The 1997 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade is the 71sy annual running of the annual event that is held in New York City every Thanksgiving Day, and usually, this would be a good event for families to watch other than the football games that the NFL would have while munching on turkey and stuffing. However, what was to be another parade would go down in infamy as being one of the parade's infamous and controversial as it would end up changing the rules afterward.
Basically, to those who do not see videos on YouTube, this parade is infamous as the winds that day would reach 45 miles per hours at time, something that would cause many balloons to be damaged, as the balloon for Pink Panther was damaged by a streetlight to the point of being beyond repair, the Barney balloon struggling with the high winds until it got its left side ripped open by a streetlight, and in an incident that will go down in Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade infamy, the Cat In The Hat balloon would slam into a lamppost, breaking a piece off that injured four people, one of them being put into a month-long coma (and would eventually sue in 2001 over the incident). This would cause the rules to change, as the next year, balloons would be given more handlers and even a couple of utility trucks, but would also add a size limit to the balloons (which would mean most balloons would be retired after this one due to exceeding the new limit alongside those that got too damaged to be used again).
While it does have some good performaces, like Shari Lewis and Charlie Horse (in what would be Shari's final performance in the parade's history, as the following year, she would die of pneumonia), and even the cast of Sesame Street, but sadly, not even Big Bird, Elmo, and friends singing Rubber Ducky can salvage this disaster from being the most infamous parade due to the injuries and balloon destruction.
