8mm Found Footage of 1939 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade
8mm Found Footage of 1939 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade
By Rusty Blazenhoff on November 24, 2011
Tom Pappalardo of Standard Design recalls that he found this 8mm reel of the 1939 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade at a western Massachusetts junk shop. He held onto it for a decade, unwatched, until this year when he began viewing all his “mystery reels” and found the parade footage. That year’s parade featured larger-than-life characters like the Fisher Price Snoopy Sniffer pull toy, a Pinocchio with an enormous nose, the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz (which was released that year), Old King Cole, Uncle Sam, a tied-down Gulliver and more.
A couple of interesting notes about the (first televised) 1939 parade from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade history site created by students at The College of William & Mary:
Most of you have worthwhile images or video in digital form. Maybe family, maybe something else. As digital photographers we have to take special care to preserve our footage. Backup of course, and promptly migrate old content onto new media.
(Psst, the cloud aint it by itself IMO)