‘WKRP In Cincinnati’ Classic Thanksgiving Turkey Episode: What To Know

ACROSS AMERICA — Whether on antenna TV, via streaming services or through bootleg YouTube uploads, Americans will be getting their Thanksgiving fix this week with what ranks as 24 of the funniest minutes ever on broadcast TV: “Turkeys Away,” the “WKRP In Cincinnati” episode that endures 44 years after its original airing in 1978.

You know the line: “As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.”

It’s funny — but not as funny as the set-up. Disagree with us if you’d like (but there is no other correct answer).

If you’ve somehow missed “Turkeys Away,” and we’re not sure how that is even possible, the hapless WKRP station manager “Big Guy” Arthur Carlson, played by Gordon Jump, felt left out and dreamed up the promotion that went awry in so, so many ways.

Here are four things to know about the “Turkeys Away” episode, the show’s seventh in its inaugural season.

How Turkey Drop Really Happened

The sitcom created by ad executive Hugh Wilson included characters and antics based on real people and things that actually happened at Atlanta’s top 40 AM radio powerhouse at the time, 790/WQXI-AM, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Wilson, according to an oral history on the website Classic TV History, based the episode on a story recounted him to by at-the-time WQXI general manager Jerry Blum.

Blum “told me about a promotion — I believe in Texas, and I want to say Dallas, but I’m not sure — in which he threw turkeys out of a helicopter, and they didn’t fly,” Wilson said. “They crashed to the ground, it was just a horrible disaster, and he wound up losing his job over it. So I said to him at the time, ‘Jerry, I think you just won me an Emmy.’ ”

The story has been embellished over the years, though Former WQXI exec Mark Kanov told the Journal-Constitution in 1966 that Blum did say the words, “I didn’t know turkeys couldn’t fly.”

But the turkeys were thrown from a flatbed truck — not a helicopter— in the early 1960s at KBOX-AM in Dallas. And the birds weren’t live, but frozen.

Blum “thought he would just throw them out of the back of the truck and they would fly,” Kanov said. “But they were like dead weights hitting the ground. Hundreds of people were grabbing them. One would get hold of a leg, another a neck. It was like tug of war.”

“The public went nuts fighting over the turkeys and it was a mess,” Gary Blum, Jerry Blum’s son, told the Journal-Constitution. “That was about the whole story.”

‘Turkeys Away’ May Have Saved ‘WKRP’

Wilson theorized in the oral history that the show may have been canceled if not for the turkey episode, according to The TV Professor blog. The first-season ratings were flat until “Turkeys Away” created a buzz, Wilson said.

“Anecdotal, around-town kind of talk,” he said. “Those people, of course, were ruled by necessity by Nielsen, but they also wanted to be involved with something that was thought around town to be good.”

The Episode Aired Before Halloween

Howard Hessman, who played DJ Johnny Fever, referenced the “Turkeys Away” episode when he told the Associated Press in 1979 that CBS executives were mismanaging the show, according to The TV Professor.

“Listen,” Hessman said at the time, “we’re talking about people who scheduled our Thanksgiving show for the night before Halloween.

“I confronted one of these people and said, ‘I can’t understand it. It’s Thanksgiving turkeys. Turkey giveaway is the theme of the episode. Thanksgiving. It has nothing to do with pumpkins, jack-o’-lanterns, witches. It makes no sense at all.’ His response was, ‘Ha-ha, yeah. I know. Damn crazy, isn’t it.’

“He considered that a response,” Hessman continued. “He could have belched and been more articulate.”

Les Nessman Got A Side Gig

Actually, it was Richard Sanders, who played the WKRP newsman, who got a side broadcasting gig as many radio stations across the country used the “Turkeys Away” episode as a springboard for their own turkey giveaways.

The turkeys weren’t expected to fly. They’d already been processed and people could pick them up from local supermarkets with coupons and gift certificates, according to the classic TV network MeTV.