Turkey Dinner or Duck Soup?

 

 I doubt that the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade was as much an American pop culture institution in 1935 as it is today. Remember, there was no television, so that made it strictly a local event. If you wanted to see it live, you had to be living in, or at least visiting, the tri-state area (New Jersey/New York/Connecticut--though some would add the northeastern most part of Pennsylvania, in which case it becomes the quad-state area.) To encourage the natives or tourists to get out of their houses or hotel rooms on what is often a cold November day, full-page advertisements such as the one above were placed in local papers. Perusing this ad--I saw a larger version that I unfortunately can't reproduce here without taking out the sidebar--one difference from the more modern version stands out: the starting time. 2 o'clock? Are they talking PM? For as long as I can remember, going back to the days when Lorne Greene and Betty White were the parade's television emcees, it started sometime in the morning and was over by noon, and at that point the network was turned over to either the NFL or the Big Ten. Of course, no television, no football game, unless you lived near a stadium. Other than when it began or ended, the parade seems not to have changed all that much. There's floats and big balloons and marching bands and celebrities. Santa, of course, at the end, but in 1935 there were other renowned visitors that you won't see on TV this Thanksgiving, so let's see who they were back then.

In the ad's upper-right-hand corner, to the immediate right of the big exclamation point, there's a small photograph of someone named Tony Sarg. Mr. Sarg may have been well-known in his day, but he's long since fallen into obscurity (even I had to look him up, accepting all kinds of so-called "cookies" to do so.) A German immigrant, Sarg wore many hats during his colorful career, including that of animator, magazine cartoonist, illustrator, designer, and, especially, puppeteer, an art form he helped popularize in the United States, eventually becoming known as the Father of North America Puppetry. Perhaps he also should be known as the Father of North American Ballooners. Sarg was already involved with Macy's as the designer of the department store's robotic window displays when, in 1927, he was asked to come up with some ideas for the Thanksgiving parade, which got its start three years earlier. His idea was the now-familiar but back then quite novel giant balloon, which was essentially a huge helium-filled reverse-marionette, the puppeteers maneuvering the blimp from the ground up. Initially, these balloons were stock figures like toy soldiers or various animals, but as the annual parade gained in popularity, owners of copyrighted characters such as the animated cartoon star Felix the Cat took notice, and let Sarg inflate the characters for publicity's stake. More about one such character, now much more well-known than Felix, in a moment (and if you examined the above ad closely, I'm sure you've already guessed who it is.) Sarg died in 1942, and that I never heard of him is my loss. There's actually quite a bit about him online, so I don't regret accepting--HEY, WHY IS MY COMPUTER RINGING AND WHAT'S ALL THESE BOXES POPPING UP ON THE SCREEN?!

Uh, give me a second, will ya?...

OK, I finally got all that under control. Shall we continue?

You'll have to scroll up a bit to get back to it, but to the left of that avian dirigible in that Macy's ad you'll find the photo of our next celebrity, bandleader Paul Whiteman. Him I've heard of, though I can't say I've followed his career all that closely. He was once referred to as The King of Jazz, but that sobriquet has been grumpily disputed, derided, denounced, and disproven by several generations of outraged jazz aficionados. Like Bill Haley a quarter of a century later, Whiteman was a--no pun intended (by me, anyway)--white man who made black music palatable for white audiences by draining it of its blackness. To be fair to Mr. Whiteman, I went to YouTube to sample some of his musical offerings. What I heard sounded closer to a high school marching band than anything that came from Louis Armstrong or Cab Calloway. But then I like all music, even high school marching bands (sometimes more than whatever game is being played), so I can't say I wasn't entertained. We'll just leave the musical critiques at that. John Philip Sousa's  Paul Whiteman's heyday was the 1920s, but he was still a musical force to be reckoned with in the decade that followed. At least on Broadway, where he and his band provided orchestration to several musicals, including Rodgers and Hart's 1935 hit Jumbo. The story of a struggling circus, the show featured actual circus acts, and ended each night with Jimmy Durante lying down on a stage and having his face gently tapped by an elephant's foot! (If you're familiar with the once-famous Durante's once-famous nose, you may wonder if it looked like that before the elephant tapped him. I'll have to look it up, but only if I don't have to accept any more cookies.) As for Whiteman, he was at the parade to promote Jumbo. Jimmy Durante wasn't, and that may be all for the best. Who knows how that elephant would have reacted in front of all those unruly paradegoers?

Now, if you're willing to scroll back up to that ad and look to the right of the big inflatable waterfowl, you'll see a celebrity that I'm not only aware of but am actually a fan of, as well as a fan of the comedy team of which he was a member, Harpo Marx of the Marx Brothers. He and his sibs Groucho, Chico, and Zeppo had spent the first half of the 1930s at Depression-wracked Paramount Pictures, but just now had moved to the ritzier digs of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where money grew on papier-mâché trees. How long Harpo, Groucho, and Chico would be allowed to stay at those ritzier digs (for all its supposed excess cash flow, Metro balked at an extra dressing room for Zeppo) all depended on the sucess of their new movie. At Paramount, the outside world, the world of order and restraint, served merely as a backdrop to the boys' anarchic antics, but MGM exec Irving Thalberg thought there were more comic possibilities in having the brothers confront the world of order and restraint head-on. Film buffs may argue about whether the Paramount approach or the Thalberg approach produced the funnier pictures, but their first MGM outing, A Night at the Opera (only in a Marx Brothers movie could opera convincingly represent the world of order and restraint) became and would remain the boys biggest box office hit, and today is still their best-known film. But in November of 1935, that still remained to be seen, and that's why Harpo was there, to promote the flick. (Incidentally, Thanksgiving fell on the 28th that year, and Harpo's birthday was five days earlier, close enough for him to have candles in that pumpkin pie.)

Speaking of Harpo, here's Harpo speaking: 

 

 

 Nothing to do with Thanksgiving, other than my way of giving thanks to a comedy god.

Our final celebrity is the one that dominates that Macy's ad, Donald Duck, looking as he did in 1935. Though for marketing reasons Donald was never able to replace Mickey Mouse as the studio mascot, Walt Disney realized before the moviegoing public did that Mickey's cartoons were destined to reach a creative dead-end, and so subtly, and then not-so-subtly, shifted his company's focus to the duck. As he was so often during his remarkable career, Walt was proved right. Donald was a much funnier character than Mickey, had a much more comedically-adaptive personality than Mickey. Donald appeared in many more cartoon shorts than Mickey, and throughout the 1940s and beyond, was the Disney studio's highest-grossing star. If that wasn't enough, Donald was a major star of comic books as well, in the days before that art form became solely dedicated to superheroes. However, in 1935, all that was still in the future. Donald Duck made his animated debut only a year earlier, and had yet to appear in a cartoon as anything other than a supporting player. So, it was quite an honor for him to appear for the first time in a Macy's parade (Mickey had made his Macy's debut the previous year, as had one of the Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf.)  If you look at the picture at the left, you'll see Donald had a long thin neck back in the day, and almost looks like he could be a baby ostrich instead of a duck.

  

 

 

The balloon followed suit. Unfortunately, it was rainy and windy that day, causing that long neck to sway. Donald sure doesn't look happy about it, does he? This was not only the first, but also the last Thanksgiving for that particular balloon.

27 years later, in 1962, a new Donald appeared at the parade. The long neck had long since disappeared from the cartoons and comic books, and so too from the balloon. Donald looks pleased. This version ran until 1971, and then was retired due to wear and tear, though it did make one more appearance in 1984 to celebrate the duck's 50th birthday. Since that time, while there's been much smaller Donalds seen on floats, there's been no balloon. According to Macy's own Thanksgiving parade web site, licensing issues may be what's holding things up. Which reminds me...

I give thanks for that every time I post on this blog. 

And I'm thankful for whoever drops by to look at this stuff. Enjoy the holiday, folks.

Square Meal It's Not

Dinner is now being served.

Dark or white meat?

Vital Viewing (You're Going Out There a Pilgrim but Coming Back a Star Edition)

If you're like me and want to occasionally take in a Broadway show but can't afford the tolls on either the Ohio or Pennsylvania Turnpikes, there's always the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade, one of the highlights of which has actors, singers, and dancers of the Great White Way performing musical numbers in front of the department store that gives said parade its name. The spirited young woman in the following video will give you an idea of what to expect:

If she hadn't pointed it out at the beginning of that clip, I don't think I would have noticed the lady had any problems with her one eye.But now that I do know...

...I'm told this stuff works wonders.

Now here's an off-off-off-off-off-Broadway Thanksgiving production:

I eagerly await the cast album.

Plymouth Rocks!

Ah, yes, another Thanksgiving is almost upon us. I suppose we all know the origins of the holiday by now. I mean, we Americans know the origins. However, as this is the Internet, I know citizens of other countries occasionally takes a gander at this blog, and they may need an explanation. To recap, in 1620 a group of Puritans at odds with the Church of England in their home country set sail on a ship called The Mayflower to North America, or as it was sometimes referred to at the time, the New World. After an arduous two-month journey, they landed in what is now Massachusetts and established a modest little colony named Plymouth, after the town back home from which the Mayflower had set sail. Dry land notwithstanding, things got even more arduous for the people who would come to be known as Pilgrims.  Disease, food shortages, and a harsh winter took its toll. Of the 102 Puritans who had set sail on the Mayflower, only about half were still alive a year later. Gradually, things did improve for the survivors. They met a group of indigenous North Americans, or Indians, who lived nearby and agreed to help them out by showing them how best to farm the soil. After a successful fall harvest, the Plymouth colonists decided to hold a celebratory feast, inviting the Indians to join them. The more, the merrier, as they say.

Then there was the day after the First Thanksgiving. That's when a phalanx of musket-toting paleface Pilgrims marched into the Indian village, knocked loudly on the first wigwam they came to, and barked, "OK, Tonto, it's Manifest Destiny time! We got a nice reservation all decked out for you. If you don't like the accommodations, take your complaints to the 7th Cavalry!"

Well, I might be telescoping events a wee bit.

Here's some Thanksgiving imagery, along with some history here and there, to mull over as you chow down on your stuffing and mashed potatoes.

 Let's start with Norman Rockwell's Freedom from Want. Though the painting (or illustration) debuted in the pages of The Saturday Evening Post in March of 1942, it's come to be associated with Thanksgiving. This is Rockwell at his most photographic. At his most detailed. For instance, in the middle-right of the picture, note how what looks to be a gelatin of some sort in magnified through a glass of water. Rockwell may have made things even more challenging for himself by having white dinnerware placed on a white tablecloth, along with white curtains in the background. So much white that in the hands of a lesser artist the picture could have become so much spilled milk. However, Rockwell was not a lesser but a greater artist (or illustrator), and so each and every object is clearly delineated. And there are some non-white objects to offer a bit of contrast, too, such as that fellow looking at us in the lower-right hand corner (hey, pal, didn't anybody ever tell you it's not nice to stare?) OK, so the artwork is technically kick-ass, but how about the message it conveys? Is perhaps Rockwell idealizing the holiday a bit too much? Well, that's something for each and every one of you to decide on your own, depending on your own experiences on Turkey Day. I mean, I've been to Thanksgiving dinners where something like the above scene more or less played out. And remember, it's a single moment in time, not the entire day. Anything that might have occurred afterwards, from a family argument, to some drunken behavior,  to people showing impatience as they wait to get into the bathroom, to a whipped cream-covered pumpkin pie becoming embedded in the carpet, to the dog snapping at a kid who yanked too hard on the his left ear, well, you can paint those pictures yourself if you want. I only have one quibble with what's arguably Rockwell's most famous work of art. I don't know what the availability of steroids were in the 1940s, but, given the size of that turkey, you'd think that woman would be straining a bit more than she is with that platter. Furthermore, she's holding it at kind of an awkward angle. Wouldn't it be much easier if she held it right in front of her as she placed it on the table? But I guess she can't because that idiot to the left of her won't get out of the way.

There's no evidence Pilgrims actually dressed this way, but someone dreamed up the look in the late 19th-early 20th century, and it's been with us ever since.

There's even less evidence that pilgrims dressed like this (TCM fans, that's Jean Arthur on the left.)

Man, look at the size of that ship! It sure takes up a good swath of the ocean. Those pilgrims should have made it to the New World in no time at all!

Ready-to-serve Thanksgiving.

As Thanksgiving made its way into the 20th century, the iconic Pilgrim began to realize he had to compete for the public's attention  (art by the once-popular illustrator J.C. Leyendecker. Don't know if he played the game or not.)

That should feed a lot of munchkins.

The Pilgrims furniture arrives.

Nothing goes with turkey like oatmeal (or whatever the heck it is.)

I hope for that woman on the left's sake that this is Plymouth and not Salem.

This Puritan descendant turned out not to be very puritanical at all.

Fowl play: a Partridge on a turkey shoot.

Plymouth Rock. The Pilgrims in their diaries, journals, and correspondence say nothing about coming across a big rock upon arriving in the New World. That's not to say it wasn't there, but just that the Pilgrims didn't think anything of it. It wasn't until 121 years later that a Plymouth civic leader decided that the rock was of great historical significance (i.e., a tourist attraction.)

More fowl play. Is Woodstock a cannibal?

Take a moment to give thanks the next time you walk into a movie theater.

 "Still crazy after all these years..."

(As much as I would like it to be, that's not my joke. Paul Simon actually sang that while hosting Saturday Night Live back in November, 1976.)

 Leftovers.

 I can't look either.

Another Thanksgiving tradition.

You always know the parade is winding down when this fellow shows up. Which brings up another point. Whatever the holiday's historical origins, these days Thanksgiving is basically the Christmas season's opening act.

Historical fact: in the final years of the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt changed Thanksgiving from the last Thursday in November to the second-to-last, thinking an early start to the Christmas shopping season might improve retail sales. A hue and cry went up from holiday traditionalists, college athletic directors who now had to rearrange the football schedule, and Republicans hoping to exploit the votes of the first two groups. After about three years, and by joint resolution of Congress which the now-chastened President signed into law, Thanksgiving was returned to the last Thursday of November. Thus the sanctity of the holiday was preserved. For a while, anyway. In the past ten years, I've worked at both Macy's and Target, and in each store Christmas decorations started going up the day after Halloween. FDR was just a bit before his time, that's all.

Well, that's all I got, and so, in parting, I'd just like to say...

 ...Happy Thanksgiving, and hats off to all of you!

Vital Viewing

Happy Thanksgiving--and stay indoors.