The annual parade rant (part three)

The holiday season is now officially upon us. Actually, it starts sometime right around the end of the World Series and runs until whenever school starts back up again. So the annual Macy’s Day Parade rant is really more of a Midholiday’s Night celebration.

This year’s experience was radically different from years past. As everyone who knows me is already oh-please-shut-up-about-it-already aware, we’re getting television exclusively from the Internet now. Thus deprived of the broadcast networks and their local affiliates, I couldn’t watch the usual parade coverage.

A quick web search uncovered a live feed from Earthcam. The site had a handful of views, most of which were breathtaking vistas of people standing on the sidewalk (must have been some kind of cell-phone-home-and-tell-everyone-I’m-on-TV thing). But one camera was perched well above street level in Times Square, and it afforded a fairly good view.

Indeed, it brought me mindful of the scene in Miracle on 34th Street in which Natalie Wood watches the parade from a neighbor’s apartment window. When I was a kid, that seemed like the bestest fun next to pie. Now watching the parade from a $10,000 per month apartment is on my bucket list (if by “bucket list” you mean “I’d rather put a metal bucket over my head and hit it repeatedly with a hammer than do that”).

The web cam was much more like actually watching the parade, so that was fun. However, it deprived me of many of my usual rant targets, such as musical numbers gaily pranced out in the street in front of Macy’s, the insanely inane commentary from network morning show hosts who lacked sufficient seniority to avoid working on a holiday, and of course celebrity float riders aging poorly or lip-syncing badly. So this year rant fans will just have to make do with the view from five or six stories up.

I tuned in right around the time the Pillsbury Doughboy balloon was drifting past. The trivia nerds at Mental Floss helpfully tweeted that the Doughboy’s actual name is “Poppin’ Fresh.” Which of course everybody knows. They then rattled off the names of his wife and children. I considered tweeting back that around the Lens household his name is The Pillsbury Dough Bastard and his wife and kids don’t have names because who gives a shit, but somehow it seemed not in keeping with the situation. So I watched it long enough to make sure Gozer the Gozerian wasn’t about to manifest.

Oh, and speaking of Mental Floss, the article they did on parade mishaps mentioned that one year it was raining and the Popeye balloon’s hat started to trap water. Eventually it got so full that the helium wouldn’t hold it up anymore, and it suddenly dumped gallons of icy water into the crowd. I couldn’t help thinking about that when the Pikachu balloon drifted by, because the view from above revealed a disturbing fontanel in the back of its head. Even more disturbing: Microsoft Word’s spell check recognizes “Pikachu” as a word.

The next thing that caught my eye was a marching band clad in matching red shirts and grass skirts. From above they looked like some kind of weird thing you might see under a microscope, an effect aided by the absence of chipper commentary on their outfits.

Also without commentary it was hard to tell if the next balloon of note was DreamWorks’s Kung Fu Panda or Renegade Animation’s Chop Kick Panda. What oh what could be drifting down Broadway, a huge corporate franchise or a thinly-disguised mockbuster? Without Katie Couric, I’ll never know for sure.

Next up, the Energizer Bunny. The Energizer Bunny? Really? At this point in our nation’s history, this thing is less about reliable batteries and more about the zombie movie advice to shoot ‘em in the head because wounds below the neckline don’t kill ‘em. Likewise the Smurfs ought probably to have been ashamed to show their blue balloony selves after the movie they put out last summer.

From my e-perch up above, a squad of what must have been Southern Belles looked like a wave of gone-over Easter Hershey’s Kisses all covered in pastel mold.

Around this time my attention strayed for a bit. As elf drill teams and the like meandered past, I started noticing things going on in the background. In particular: does Times Square really have an Olive Garden? Does it really?

The last actual parade element that caught my eye was a vehicle disguised as a giant Christmas ornament. Its dizzying gyrations from one side of the road to the other made my heart go out to the poor sap who had to drive the thing in circles all along the parade route. Were I that hapless wight, children throughout the Big Apple would forever know that particular attraction as the Big Ball That Smelled Like a Lot of Puke. In the spirit of the holiday, that made me thankful for a comfortable living far away from the East Coast (though I could be lured back to do the driving if the Big Ball was going to get to Herald Square, burst in half and reveal the Deathmobile inside).

Sadly, toward the end of the parade the cats started doing something adorable and/or annoying, and I got back to my computer just in time to watch the crowds dispersing and the cross-traffic once again flowing across Broadway. Guess I’ll just have to catch Santa next year.