commissioned the company to produce a short animated segment for The Star Wars Holiday Special that introduced Boba Fett, which is one of the very few things anyone has any praise for in that disaster.  About a month and a half before Star Wars fans would sit utterly confused by ten minutes of Wookie grunting, the studio debuted its new special on CBC, just in time for Canadian Thanksgiving.

Intergalactic Thanksgiving, or Please Don't Eat the Planet focuses on a human pioneer family, the Spademinders, who left their home in search of a better life.  As the title suggests, they were traveling through space before crash-landing on a random planet and deciding this was the place to make their home.  Unbeknownst to them, the planet was already occupied by a thriving civilization, a group of green creature with a vague resemblance to Shrek, who were happy to make the acquaintance of the strange aliens that had landed on their world.

That plot description rather hides how goofy this special truly is, though.  The planet's name is Laughalot, and the king is very much committed to being the funniest creature around.  He doesn't take too kindly to realizing that his subjects think his material is tired and hacky, and that they think the no-nonsense Spandeminders are about the funniest people they've ever seen.

Tensions come to a head when the king's actions cause a giant fissure to open up in the ground, sending the Spandeminder's vaguely adolescent-aged daughter and the king's vaguely adolescent-aged son hurling toward the center of the planet, which they discover has been hollowed out by the society's food-mining technology and is in immediate danger of collapsing.

Earlier this week, I complained that I thought The Mouse on the Mayflower should have been a half-hour special instead of a full hour.  I have the opposite problem with this special.  It feels far too rushed, with more story than time.  I don't know if there was enough story to stretch to a full hour, but at least the surprise environmental story wouldn't feel like it was half-told, and the two kid characters, who were clearly meant to be the audience surrogates, might not have felt so bland.

Voice work is decent in the special.  The big-named star at the time was Sid Caesar, who played the king.  He was fine.  Today, the other name that stands out on the cast list is Catherine O'Hara's.  In 1979, she was best known for her work on SCTV, but had some side gigs doing voice acting for Canadian-produced specials.  She played Ma Spandminder with a generic old woman voice.  I wish I could say it was a distinctive performance, but it really isn't.

Like B.C.: The First Thanksgiving, this sort of stuffs its holiday references in toward the end, as if the writers needed something to justify the title.  Intergalactic Thanksgiving, or Please Don't Eat the Planet is a cute special, but the best work from Nelvana still laid in the company's future.

Next time: Thanksgiving over the rainbow

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