Tupac Posted July 4, 2009 Posted July 4, 2009 DCI championships start one month from today. I know I'm getting older and time goes a lot faster but didn't the season just get started? Also, watching corps in Madison, I noticed that some of the shows are still not complete. I guess they wait until the corps are on tour to add the rest of the show. Quote
GGarrett Posted July 4, 2009 Posted July 4, 2009 "It's getting late early." <1$ to Yogi Berra> Yes, it is much shorter than it used to be. Kids have so much on their plates now days. School programs have them going until sometimes early June, and they have to get back to college or school now sometimes in mid August. Memorial day to Labor Day season is way in the past now. Most marching age kids now don't even know that's how long it used to be... nor can they imagine it, either! Quote
MelloMike Posted July 5, 2009 Posted July 5, 2009 wow memorial day to labor day? was memorial day the start of everydays or the start of performances? i did 30+ shows in 07 and can't imagine doing many more than that. it'd be a blast i'm sure but you'd be way more exhausted by september i'd imagine Quote
vferrera Posted July 5, 2009 Posted July 5, 2009 50 days. 7 weeks and a day. 1972 was 12 weeks (May 27 - Aug. 19) 1979 was 10 weeks (June 9 - Aug 18) 1989 was 10 weeks 1999 was 9 weeks But the number of shows has remained constant ~30 per corps. Quote
j.morgus Posted July 5, 2009 Posted July 5, 2009 wow memorial day to labor day? was memorial day the start of everydays or the start of performances? i did 30+ shows in 07 and can't imagine doing many more than that. it'd be a blast i'm sure but you'd be way more exhausted by september i'd imagine Memorial Day contests were the norm for many years. Bear in mind that many corps had a mostly local membership, and did weekly or more often rehearsals year round. 30 was still a goodly number of shows for most, only it was spread out over the whole summer with many, many more venues and lineup combinations. Quote
perc2100 Posted July 5, 2009 Posted July 5, 2009 Memorial Day contests were the norm for many years. Bear in mind that many corps had a mostly local membership, and did weekly or more often rehearsals year round. 30 was still a goodly number of shows for most, only it was spread out over the whole summer with many, many more venues and lineup combinations. Also, if I'm not mistaken, "back in the day" corps did not travel all over the country all summer long. I always thought that it was mostly local shows in the local circuit early in summer (maybe even just weekend shows the first 1/4 of the summer), then maybe the last few weeks of the tour was a more national-style tour. Is this correct? Quote
j.morgus Posted July 5, 2009 Posted July 5, 2009 (edited) Also, if I'm not mistaken, "back in the day" corps did not travel all over the country all summer long. I always thought that it was mostly local shows in the local circuit early in summer (maybe even just weekend shows the first 1/4 of the summer), then maybe the last few weeks of the tour was a more national-style tour.Is this correct? It was around the Boston area when I was a kid, if the corps left town at all. Later, when I lived near New Orleans, it was tour or nothing, as corps were sparser as well as show venues. Even then, it wasn't like today with really only a couple of tour options with most of the same corps every night. There were quite a few options in any given week or region, and we would see different lineups more often, broken up over 2 or three "tours" in a season. Edited July 5, 2009 by j.morgus Quote
GGarrett Posted July 5, 2009 Posted July 5, 2009 That's correct. Most of the "major" corps did two split tours back then. Many smaller corps would do one or the other tour with them. Shows could be rounded out with smaller corps from the show site area that didn't really go on any tour at all. I was in a corps that didn't compete in DCI midwest my first year, but we took our bus up to that show to watch. Sounds kind of silly now I guess. I know it's hard for some marching members of the last 10 years anyway to envision this, but I'm not kidding when I say that in the Chicago area alone in the 70's we had probably 25 corps just in the immediate area. The east coast was twice that in their respective areas... and if you want figure Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio back then the number was easily 100 corps. Most were just very small (but entertaining!) corps. Shows were going on basically Thursday through Sunday nights around here back then SOME where... and there were drum corps in most every parade in the vicinity as well. Quote
j.morgus Posted July 5, 2009 Posted July 5, 2009 Shows were going on basically Thursday through Sunday nights around here back then SOME where... and there were drum corps in most every parade in the vicinity as well. Many towns had a drum corps show and a parade as part of their community's sumer bash. We marched shows at the [insert local produce/geographic feature] festival all over the midwest. All of these people knew about and saw a lot of corps over the summer. It was much more a part of the landscape then. Quote
hallrc Posted July 5, 2009 Posted July 5, 2009 Would it be possible to go back to a similar format (smaller, regional circuits), and then have a larger tour heading to DCI? Quote
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