Death to the Hollywood Christmas Parade

We knew something was wrong. In November we asked "Does the Hollywood Christmas Parade Try to Suck?", and little did we know it wasn't spasticly waving, it was drowning.

The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce yesterday said they lost $100k on the parade last year and would probably lose $200k this year. Which is a lot for something that sucks as much as it does, so they're ending the parade forever.

But just because something sucks and cost a lot of money doesn't mean that we should just cast it aside, hell some of our best friends suck and cost a lot of money.

So we thought that someone should take ownership of the parade, or at least co-sponsor it for the $200k, someone who understands what it means to spend a lot of money on total crap: Hollywood.

If the studios and the networks and the record labels who all call Hollywood home celebrated their big stars of that year, big successes, or soon-to-be stars and hits, you'd have a way better parade than that one with the pretty flowers in Pasadena.

And with the proper exploitation you could even put that on tv and get a few million people to tune in to watch their favorite stars ride down Hollywood Blvd in a totally pimped out convertible or some wild float professionally built by real set designers n shit.

But you can't have a studio take it over and make the MGM Hollywood Christmas Parade because then it would slant to MGM crap, same goes for Fox, Sony, Disney, and all the others who would gladly be able to remake the most overlooked Christmas parade of all.

Ultimately it should fall on the laps of two companies, E! and MTV. And since E! is on the Miracle Mile and MTV has a big office in Santa Monica they're a NY company, so E! should do it.

And E! should say, ok there will be 40 cars and 20 floats and we will charge the studios and labels $40k for a car and $80k for a float and promise to air that shit ten times before Christmas. Done.

Have a real drum line competition. Have a band or two on the roof of the Highlands. Have rappers walking down the street bustin. Skateboarders, elephants, hell, paint the street red for all we care.

The problem with the 75th parade was it felt 75. It was old, crusty, lame, out of step, and not even kitschy. The solution is a modern day parade fueld by the resources of all the creative interests of Hollywood's entertainment community dying to figure out a way to tell you about that new movie, tv show, or cd.

Done correctly it could actually be cool.

So I take back letting E! do it.

LAist should do it, and we should sell it to E!

Fine.

photo via Hollywood Chamber of Commerce