There are plenty of Thanksgiving cartoons about pilgrims, turkeys, family gatherings, and the importance of being thankful. Then there’s Intergalactic Thanksgiving, a 1979 animated special in which a family of space-faring farmers crash-lands on a planet inhabited by green aliens who have been eating their own world.
Literally.
They have enormous machines digging into the planet’s interior and turning its edible crust into dinner.
If that sounds like something you might remember from a fever dream after eating too much Thanksgiving stuffing, you’re not alone. Also known as Please Don’t Eat the Planet, this 23-minute Canadian animated oddity has spent decades lurking in the memories of people who caught it as children. Some remembered the strange aliens and the planet-eating machinery, but had completely forgotten the Thanksgiving connection.
Produced by Toronto animation studio Nelvana, the special follows the Spademinder family, who are traveling through space with a wagon train of other humans searching for somewhere to settle. When Pa, Ma, their daughter Victoria, and their dog Cromwell crash-land on Planet Laffalot, they discover a civilization that takes comedy very seriously. The funniest person gets to rule, which makes King Goochi a pretty important guy.
His subjects spend their days laughing, while his son, Prince Notfunnyenuf, would rather everyone take things a little more seriously. The arrival of the Spademinders gives the aliens something new to laugh about when they start farming the soil. But the planet has a much bigger problem than a king with a bruised ego. Its inhabitants have been mining the planet’s interior for food, hollowing it out with giant machines and putting the entire world at risk.
When Victoria and the prince fall into a fissure, the humans and aliens have to work together. The solution involves growing vegetables instead of eating the planet from the inside out. It’s an ecological message wrapped inside a bizarre space adventure, with a Thanksgiving feast waiting at the end.
The voice cast is another reason this little cartoon deserves a second look. Sid Caesar plays King Goochi, Catherine O’Hara voices Ma Spademinder, Chris Wiggins plays Pa, Derek McGrath is Prince Notfunnyenuf, and Al Waxman voices The Bug. The music also has some serious Canadian talent behind it, with John Sebastian providing the songs, Patricia Cullen composing the score, and the Canadian Brass performing the music.
Nelvana Was Making Some Seriously Strange Cartoons
Intergalactic Thanksgiving was the fourth television special from Nelvana’s early run of experimental, cosmic-themed productions. The studio had already made A Cosmic Christmas in 1977, The Devil and Daniel Mouse in 1978, and Romie-0 and Julie-8 in 1979. These weren’t cookie-cutter holiday cartoons. Nelvana was making strange, imaginative stories with distinctive animation, unusual musical choices, and ideas that could get pretty far out there.
The studio’s work caught the attention of someone who would eventually make a little movie called Star Wars. George Lucas saw A Cosmic Christmas and was impressed enough to bring Nelvana aboard for the animated segment in the infamous 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special. That segment, The Story of the Faithful Wookiee, introduced Boba Fett to television audiences two years before The Empire Strikes Back arrived in theaters.
There’s a fascinating visual connection between the two productions. Nelvana’s animation had a psychedelic, whimsical quality that felt worlds away from the more familiar American television cartoons of the period. Lucas specifically requested a visual style inspired by French comic artist Jean Giraud, better known as Moebius, for The Story of the Faithful Wookiee. The result was an animated Star Wars adventure with a distinctive look, and a very early appearance by one of the franchise’s most recognizable characters.
Boba Fett was voiced by Don Francks, a Canadian actor and musician who was part of Nelvana’s creative circle. Francks also worked on other studio productions, including A Cosmic Christmas, and later lent his voice to Inspector Gadget and Rock & Rule. His contribution to Star Wars went uncredited, but Nelvana co-founder Clive Smith confirmed Francks was the voice behind the bounty hunter decades later.
The live-action portions of The Star Wars Holiday Special have become legendary for all the wrong reasons, but Nelvana’s animated contribution is widely regarded as one of its highlights. The Story of the Faithful Wookiee has since been made available on Disney+, giving the animated segment a much longer life than the television special that originally contained it. Nelvana would return to the galaxy far, far away to work on the Droids and Ewoks animated series in the 1980s.
So Where Did This Thanksgiving Fever Dream Go?
Unlike a major network holiday event, Intergalactic Thanksgiving was distributed in the United States through television syndication. Local stations could acquire it and schedule it for their own audiences, which meant there wasn’t one nationwide broadcast time for everyone to remember. It premiered on Canada’s CBC on October 3, 1979, and reached American audiences during the Thanksgiving season later that year.
The lack of a single network broadcast also means there isn’t one big national Nielsen rating to point to when measuring its success. But the contemporary trade press tells a more interesting story than the idea that nobody watched it. A 1979 Broadcasting magazine advertisement from distributor Viacom described the special as another advertiser sellout, reporting that it had reached 140 stations and approximately 90% national coverage. That’s a substantial footprint for a syndicated holiday cartoon. It was even packaged into Nelvana compilation broadcasts, including Nelvanamation in 1980.
So why isn’t it sitting alongside the annual Thanksgiving favorites? Part of the problem may simply be the calendar. Christmas specials have weeks to find an audience, while Thanksgiving programming has a much smaller window. Once the holiday passes, television schedules move on to Christmas, and a cartoon about aliens eating their own planet isn’t exactly the first thing programmers are likely to pull out for December.
The title probably hasn’t helped its long-term discoverability, either. Intergalactic Thanksgiving and Please Don’t Eat the Planet are both used to identify the special, making it easy for someone trying to track down a half-remembered cartoon to search for the wrong thing. And when a child remembers a green alien, an underground food-mining machine, and a planet being devoured from the inside, the words “Thanksgiving special” might not be the first search terms that come to mind.
Nelvana itself would eventually move toward more commercially supported children’s entertainment, producing familiar franchises such as Care Bears, Inspector Gadget, and Babar. The studio’s early experimental specials remained an interesting part of its history, but they didn’t receive the kind of constant reruns and renewed attention that helped other holiday cartoons become annual traditions.
For anyone who remembers watching Intergalactic Thanksgiving, the special is a strange little time capsule from an era when animated television could take some pretty wild chances. For everyone else, it’s a Thanksgiving cartoon in which a bunch of aliens are slowly eating their planet, a king is obsessed with being the funniest person alive, and Catherine O’Hara is along for the ride.
Maybe it’s time we added it to the holiday rotation. Just remember to bring a side dish. The planet is already running out of food.
