Word: coonskin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Attention, raccoons: head for the hills! Not since the 1950s, when Fess Parker sported a coonskin cap on the TV show Davy Crockett, have the long-tailed hats been so popular. Manhattan-based Jack Seifter and Sons, the largest U.S. manufacturer of the caps, has seen sales double in the past several months. During 1988 the company sold 500 of the authentic caps (retail price: $100) and 10,000 versions made with fake fur or rabbit pelt and a real ringtail...
...arrived, and Walt really revved up his marketing genius. He named his first prime-time series Disneyland -- a recurrent plug for the Anaheim theme park -- and filled it with old cartoons and his avuncular presence. When a Disneyland serial about Indian Fighter Davy Crockett stoked a brief frenzy for coonskin caps, the studio quickly sutured the three episodes together and released them as a theatrical feature. Minimal expenditures, more revenue. Then Disney launched an afternoon program, The Mickey Mouse Club, which introduced the Mouseketeers, a troupe of child stars who cavorted like stagestruck Cub Scouts and intoned the show...
...soon the fad faded in red ink and rancor. The same black community leaders who would urge Paramount Pictures to suppress Ralph Bakshi's "racist" film Coonskin (and, a decade later, Sam Fuller's White Dog) were condemning blaxploitation as image suicide. Moreover, white liberal producers, reluctant to portray black men as rapists and dopers, failed to come up with alternatives. "If you're not working," says Actor Stan Shaw (Roots II), "you don't "get better...
...sometimes lonely road to glory. But our system is not an ideological one. It is based on flexibility, compromise. Clifford recalls Johnson as he sealed his fate in the sweltering officers' club of Cam Ranh Bay in Viet Nam, urging his field commanders to "come home with that coonskin on the wall." L.B.J.'s lust for victory was ultimately to defeat...