Just finished watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on NBC yesterday. I don’t know how much you all follow it, but I felt like talking about it for some reason. (I don’t have anyone to Christmas shop for, so not much else on my plate.)
Before I begin, a couple general recurring thoughts I had:
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Other than some legacy (Snoopy, Smokey The Bear) and manga stuff, the balloons were entirely geared toward children’s properties. Nothing wrong with that, but I found it a little surprising since, well, I’ve been in Macy’s, and trust me, there’s very little there that would appeal to a child.
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There were a ton of cheerleaders (500 specifically called up for the parade alone!), and quite a few a few dancers, many of whom were wearing various types of tights or stockings. I’m…ambivalent about this. Look, I get that the Atlantic Seaboard gets cold in November, but if you’re going to be a cheerleader…I remember mentioning this somewhere in the American Ninja Warrior thread…showing your legs just comes with the territory. If you’re in a leotard, that’s even more egregious, as the whole point of such a garment is to put your legs on full display. If you include tights with a cheerleader or dancer outfit, you’re basically dressed like a skier. So why not just make a clean job of it with a unitard, or tight pants and a top if that’s too restricting? Just trying to think practically here, ladies.
0:05 Our first look at the lead float, containing, naturally, a turkey. Also a few women in brown unitards, so I did make a reasonable suggestion, all right? 
0:09 Wow, the Harlem Globetrotters are a pretty diverse bunch, with a woman, a midget, and a (gasp!) white man…wait a minute, the Harlem Globetrotters are still a thing? In 2023? I always thought the whole point of this squad was to prove that blacks could be great basketball players, which I’m fairly certain most of the country has accepted at this point.
0:14 Our first song & dance number, for the new Broadway play And Juliet. Alternative takes on Romeo and Juliet are nothing new, of course (I’d really like to see Rosaline someday; it sounds like a hoot), but this one’s different because…Juliet is independent. Uh… 
Insert my usual why-not-just-make-your-own-girl-power-story-instead-of-changing etc. comment. Anyway, sounds fun, hope it succeeds.
0:26 “Whoa! She’s spinning the table on her feet! She’s spinning! The table! On her feet! Now she just threw the table upward! With her feet! That is just mind-blowing! I don’t know how she does it! I don’t even know what to say about this! She must have practiced this a lot! I can’t imagine how much practice it must have taken to spin a table with such precision! With her feet! Her feet! I’m completely at a loss for words! Seriously, I have nothing all to say about…” ARRRGHGHBLBHBLRRGGHH SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP 
0:30 Spamalot, which I never realized was actually a thing. Just looked it up on Wikipedia and…wow. 
I’m terrified of anything with an audience participation element, but sounds like a really fun ride!
0:35 Our periodic depressing reminder that ******* NBC still has a death grip on the Olympics. 
0:39 “Do you all have any idea, like actually taken a moment to process, how utterly f___ing depressing it is that Joe Biden is unambiguously the best President in my lifetime.” - August J. Pollak
0:48 Something called How to Dance in Ohio performed by a troupe with about the same racial diversity and musical sense as Ohio.
0:55 The Spirit of America cheerleaders, the gathering of 500 I mentioned earlier. Sheesh, if you’re going to put that many people in matching uniforms, maybe pick colors a bit less eye-searing. 
1:01 And someone’s here to…officially announce the…start…of…the parade…one hour in. 
Hey, your guess is as good as mine. “First” up is the first college marching band, Alabama A&M.
1:05 Wait a minute, Peanuts is still a thing? The last actual new creation I remember there being for it was the PS4 Snoopy game, released in 2015. I’m genuinely curious as to who’s keeping the memory of this property alive…it certainly isn’t the newspapers!
1:06 Towing each float is a Dodge Ram, thus completely proving that a bloated gas-guzzling monstrosity of a truck which somehow also manages to have the wimpiest flatbed imaginable is the perfect vehicle for driving the streets of a major city!
1:07 And here’s Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors doing a country song to plug an outdoor grill on those same streets!
1:11 Every time I see the Jolly Green Giant, I’m reminded of this country’s truly warped mentalities about vegetables. All the drama, all the militancy, all the yelling. Look, I eat them because I don’t want to die of malnutrition, is that a hard concept for anyone? Definitely not helping is the super-corny song on display here about…wait for it…corn. Besides the fact that corn is, y’know, tasty and therefore doesn’t need the help (get asparagus, cabbage, or cucumbers over and maybe I’ll be impressed), what the everloving hell is “the same going in as coming out” supposed to mean? Or do I even want to know?
1:17 Our once-a-year reminder that we didn’t kill all the First Nations people! Go us! 
1:24 Wait a minute, Miss America is still a thing? I don’t think even Fox News gives this the time of day anymore, and they’re maniacally fanatical about propping up every archaic, useless, embarrassing American tradition that ever existed.
1:25 When Toys R Us (I don’t know how to do Cyrillic letters on this board) got shuttered due to a truly vile act of “capitalism” (a.k.a. “rich people take and take and take and take and take” 
), it was a sad day for a lot of parents. When Macy’s later acquired the brand and set up a Toys R Us sections in every store, it was…a sad day for a different reason. I visited one yesterday, and the immediate impression I got was “Gamestop with an annoying theme song”. None of the grandeur, or energy, or variety of the great toy emporium of old. Well, life goes on, so…
…oh, HELL no. It’s someone named Jax (the American Idol contestant, not the head-crushing Marine) singing that familiar Jet standard, Are you going to be my…GUY. 
And for the record, that’s how she always does it (Check it out!) I…I can’t…gah. Look, I’ll just spell it out: Screw homophobia. Irrational hatred of things that hurt no one has no place in any society that calls itself civilized. It’s bad enough that there’s zero LGBTQ+ representation in this parade…yes, I noticed!..but mangling lyrics, which is like nails on a chalkboard to me to begin with, out of infantile squeamishness about a women having a thing for another woman (Again! 100+ NSFW videos costing about $22 each! And the complete Dykes To Watch Out For collection!) is just unforgivable.
1:28 Rutgers University, in [checks Bing]…New Jersey! Close to home! 
1:31 Wow, whoever this Paul Russell is, he really likes the color black.
1:34 Wonder Bread. I never liked the color scheme (if your bread ever turns red, yellow, or blue, that is a very bad sign), but even it makes more sense than Chicago serenading it with You’re The Inspiration. White bread? Inspiring? Did they think that’s what that horribly abusive violent parasitic self-centered smarmy tiger called “Opposite Day” or something?
1:36 The first moronic worthless crappy art-based scam Macy’s parade balloon ever! And hopefully the last!
1:40 I am completely at a loss to explain what’s so special about Hyphen, and my only exposure to K-pop pre-BTS was Pump it Up.
1:43 Kalahari Resort, an apparently elephant-themed theme park, and En Vogue performing one of the two songs they’ve done that doesn’t make me want to punch them in the face. 
1:50 I get that Mercer High School needed something easy to play on the march, but Holiday Road…a song forever tied to vacations going horribly wrong…was an iffy choice.
1:51 The Louisiana Office of Tourism with a swamphouse-themed float. Headlined by, of course, a singer who regales us with how inferior the women in New York are, right in the heart of the absolute ideal location for expressing such a sentiment. 
1:53 Wait a minute, that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles song is still a thing? The brand has evolved so much since even my memories of the 80’s cartoon and Konami games (much less the original black and white comics), but the theme was so iconic that they just had to keep it? That’s…so cool. 
2:00 Band from Greendale, Wisconsin, thereby meeting the Midwest quota.
2:02 I’ve never gotten a handle on when and why TV networks leave certain foreign words untranslated, but Spanish always seems to get the worst of it. (Case in point, it’s been seven decades and I have yet to see or hear one word of La Bamba translated FREAKING ANYWHERE.) So I’m sorry, but I can’t tell you if this Manuel Torizo is any good. Seems nice enough, though.
2:03 “Hall of fame pro bowler” will never not sound weird to me.
2:10 Wait a minute, Ronald McDonald is still a thing?? When did his last commercial air, 1990?
2:11 The NYPD. Wonder what those “jailbird” caricatures are supposed to represent. My guess: “We’re the police force that goes after actual crooks and restrains ourselves from beating them to death so we can actually prosecute them!”
2:15 The Peacock peacock, providing round the clock Peacock to Peacock Peacock Peacock! Wow, NBC is really… [digs through hat] “pulling out all the stops”! (And no, I still haven’t seen American Ninja Warrior Junior season 3 yet.) And somebody starts belting We Are The Champions 
, and it’s a good thing I didn’t have a large piece of building material next to me, if you catch my drift.
2:19 Texas Tech. Is it just me or is the South getting way too much representation here?
2:24 Back To The Future, The Musical. Given our truly disturbing national response to the Covid vaccines, you’d think a play about a scientist desperately working to preserve the future wouldn’t have a chance, but here we are.
2:33 The Spirit of America crew in much nicer-looking colors, after apparently stripping off their previous dresses on the street in broad daylight in front of hundreds and hundreds of spectators on national television. I mean, more power to them, absolutely, but given the apparently brutal crackdowns on LGBTQ+ representation and exposed bikini areas, I’m a bit surprised parade enforcement let that slide.
2:34 Ode to Joy with a bunch of annoying twitters and warbles and fleeps and bloops. Folks, it’s a student’s song. It’s meant to be plain, simple, and vanilla. That’s its purpose. You want something complicated, play Flight of the Bumblebee or In The Hall of the Mountain King or something.
2:36 You know, while it was a very long time ago, I distinctly remember there being Sesame Street songs sung in a normal tone of voice. (Telephone Rock and Exit were a couple of my favorites.) Even if Macy’s is springing for the youth market, I don’t see why a parade audience containing a very many non-children couldn’t have one.
2:46 Wait a minute, Willy Wonka…ah, forget it, too tired.
And the Christmas stuff begins at 2:50 and I’m out. Of course we all know that Thanksgiving ceased to be its own thing a very long time ago and is essentially Christmas preseason, but what’s a tad surprising is that everyone seems to be fine with this. I’ve heard nothing lamenting the “destruction of this great American tradition”, not even from Fox News. I guess when a tradition involves being around your entire extended family and remembering why you don’t give those piles of filth the time of day the other 364 days of the year, it’s no great loss.
Oh, by the way, the much-ballyhooed Cher song is at 3:17. Not much to say; she still looks and sounds largely the same as she did on the Dancing With The Stars season 28 finale (plastic and robotic, respectively). Whatever she may have accomplished in the past, she’s had so much work done that the original…person is, regrettably, long gone.
The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade! It ain’t the Pride March, that’s for sure! But it you want a bunch of mostly harmless colorful spectacle, you could do worse.
