Coming Up on TV: Pigskin Parade

Football fans may be interested in the silly comedy Pigskin Parade because it shows how college football was played in 1936.  It airs on Turner Classic Movies on April 22.

Like many sports movies, Pigskin Parade ends with a climactic game – and there’s footage of real football being played in a snowstorm (in long shot) interspersed with the comic movie football (in medium shot).  You can see the formations, men in motion and punt formation.  I knew about the leather helmets for the players, but I didn’t know that the referees wore unstriped white Knickerbockers and baker boy caps or that the coaches sent in  substitutions by written note.

Jack Haley plays a dim football coach hired at the fictional Texas State.  His spark plug wife (the very funny Patsy Kelly) is the real football brain.  Out in the countryside, they find a hayseed QB who can throw the ball out of the stadium and outrun a deer when he is barefoot; he is played by Stuart Erwin (who garnered a Supporting Actor Oscar nod).

In the final game, Texas State, referred to as “Texas” by the radio broadcaster, is a big underdog to Yale.  Yale was indeed a power at the time.  Yale players won the Heisman in both 1936 and 1937.

Pigskin Parade was the first feature film for Judy Garland and the second acting credit of over 200 for Elisha Cook Jr.  Betty Grable appears before she became a star.  Judy, Betty and Elisha are all billed below the comic quartet The Yacht Club Boys.  (Creepiness alert:  all but one of The Yacht Club Boys were way too old to be hanging around a college campus acting zany and wearing varsity gear.)

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