Talk:Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade

1927

I'm going crazy trying to find the correct answer here. I see three distinct narratives about the origin of the balloons:

• Felix the Cat debuted in 1927. This appears in Grippo p. 14 complete with a photo from the "Bill Smith collection," and appears in many other sources, sometimes attributed to Macy's, sometimes not.
  • ... as an air-filled balloon, with the innovation in '28 being the use of helium. This is also in Grippo p. 14, which on the one hand is an actual book published by a reasonably reliable publisher, so you'd think would be the most reliable source here, but on the other hand is objectively wrong about another story involving balloons (compare p. 23 to contemporaneous [1]). But a 2016 NPR piece explicitly says air, not helium (although they also then call air "oxygen"). An NYT article from the same year—citing a Macy's page whose relevant content is gone and was never archived—repeats the year 1927 and, while it doesn't say air or helium. says the balloon was held up on poles, which would imply air.
  • ... as a helium-filled balloon, with the innovation in '28 being the slow release to avoid popping. This article previously cited Mental Floss for that. Mental Floss isn't a great source, but Time makes the same claim, in more detail: "Macy’s filled the rubber animal with helium but didn’t have a plan for deflating it when the parade was done, so Felix was just released into the air. He popped, of course, so the next year officials released balloons again, but incorporated release valves designed to let the helium leak out slowly over the course of a week."
• The balloons debuted in 1928 and the 1927 thing is apocryphal. I can't find reliable sources making this claim, but several editors have made some version of it, and it's the position of the Macy's Fandom wiki. We of course can't say this as original research if no reliable sources say it, but it can still influence our editorial decision of how to present this information, as I write about in the essay when sources are wrong. I'm not yet convinced that this view is correct, but at the same time I've been as of yet unable to find sources from 1927 about this.

So I'm at my wit's end. @Epicgenius, do you have any idea what's going on here? -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 19:55, 22 August 2024 (UTC)

@Tamzin, thanks for the ping. I looked this up on ProQuest (with the search terms ("macy's" or "macy") and ("thanksgiving" or "thanks giving") and "felix"), but contemporary sources from 1927-1928 don't seem to mention Felix much. After removing "Felix" from the search, I stumbled upon an article from USA Today (which is also accessible here). This source says: It wasn't until 1927 that the large helium-filled iconic characters that we now know and love began to be implemented into the celebration. That year, artist and puppeteer Tony Sarg designed a Felix the Cat balloon.

I found two sources which clearly mention that Sarg designed five helium balloons for the parade in 1928:

• "Macy's to Send Up Tiger, Elephant, Bird Balloons: Ghost also in Holiday Group; Finders of each to Get $100." New York Herald Tribune, Nov 27 1928, p. 19.
• "Macy's Tony Sarg Parade to be Held Thanksgiving Day." Women’s Wear Daily 37.125 (1928): 2.

These sources from 1927 mention floats designed by Sarg, but they don't say anything about balloons. I'd have to do some more research, however, as I could be looking in the wrong place. – Epicgenius (talk) 20:22, 22 August 2024 (UTC)

The USA Today source is recent enough that it might be citogenesis, and even if it's not, the whole issue here is that a lot of media sources contradict each other. So what would be really good to find is historical news sources, or some actual academic works. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 20:35, 22 August 2024 (UTC)

I see. Given that, a good place to start would be the four contemporary sources I linked above, if you're able to access them. There is some more coverage of Sarg's designs in Women's Wear Daily, which I will link when I'm back from my vacation. – Epicgenius (talk) 21:13, 22 August 2024 (UTC)

@Epicgenius: How's vacation? :D -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 21:25, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

@Tamzin, whoops, I forgot about this after returning from vacation. I can take a look on Friday or maybe tomorrow. – Epicgenius (talk) 00:19, 21 November 2024 (UTC)