So while it’s fun to see Snoopy glide slowly past the M&M’s World, it doesn’t exactly feel like a novelty. Which is precisely what’s so great about these scenes of floats being pulled through the black-and-white New York City of yore. In each, there’s some strange admixture of everyday levity and historical gravity. It’s like seeing Fiorello La Guardia do jumping jacks.

 

The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade started in 1924, though then it was called the Christmas Parade. In its earliest years, entertainment came in the form of animals borrowed from the Central Park Zoo. The first float, Felix the Cat, appeared three years later in 1927. At that point, after the parade was done, officials would just release the tethers and let the balloons float away; there was a $100 prize awarded to anyone who could find and return one to Macy’s. That event was discontinued in 1933 after a guy crashed his plane trying to secure a runaway balloon.