10 years ago, while watching How the Grinch Stole Christmas (the good one), I had an idea. An awful idea. I had a wonderful, awful idea, namely to start reviewing Christmas specials in the What's On Tonight comments during the holidays. I figured I would run out of specials to review in a couple of years, but here we are, at the beginning of the 11th annual A MarkInTexas Made-For-TV Christmas and as I've discovered, there is an endless number of Christmas specials to watch. We have gotten through most of the well-known perennials (including The Grinch, which was my very first entry), but there's enough of the more obscure ones that I might just have another decade's worth of entries--at least. We're starting this year with a couple of slight changes, first that we're starting before Thanksgiving, and second that we're actually starting with a formally long-lost Thanksgiving special, a special that disappeared for decades even though it stars two of the most popular figures of late 20th century pop culture at the height of their popularity.
For an event that only takes about three hours once a year, the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade is a massive undertaking, requiring a full-time, year-round staff. Indeed, even as the finishing touches are being put together for this year's parade, the team is also hard at work not only on next year's parade, but even the 2026 parade. The high school marching bands invited to participate this year (which includes a school in my local district) were formally invited to participate over a year and a half ago, in spring of 2023. We already know who will be marching in the parade next year (including another school relatively near me), and the team is undoubtably hard at work going through submissions to figure out who to invite early next year for the 2026 parade.
Surprisingly, however, there isn't much information about the production of the parade publiclly available. There are the annual news reports chronicaling the blowing up of the balloons, of course, and a few peaks into the workspaces where the floats and balloons are crreated. But for the most part, Macy's seems to keep its production secrets close to its vest.
If all it was was a look behind the scenes of the 1977 parade, Hip Hip Parade!, which would debut a year later, would still be an interesting time capsule of what producing the parade was like nearly a half-century ago, though the special, which appears to have been produced in-house by WNET, New York City's primary PBS member station, would not have been highly sought after over the years. No, the reason the special, which ran a few times in 1978 and 1979 before slipping into relative obscurity, was so wanted before its re-emergence last year was because of the special's two hosts--Kermit the Frog and Fozzie Bear.
Even though Jim Henson and Frank Oz (the puppeteers and voices of Kermit and Fozzie, respectively) worked for PBS, getting the two of them was still quite the coup for WNET. After all, in 1978, the Muppets were near the peak of their popularity. In addition to their continuing work on Sesame Street, Henson and Oz were also busy producing The Muppet Show, which by then had become the most watched show in the world (I wasn't able to find specific US ratings, but at it's height, The Muppet Show was drawing a weekly worldwide audiences of roughly 200 million), and The Muppet Movie (which would come out the following summer) was also in production. In addition, Oz was busy preparing the Yoda puppet for The Empire Strikes Back. So these were two very busy guys throughout 1978. Given that their footage could have been shot at any point between Thanksgiving 1977 and Thanksgiving 1978, they were probably able to squeeze in a day or two of work on the special at some point. Still, the fact that they had the time at all is a minor miracle.
To be sure, Henson and Oz aren't in peak form, but even near-peak Kermit and Fozzie is going to still be pretty funny. Fozzie almost immediately tells the viewers that, no they're not standing in the middle of a New York street, but instead in front of a green screen. Even better is the running gag during the second haf of the special. After Fozzie spots the Kermit balloon, he naturally assumes there's also a Fozzie balloon, and keeps wondering when it is going to show up, while Kermit despretely tries to change the subject to just about anything else.
Another way the special is valuable is that it shows quite a bit of the balloons and floats of the 1977 parade, given that, like most parades from before VCRs became commonplace in the early 1980s, the NBC broadcast of the parade has never emerged in full on the Internet. The footage does not appear to be from NBC, but perhaps is Macy's own footage, which makes sense, as the store would probably have its own archive of the parade seperate from NBC's.
We do get to see a lot of the balloons that flew in the 1977 parade (including, of course, the aforementioned Kermit balloon) as well as a number of the floats. The ones that most amused me was the giant Cootie, from the classic game of the same name, and the Sesame Street float, mainly because of Fozzie's in-joke asides when Kermit mentions that he works on the show ("that's a kid's show, isn't it?" "Those are cute puppets!"). When Kermit points out a certain pair of roommates, the voice of Bert tells the voice of Ernie "I don't know them".
In terms of behind-the-scenes footage, we get footage of the convey carrying the floats, arriving from the warehouse in New Jersey in the dead of night of Thanksgiving Eve, as well as footage of two of the high school bands practicing at about the same time (so much for getting a good night's sleep). There's an interview both with a veteran clown and a new Macy's employee who was being a parade clown for the first time in 1977. There's also an interview with Manfred Bass, who was the chief float designer for Macy's from 1963 until his retirement in 2000 (after his death in 2017, that year's parade was dedicated to his memory). He describes the building of two new floats, both advertising animated adaptions of books. One was a float involving Smaug the dragon, from Rankin-Bass's animated adaption of The Hobbit, which NBC would air on the Sunday after Thanksgiving. The other were the rabbits from the float for the adaption of Watership Down, which wouldn't even be in theaters until the fall of 1978 (the Hobbit float wouldn't be back the next year, though, since the film was still playing in theaters, the Watership Down one would be).
One amusing aspect is that one of the bands involved played a medley of songs from West Side Story, which ended up being the underlying soundtrack to most of the special. Over the closing credits, there was another band playing the main theme from Star Wars, reminding us that it is 1977, but then again, a marching band playing Star Wars isn't exactly uncommon in 2024.
Given the nationwide interest in the parade and the popularity of the two hosts, one might think that WNET would have no problem finding other stations to air the special. However, my (non-comprehensive) search failed to find any listings for the special aside from its WNET airings. Could the special have aired elsewhere? Quite possibly, but its also very possible that the show ended up airing exclusively on WNET, which would explain why it ended up being publicly unavailable for deceades until someone posted a copy of the special (perhaps taken driectly from WNET's master tape) on YouTube late last year.
For fans of Kermit and Fozzie or fans of the parade, Hip Hip Parade! is well worth checking out. I'd be interested in a more modern documentary, showcasing the changes that nearly a half-century has bought to the parade (I'm willing to bet that float designing and building relies a lot more on computers these days), but as a time capsule, this is a delight.
Next time: The love guru at Christmas
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