November 2019 – saleintothe90s

400. My favorite highlights from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade (1980s, 1990s)

In 1982, Olive Oyl became the first human female balloon at the Macy’s parade. However, by 1985, she was left out of the parade due to her height + the bad weather that day:

Olive Oyl was redesigned for her final parade in 1986, but it was too late, she was just too tall:

(also note that her elbow is missing)

However, I found a clip of her at a parade in Philadelphia in 1989! Being her dangerous self. (blog entry about this parade here)

In 1983, Mickey Mouse died, and I am loving the drama associated with it. I looked up what the Mickey balloon looked like back then, and he looked like a knockoff of Mickey. Bobo Mickey.

I watched parts of the 1983 parade on YouTube, and you know who is in it?

Cats.

(at 36:59) Oh my god. The original broadway cast with Betty Buckley playing Grizabella, and Marlene Danielle is there, playing Demeter!

There was also a cat hanging out of the window at Macys! I can’t tell which one this is.

Bryant Gumbel from Today hosted this year, and you can totally tell that he is miserable. That’s something I’ve learned to like about him since starting this blog several years ago. He never hides how miserable he is. (I mean … the memo) Rewind the cats performance, listen to him read the lyrics to Grizabella the Glamour Cat. He is gone.

Alvin & the Chipmunks sang “tomorrow’ from Annie? There’s a part where these voices off screen ask the kids when they’re gonna do their chores, and the answer is “🎵tomorrow🎶”. Well, one of the chores is “are you gonna start your diet, Theodore?”Then the camera cuts to Bryant and he is giggling:

(baby) Joey Lawrence is also there through at least the first part of the parade interrupting stuff, like dancing with the Flintstones while they sing “jingle bell rocks”. He was also in the Cissy Houston broadway bit too.

(Robin looked like he was about to barf on his float)

1989 (partial video of parade) , it snowed about four inches that day. Deborah Norville hosted for the first time that year along with Willard Scott. She suuuuckkkked as a Today show host. I know its not polite to use the word “sucked” when I’m trying to be a professional pretend historian, but she wasn’t good.

Melba was at this parade! We remember Melba…

OH. 1989 was the year that Alf kept interrupting! He nearly dies of excitement when he sees the Garfield balloon. He looks kinda depressing here, hanging out a window in a dark room at Macys, snow falling down.

Scott Bakula striked up a band in the snow. The crowd behind him judging his every move. Dixie Carter was on a Native American float wearing a giant grey fur coat, looking like Old ‘Doot from Cats.

This happened too.

Bart is my all time favorite balloon. He misbehaved a few years later too:

1995 was Bart’s last year, after having problems every single year he was in the parade.

I love this description on yet another year where Kermit broke (this time in 1991):

1991 (video) was the first year that Katie Couric hosted with Willard Scott. A magician makes them appear!

Sharon, Lois, and Braham was there too … three people who I completely forgot about until this very second.

A circus came and a wind up elephant dog was there.

Lea Salonga sang from Miss Saigon!

OUR BOY FRASIER SHOWED UP.

Part 2 has Kermit’s demise. Aw, Willard said “it’s not so easy being green” as he was introducing the Kermit balloon.

They had clips of Kermit in better days ready to go! I guess this was the usual back then for when a balloon popped mid-parade, show its archive roll.

“You test me every (thanksgiving) day boy!”

(deflated Kermit was the inspiration for this piece of art in 2018)

You know one balloon I didn’t like growing up? Beethoven. He was in the parade from 1992-1995, and then brought back in 2008 for some reason. I guess he had another direct to DVD movie.

He looked extra droopy in 2008. I guess that’s what happens when you’re a 16 year old balloon.

1994 was the first year for the Cat in the Hat balloon, which became infamous in 1997 when he flew into a lamppost and critically injured a woman, Kathleen Caronna, who was in a coma for a month after her injury. 1 You may also remember Kathleen because in 2006, a plane carrying baseball player Cory Lidle crashed into her apartment. When my dad told me this, I thought he was reading an internet hoax. No, it was her apartment, for reals! 2

1999 was the peak of the dot-com boom, and its apparent. One of the sponsors was (in Don Pardo voice) GAAAATTEEWAYYYYY COMMPUUUUTTERRS.

and the pets.com dog had a float.

The Rockettes also dressed like marshmallow ladies who are manequins come to life? Matt Lauer’s words, not mine. It poured rain that day, and the painted street decoration was ruined immediately. I feel like I remember green pant being on some broadway performers costumes.

Millennium Snoopy in the rain bids the reader au revoir.

399. The “Cats” round up

This week was Halloween, and this year I went as Jemima from Cats. Why did I decide on this costume? Well, seeing the trailer (and H3H3′s reaction to it) for the scary 2019 movie with those basic b’s Taylor and James made me want to see the original Cats, the good Cats.

You can watch most of the direct to VHS 1998 edition on YouTube in parts. So far, its the only musical that doesn’t bore me to tears, even if the scenes where they perform a play for Old Deuteronomy makes no sense.

You know what Cats sorta reminds me of, that old PBS show Zoobilee Zoo, especially Victoria the white cat, she reminds me of the pink kangaroo lady.

Cats came to New York City in October of 1982 after beginning a successful run in London. It was announced at the end of 1981 that the musical would be coming to New York:

Anticipation was so great that copies of T.S. Eliot’s original work was selling out:

(I’m mad I can’t find this commercial)

Tickets for the show were sold months in advance, with many bulk orders:

More than six months before opening night, the Fresh Air Fund had already bought 500 seats. The Arthritis Foundation purchased 300 tickets, the Archives of American Art bought 300, and the American Red Cross bought 500 seats. Then there was the Burden Center for Aging with 300, University Settlement with 200 and the Social Service Big Sister League with 500 seats. Those are just a handful among many, but by the time “Cats” opened on Broadway last week such orders added up to $6.2 million in advance ticket sales. Of that sum, $4.5 million had already been collected, with only $1.7 million in contracts still to be paid in full. This could be the largest advance sale in Broadway history, according to many theater analysts. Orders began to come in more than a year before “Cats” – a big hit in London – finally arrived in New York, and tickets are now being sold as far in advance as next May. 2

The musical debut was also supposed to be a cover story in Newsweek, but the Tylenol murders prevailed. 2

Someone defaced the copy at archive.org.

I somehow found the cover though. I wonder if this was for Canada? There are people on sketchy websites selling this as a print? The library bound Newsweek from archive.org has the Tylenol cover. I believe the woman on the bottom row, right is Janet Hubert, who played Aunt Viv the first on Fresh Prince. In Cats, she played Tantomile in the first Broadway cast.

(I made screencaps of the Newsweek article and uploaded the screencaps to the mirror site on wordpress)

As you may have noticed these Cats from the early 80s are kind of scary looking. There are several videos on YouTube of the cast performing at the 1983 Tony Awards, and there is this cat that is absolutely terrifying:

It’s the one who sings “can you see in the dark?!”. I think its Demeter, and Marlene Danielle is playing her? Marlene was an originally an understudy in 1982 and eventually played Bombularina until the end of Cats’ run on Broadway in 2000.

Here she is on Today in 1999 discussing the role and she also performs “Macavity”.

The cats of Cats became so popular in the 1980s that they were even in a No Smoking commercial.

And a seat buckle/child seat PSA! This one is really dark, I mean Memory plays at the end.

In 1984, Rum Tum Tugger became the star of his own music video. 3 I don’t know how often MTV played this–maybe it played more overseas. I remember my choir teacher in high school, Ms. Forrest showing us a VHS once of music videos from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musicals, and she said that they were popular in the UK and shown on MTV over there. All I remember is a Phantom of the Opera remix and Requiem sung by his ex-wife.

By 1987, Celine Dion (who was still a music star in Canada, but not yet America, and sung mostly in French) sang Memory on TV.

In this clip from the short lived America’s Talking channel (later to become MSNBC) a reporter asks the cats what they did on their snow day during the 1996 blizzard. I can’t confirm this, but he says that it was the first time the show had ever been canceled. This reporter is peak 1996 in mens clothes with his bomber jacket and tie.

By June of 1997, Cats broke the record previously held by A Chorus Line of longest running show on Broadway:

Along the way to its longevity record, which applies just to Broadway shows, “Cats” has piled up some big numbers. It has provided employment to 231 actors, two of whom, Marlene Danielle and Susan Powers, have been with the musical since it opened. (Nineteen cast members have died.) The magical tire that carries Grizabella heavenward has clocked more than 114 miles in its nightly voyage to the Heaviside Layer. “Memory,” the show-stopping song that ends the first act, has been recorded by more than 180 artists. The New York production has used more than 1.5 million pounds of dry ice and 2,706 pounds of yak hair for wigs. It has sold 390,000 T-shirts, 130,000 sweat shirts, 147,000 lapel pins and 1.14 million souvenir books. 1