On Monday morning, October 19, commuters rushing through Grand Central Terminal looked up and saw an old friend. A brand-new Underdog balloon, posed in the same arms-out flying stance kids remember from the 1960s, was on display inside the station, and Macy’s made it official: Underdog will fly in the 2026 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, his first time in the lineup in 42 years. According to ABC7 New York, the Underdog balloon appeared in every parade from 1965 through 1984, which makes him one of the longest-running characters the parade has ever had.
For anyone who spent Saturday mornings cross-legged in front of the TV with a bowl of cereal, that is wonderful news. But the balloon that rose over Central Park West all those years had a story of its own, and it began with a cartoon dog who talked in rhymes.
How Did a Mild-Mannered Shoeshine Boy Become Saturday Morning’s Favorite Hero?
Underdog premiered on NBC on October 3, 1964, with General Mills footing the bill as its main sponsor, and it moved over to CBS in 1966 before its original run wrapped in March 1967. The show came out of Total Television, the studio run by W. Watts “Buck” Biggers, Chet Stover, Treadwell Covington, and artist Joe Harris, the same team that had already given kids King Leonardo and Tennessee Tuxedo.
The idea started as a brainstorm. “We were talking about a character that would be a super dog or a super chicken,” Harris recalled in a 1997 interview quoted by Cartoon Research. “We decided on a super dog, and one of the guys came up with the idea of Underdog.” His first sketch was a little too slick, he admitted, and the sponsors pushed back. “They said, ‘No, we need someone more vulnerable.'”
Vulnerable is exactly what they got. By day he was humble Shoeshine Boy, and when Sweet Polly Purebred landed in trouble he ducked into a phone booth and came out in a red suit and blue cape, powered by the energy pill he kept tucked inside his ring. His enemies were the mad scientist Simon Bar Sinister, forever shouting “Simon says HOLD IT!”, and the gangster wolf Riff Raff. And every rescue opened with the couplet a whole generation can still recite: “There’s no need to fear, Underdog is here!”
The voice behind both Shoeshine Boy and his alter ego belonged to Wally Cox, the gentle, bespectacled comic who had starred in Mister Peepers on NBC in the early 1950s. Harris never doubted the choice. “His voice was perfect for Underdog,” he said in that same 1997 interview, adding that Cox “was the embodiment of the character.” That mix of timid and brave was the whole joke, and for kids who felt small themselves, it was also the whole appeal.
Who Designed the Underdog Balloon That Soared Down Broadway?
A year after the show premiered, Macy’s came calling, and the job of designing the giant balloon fell to Joe Harris himself. He never forgot the phone call.
“When Macy’s said, ‘Can you design a balloon?’ I thought, ‘Boy, we hit the big time,'” Harris told the interviewer, according to Cartoon Research. “That was my first inkling that was something beyond what I had been doing before.”
His design made Underdog look as if he were flying between the buildings of New York, chest out and arms stretched forward, and from 1965 on he was a fixture of Thanksgiving morning. Families watching at home could count on spotting him somewhere between the floats and the marching bands, year after year.
Not every flight was smooth. In 1975, a 1988 UPI history of the parade recalled, handlers lost control of the Underdog balloon and he crashed into a light pole in Times Square, which knocked him out for the rest of the parade. He was back the following year, though, and he kept coming back right through 1984. After that, the Underdog balloon quietly went into retirement.
He never really left the culture, however. Ten years later, in November 1994, a whole sitcom episode was built around him. In the Friends Thanksgiving episode “The One Where Underdog Gets Away,” the gang heads up to the roof to watch the runaway Underdog balloon drift over the city and ends up locked out of Monica’s apartment on Thanksgiving. The balloon was already a memory by then, and the writers knew their audience would remember it.
What Will Underdog Find When He Takes Flight Again This Thanksgiving?
The parade he returns to is a milestone one. The 2026 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade is the 100th, and Macy’s has packed it with nostalgia. A brand-new Snoopy balloon joins the lineup, along with a new Sorcerer’s Apprentice Mickey. Felix the Cat, the parade’s very first character balloon back in 1927, is coming home too, and so is the Blue Hippopotamus, which floated off in 1931 and was never seen again. Bullwinkle, Popeye and Olive Oyl ride together on a special float of parade all-stars.
Even in that crowd, Underdog stands out, because he is the one so many of us waited for. The parade steps off at 8:30 a.m. on Thursday, November 26, and airs on NBC and Peacock.
Somewhere along the route that morning, there will be grandparents who first saw him on the family’s console TV, now holding up grandchildren who have never heard of Shoeshine Boy. When that red suit and blue cape come gliding down the avenue, someone in the crowd is bound to say it out loud, the way we all did as kids: there’s no need to fear.
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