Colonel Sanders
“I'd certainly taste his chicken for him. *Wink*”
“I missed one?!?!?!”
“I hope to have God on my side, but I must have Kentucky.”
A native son of Kentuckistan, Adolf "Colonel" Sanders was born Jesus Harland Sanders in 1834. His parents were poor marijuana farmers in an area so remote that no one knew of marijuana and they never made a cent.
Early life
Despite crippling poverty, he had a normal childhood and gained no recognition until the outbreak of the Civil War. His family, while poor, was proud as punch since his mama had won the Kentucky Derby two times running. The young Harlan was raised by his uncle, an overseer on a slave-breeding plantation in Hickman County, once his father had gone west to serve under the Nebraska Admirals in a largely-unsuccessful attempt to eke out a living.
While papa's budding naval career was cut short by the abrupt realisation that Nebraska, along with much of the soon-to-be colonised Northwest Territory, was landlocked, his son was hard at work on the plantation breeding slaves for auction. The local yokels of Hickman, Kentucky (known as Hicks) soon noted his skill in fattening slave children at low cost with greasy, abysmal-quality food so that they could be profitably sold away from their families at auction at favourable prices and at increasingly-younger ages. It was said that the fare in the Sanders' mess tent could age a slave's cardiovascular system a decade in the space of less than a year, but even if it were unfit to be fed to livestock there was no sense in letting it go to waste.
Influences
While Kentucky, as a slave-holding border state, was awkwardly perched between the abolitionist North and the increasingly secessionist South, many of Sander's early influences were tied economically to the deep South and its prosperous cotton plantations. Many looked worriedly at the construction project, operating under the direction of Harriet Tubman and her sidekick Tubgirl, which was to build an Underground Railroad from the Kentucky-Ohio border northward to Canada and ultimately connect with the underground trains of the Toronto Transit Commission.
Most notably, Kentucky-born Jefferson Davis, a retired army first lieutenant who had established a cotton plantation in Vicksburg, Mississippi after eloping with a colonel's daughter, encouraged Sanders to take on a military career. A stint in the army would get Sanders away from the wretched poverty of rural Kentucky, allowing him to make his mark upon the world.
Upon the election of notorious Kentucky abolitionist Abraham Lincoln in 1860, Davis and his former comrade-in-arms from the Mexican-American War, Robert E. Lee, became respectively president and commanding general of the Confederate States of America, a group of secessionist states operating from a capital at Richmond, Virginia. Private Sanders, as their first recruit in a 30,000-strong army, very quickly established his military credentials at the Battle of Fort Sumter, leaving his former life on a humble Kentucky slave-breeding plantation behind and ruthlessly pursuing countless military promotions.
Military campaigns and conflicts
US Civil War
Enlisting as a private in the Confederate army, Sanders was first stationed outside Richmond, VA. However, after the Union's advance past North Carolina, Confederate leader General Tso, great-great-great grandfather of actress Margaret Tso, saw the need for immediate action. He promoted Pvt. Sanders to the rank of colonel and sent him on a campaign in the north. Most notable of Col. Sander's accomplishments was his brave leadership of the Confederate forces at the Battle of Ticonderoga, where unfortunately, he lost his one and only testicle. Due to this horrible combat wound, he was ordered to develop a biological weapon to be used on the Union army. Hence, he developed his Original Recipe, which consisted of undercooked poultry, bovine colostrum, and dead Confederate soldiers. After consumption, the Union troops became violently ill, thusly allowing the Confederate army to be victorious in the battle.
The only credible adversary which the North could offer in defence against the fowl southern Colonel was General Sherman, best known for his initiative in building the steel battle chariot which would bear his name. Sherman was able not only to convince Lincoln that mechanisation was the future of war and that a costly arms race was necessary to defeat the Confederacy, but was able to find common ground with Lincoln's own technological ambitions. Sherman would have his metal chariots and Lincoln would go on to lay the groundwork for what, after the war, would be the foundation of his own Northern manufacturing empire in horseless carriages. While the increasingly cash-strapped Confederate army would devote a disproportional quantity of its remaining resources to keeping ever-stretched food supply lines open to troops (Private Mills and Corporal Foods would both ultimately be promoted to General for their efforts in this regard), the North would use its technological advantage to eventually bankrupt the fledgling Confederacy.
General Sherman's protegés were well-rewarded for their efforts in this nascent technological arms race. Private Motors, newly promoted to General, would ally himself with Colonel Sam McLaughlin of Oshawa and make a name for himself in the horseless carriage industry while Corporal Dynamics and Major Electric, both well on their way to being promoted to General for their efforts in battle, would take charge of the rapidly-growing US military-industrial complex.
Colonel Sanders, his salary issued by General Lee in Confederate dollars, would be less fortunate. Impoverished, and with no plantation to which to return now that slavery had been abolished, he would be forced to return to selling greasy, inedible food to the growing Negro population in order to make ends meet. It would take years for him to bring in enough money to re-arm and to equip an army for battle, but his initial military objectives of world domination would never be abandoned. The Confederacy had been bankrupted but the Colonel would return... with a vengeance.
The Great War
In 1914, the Colonel was busy plotting his takeover of the Old World. He approached Archduke Ferdinand, eager that a million chickens be deployed from across Europe to feed the starving masses of Austria-Hungary, when his evil plan was interrupted by the shot heard around the world.
The Nebraska admirals were furious. They vowed to, as soon as they could find a solution to their problem of being landlocked, launch a fearsome armada the likes of which the world had never seen in support of the Kentucky Colonel. These ships were known to all those who sailed upon them as the "Gravy Boats" and represented a key supply line in the Colonel's war to crush and conquer Europe.
As the Great War, World War I marked the introduction of key military innovations, including the deployment of mustard gas in the killing fields of Ypres. A subsequent experiment with ketchup gas went even more badly awry, leaving the blood-soaked battlefields a trickling sea of red where fallen soldiers lie dead in their trenches.
The end of the war brought humiliation and defeat for the Kaiser and his Germanic peoples. Onerous war reparations were to strip the defeated nation of all of its valuables; apple strudel, coleslaw, sauerkraut, Black Forest cake and Weiner-schnitzel. America, meanwhile, was on the road to prosperity with a chicken in every pot.
While the defeated Germans were starving, the victorious Colonel now had what he needed to build his evil Empire.
World War II
The Colonel's military successes horrified the German people, and their growing displeasure was exploited by the fascist dictatorship which had taken hold in order to start a war the likes of which the world had never known.
Hitler, already demonized by Jewish chefs for his failure to keep kitchens kosher, was about to launch an offensive which would bring the world to the battle trenches. Using a military strategy of blitzkrieg, he cut off a key supply line of French fries by following the long-standing Germanic tradition of invading France through Belgium at the first sign of any conflict, no matter how trivial. With key European supplies of French fries compromised, rulers throughout the Burger Kingdom and other key European dynasties were suddenly dependent on a massive sealift of supplies from the west in order to keep afloat.
While the land war in Belgium was killing countless smurfs, allied merchant marine vessels were coming under increasing attack by U-boats, leading General Foods and General Mills of the Allied armed forces to draft the Colonel and his regiments back into action. The supply lines would be defended by Allied military might, and reinforced with the most indestructible foodstuff available to the western forces: spam. Hitler's U-boats proved no match for the indestructible cans of seemingly-unidentifiable matter, with the wurst of the conflict well in sight for the western Allies as the Colonel's boys and girls dug in at the beaches of Normandy to establish the franchise rights of the American occupying power over an ever-growing European beachhead.
Stalin was furious; as his was a poor country with nothing but fish eggs for dinner, the Russian empire began to seem increasingly vulnerable. The only viable option appeared to be a bloody Soviet occupation of Poland, a key source of Polish sausage and Polski Ogorski pickles as well as a well-suited launching point for a Soviet occupation of Berlin and much of the east. Mindful of the ancient teachings of General Tso, Stalin knew that he had to capture Berlin for the Komintern block before it fell to the Colonel and the American empire.
War in Asia
The defeat of the Germans left two key obstacles in the Colonel's path toward world domination. One was Russia. The other, and much more annoying threat, was from an Asian takeaway chain known as Korean Fried Dog.
KFD was a clear and direct rival to KFC; efforts to eradicate the chain, which was founded by dictator Kim Il-sung during the bloody second war, had ground to a sickening halt on the 38°th parallel. The United Nations had become involved but to no avail.
Worse yet, the KFD forces had begun an offensive, and it was a very offensive offensive, with the seeming intent of taking over the entire Korean peninsula. The current stalemate with two Koreas, and with KFC in the south while KFD controlled the communist north, was bad enough. Any expansion of the red Korea Fried Dog menace and America's chefs would be once again preparing for war.
A defensive line, known as the Chow Line, was built across Korea and ultimately advanced to be anchored by KFC stands on both sides of the 38°th. America was marching northward, eager to eliminate the vile gastronomic menace of KFD from the Korean peninsula. All looked to be on track, until the menace of Red China began to make its appearance - first at one edge of the tablecloth, then claiming one place setting after another. American forces were being driven back and the Colonel was deployed alongside the M*A*S*H 4077th to shore up defenses and impose a demilitarised zone at the 38°th parallel. The Western forces were driven back to the 38°th but the evil communists could advance no further. There would be no peace, only an uneasy ceasefire as the so-called Demilitarised Zone would become one of the most militarised and defended borders on earth, matched only by the IHOP - Waffle House border which has split the US along the Mason-Dixon line since the US Civil War.
The Cold War
With KFD at bay and forced to heel, sit and stay, the American military giant turned its focus to a larger threat - that of the godless Soviet empire. America claimed superiority over the seas and the air, using huge intercontinental missiles such as the Minuteman II to deliver fast food anywhere in the world. Thirty minutes or it's free. Would you like flaming radioactive nuclear devastation with that? Very well then, drive up to the second window...
The 1950's were the age of the drive-in, the hamburger stands, the bomb shelter and the "duck and cover" civil defence approach in which the West tried to convince itself of its readiness to stand firm against Russian hordes who had been forced to eat cold food and which were still living on little more than fish eggs and borscht, washing all of this down with massive amounts of vodka. The Soviets were even to occupy Georgia, a battle tactic blatantly stolen from General Sherman, although fortunately for the fast-food empires of the world they were unable to find the Coca-Cola secret anywhere in Tbilisi. Ever the cautious man of military, Colonel Sanders forged alliances with Pepsi in order to be ready for any eventuality.
The Pepsi brigades were sheltered from aerial bombardment in a series of impermeable concrete bunkers, known as Pizza Huts, as part of the Army Corps of Engineers effort, Operation Deep Dish. These fortifications would be key during the bloodshed which was about to take place as part of the Fast Food Wars.
Fast Food wars
Sanders took part in the battle of Kentuckycoursant against the evil chicken men in 1951. After killing many with grenade launchers and M16, he learned that lead with a dash of gun powder makes tasty seasoning. He did not realize the gravity of his discovery until the rise of the Fast Food Wars.
The troubles started quietly enough. First a growing pattern of unrest and anger amongst the minimum-wage troops, then word that key minions had been captured by the evil dictator Burger King and his doubly-evil consort, the dreaded Dairy Queen. "Let them eat cake", exclaimed the putrid pistachio princess as she looked out among the throngs of miserable McMinions.
Discontent soon led to open confrontation in the streets of major cities, then escalated to armed military assault. The empire of the foul Burger King would be either built or destroyed; every gun, every oven, every cannon was at the ready for the military conflict to dethrone the ruthless tyrants.
Meanwhile, as mighty alliances were formed and armed conflict spilled across the seas, the bloodiest of all battles were between the KFC ( Kentuckistan Fried Combatants), led by the colonel, and the McDonaldland McMilitia, led by none other than Ronald McDonald. After many street battles across the USA, Colonel Sanders finally defeated Ronald McDonald in a one-on-one death match in February 1976.
Decline
Sanders' price for his addiction of fried chicken
As Sanders got older his chicken would soon take over his mind. For weeks on end he would eat up to five buckets a day with no side dishes. Though on a warm spring evening his obsession for chicken would soon scar him.
As he dropped the raw drumsticks in the fryer he soon got impatient with a raging desire for his beloved chicken. With a furious squeal of hunger he dove his hand in the boiling fat turning his hand to a fried golden crisp. His mindless love for chicken had left the colonel scarred but his resolve has never been stronger! With a great deal of confidence inside Sanders he went forth to the U.S. senate and turned his franchise to the height of being the first restaurant empire of fried chicken for a fat and lazy society!
With a roaring applause the senate eagerly awaited the Colonel's supreme control of the fast food business for the next 20 years after the ignoble crushing of the McDonald's rebellion. The endless battles to defend his military empire, however, were slowly taking their toll on an increasingly frail and ageing Kentucky Colonel.
Death and zombie resurrection
On December 16 1980, Colonel Sanders ultimately fell victim to brutal ambush by extremist factions during an liberation effort in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, sadly meeting a painful end in poppy and sesame-seed adorned killing fields where ketchup ran like blood. His remains would be repatriated in a daring marine commando raid which was to serve as a taste of a 1993-era Somalia to come; a Black Hawk Down moment, with Soviet-era Chicken Kiev serving as a diversion until it could be destroyed in a Chernobyl-sized nuclear mushroom cloud with parsnips and gravy.
He was laid to rest in a huge national ceremony with full military honours and a side order of coleslaw. Even today, the Colonel Sanders First Brigade mausoleum stands tall at Arlington National Cemetery, fittingly leaving the war-hardened but mighty Colonel with a spot in his beloved Confederacy as final resting place.
Nonetheless, America's enemies in various far-flung faraway lands from Iraq and Libya to the site of his final battle for control of Afghanistan have reported some rather strange sightings at countless roadside locations, stretching mirage-like across cities, nations, deserts and battlefields. The reaction of terrorised fear which would be inspired in unsuspecting mujihadeen when caught, improvised explosive devices in hand, by the ghostly Colonel proudly brandishing a red, white and blue bucket of Kentucky poultry has been one in which would-be martyrs have been reduced to quivering masses in what can only be described by soldiers in the field as "turning chicken". As a haunting symbol of NATO aggression, the Kentucky Colonel is perceived throughout the Muslim world to be backed with Turkey as an ally in a game of chicken which the Western alliance's enemies cannot win but can merely endure as an endless war of attrition... a pointless military endeavour as one simply cannot kill a soldier who is nominally already dead.
Like many old soldiers in the Allied tradition, the Colonel refuses to die but merely, slowly fades away.
11 Secret Spices
While the content of the eleven secret spices is closely guarded, it has long been suspected by many to have been locked away deep below the Sanders ancestral base of Fort Knox, Kentucky. Only a few key operatives at American Intelligence headquarters in Langley, Virginia know for sure.
In the interest of military security, it is believed that each of the NATO allies has only a fragment of the key to unlock one of the eleven secret ingredients. These keys are to be assembled in underground bunkers for deployment in the event of thermonuclear Armageddon.
US Revolution and Civil War
A number of attempts have been made by foreign intelligence agencies to determine the content of the recipe, but only fragments and conjecture remain. The first of these records is traceable to Benedict Arnold, then US bureau chief of MI5, who reported the initial recipe to be heavy with "coal and sulphur", common ingredients in the primitive gunpowder of the era.
As the recipe was successfully kept out of the hands of Union soldiers during the Confederate War of Secession, the Union forces in the north were forced to hunt buffalo for their wings, which would then be seasoned in an attempt to make them taste like chicken. This lead to the near-extinction of the bison on the northern plains. Britain, meanwhile, had carefully concealed the Benedict Arnold dispatches in the Tower of London along with a collection of other recipes, including not only coleslaw and side dishes but also an egg concoction which was to become Eggs Benedict and be used to prop up the English muffin industry in their battles against the mesquinerie of the so-called "Continental breakfast" which so turned the stomachs of loyal British beefeaters.
There is no historical record of whether Great Britain attempted to use Arnold's dispatch as a basis for wartime production, but the recipe appears to have been used aboard Mont Blanc - a French munitions ship - with disastrous results which included the unintended destruction of much of Halifax, Nova Scotia during the Great War. Fortunately the Citadel, a fortification shielded from the force of the main blast due to its construction on a hill which directed the worst of the shockwave upward, was to survive and defend the tiny Scottish colony so that it could rebuild.
This appears to have been the last attempt to replicate the Colonel's military feats abroad. The deadly but painful lesson had been learned.
Great War and World War II
As the quantity of fries required to regain control of Belgium alone during two world wars would place a massive strain on allied military budgets, every ingredient from the smallest condiment package to the largest incendiary and explosive bombardment would need to be meticulously accounted for under the strictest of military secrecy.
In order to foil rival intelligence agencies, the composition, ballistic and explosive properties have been refined and new spices added over the years. The initial flavour of black powder and saltpetre would change as advances in metallurgy would dramatically recast the size, calibre and range of chicken cannon in the various military campaigns over more than a century of active wartime service.
Each war would bring new challenges, new carnage and new taste preferences which would be met with the full weight of the Sanders battalions and their military engineering capabilities. Ultimately, Albert Einstein and the entire Manhattan Project would be enlisted and drafted to the task of creating the one final secret ingredient, plutonium, which would leave a Tokyo Emperor outflanked by General Tso in the Chinese-led east, Colonel Sanders standing tall on behalf of the US-backed western allies and nothing but nuclear devastation all about. The final surrender was ultimately only to come about after the demise in Nagasaki of Japanese naval admiral Chicken Teriyaki, at that time the only surviving Imperial Japan kamikaze pilot, left Hirohito no option but an unconditional surrender which would end the worst war the world had ever known.
In the immortal words of Harry S. Truman, "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen".
Trivia
- The Colonel once tried making giant drumsticks by cloning dinosaurs, this is explained in documentary both as stone tablets and in the feature film "Jurassic Park".
- The Colonel liked to dress in women's clothing. He would try on designer lingerie and dance; after the Dairy Queen was sent to the guillotine for her transgressions during the French Vanilla Revolution, Sanders went on to steal her identity and wardrobe, living as a woman for many years.
- Madonna referred to the famous Kentuckistan Fried Chicken slogan in her 1992 song about oral sex, "Where Life Begins", singing the lines Colonel Sanders says it best/It's finger-lickin' good. In the video promoting this song, she appears wearing women's clothing and inviting viewers with "let them eat cake".
- In Adam Sandler's movie The Waterboy, he refers to his biology teacher as Colonel Sanders, due to the fact he's "finger-licking good."
- In 1957 Colonel Sanders won a stand off against the FBI armed only with fried chicken and side dishes.
- Colonel Sanders was deported during the reign of Diageo in the aftermath of a failed attempt to assassinate the Burger King. He contemplated a military counterattack but instead retrenched and gorged himself with fried chicken that night after the American Broadcasting System reported the Burger King's forced abdication and exile.
- In an episode of The Muppet Show, a picture of Colonel Sanders is used as a dartboard in Camilla's dressing room.
- The Hanshin Tiger baseball team suffered from the "Curse of the Colonel" for many years: rioting fans stole a statue of the Colonel from a local KFC shop in 1985 and the team did not win another championship until 2003. (The Tigers' star player was a bearded American slugger named Randy Bass who bore a faint resemblance to the Colonel.)
- Colonel Sanders appears as a fictional character in Haruki Murakami's novel Kafka on the Shore. The Colonel also appeared in Water Boy but nobody saw it.
- Was promoted to General for a brief period when he fought on the side of the Pepsi Republican Army during the Cola Wars. He was demoted back to Colonel as punishment for ordering the murder of over two thousand civilians in what came to be known as the Christmas Eve Massacre.
- Colonel Sanders is the half-brother of popcorn guru Orville Redenbacher and gave him the nickname "The Kernel". Redenbacher claims he and his brother would feed his chickens popcorn kernels and then roast them over a spitfire, thus inventing "popcorn chicken". The recipe was a flop until Popeye's Chicken revised it so there were fewer feathers to pick out of one's teeth.
- Colonel Sanders also goes under the name of Xerxes the God King. His evil ways were exposed by Chicken Little but no one paid attention to the warnings until it was already too late.
- From 2004-2006 KFC restaurants in Cambodia replaced the logo featuring Colonel Sanders with one depicting disgraced '70s rock star Gary Glitter. The same is not true in North Korea, where only propaganda for the rival KFD chain is permitted by the communist régime.
References
- Jonathan Seagull Chicken by Chicken Little, ISBN 978-0099083009 details the Colonel's wartime atrocities
See Also
- Uncyclopedia:Colonel Sanders, on which portions of this text were based (now deleted)
- カーネル・サンダース in Japanese
- 刪的死上校 in Traditional Chinese