Ice Capades
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The Ice Capades was a traveling entertainment show featuring theatrical performances involving ice skating.
Ice Capades was founded at an Arena Managers Association Meeting, held on February 14, 1940, in Hershey, PA. The ten Arena managers attending agreed to start a new Ice Show. The Arena managers all desired additional dates from Ice Follies, the original traveling ice show, for their buildings. With Ice Follies booked solid, their only solution was a second show. Peter A. Tyrrell, General Manager, of the Philadelphia Arena was elected President of the new venture. Sonja Heine, had turned professional in Tyrrell’s, Philadelphia Arena and Tyrrell had been given credit for the first successful run of Ice Follies, (See Eddie Shipstead, Ice Follies Star pp 98-101) no doubt contributed to Tyrrell’s selection to launch and manage the new venture. The first edition of Ice Capades was rehearsed in the Philadelphia Arena following the meeting in Hershey and the new show opened in New Orleans LA on June 16, 1940. Following the premiere opening in New Orleans, the show played during the summer of 1940 in Atlantic City, where the 1941 edition of the show was rehearsed during the day.. In February of 1941 Tyrrell relinquished the Presidency to John H. Harris, of the Pittsburgh Gardens, as Tyrrell having successfully started the show had no desire to travel.In the early days, Ice Capades shows were highly theatrical, with vaudeville elements, including scantily-clad showgirls.
Ice Capades shows were extremely popular for several decades — virtually a household name — although criticized by some as kitsch. Shows would often feature former Olympic figure skaters who had retired from amateur competition.
Tyrrell negotiated the sale, which was approved by the Board of Directors, of the company in 1963 for $5.5 million; in 1986 then-owner Metromedia sold Ice Capades and the Harlem Globetrotters as a package to International Broadcasting Corporation for $30 million. However, a decline in popularity began in the 1980s and the parent company went bankrupt in 1991. In 1993 Dorothy Hamill bought Ice Capades assets in a bankruptcy sale and attempted to revive the company with the critically acclaimed Frozen in Time: Cinderella on Ice, but attendance figures remained stagnant. In February 1995 she sold the company for $10 million to television evangelist Pat Robertson's International Family Entertainment, Inc., but they announced plans to sell in August 1995, and Ice Capades went out of business permanently a short time later. It is likely that, in reconciling their outstanding debts, their assets were frozen.
Analysts believe that on the one hand, the increasing popularity of the sport of figure skating meant that more sophisticated audiences came to prefer straightforward Olympic-style ice-skating competitions, or skating shows for adults (i.e., without cartoon characters) such as Stars on Ice; and on the other hand, shows such as Disney on Ice (featuring Disney cartoon characters) successfully competed for the child audience.
Similar traditional ice-skating entertainment shows included the Ice Follies and Holiday on Ice.
[edit] Ice Capades in popular culture
Curiously, sitcom episodes with a plot involving tickets to the Ice Capades were still being written years after the demise of the company, including episode 208 ("Drew Hunts a Silver Fox") of the Drew Carey Show (broadcast in 2004) and episode 157 ("The Thought That Counts") of Everybody Loves Raymond (broadcast in 2002).
Gary Larson parodied the Ice Capades in his Far Side comic with comics captioned "Ice Crusades" and "Dirt Capades".
In his film Hannah and Her Sisters, Woody Allen remarks about Nietzsche's theory of eternal recurrence: "He said that the life we lived we're gonna live over again the exact same way for eternity. Great. That means I'll have to sit through the Ice Capades again."
In an episode of Olsen twin sitcom Two of a Kind, Carrie says that one guy she dated joined the Ice Capades after they broke up.
In the Ramones song 'Judy Is A Punk' there is the lyric, "they both went down to Berlin, joined the Ice Capades".
In The X Files, Mulder occasionally refers to the Ice Capades. It is implied that he found it boring.
In his HBO special "You Are All Diseased" (1999), American stand-up comedian George Carlin explains why he lost his faith in God: "...the longer you live, the more you look around, the more you realize something is f***ed up. Something is wrong here: war, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and The Ice Capades".
In Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit, Whoopi Goldberg's character Deloris van Cartier says that she wanted to be in the Ice Capades. When Lauryn Hill's character Rita rolls her eye, Deloris says that they were very cool.
