All posts by Matthew Callan

Slice of Turkey

Slice of Turkey: Ed McMahon and Regis Philbin, 1981

Most of my youth, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade was hosted by preternaturally gleeful souls like Willard Scott or Matt Lauer. Morning people, through and through, with orange juice and low-octane coffee running through their veins.

Apparently, t’was not always so. In this clip from the 1981 parade, Ed McMahon is your host. You know, Johnny Carson’s affable sidekick. Ed was more of a night owl, if you catch my drift, and boy does he show it here.

McMahon looks woefully ill equipped to be awake and outside at this early hour. He was supposed to arrive on the back of a rollerskating elephant from the Big Apple Circus (!), but after five minutes on the beast’s shaky back he could take no more. So he stumbles out from behind a red curtain, trembling and breathing heavily, and literally pushes his way past two lines of Rockettes to begin his opening monologue. And if you can follow that monologue, you and Ed must speak a special sidekick twin language. Individually, all of his words make sense, but they don’t quite add up to a cohesive whole. It’s like a verbal clearance bin.

McMahon eventually throws things over to “NBC’s newest morning talk show host,” Regis Philbin. Reeg engages Ed with his usual rapid-fire Regis-isms, then switches gears to wax nostalgic over the Thanksgiving parades of his youth and his alma mater, Cardinal Hayes High School. It’s weird to hear a somewhat solemn, subdued Regis Philbin, since I don’t think he’s been able to lower his voice below Shout Level for the last 20 years or so. My theory is, at some point he became confused over where Dana Carvey’s impression of himself ended and the real him began.

After a brief commercial break (McDonalds and an awesome windup motorcycle I kinda want right now), things end on a sour note, as we get a glimpse of the rollerskating elephant. The poor thing totters unsteady on the pavement, moving gingerly. It looks like the unhappiest animal on the planet. Good thing PETA didn’t exist back then, or the Big Apple Circus would’ve gotten a big bucket of red paint in their faces.

UPDATE, 11/19/2012: The original video I shared here has been removed from YouTube by people who hate our freedom. You can, however, get a brief glimpse of what was described above from the clip now posted below, which includes the very beginning of NBC’s 1981 parade coverage. The quality of this video is not fantastic and you will only hear a tiny piece of Ed McMahon’s rambling monologue. However, you will still see Ed almost run over a couple of Rockettes.

Just for laughs, here’s the old link, on the off chance it is restored some day. Courage!

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.

Slice of Turkey

Slice of Turkey: Forever Plaid, 1990

One evergreen feature of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade is to feature the cast of a Broadway musical performing a number from their show. The effect is often weird, since the actors, singers, and dancers are asked to complete a routine in an area a fraction the size of an actual Broadway stage. It’s like asking Michael Phelps to breaststroke across a bathtub. Not to long ago, I wrote about Starlight Express, which is an extreme but representative example of this phenomenon. Starlight Express was bonkers even at its full scale. Reduced to tiny TV dimensions, it was practically suicidal.

I’ve chosen this clip that features the original cast of Forever Plaid for a few reasons. For one thing, it is a rare case where it seems that no reduction in scale was necessary, nor did it endanger anyone’s life. It’s also pretty amusing. I was genuinely impressed by the insane showmanship on display here.

But mostly I chose this clip because it triggered an ancient memory. My freshman year at NYU, one of my roommates was a pleasant enough person with whom I had no problems with at all, except that he loved to belt out songs with wild, unbridled enthusiasm, particularly early in the morning while showering. It bugged me, but I dealt with, because when it comes to putting up with petty annoyances (as opposed to actually confronting their sources), I have Herculean strength. I will exhaust any and all contingencies before asking someone to knock off whatever they’re doing.

My roommate was painfully, blissfully oblivious to how loud he was, until one morning after I’d invited several girls to crash in our room. (Nought but crashing went on; it was, for all intents and purposes, a slumber party. I only mention this to emphasize how awkwardly chaste I still was at age 18.) I was used to my roommate’s performances and just buried my head under a pillow. The girls, however, thought it was the funniest thing they’d ever heard. They all tried to shush each other but couldn’t help breaking out into chortles at his thoroughly earnest crooning.

He eventually emerged from the bathroom, wearing nothing but a towel, to find several girls (who’d escaped his notice before, apparently) sitting up in their sleeping bags, giggling. One told him she liked his voice. She said it sincerely, but he looked mortified. “You could hear me?” he asked, incredulous. I have no idea how he could not have known we could hear him. The whole dorm could.

From thereon out, his singing was far more subdued and infrequent, which was good for sleeping in but bad for my conscience. Annoying though it may have been, I felt awful for making him feel so self conscious about his shower singing. He also became a bit leery of me, suddenly thinking I was this super macho hetero dude because I was bringing over multiple girls to our room. Even I found this to be ridiculously funny, because the most exciting thing that happened that night was watching the “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians” episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Regardless of reality, he now saw me very differently, and we were never quite “cool” again.

Before this incident, however, Forever Plaid was in heavy rotation in my roommate’s repertoire. I’ve never seen the show or learned much about it; according to Wikipedia, it seems to be a proto-jukebox musical with an oddly dark premise. On the rare occasions where I hear/see it mentioned, I think of my freshman year roommate and how I accidentally crushed his fragile spirit with my irrepressible manliness.