Another walk through Thanksgiving history, in the form of the early Survivor Series’:

For weeks leading up to the Series, the announcers had been touting a giant egg that sat atop a pedestal in the audience, and which they claimed would hatch live at Survivor Series. This was supposed to create a good deal of suspense, one assumes, and to look back even-handedly at the WWF of the 1980s, it wasn’t a totally ridiculous assumption — lots of silly storylines succeeded in those days. . . . What emerged was none other than the Gobbledy Gooker, a man in a full turkey costume who dragged Okerlund into the ring so that they could square-dance, more or less, to “Turkey in the Straw.” The crowd’s boos were dampened only by the turkey noises that were projecting out over the PA system to approximate the Gooker’s “speech.”It’s from this noise that Okerlund famously gave us the new guy’s name, too: “What is with the gobbledy? The gobbledy gook? PAH! — don’t tell me you’re the Gobbledy Gooker?!” . . .

The crowd saw this and were incensed. It’s easy to look back now and say, “Of course they hated that gimmick,” but that just wasn’t the way things went back then. For years, we had booed when the WWF wanted us to boo and cheered when they wanted us to cheer.Survivor Series 1990 may have been the first full-scale crowd revolt in WWF history, and as such, it was the Federation’s welcome to modernity.

That same night, in his match against Dusty Rhodes’ “Dream Team,” “The Million Dollar Man” Ted DiBiase unveiled a new wrestler whom he had “purchased” for his side: The Undertaker. It’s easy to cut and paste The Undertaker we know today into the memory of that night, because they’re very similar. It’s also important to consider what McMahon & Co. were pawning off on us: Mark Calaway — previously a midcard attraction in the NWA (and fairly recognizable as such) — portraying an undead old-West mortician. (Incongruously, he was led to the ring by Brother Love, a red-faced televangelist character, before Love was replaced by the more suitable Paul Bearer.) The Undertaker was every bit the harebrained, ’80s-era wrestling cartoon that the Gooker was; he just wasn’t played for a laugh.To call it ironic that those two characters debuted on the same night gets it exactly backwards. The Gobbledy Gooker and The Undertaker are the same: two characters cut from the same cloth, two ideas hatched from the same egg — er, mind. I’m sure McMahon thought both of them would succeed to some degree; that the audience came down so decisively signaled the beginning of a new day in WWF history. It was the moment we chose tragedy over comedy.

Tyler sticks in the shiv:

A girl with the twitter name Elana_Brooklyn posted this picture of Anne Hathaway at yesterdays Occupy Wall Street rally holding a sign that said, “Blackboards Not Bullets”. Because apparently Anne thinks those are the two choices, and that Wall Street is in charge of that.

For me, Thanksgiving and Macy’s are so intertwined that I always refer to the event as the “Macy’s Day Parade.”

So this Jim Shooter post about the design and creation of the Spider-Man balloon and the Marvel float is pure gold.

I understand that you quibble with Ann Coulter at your own peril because she’s wicked smart and very funny. And she makes a perfectly sensible argument in favor of Mitt Romney as the Republican nominee.

She does, however, oversell two points concerning his electoral powers:

* “Among Romney’s positives is the fact that he has a demonstrated ability to trick liberals into voting for him.”

That’s true enough–he won a single state-wide election in a very Democratic state. However, I’d remind people that Romney won this race with less than 50 percent of the vote. And also that it isn’t entirely unheard of to have Republican governors in Massachusetts. Romney was elected in 2002. At that point, Massachusetts had had a Republican governor for 11 years.

Romney was preceded by Jane Swift, Paul Cellucci, and Bill Weld.

Weld was elected in 1990 with 50.19 percent of the vote. He won reelection in 1994 with 70.85 percent.

Cellucci, who stepped in for Weld, won his own term in 1998 with 50.81 percent of the vote.

Swift, who stepped into office for Cellucci, did not run because the state party pushed her aside for Romney in 2002.

I’m not suggesting that a Republican winning the governorship of Massachusetts isn’t impressive–it is! But it’s worth understanding that Romney’s 49.77 percent of the vote in 2002–a generally very good year for Republicans nationally–was the worst showing for a Republican gubernatorial candidate in the state in a decade.

* “He came close to stopping the greatest calamity to befall this nation since Pearl Harbor by nearly beating Teddy Kennedy in a Senate race.”

Depends on what you think “close” is. Romney lost by 17 points in a mammoth Republican year nationally. And he ran 30 points behind a popular Republican governor on the same ballot.

I keep having to say this–I’m not anti-Romney. Maybe he’d make a good nominee and be well-positioned to fight Obama. Maybe his experience and intelligence would make him a really great president. And if Coulter is on that bus, then good for her.

I’d just caution that Republicans should have their eyes wide open about Romney’s electoral track record. And that, whatever his other merits, Romney’s electoral experience suggests more bugs than features.

Via The Transom. It’s awesome.

I should have noted yesterday that in appreciating (or criticizing) the New DC, it’s important not to romanticize the past.

(You should click to look at the big version and check out the detailed ridiculousness. The “Space Ape” is wearing a spacesuit/Martian helmet.)

(And no, this is not from my private collection.)

(Yet.)

I’ve never quite seen anything like the box score of last week’s Denver vs. Kansas City game: Denver completes 2 of 8 passes. Half of their completions were TDs. Six players rushed for double-digit yards. And they won.

I understand why high schools run the option. And I understand why, at the collegiate level, a very few teams run it to mask personnel weaknesses.

What I don’t understand is why, at the pro level, the option is either (a) doomed to fail; or (b) could be run with a reasonable level of success.

I’d love to read smart thoughts about this if anyone has them.