This Thanksgiving, most Americans will be celebrating the usual traditions including family gatherings with turkey, mashed potatoes, pumpkin pie … and watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York and perhaps catching a glimpse of a gigantic Mickey Mouse floating high above 34th Street.
On November 27, 1924, the first Macy’s CHRISTMAS Parade (as it was originally called) stepped into the streets of New York with over four hundred Macy employees (dressed as clowns, cowboys, knights and sheiks) accompanied by animals from camels to elephants (borrowed from the Central Park Zoo) and bands and floats. There was an audience of over a quarter million people!
Conceived by Macy’s employees (many of whom were first generation immigrants who wanted to celebrate the American holiday with a similar traditional festival popular in their homelands), the parade ended with Santa Claus unveiling Macy’s Christmas windows on 34th Street and attracted children and their parents to Macy’s newly expanded toy department.
The famous balloons did not make their appearance until 1927 (to replace the real animals which were frightening young children) and they were in fact not the balloons we are familiar with today. They were air-filled bags of rubber that were held upright with sticks. The first cartoon superstar in that 1927 parade was Felix the Cat.
Those first balloons which for a while were called “balloniacs” (and the later helium filled airborne ones) were the designs of Tony Sarg. Most histories of the parade refer to Sarg as “the artist behind Macy’s fabulous window displays” but that is only the tip of the iceberg. Tony Sarg was one of America’s premiere puppeteers as well as an illustrator. Sarg who had a marionette act in vaudeville also made animated films using what is often referred to as “shadow silhouette” animation where black cutouts were manipulated by rods.
Sarg worked with Herbert Dawley who produced the films known as the “Almanac” series and in fact, some of those early films were color tinted. One film, THE FIRST CIRCUS (1921) showed some comical cavemen watching another caveman cavorting on a brontosaurus. Disney had also licensed Sarg to produce Disney character marionettes during the 1930s including Mickey, Minnie, Pluto, Donald and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Sarg’s studio was responsible for all the early Macy balloons. Unfortunately, Sarg’s business went bankrupt in 1939 and to help settle the debts, Sarg had to sell all his puppets. Sarg died in 1942 at the age of 60 after an emergency appendectomy.
In 1934, Sarg teamed with Walt Disney to produce the first Disney balloons to appear in the Macy Parade. The 1935 Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade (as it was now called) included a fifty-five foot high pie-eyed black and white Mickey Mouse balloon. Mickey was in a “Superman-style” pose with his hands on his hips and elbows out in the air while over a dozen balloon handlers dressed in black sweaters, baggy shorts, black tights and Mickey Mouse masks held on to ropes and guided the helium filled mouse down the street. (Mickey’s face had been painted in Akron but the rest of his body was painted in a huge warehouse in New York.)
That 1935 parade also featured Pluto, the Big Bad Wolf and one of the three little pigs. (Some accounts mention a Horace Horsecollar balloon but I could not find any definite confirmation of his appearance.)
Mickey was quite popular in 1935. The Ingersoll Waterbury Company who were near bankruptcy had produced a Mickey Mouse watch in 1933 and in a single day, Macy’s department store sold over 11,000 of them. Not to mention the Mickey and Minnie handcar produced by the Lionel Train Company for Christmas 1934 which was such a big hit at stores like Macy’s that the Lionel company was saved from financial ruin.
For two consecutive years, Whitman Publishing Company (responsible for producing Big Little Books featuring the Disney characters) printed two special Mickey Mouse premiums for Macy’s Department Stores. Macy’s Santa handed out copies of MICKEY MOUSE AND MINNIE AT MACY’S to children during the 1934 Christmas season. The following Christmas season in 1935 saw Macy’s Santa handing out MICKEY MOUSE AND MINNIE MARCH TO MACY’S. Both of these special Big Little Books (3 7/16″ x 3 9/16″ and 144 pages long) told the story of Mickey and Minnie attending the Macy parade. Like other BLBs, one page had text while the facing page had a black and white drawing. Kay Kamen was the instigator behind these unique promotional books which today are so rare that they sell from $1,000 to over $3,000 each.
While a Mickey Mouse floated in the parade during most of the Great Depression, in 1939 Macy’s Department Store in New York City handed out an advertising booklet premium with blue and white illustrations and color covers which helped promote the Max Fleischer animated feature GULLIVER’S TRAVELS and wished customers “A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from Macy’s”.
Mickey Mouse as a balloon disappeared from the parade for several decades until 1970 when an updated Mickey appeared just in time to help promote the upcoming opening of Walt Disney World. (In 1971, gale force winds grounded all the Macy balloons and television viewers had to settle for watching clips of the balloons from the 1970 parade. Mickey was back flying high in 1972.) This was a colorful Mickey wearing an opened collared, short sleeved yellow shirt, his famous red shorts, yellow shoes and white gloves and pupils that were so close together that Mickey looked cross-eyed.
This famous image became the object of controversy when artist Melanie Taylor Kent released in 1983 her serigraph entitled “Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade”. Taylor is a well-known artist whose work has dealt with many celebrations including a limited edition print used to commemorate Walt Disney World’s 15th Anniversary. The image of the yellow shirt Mickey Mouse balloon floating at the head of the parade, followed by a Scooby Doo balloon as well as Snoopy wearing his Flying Ace helmet and goggles did not amuse the Disney Company. Disney sued and Kent had to cease making those prints. A copy of that print now lists for close to $7,000.
Mickey Mouse again disappeared from the parade for a period of time but was re-invented for the 74th Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 2000, as Bandleader Mickey Mouse led the parade into the new Millenium. The red and gold outfit was inspired by Mickey’s bandleader outfit from the 1950s MICKEY MOUSE CLUB television show (although the balloon Mickey’s baton in his right hand was significantly different).
Macy’s window displays that faced Broadway featured Mickey, Minnie, and Pluto as three-dimensional moving sculptures in various outdoor and indoor activities. Inside Macy’s, thousands of Bandleader Mickey plush dolls sat on gift boxes. Customers could purchase a limited edition Mickey doll for $16.95 with any $35 purchase (or for $35 if they didn’t want to purchase anything else).
Today it takes from six to nine months to create a new Macy’s parade balloon like Bandleader Mickey. After several sketches of possible designs, designers build two models the new balloon out of plastic and fiberglass. One model has numbers over it to help figure out how to cut the pieces of fabric and where to attach the ropes. The second model shows what colors to paint the balloon. Disney makes sure those colors are accurate.
The balloons are made in many sections and each section is inflated separately so that if there is a leak, the entire balloon won’t deflate. Today, there are 45-70 trained rope handlers (usually all Macy’s employees) for each balloon like Bandleader Mickey.
A sad Disney connection is that it was a 1997 Macy’s department store surveillance video that was shown in a Ventura courtroom that revealed that former Mouseketeer Darlene Faye Gillespie was guilty of attempting the five finger discount in the store.
Let’s not forget Macy’s 1992 Tap-O-Mania where over 6,000 children and adults (wearing Mickey Mouse ears) tapped their way down 34th Street to keep their place in the Guinness Book of World Records as the Largest Assembly of Tap Dancers to dance in a single routine.
Over seventy-five years after the first parade, toys have disappeared from Macy’s but the parade continues to be a magical experience Thanksgiving morning for both children and adults.