In the book Ella Minnow Pea the one they came up with was, IIRC, “Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs”.
All this time I thought foxes were red…
That one was in Ripley’s, too.
The book Ella Minnow Pea, which Corii already mentioned, is a lot of fun. If you like this kind of word game, give it a read. It’s in the form of letters being written from a country where letters are being banned one-by-one as various tiles fall off of a statue. The premise is silly, but the book is a kick, and the author is extremely talented–just try writing a chapter of a book in English using only half the letters in the alphabet!
And let us not forget Big Bird’s song from Sesame Street, “ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ”.
Big Bird pronounced it “Abca defghee Jekyll muh-nop quer stuve wix iz”, because he thought it was a word and not the alphabet, you see.
The quick brown fox JUMPS over the lazy dog. Ha! Beat That!
Nine years late to the party, and that’s the best you can come up with?
The dog and fox have both been dead for years now 
No; I think that omits C, I, J, K, L, M, P, Q, U, X and Z
And also mentioned multiple times in the thread.
And I’ll just note that a pangram is any sentence that contains all 26 letters, even if it has extras. A minimal pangram is a pangram that has each letter exactly once.
In the * Guinness Book of World Records:*
Quartz glyph job vex’d cwm finks
Here’s a variation that I remember reading about several years ago: All the letters must be in alphabetical (or reverse alphabetical) order. That is, the last “F” in the sentence must be preceded by at least one “E”. The last “S” in the sentence must have at least one “A” through “R” before it. To put this another way, write all the letters “A” through “Z” down. Then insert as few letters as necessary to make this a coherent sentence.
- Guinness Book of Records * 1974 edition : “cwm-fjord bank glyphs vext quiz” 26 letters. Headline stating that inscriptions in a mountain valley irritate an eccentric philosopher.
My favourite (for sounding more or less natural) was “New job: fix Mr. Gluck’s hazy TV, PDQ!”
The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog.
At a loose end: feel moved to risk reviving this two-year-old zombie, hoping not to be come down on like a ton of bricks for so doing.
Sentences using all 26 letters of the alphabet, each one just once: the problem with this, is to come up with something not horribly stilted and tortured. In all this thread so far, only two such strike me as “surviving that test”:
Mr. Jock, TV Quiz PhD., bags few lynx.
and
New job: fix Mr. Gluck’s hazy TV, PDQ !
Taking it that for this difficult exercise, initials / acronyms are allowed and unavoidable: I have such a sentence (not my invention, but seen long ago and never forgotten) which I feel elegantly, and fairly meaningfully, uses each-letter-just-once. It involves a British abbreviation in the realm of the legal profession: QC (Queen’s Counsel).
Jump, dogs ! Why vex Fritz Blank, QC?
One minimal pangram not mentioned so far is the following:
Qwyk bitch vox jumps glaz’d fern
Courtesy of wordsmith Peter Newby, who intended it to be understandable without explanation. Granted it uses an archaic spelling and an apostrophe, so it’s no better than the others I guess. But the nice thing about it is its relative similarity to the canonical “quick brown fox” sentence.
Well, yes – especially, as you intimate, if one is a fan of quick foxes. And this one does indeed avoid initials / acronyms. I personally, though, find it rather “twisted and tormented”. An ongoing oppositional thing in all wordplay of this kind – “ingenuity; versus to what degree of making sense /actually inhabiting this planet”.
I once got into a bit of an altercation with a work colleague, about palindromes. I proudly submitted a very long and cunningly-crafted one (I hasten to add, not my own and not claimed to him as such) which in a roundabout and contorted way, did sort-of make sense. He pooh-poohed it, asserting that it was better to have this kind of stuff short, but saying something understandable and basically “right”; rather than long, and essentially “a load of rubbish” – he quoted in support, his favourite palindrome, “Was it a car or a cat I saw?” Feeling a bit nettled, I opined that that nine-word offering was hardly a gem of meaningful sense-making, either: anyone who has difficulty visually distinguishing a car from a cat, must be either three-quarters blind or extremely stupid.
We cooled it, and agreed to disagree, before getting to the stage of setting about each other with fists; it’s maybe useful to reflect that the very large number of the world’s population who are not great wordplay enthusiasts, would consider those who are same – to the point of tempers getting heated about such stuff – highly “sad” and in need of getting lives.