My Top 5 Videos of Turkey Gone Wrong

There are many ways to prepare a turkey. Here are some of the most inappropriate.

What are you thankful for? How about a turkey stuffed with several other kinds of meat? Or an entire Thanksgiving dinner liquefied and served in a plastic pitcher? Whether you’re a Michelin star-winning chef or a Tofurkey-eating vegetarian, there are videos to be found online that will turn you off turkey-related foods forever. Sarah Palin gave us one last week, a widely broadcast news feed of her pardoning a turkey—while other turkeys graphically met their ultimate demise directly behind her. But Palin’s isn’t the only turkey-related video that will make you want to stick to yams this Thursday. Here are five “Not Safe For Dinner” YouTube videos that push turkey to its limits.

Will It Blend? (Thanksgiving Dinner)

The series of creative Blendtec commercials—made famous with an on-camera iPhone puree last year—were designed as low-budget online infomercials to show off the power of the Blendtec blender. In this video, the infomercial’s host aims to blend an entire turkey dinner, including stuffing, pumpkin pie, and a turkey drumstick on the bone. Top it off with some whipped cream and you’ve got yourself a big pitcher of “I dare you,” ready to serve.

Thanksgiving Turkey Stomach Burst

It’s a well-made DIY video, and it’s not for the faint of heart. In this issue of Backyard Film Effects, a crafty online show that demonstrates how to do big-budget special effects for low-budget prices, host Erik Beck explains how an amateur filmmaker can depict eating until one’s stomach literally bursts. Hint: You’ll need yourself a couple of grabber-claw toys (not one, but two!), latex sheeting, and some “fake blood fixins.”

Thanksgiving Turkey Eat-Off

The competitors in this video know how to stuff a turkey: by using their faces. The surprisingly svelte winner of this gag-worthy eating competition, Sonya Thomas, aka “The Black Widow,” is one of the world’s foremost competitive eaters, and a veteran of the annual Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest at Coney Island. But the true star of this video is pure gluttony, set to triumphant Carmina Burana-style classical music.

The Early Show—Thanksgiving Pop-Up

Here’s a cooking show for the ADD generation. It’s not gross—just annoying enough to make you lose your appetite. This Thanksgiving segment on CBS’s Early Show uses pop-up “fun facts” to make brining raw poultry more entertaining than it otherwise would be. It starts off cute, but the pop-ups ultimately take over the show, even obscuring the talents’ faces. Should I care that Benjamin Franklin wanted the turkey to be America’s national bird? And what the hell does Chuck Norris have to do with my Thanksgiving dinner?

How to Make a Turducken

In this mysterious cooking short, a gangster in silhouette tells us about his favorite down-home Thanksgiving recipe: turducken. What’s a turducken? As Anderson Cooper put it, “It’s for the people who never met anything they didn’t want to kill and eat: a turkey stuffed with a duck, stuffed with a chicken.” Ah, America! Only in our fair nation would we be compelled to stuff our food with food (and then stuff that with food).

Randi Zuckerberg works in marketing at Facebook, where she leads the company’s election strategy and has pioneered several large media partnerships. Included in The Hollywood Reporter’s 2008 Digital Power List, she is also a founder of The Dot Comix, an online video troupe that creates satirical videos about technology and geek culture.