Mardi Gras Carnival

Footage recently discovered in Amsterdam shows a short portion of the Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans in 1898 as it rolls down Canal street. It is thought to be the oldest footage shot of the city. Notice how the crowds just stand and watch the parade and are not the celebratory lot you'd see today under the same circumstances.

Mardi Gras Carnival includes part of the Rex parade, and shows the floats and riders. This edition of Rex also included a live bull. The theme of Rex that year was "Harvest Queens." The floats shown are corn, cherries, coffee, tea - at least that's what the notes say. However, the second float clearly is loaded with pineapples, not cherries.

There is a group of young men marching in the parade dressed as union soldiers. I can only wonder how that went over with the citizens of New Orleans since the city was occupied during the Civil War by the Union army starting in 1862, especially since that conflict had only ended 33 years before.

Here's a short form the American Mutoscope & Biograph Company showing what the Mardi Gras looked like in 1898: like a parade with a bunch of fantastic and imaginative floats. Nowadays, the crews who do these things down in the Crescent City are in a serious struggle to produce the most fantastic costumes. Back then, however, it looked like the Rose Bowl Parade, if they used bells instead of roses, the horses were members of the Ku Klux Klan, and the images on the floats were supposed to represent something. Although the linkage between the products they were supposed to be promoting and the way the people and sets on the floats are decorated is beyond me.

Still, it's interesting to see this step in the evolution of the Mardi Gras, and that is presumably why it's on the National Registry.