Tag Archives: 1980

Slice of Turkey

Slice of Turkey: Cornucopia Finale

To wrap up this feature, I figured I’d showcase a collection of Thanksgiving artifacts from years gone by that didn’t quite warrant a post of their own but which deserve viewing nonetheless. First, an NBC parade promo from 1977, which also contains an ad for a Dolphins-Cardinals game, plus a very 1970s Jane Pauley tells us about Anwar Sadat.

Here are a few opening segments from old Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parades. The thing I love about these is that they cram together all the celebrities in no particular order, and in so doing, create an odd potpourri of folks who have almost nothing in common. Stick around for Jim Nabors, Gregory Hines, and Don McLean!

The 1983 parade opener tells us to get excited for Tommy Tune & Twiggy, Ashford & Simpson, Lou Rawls, and Ballet Hispanico! Plus, Bryant Gumbel hosts this year and he could not give less of a shit!

1984 parade opener, featuring a young, mugging Joey Lawrence and a weird, rubber-necked clown. The glory-hogging cast of The Tapdance Kid returns! The cast of V is here, and so is Dom Deluise!

The 1984 parade ended like this, with that weird clown making a kid disappear. Then a litany of sponsors, and Santa Claus tells us Christmas is here, so you better get your ass to the mall.

Not parade related, but certainly worthy of inclusion: Happy Thanksgiving from The Weird Al Show, the parodist’s short-lived kids CBS kids show, circa 1997.

Slice of Turkey

Slice of Turkey: ABC News, 1980

I’ve written before about how terrifying I found the local news when I was a kid. In the 1980s, local NYC newscasts were catalogs of horror. Race riots. Crack. Serial killers. Bernie Goetz. Rock and roller cola wars, I CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE! (tips over burning table)

That’s why I find feature on the 1980 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade done by the local ABC affiliate so endearing. Not one mention of an elderly woman beaten to death or a kid stabbed for his sneakers! In it, anchorman Roger Sharpe and his adorable two year old son (I assume?) take in the parade together. There’s a buffet of greatness packed into these two and a half minutes. We get some nostalgia-riffic shots of the balloons and paraders. A clown terrorizes Sharpe’s young child. Sharpe notes that Smokey the Bear can’t quite float straight because “he was out with Grimsby last night.” Roger Grimsby was another ABC anchor with a rep as a lush. That must have made the end of this segment awkward, since it throws back to Grimsby in the ABC News studio. (Ooops).

But the best part comes at 1:50, when Sharpe asks a bunch of kids what their favorite part of the parade was, and one highly advanced 11-year-old says “the women.” This would be funny enough, but Sharpe’s attempts to get this young man to explain himself compound the hilarity. That’s why Sharpe got paid the big bucks, to ask the tough questions.

NYC, Pointless Nostalgia

Terror at Minus-50 Feet

This past weekend, we decided to venture into Manhattan, which was mistake number 1. Thanks to Bloomberg, subway service on Saturdays has become twisted Kafka-esque nightmare, with a smell to match. Trying to make our way to the upper west side, we changed routes several times, wasting an insane amount of time just trying to find a train that moved. It felt a lot longer than it really was, because we had The Baby in tow, and we began to acquire a child’s sense of the interminable passage of time by osmosis.

After a few geological epochs had passed, we finally got in a functional C train. Someone on that train asked us how they could hook back up with the 3 train, which was not running between 96th Street and Forever. Thanks to an investigation, this woman had heard. She was right, but “investigation” was an extreme understatement.

The investigation in question was to catch Maksim Gelman, a maniac who’d spent the previous 28 hours stabbing people across Brooklyn, killing four and wounding several others in a drug-and-rage-fueled rampage. I didn’t learn any of this until Sunday. I didn’t even know about Gelman’s one-man terrorist campaign before we left; if I had, I probably would’ve stayed home. We had even contemplated taking the 1-2-3 to our destination, the train where Gelman stabbed one last victim before being apprehended.

Aside from being one of those horrifying incidents that reminds you there are monsters in the world, Gelman’s exploits were reminiscent of those I saw on the news every night as a kid, back when senseless murders were as common in NYC as hot dog carts.
It seemed that each evening would bring some new horror on the city streets, be it a copycat Zodiac Killer or a model who was slashed in the face when she rejected her landlord’s advances. This why a subway vigilante like Bernard Goetz was elevated to the level of folk hero by some people, even though he was just a weird little creep. And if it wasn’t some unearthly horror, it was some everyday item turned deadly, like when Tylenol was suddenly filled with cyanide.

This was the landscape of my mind as a kid. This is why, whenever someone says “the 80s were awesome,” I want to karate chop them in the throat.