PicoBlog

Among the copious piles of mid-century ephemera that I’ve collected (and am still in the process of unpacking in my new home, after many months) is this brochure for the Ice Capades of 1952. Founded in 1940, Ice Capades was a traveling theatrical ice skating show that for over fifty years was known as the pinnacle of kitsch, or “America’s most glorious ice carnival” in the words of one Slate writer. Drawing on vaudeville, it began as a halftime show: a Pittsburgh rink owner noticed that hockey crowds “swelled when he booked a figure skater to perform between periods. [John H.] Harris envisioned an ice carnival that would entertain crowds in rinks across America. He hired professional skaters, comedians, clowns, jugglers, barrel jumpers, and swarms of scantily-clad chorus girls.” Olympic figure skaters joined the cast, as did famous Vaudevillians. In 1941, Harris hired a sixteen-year-old US figure skating champion, Donna Atwood; within a year she was the star, known as “The Queen of the Ice.” Eight years later she married Harris, 27 years her senior, and gave birth to twin boys the following year to “facilitate her travel with young children, the Ice Capades props department used a 10-foot traveling trunk to build a portable nursery that could be rolled into her hotel room.”

By 1952, Ice Capades was a behemoth—on the road for most of the year, they had a profitable deal with Disney that allowed them to use Disney characters and music in their performances. Before the opening of Disneyland in 1955, these segments were the first time fans could see their favourite characters in real life – and presaged Disney on Ice, which launched in 1981 and continues to this day. A new Ice Capades show would launch in January and feature a mix of different types of performances: a true variety show on Ice. Those “scantily-clad chorus girls,” known as ‘The Ice Ca-“Pets”,’ performed en masse in many of the segments alongside their male counterparts, “The Ice Cadets”—backing up and supporting the known championship skaters. The central performance that year was Disney’s Cinderella, which had been released in 1950, with Donna Atwood skating opposite US figure skating champion Bobby Specht. Other performances included Trixie, a skating juggler—“she proves her ability to skip rope while bouncing a ball on her head or maneuvers three hats so swiftly that she almost seems to be wearing all three at once”—and a “pair of slow moving acrobats from Australia” called the Maxwells.

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