We're now moving into the end of our holiday season this year.

For the past month, I've posted brand new episodes on Sunday, just like always,

about current stories related to the Disney Company,

and then during the week I posted holiday stories about Walt and the parks

and other areas within the Disney Enterprise.

This coming Sunday we'll explore a question

that is central to coming theme park design, but today we have one last holiday story, a story

that we often post to close out the holiday season, a story about Walt's last New Year's Day, the day when

he was Grand Marshal at the Rose Parade.

As we move to the end of the holidays, we have one last seasonal episode to share.

It's an episode recently updated, expanded, and re-recorded from our early years that for a few days we're shuffling to the top of our feed.

An episode on Walt's last new year.

Let me set it up for you. Throughout his professional life, Walt Disney participated in the

Pasadena Rose Parade. The company's tradition of preview marketing and the parade goes back

to 1938 when the first Disney feature-related float was included in the parade.

Though Snow White had premiered 10 days earlier in the middle of December, 1937, the film wouldn't go into a general release until February 8th.

As such, Disney arranged an elaborate and costly float to be featured in the parade as a type of promotion.

Though one might think the parade in a pre-television era enjoyed an audience only of local Californians,

that wasn't true. The parade was regularly featured in magazines, newspapers, and various theatrical newsreels throughout the

country and even overseas. Marge championed the live-action movement model for Snow White

was featured on the float along with the Seven Dors. Two years later, a month before

Pinocchio premiered in New York, Disney created a rose parade float to promote that release as well.

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