Balloons Over Broadway: The American Visionary Who Created the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade Balloons

00:00:10
Speaker 1: And we continue with Our American Stories. Everyone’s in New York, or on Thanksgiving Day, when young and old rise early to see what giant new balloons will fill the skies for Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Our next story is about the man who first invented these upside-down puppets. His name: Tony Sarg. Here to tell the story is Deborah Srensen, curator of exhibitions at the Nantucket Historical Association, where their exhibition, “Tony Sarg: Genius at Play,” is the first comprehensive exhibition exploring his life. Let’s take a listen to the story.

00:00:53
Speaker 2: Tony Sarg is a really remarkable early 20th-century commercial artist and entrepreneur who was born in Guatemala to a family that was a German father, an English mother. In 1880, when he was around seven years old, they moved back to Germany, where he could attend military school. He inherited a number of toys from his grandmother, who was also an artist, quite well-known Mary Ellen Best. She is a remarkable watercolorist, and so as a child, he loved playing with her marionettes and mechanical toys and always just had a fascination with how things worked and were put together. Had a very mechanical mind, but was also very artistic, so he kind of blended these two halves of kind of the right and left brain—of being very technical but also very creative. When he was a teen and actually was commissioned as a lieutenant in the German Army, he was always sketching. He was self-taught. This is something that people are always prized by when they come through the exhibition because the quality of his work, even just as a child, the early sketches he did, but then definitely as he was growing into adulthood, are very skillful and very sophisticated. And so he resigned his commission against his father’s wishes by all accounts, and he moved himself to London to pursue a career as a professional artist. And it was really the golden age of commercial illustration. You had print media circulating that needed visuals. You had artists working, sketching, visiting theater productions, what Tony Sarg did, documenting those events. So, this is 1905; he’s in London. He watched other artists that were more well-established and saw that they had ways of promoting themselves that were indirect, that they were not able, or it was considered, as he put it, quote, “unethical to self-promote as an artist, to try to go out and seek work for yourself.” But if you could have a party trick, or invite people to your salon, or have ways to get your name in the air,” as he described it, “you could make good connections and you would solicit new commissions.” And he looked about for something that might work for him, saying that he was a shy individual, which I find very hard to believe. But he turned to puppetry, and the kind of inspiring situation, or the thing that actually launched this, was on assignment. He went to a performance by Thomas Holden’s Marionettes and was completely fascinated, and it revived kind of this childhood fascination with puppets and toys, and he returned again and again. After being rebuffed by the performers who would not share their secrets with him, he’s like, ‘Well, I guess I will just watch the show as many times as I can,’ and he figured it out for himself, went back to his studio and started to experiment. He invents a new controller that can hold up to 24 strings. Prior to that, you might have one controller that has just a few strings on either side, that has a limited range of movement, and that his innovation was to have more points of contact, more ability for more subtle movements. But I do know that that controller, that T-shaped controller, that airplane-shaped controller, is something that’s still used today. It was not in use before his creation of it. And as he gains the skills, he starts to invite people to his studio, put on small performances, realizes that puppetry could be his hook, his way of gathering new contacts and promoting himself, and does really well and basically would have continued along those lines as an illustrator doing a side hustle, if you will, of marionettes, if not for World War I, and being of German heritage, an anti-German sentiment that is of course spreading at this time, he decides to relocate himself as well as by now he has a wife and a young daughter to New York, and in 1915, they immigrate to the United States. And once he’s there, he’s now a 10-year veteran of kind of commercial art and illustration. He’s fairly well known. He starts doing illustrations for popular humorists like Irvin Cobb, settles in Greenwich Village, and the city gets to know everybody in that kind of artistic bohemian community. In the late teens, now establishes a studio in the Flatiron Building. He brings people into his studio. He puts on impromptu marionette performances, delighting all sorts of publishers, newspapermen. There are a number of publications that were headquartered in the Flatiron at the time. So a theatrical producer wants to invest in him. Launches the Tony Sarg Marionettes Company, starts performing in theaters in the city, but then eventually makes his way to Broadway, all the while receiving really incredible press for his tricks that he puts on stage. You have marionettes that are smoking, you have marionettes that are juggling, playing piano, spinning on stools, really remarkable feats that people can’t figure out, are very humorous and very original. So, unlike in London, as soon as he starts to establish something in New York, his name is the brand, he becomes the brand, so it’s Tony Sarg’s Marionettes is the company that leads to a touring company in 1921. He takes that success and that name recognition and starts a series of short films, animated cartoons that, between 1921 and 1923, take his name to all of the city locations where his company is now traveling and puts them in lights with a new cartoon series, which is the Tony Sarg’s Almanac series. So he went from New York theaters to national theaters to national movie theaters, and it’s Tony Sarg’s Marionettes, Tony Sarg’s Almanac. By then he publishes his Tony Sarg’s Marionette Book, revealing all of his secrets of how he produces all of the marionettes that people are seeing when they’re able to go visit in their own towns. Now they have that kind of behind-the-scenes inside scoop, and instead of it being a limiting factor or keeping people from coming out, they’re more interested and intrigued in actually seeing the work he’s doing. So a very savvy businessman and also just a believer in spreading his knowledge. So, by 1923, it’s not terribly surprising that the RHAC Company would approach him to then design mechanical or puppets for their display windows. So in 1923, they’ve built this new, the world’s largest department store in New York. They have all of this window real estate, and they go to kind of the master showman himself, and they said, ‘Okay, we want Tony Sarg window displays, like that’s going to open our brand-new store. It’s going to kick off the holiday season.’ And so in 1923, he does this spectacular fairy tale-inspired—I don’t remember how many windows it is. It’s like 66 feet long or something like that, full of moving mechanical puppets. It was like a revolving platform and all sorts of mechanical components with this fairy tale setting.

00:08:47
Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to Debor Sarns tell the story of Tony Sarg and, like so many stories about people who were pioneers in their field on this show, from the Wright Brothers to Irving Berlin. Sarg was self-taught. And when we come back, we’re going to learn about how that initial visit with Macy’s to help with their store windows turned into those upside-down puppets we’ve all come to know and love on the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. The story continues—Tony Sarg’s story, that is—here on Our American Stories. And we continue with Our American Stories and Tony Sarg’s story. In 1923, Macy’s in New York City—their flagship store still today—commissioned puppeteer Tony Sarg to create an animated holiday window display for their brand-new department store. Let’s continue with the story from Deborah, and she’s a curator of exhibitions at the Nantucket Historical Association.

00:10:06
Speaker 2: The following year, Macy’s Company inaugurates their first Christmas parade, and the goal of the parade at that time was to lead you to the display windows. It was, basically, ‘We’re going to march to the store, reveal the windows, and then you can come inside, right?’ So, the function of the parade was literally just to guide you to the display. It was a circus theme. That first year they had animals from the Central Perk Zoo. Actual animals included didn’t go very well. There weren’t balloons yet, but Tony Sarg did design floats and all sorts of very strange figures, like giant heads and costumes. They were called, almost from the very beginning, hit the grotesques. It was Tony Sarg’s grotesques for some reason. So, in 1924, you have this parade. You have Sarg designing materials for the parade and also the windows, so his role is now expanding. There’s a bit of a hiatus with other individuals kind of coming in to do work for the parade. But by the time you get to 1927, Sarg is back and he takes kind of control of it again and introduces his first balloon characters. But at this time they’re held up on poles, so they’re inflated rubber figures, but they are not helium-filled; they’re not floating on ropes and strings. They’re just sort of, they’re heavy, they’re being carried. The story that you hear is that the balloons, because they were lower to the ground, were hard to see. I find that not so accurate because they’re still very big and it’s no different than a float, right? So, but that’s the excuse or a justification for the following year working to produce a larger, inflated, helium-filled that uses rubberized silk. And beginning in 1927, the partnership Sarg forms is actually with the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company in Akron, Ohio, and they’re the ones who are producing the balloons. So Sarg would do the designs; the rubber would be designed into these kind of spherical forms that then are turned into patterns, cut out on these huge scale, pasted together. It’s like rubber cement that’s putting them together, painted. They were assembled at the Goodyear Airship air dock where they’re building zeppelins is also where they’re building these balloon figures. So, in 1927, they bring the figures. They’re popular, but weird because at the time they were not copyrighted figures like today that are coming from branded things. They were imaginary. So they are all sorts of storybook characters more than anything that Sarg is creating, which is in keeping with the types of plays that his mary that company is doing. They’re doing lots of traditional folktales and stories, and so he’s building upon characters that are in those very popular, but there’s only a few of these large balloons in the parade at first. It’s not as though the entire parade is filled with balloons like we see more today. The thing to know about early parades, this is about 1928 to 1932, is they actually released the balloons after the parade, so they would let them go, untether them, and fly up in the air. There’s great photographs showing these balloons up by the Empire State Building, and they would have tags attached to them offering a reward from the Macy’s store for people who would let them know where they were found. And there’s some photographs of Tony Saragh in the newspaper handing a one hundred dollars check to a young man who found a particular balloon in a field in New Jersey. So it’s hard to imagine that happening today. Even at the time, it was not safe. There were balloons that caught fire in power lines. There was a balloon that was visible by airplanes, and in 1931 actually collided with an airplane, which is what prompted them to stop doing this practice. The plane nosedived, but they were able to recover. It was a student pilot, so they even had to release statements ahead of that, saying, ‘Pilots, don’t try to catch the balloons for the reward, because they thought that might happen,’ and it did. So it’s kind of crazy to think about these early years of the Macy’s Parade and Tony Sart’s involvement. He was very much the celebrity at the helm of creating these spectacles and led them for the rest of his life. He was involved in designing balloons, in particular with one of his colleagues, a puppeteer named Bill Baird, who was a primary point of contact and colleague working with the Goodyear Company, known for ‘The Sound of Music’s’ ‘Lonely Goatherd’ marionette scene. ‘Hi on the Hill was.’

00:15:10
Speaker 1: A lone lingoat head lay. Now it was the vost of the lone lingo head lay.

00:15:19
Speaker 2: Those are from Bill Baird. So, but he got his beginning with Tony Sarg and specifically with the Macy’s Parade, developing and designing these huge balloons, and he’s also credited with the notion of them as quote-unquote ‘upside-down marionettes.’ When you see them in motion, there is something really magical about it, just like he had done with marionettes. So, I could add more tethers and strings; there are that many more points of movement and the illusion of life that could be manifest. So, let’s have more points of attachment, let’s have longer lines, let’s create a system in which the pieces themselves are bigger and there’s more surface area to move around to create that sense of life. And I think it’s amazing to think of how much he accomplished in his own life. And I always liken him to a Walt Disney before Walt Disney, and there were a lot of points of contact between Sarg and Disney, starting very early in the 1920s, going all the way through the ’30s. Sarg’s development of a name brand and putting ‘Tony Sarg this and Tony Sarg that’ above everything he did is very much what you see happening with Walt Disney. Later you get the Walt Disney’s ‘X,’ or Walt Disney’s ‘Pinocchio,’ Walt Disney’s ‘What Have You,’ and it’s very much along the same lines. And in the 1930s, you even have Tony Sarg producing marionettes for the Madame Alexander Dohal Company, and they’re successful, and immediately it goes to Walt Disney after that, and they become Walt Disney characters, and that shift towards DID characters, which Disney represents, versus the brand of the creator of Tony Sarg. That’s the transition you start to see, even within their lifetime, because Tony Sarg is involved in creating the first Walt Disney balloons for the Macy’s Day Parade. There were books published of ‘Mickey and Minny Go to Macy’s’ in the early ’30s, and they go and they meet Tony Sarg, who’s creating their own balloons for the parade. So you have the Disney characters meeting their maker, but it’s not Walt Disney. It’s Tony Sarg making the balloons. And beyond the Macy’s book, in some instances, they’re immediately following the success of what Sarg produced turns to Walt Disney. The marionette book that Sarg published in 1921 and had sample plays at the back. ‘Snow White’ is one of the plays that’s in the back of that particular book, the degree to which Walt Disney looked to store worries that were familiar, folktales that were familiar. Most of them had also, for the past 15 years, been touring the country with Tony Sark’s Marionette Company, so they weren’t unknown stories. They had been appearing in his books, in his marionette companies, in his wallpaper designs, ‘Alice in Wonderland.’ You have all sorts of stories that then become Walt Disney classics. Not to say they were pre-existing properties. It’s not like Tony Sarg invented them, but he popularized them. And it was only natural then that you would have an individual who’s themselves trying to popularize something. Take, well, ‘This is familiar. It’s been touring the country with Tony Sark’s marionettes for the last 10 years.’ So there’s all these sorts of amazing points of connection between the two of them. And then as the years go on and you get into the post-war years of television in particular, that’s when Disney is able to transform this approach to popular culture and really become the person we know. And I think had Tony Sarg lived beyond 1942, when he passed away following a surgery for a ruptured appendix. Had he lived beyond the World War II era, everybody would know who he is. There is no doubt he was a popular for year on radio shows of the day. He would have been so on television, no question. Extremely charismatic individual who really left a remarkable legacy that I hope more people can learn about.

00:19:32
Speaker 1: And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Greg Hengler. And a special thanks to Deborah Sawrenson. She’s the curator of exhibitions at the Nantucket Historical Association, where their exhibition, ‘Tony Sarg: Genius at Play,’ is the first comprehensive exhibition exploring his life and what a life story to go from well just amateur puppeteer to creating the most iconic puppa of all time. And let’s face it, that’s what these are. The story of Tony Sarg, the story of the Upside-Down Puppets and how they came to be, and in the end, the story of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, here on Our American Stories.