One of the biggest fads of all time was the Fess Parker/Davy Crockett inspired coonskin caps. My mother sent two of them at the beginning of the fad to her nephew/niece and their friends in Ipswich, England and they ended up selling them for the equivalent of about $10 each and sending the money to her to send as many as possible back (they were about $2 here) as they weren’t yet available there in quantity yet but the demand was huge.
I didn’t realize that the coon tails were real. (The cap was of fake fur so I assumed the tail was as well.) Today PETA would be sending suicide bombers to Disney Studios probably.
Trivia: Fess Parker was a star before the big payday and residuals but he lived on what he made from the series and invested what he made from personal appearances (which was more) and from the show DANIEL BOONE (which was essentially Davy Crockett but without risk of a lawsuit from Disney and more profit sharing). Today he owns a winery in Foxen Canyon/Santa Barbara County, CA where operations are handled by Eli Parker, a same-name descendant of the Iroquois sachem & Union general and where his bestselling item in the gift shop is not wine but autographed coonskin caps. So if you want to scare your racoons into good behavior, just leave some wine from Parker Vineyards laying around and whistle Davy Crockett.
“The Lady in the Tutti Frutti Hat” – Carmen Miranda. Miranda was known for her outrageous headgear, often with fruit. So much so that Harry Warren wrote a song memorializing her. Miranda knew she looked goofy and had a lot of fun with it.
In The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, Maynard G. Krebs is babysitting an infant and watching TV with him: “Okay, baby, if the cowboy has a white hat, he’s a good guy and if he looks at his pocketwatch, he’s a bad guy. (Pause) He’s got a white hat… and he’s looking at his pocketwatch! This must be one of those “adult” westerns!”
Oh, wait: Gilligan and Skipper!
While not nearly as much of a plot point as the box it came in, Melanie Griffith’s character travels cross country with a very expensive designer chapeau from an upscale shop in New Orleans in Crazy in Alabama.
Eliza’s Ascot hat was mentioned above, but Higgins’ inspector hat also became a popular seller and was sufficiently recognizable to appear on the cover of a Nat King Cole album.
From The Avengers, John Steed’s bowler.
What about the absence of a hat?
And the Bottle Dance from Fiddler on the Roof?
It seems that Robin Hood and Peter Pan have the same haberdasher.
Also, western film star Tom Mix was known for his hat, and with a hat like that, how could you not be?
Gandalf’s hat, tall pointy and with a wide brim, always seemed important to me.
In some way it helped define Gandalf. It said Wizard as much as his staff did.
Jim
Another thought on hats
In the movie Brazil, the main characters mother wore a hat that looked just like an inverted high heel shoe…
fml
Heh, my first thought was Luna Lovegood’s roaring lion hat in Book Five, though I guess it hasn’t got much plot significance (although one of my early completely daft Harry Potter theories was that Regulus Black was alive and well and had merely been Transfigured into that hat*, but I think Rowling has said that he’s definitely dead).
- Because, you know, Sirius is to dogs as Regulus is to lions, and that was the only lion in the books. I told you it was completely daft.
[Go Dog Go] Do you like my hat? [/Go Dog Go]
In The Prestige, Angier’s hat plays an important role:
Tesla tests his device on Angier’s hat, hoping to transport it outside the cage. Lots of lightning bolts flash and crack, but it doesn’t move, and Angier storms off in a huff.
Later on, we find a clearing in the forest full of hats, all identical to Angier’s–and Tesla realizes that his transporter machine is actually, in fact, a replicating machine. The device doesn’t make the hat move, it makes another copy some distance away. Angier decides this is good enough for him and snaps up the machine, and uses it to duplicate himself in his show every night.
This moment leads to a great line:
Angier: Which hat is mine?
Nikola Tesla: They are all your hat, Mr. Angier.
Any plan where you lose your hat
There are some magnificient hats in this storyline.
The Golux’s “indescribable hat” in James Thurber’s The Thirteen Clocks.
Sailboat
In nonfiction, there is Oliver Sachs’s, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. The title is literal.
Dale Gribble’s Mack Truck hat is pretty notable I think. The amusing thing about him is that he thinks that nobody realizes he’s bald when he wears it.
I guess that isn’t really film though.
-Way before even me, but Tom Mix’s ten gallon white stetson became a fixture for my father’s generation.
-Charlie Caplin’s Little Tramp’s bowler also defined him.
-John Wayne’s cowboy hat was used by the Duke time and again. I believe it was buried with him too.
-Speaking of the Duke, in one of his films, El Dorado, James Caan’s character, Mississippi keeps getting into trouble because of his hat, a squat not quite top hat.
-In a number of books and movies about World War I, the hero is a member of the Hat in Ring squadron and as such the top hat on the side of the plane is displayed often.
-The minds behind The Monkees tried to have Mike Nesmith (or was it Peter Tork?) defined by always wearing a stocking cap. In fact if you look at the promo stuff before the Monkees went on the air the names went; Davy, Mickey, Peter and Wool Cap. I was a very young disc jockey at the time and I remember receiving the stuff at the station and I thought “Wool Cap” was a monumentally stupid nickname.
In Tom Hank’s movie That Thing You Do when the drummer was given sunglasses and renamed “Shades,” it reminded me of the Monkees and the cap. I hadn’t thought about it until then.
In the Brit comedy “Keeping up Appearances” Daisy’s husband always has that ball cap with the New Zealand trucking firm logo on it.
Speaking of ball caps, Magnum and his Detroit Tigers cap (somebody probably has already listed that one though).
In the cartoon world:
Rocky the squirrel’s flying helmet
Tom Terriffic’s inverted funnel
Popeye’s sailor’s cap
Donald Duck’s weird Lord Fauntleroy hat
Huey Dewy and Luey’s beanies
Snoopy’s Flying Ace Cap with the scarf and goggles.
On “Prison Break” Michael Schofield’s Magical Cap of Invisibility ™