In “South Park,” Season 15, Episode 13, “A History Channel Thanksgiving” the boys experience the History Channel’s tendency toward bizarre programming, phony Native Americans, Natalie Portman, and a riff from the movie “Thor.”
Spoilers surely follow.
With Thanksgiving just a couple of weeks away, the boys are subjected to a classroom visit from a “one-sixteenth” “Native American” with western garb, a head band, and blond hair snarling about how his people were abused by the Pilgrims. They are now supposed to write a report on the subject. They turn to the History Channel for material, only to find that both the Pilgrims and the Indians were aliens from other worlds.
The boys are then taken on a wild ride that features men in black working for the History Channel, Miles Standish as a superbeing alien, an interplanetary war between the Pilgrims and the Indians, and Natalie Portman’s reluctance to open up wormholes. It also seems that stuffing, a crucial part of the Thanksgiving feast, is not after all made with bread crumbs, vegetables, and turkey stock, but is rather mined on the Pilgrim planet and is now being fought over by the two alien races.
Along the way we find out that the gentle Native Americans are not the peaceful, put-upon people of legend, but are really vicious, aggressive aliens who could teach the Klingons a thing or two about interplanetary aggression. It is their renewed war against the Pilgrims that is causing a stuffing shortage on Earth.
Can Natalie Portman be persuaded to open up the wormhole between the worlds, allowing Miles Standish to return to his world, lead his people to victory, and thus save Thanksgiving? Apparently not without dinner and small talk first. Typical.
The episode is somewhat scattershot in its targets, but does have some satisfying moment, such as when the phony Native American grievance monger is disintegrated by Miles Standish in a test that shows that he is not even one-sixteenth Indian. The History Channel, which often features shows that have nothing to do with history, is taken down with great alacrity. There is only one dirty moment, a brief visual.