Running It Back to the 1997 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade

It is Thanksgiving, so the shop ran it back to the 1997 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.

For anyone who missed it: that year, the Cat in the Hat balloon got caught in the wind off a Manhattan skyscraper and clipped a light post. The Cat came down. The Barney balloon also met a bad fate earlier on the route. It was a strange parade. A lot of kids had a lot of questions.

Why we care

The 1997 parade is a perfect little time capsule of late-90s network TV. Katie Couric hosting. Al Roker on the street. A Spice Girls performance. Hanson in full MMMBop era. It played on a Thursday morning in millions of living rooms and then got taped, and many of those tapes ended up in collections of dads and grandmas.

When someone brings a stack of mid-90s TV VHS into the shop, there is always a chance the 97 parade is in there. We put those on the shelf. They will move to someone who taped it the first time.

What is on the shelf today

Peanuts Thanksgiving. Garfield's Thanksgiving. A small handful of Thanksgiving-themed VHS from the 80s and 90s. None of it is priced to the moon. All of it is worth watching with family the way it was watched originally: on a TV that warms up, with somebody chewing turkey in the background.

Happy Thanksgiving from the shop. Barney may be gone. The tapes are not.