(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Support for this program comes from, the first super krewe, Bacchus 1969.

Thank you, Blaine Kern, for your vision and genius.

Bacchus Sunday is a night of spectacular, iconic floats, sparked by imagination.

From designing floats to helping create krewes, Blaine Kern was one of a kind and the krewe at Endymion is proud to honor his legacy by supporting this program.

The krewe of Hermes was founded in 1937, to spur economic activity after the Great Depression.

In line with that mission, the krewe is honored to celebrate Blaine Kern's contributions to the growth and development of Mardi Gras.

The krewe of Iris, the oldest and largest all female carnival krewe in New Orleans is proud to support this program and honor the legacy of Blaine Kern.

The krewe of Orpheus celebrates our dear friend Blaine, thank you for your friendship and creativity.

Cheers to you, Mr. Mardi Gras.

(gentle music) Program underwriting also from the Krewe of Alla, and the Legion of Mars.

The Krewe of Tucks.

And by Reve Realtors.

(upbeat music) (crowd cheering) - [Narrator] It's often called the greatest free show on Earth.

The world's largest international party, the weekslong, pre-Lenten celebration culminates on Fat Tuesday, Mardi Gras Day.

Carnival season in New Orleans draws hundreds of thousands of participants and spectators from across the country and around the world.

It's a gaudy, exuberant spectacle with marching bands, dancing groups, flambeaux carriers, animated, larger than life Mardi Gras floats, Children on ladders, all with hands up in the air, screaming, "Throw me something!"

hoping to catch a prized doubloon, a toy, or signature prize.

(upbeat music) Mardi Gras revels in extraordinary pageantry.

The krewes costume to chosen themes and create their own history, their own traditions, many of them funny and irreverent and creative.

The crowds are a gumbo of locals, visitors, kids, friends, strangers, people with many different backgrounds, positions and beliefs crowding together on New Orleans' streets to share in the jubilation.

Mardi Gras in New Orleans has its own rhythm, its own music and style.

Dozens of parades for several weeks leading up to Fat Tuesday, the last day, according to the Christian calendar, to indulge in food and fun and desire before Ash Wednesday and 40 days of sacrifice during Lent leading up to Easter Sunday.

And one man made a mark and contributions so profound they call him Mr. Mardi Gras.

(upbeat music) - Folks, they call me Mr. Mardi Gras because I produce about 80% of what you all know as Mardi Gras in the world.

I'm a tremendous promoter.

- [Narrator] Blaine Kern Sr. grew up on the West Bank of New Orleans in Algiers, and he was a sickly child, in his later years telling how he suffered from mastoiditis, a middle ear infection.

It was before treatment with penicillin and it was often a deadly disease.

- I had extremeunction, which is the last rites of the church, two or three times.

I could have died, in other words, from the infection.

It went all through my system, so much so I couldn't even walk, so I ended up three and four months in the hospital, living there.

- [Narrator] Blaine was born at a time when communities up and down the Mississippi were fighting the great flood of 1927, only two years before a stock market crash triggered the Great Depression and his family was fighting financial hardship.

- Oh my God, we were poor.

I was hungry sometimes.

I remember going to school, had breakfast.

I had a cup of coffee and maybe a piece of bread.

I'd get dizzy spells and headaches from hunger.

- [Narrator] His family was so poor that four elderly schoolteachers took them in.

We went and lived with them because we didn't have the $17.50 a month for the rent.

- [Narrator] His sickness meant he couldn't go out and play with the other kids, so he explored exciting, distant worlds through the books those teachers encouraged him to read.

He says that fired up his imagination.

- I read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs.

I was going to the Moon before Sputnik, man.

I had a sense of imagination.

And you know what Albert Einstein said?

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

- [Narrator] In fact, Einstein added, knowledge is limited.

Imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.

- [Blaine] Now think of that!

- [Narrator] Blaine credits his imagination for a lot of his success in life and growing up as the only boy surrounded by women, those elderly teachers, his mom and his three sisters, may have given him the confidence to act on the ideas he imagined.

- He was probably doted on, probably created some of the ego that he possesses.

You know, having seven women tell you you're the greatest.

- Oh I was the prince.

I could do no wrong, completely spoiled.

And my mother had a saying: Blaine, aim for the moon but keep your feet on the ground and the shadows are always darkest when the sun is the brightest.

So my mother swelled me up that I could do anything and I believe I can.

To this day, I think I could do anything.

- [Narrator] But in school, his teachers worried about him.

- All of his teachers in all of his classes used to say that Blaine was never going to amount to anything because he wasn't a good student.

- I was always in trouble.

All I ever did in school was read books and draw pictures.

I was at the bottom of the class, honest to goodness.

- [Narrator] Blaine was about five when his dad, Roy Kern, started building floats.

- 1932, I was a little boy and daddy took seven garbage wagons and converted them into covered wagons for the Krewe of Choctaw in Algiers.

- [Narrator] And a year later, his dad built the first float for the new Krewe of Alla, named for Algiers, Louisiana.

Over the years, Blaine helped, his dad telling people to check out his son's artistic talent.

- Daddy always promoted me.

Former New Orleans councilwoman Jackie Clarkson grew up in Algiers with Blaine and his sisters.

He was older, about nine, when she remembers watching him sketch.

- He was sitting under one of the most gorgeous oak trees in Algiers, drawing gorgeous, genius work.

- [Narrator] She says she was so impressed, she later told her father- - Daddy, he's a genius.

Now that's a statement I remember making at age five.

- I'm very gifted as I'm talented and never lost an art contest as a boy.

- [Narrator] Blaine studied at the art school that the famous watercolorist John McCrady owned.

- When they'd ask him to draw things, he would draw floats, and John McCrady would say, Son, you're never going to make a living drawing Mardi Gras floats.

- [Narrator] Blaine came back from the Army after World War II to discover his family in crisis.

His mother needed surgery, but his family could not afford it.

The Krewe of Alla's captain, Dr. Henry LaRocca, owned the only clinic in Algiers, and he came to the rescue.

- Dr. LaRocca said, Look, Blaine, I'll give you your mom's operation if you can paint the history of medicine in a mural on the walls of my clinic, and apparently he did a wonderful job.

And Dr. LaRocca said to him, hey, do you think you could build a parade?

- [Narrator] Blaine was only 19 years old.

He had never designed and built a whole parade before.

He had only helped his dad with some floats.

And yet.

- I knew I could do anything.

Stupid, you know?

Anyway, I did the parade.

- [Narrator] It was a big success.

And Blaine's display of almost audacious self-confidence and his visionary imagination would drive his career.

- It's what I love about him the most is that he really, really believed in himself and his dreams, and he was and still is an incredible dreamer.

- He has a great imagination.

He's also very well versed in history, mythology.

He is not afraid of his ideas.

He will quickly come up with an idea.

You know, lots of times they're great ideas.

- [Narrator] The parades he designed and built for Alla got the attention of the aristocratic crowd in New Orleans.

- Everybody in New Orleans was talking about how the floats that the poor people in Algiers on the other side of the tracks or the other side of the river in this particular case, the floats were more impressive and told a story better than even those that were going down St Charles Avenue with the old line krewes.

- [Narrator] Rex, the King of Carnival, was Mardi Gras' most prestigious krewe and traditionally presented the most artistically impressive parade.

For decades, well before Carnival throws had people with hands in the air yelling, throw me something the Rex Parade like this one in 1913 filled Canal Street sidewalk to sidewalk, the crowds just wanting to witness the artistic spectacle of the rolling tableau.

- Just watching those works of art go by and loving that.

And that's why they came from from Iowa and from Illinois and from New York, and from all over the country, all over the world to see rolling works of art.

- [Narrator] But by the late 1940s and '50s some people said the Rex Parade was in trouble.

The floats no longer nearly as artistic or appealing.

- They looked like baby carriages.

They did it in a hurry, and each one looked like the other one.

And it was about 15 of them really bad.

- They weren't as dynamic as beautiful as those earlier parades.

- [Narrator] Then a new captain, Darwin Fenner, took charge of Rex.

- I always looked at him as a pivotal figure in Rex history.

- [Narrator] Fenner wanted to rejuvenate Rex with fresh energy and new excitement.

- And Fenner saw what this young Blaine Kern was doing with the Alla Parade.

- Mr. Fenner reached out to a young Blaine Kern and sort of took him under his wing and encouraged him to learn new techniques.

- [Narrator] For Blaine, building what was just a secondary parade to be contacted by the captain of the most prestigious parade, it was an incredible rush and another huge break.

(text whooshing) Darwin Fenner hired Blaine to design and build the Rex Parade and sent him to Europe to find fresh ideas for Rex.

- He sent me to live out of his own pocket over in Valencia and in Viareggio in Italy and to go see the carnival in Nice and in Mainz, Frankfurt and Cologne where they have the Prince Carnival.

And they have the all of the heraldry and I start getting all these ideas what it could be.

- [Narrator] He was especially impressed with what he saw in Viareggio, Italy.

- The floats there are enormous and have multiple props, all of which are animated.

- [Narrator] The float builders in Viareggio were doing extraordinary things Blaine had never seen before.

- God, yes, they would have floats only eight or 10 of them, but they'd be 50 feet tall and they'd have animation.

- He began to import some of the props and sculptures directly from Viareggio.

So some of the figures that you see on Rex parades in the '60s and '70s weren't made here.

They were made in Viareggio.

- And it was a big hit.

- [Narrator] For the first time, in 1958, the Rex Parade had animation.

It was among the first of many innovations Blaine would bring to Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

- I was just wow, this is something else.

You'd never seen that before.

- [Narrator] Over time, Blaine put his own artistic stamp on some of Rex's iconic floats, including possibly the best known.

The King's Float.

- The King's float in Rex was a very small float.

He created the swirl on the back of it, the scroll work and the heraldry, basically made that float bigger and enhanced what it was made it feel majestic.

- I added embellishments to it.

Scrolls here.

And here's famous my God, the Boeuf Gras.

I introduced this back to Rex, it had not been used since 1900, so it was 50 years later.

I introduced the papier mache Boeuf Gras.

- [Narrator] Blaine took over as the captain of Alla after his early mentor, Dr. Henry LaRocca, died in 1957, and the spectacular show he staged at the Alla Ball in 1960 scared, dazzled and won rave reviews.

- He had this humongous King Kong.

It took five or six men to operate the arms the legs and all, and the auditorium was in darkness.

And all of a sudden you saw the eyes of Kong.

And I remember one lady who went to that ball told me, she said I was so scared.

I almost jumped under my seat.

The eyes were lit and in darkness people saw the eyes and heard the roar of King Kong.

(Kong roaring) And was just something that was very impressive to people because they hadn't seen anything like that before.

- [Narrator] Blaine's King Kong was 18 1/2 feet high.

- I built the whole set that looked like a huge gate and you heard boom, boom, boom, snap, breaking foliage and everything and finally Kong pushing.

And the whole Alla krewe like natives.

They were trying to hold the gate closed, but they couldn't, and he pushed it open.

- [Narrator] Kong was ready to grab a beautiful young woman in front of him when Sammy, a short man with a rifle, took action to save her.

- And he picked up his rifle and I had a cannon go off in the auditorium, complete darkness, and then the lights came on gradually.

The girl was alone holding Sammy in her arms and Kong had a big net over him.

- One thing that hasn't changed is his fascination with King Kong.

And really, to understand Blaine, you have to see King Kong.

- I fell in love with King Kong when I was a little boy.

Blaine says that 1933 movie made a great impression on him.

- Oh God, did it.

The most impressive thing in my whole life.

At that time they didn't make movies like that, just, he was animated, they had this girl had her blouse tore off.

She was a sacrifice and Kong got closer and closer breaking vegetation and holding the gate.

Then the gate burst open.

That was it.

- [Narrator] Years later, Blaine would add a King Kong float to the Bacchus parade and eventually Queen Kong and Baby Kong as well.

- His role model, obviously, is the entrepreneur who is going to bring Kong back to New York and does.

Kong, eighth wonder of the world!

It's perfect for Blaine because frankly, it's overcoming all the obstacles to think that a guy from Algiers that came up in the circumstances that he did socioeconomically to become the artist most recognized with what Carnival is today.

- [Narrator] Walt Disney was so impressed with Blaine's King Kong and his parades that he invited Blaine to Hollywood to work with him.

But Darwin Fenner talked him out of it.

- Mr. Fenner said son, let me tell you something.

You go to Hollywood, you can be a little fish in a big, big pond.

The way you are acting and doing Mardi Gras, it's going to grow and grow.

You can end up being a big fish in a little pond, so I turned Disney down.

(text whooshing) - [Narrator] And Blaine did a lot to make Mardi Gras grow.

He helped start dozens of new krewes by renting floats to groups that could not afford to buy them, enabling them to have their own carnival parades.

- I started the Krewe of Grela.

I started the Krewe of Houmas in Houma, Louisiana, and I had a krewe in Golden Meadow.

I started 38 krewes in New Orleans alone.

- He brought Mardi Gras to the masses.

He built rental floats that were then shared by many different organizations.

- It gave people who could not afford to spend a lot of money on Mardi Gras, an opportunity to participate and be part of it.

Zulu was among the krewes renting floats from Blaine Kern Artists.

Blaine is really responsible for Zulu being where they are today.

- We had a good relationship with Blaine Kern.

I mean, it was...

He wanted to work with us and we wanted to work with him.

The biggest challenge was the fact that we were a black organization.

He provided floats to white krewes.

So I mean, we used the floats.

But then, after the black awareness came about, the figures on his floats, our members wondered, why can't you have black figures?

And as a matter of fact, one year one of the members did.

They put black face on the figure's face.

And that kind of got him to change the figures on that.

- [Narrator] Zulu leaders got together with Blaine to create the figures that would be placed on the floats the krewe rented and eventually bought.

The expansion of Mardi Gras was very much because of Blaine.

- [Narrator] Some people complained he was cheapening Mardi Gras, but many argued he was making it better.

- Before that, you had to be an uptown blue blood and get an invitation from them to join.

- It opened it up, and, you know, to me one of the strengths of Mardi Gras is the diversity in it.

- [Narrator] In the late '60s, some people in the hospitality industry were concerned about Mardi Gras' appeal as a tourist attraction.

- Back in '68.

The old lady, she was hurting, man.

When you consider occupancy for Mardi Gras weekend was under 40% with 6,000 rooms.

- [Narrator] Restaurateur Owen "Pip" Brennan Jr. says at the time, people were seeing extravagant Rose Bowl and Cotton Bowl parades on TV.

- On television, they were outstanding.

And then we felt a lot of people were coming to New Orleans expecting something like that, and it wasn't happening and they were saying is this all.

And we felt something had to be done to bring national and international publicity to the city.

- [Narrator] So whom did Pip and costume maker Larry Youngblood meet with to see about launching this big new parade?

Blaine Kern.

- By 1968, I mean, he's an established star.

He's the guy everybody's calling Mr. Mardi Gras.

- They were talking about a parade on the empty Sunday night, and they were going to call themselves the merry men of Sherwood.

I said, you can't name it the Merry Men of Sherwood.

- Blaine said Pip, man, you've got to name this krewe Bacchus.

Your dad started this in 1950.

It makes sense.

- [Narrator] Pip's father, Owen Brennan, Senior, co-founded the original krewe of Bacchus and for a couple of years held carnival balls for tourists and locals who were unable to attend Mardi Gras events outside of street parades.

Pip told Blaine he wanted this new parade to be big enough and exciting enough to supercharge the appeal of Mardi Gras.

- We weren't interested in a ball and a court and the Queen and maids.

- [Narrator] Pip says they strictly wanted a great parade for the public, with large animated figures, new exciting lighting and a national celebrity as king.

- He couldn't digest that one too good at that point.

- [Narrator] The plan was simple: build a spectacular parade on Sunday night when there was an open spot that was so exciting, so electrifying tourists would stay in town an extra night, patronizing local hotels, restaurants and businesses.

- You know what?

If they stayed in town Sunday night, very likely they'd make it through Tuesday morning.

They just wanted to create a few more days of people to be in town.

- [Narrator] The first parade's theme?

The Best Things in Life.

Blaine, I mean, he was so talented, he was so far ahead of his time.

In less than 10 days, he came back with the drawing of each individual float.

How it fit the theme, the colors, everything.

At the very first membership meeting, 356 men had signed up for the all male, racially integrated krewe, including some out-of-towners.

And Bacchus opened it up to everybody.

- You could be a Jew, black, didn't matter.

Pip Brennan made sure of that.

- [Narrator] But Bacchus would have to overcome hardcore resistance from some old line Carnival krewe leaders.

- They were like, well, you can't do this, you can't do that.

You can't make floats bigger than anybody's ever had.

You can't have a celebrity king.

- They said that the king would overshadow the king of Mardi Gras.

And I said, come on, guys.

Rex is Rex.

He'll always be the king of Mardi Gras.

Our king is not going to overshadow Rex.

- I mean I had guys come to me: Blaine, how can you ruin Mardi Gras?

I said ruin Mardi Gras my (beep).

I said watch.

- And of course, my dad was on television crowing that this was going to be the best thing that anybody had ever seen, which I guess was kind of counter to what some of the other guys wanted to hear.

- [Narrator] The parade eventually rolled, but only after old line Carnival leaders suggested what Pip and his pals were planning for Bacchus would amount to trespassing or theft.

- They said, don't you know, Mardi Gras belongs to us?

You don't understand that?

I said, I'll tell you what.

Let's go right now out the door on Royal Street, and let's start asking people if Mardi Gras belongs to you.

They didn't know what to say.

But really, I mean, they was serious.

Mardi Gras belongs to them.

- [Narrator] And it didn't stop there.

One of the leaders asked where are you getting tractors to pull the floats?

- And my dad said, oh, we're going to pull the floats the same thing you pull them with.

And the guy looks at them and goes, oh, well they're not available.

- So man my antennas went up, you know, and I said, we going to buy them.

You're going to buy them?

How?

Yeah, we're going to buy them.

- [Narrator] Danny Kaye was the celebrity king when Bacchus, Carnival's first super krewe, hit the streets in 1969, and it was a huge crowd pleaser.

- That blew the doors down.

I mean, that was a whole.

It was the beginning of a new era of Mardi Gras.

Everything that's happened since then really copied it or was a reaction against it in some ways.

- Blaine.

He had the vision and the imagination for the themes and the floats, the doubloons, the beads, the designs, you know.

Then he was so enthusiastic.

- [Narrator] Pip says Bacchus was the first group to turn Blaine loose as if money and cost were no concern, enabling Blaine for the first time in his Mardi Gras life to create some of the things he had always dreamed about on floats.

- Even from the first year our floats were so much larger than usual, and the animation was, you know, real.

And then the lighting, it was like we were parading in the daytime.

- [Narrator] And the parade ended with another new twist.

The floats rolled into the old convention center, the Rivergate, for the Rendezvous, the Bacchus ball.

- That was Blaine.

He said Pip, I think we ought to bring the whole parade in the Rivergate as part of our parade route.

We parked the floats and kept them lighted.

That was the backdrop for the room.

And I mean, it just was so exciting.

- [Narrator] Years later, Bob Hope was king and gushing with praise for the spectacle.

- He told me, he said, Pip, let me tell you something, I've been all over the world.

And when I pulled in to the convention center and I saw all those people in black ties and long, gorgeous gowns, I have never seen anything like that in my life.

He said it just blew me away.

- [Narrator] Pip Brennan gives Blaine a lot of credit for making it all happen.

- When he took on Bacchus, I didn't say, here's the check, Blaine, go to work.

He went to work and just believing in us, man.

That takes a lot of guts when you're almost a one man show.

- [Narrator] At the time, Endymion was a neighborhood parade in Gentilly, but that was about to change.

Blaine brought Endymion's founding captain, Ed Muniz, to the Bacchus ball at the Rivergate.

And he saw this big spectacle.

- This idea of bringing the floats in and he says, wow, I want to do this too.

And so Ed Muniz was fired up, and of course, he turns to Blaine Kern.

- [Narrator] Harry Connick Jr was 25 when he reigned as the 25th king of Bacchus.

- He had such a good time on the float, enjoyed it so much.

- [Narrator] So he called Sonny Borey, who had been running the speech and theater department at Jesuit when Harry went to high school there.

- And he said, Sonny, let's start a parade.

And my first words to him were what were you smoking?

All right.

And he said no we can do this.

So along comes Harry Connick with this idea of also starting a super krewe which would parade on the night before, on what's now called Lundi Gras.

And it was Orpheus.

Now Orpheus is both males and females.

- [Narrator] This happened after Councilwoman Dorothy Mae Taylor pushed through an ordinance to force Carnival krewes to integrate.

It was eventually watered down to say krewes had to pledge not to discriminate in order to get parade permits.

Connick's plan was partly a response to the controversy that caused several krewes to quit parading.

His idea to start a parade and include everybody was a huge, huge thing for, I think, for the city.

I think it helped bring the city back together from all of the tension that went on from the other parades dropping out.

Blaine was a huge help in getting this done, and we said we want to be a large parade, a parade that's open to everyone of goodwill and good character.

- Welcome to the greatest parade in Mardi Gras history.

The only parade that truly celebrates the music of New Orleans, the only parade to have men and women in it as a super krewe.

The only parade to openly invite all members of the community to ride because that's what we stand for.

- [Narrator] The big three super krewes attracted a lot more out-of-town members to ride in the parades and participate in Mardi Gras.

Some entire floats are filled with out-of-towners.

- And I think it's great, it gives everybody a chance to participate.

That whole idea of expanding the availability, the openness of Mardi Gras to everybody certainly helped the economy.

- [Narrator] Each of the super krewes hit the streets with big eye-popping floats that quickly became iconic.

Some of them carrying dozens of riders in multiple sections.

If you look at the innovations in floats that he's been responsible for through the years, it's amazing.

What we call the super float from Endymion in 1976 now is an average rental float.

They've gotten bigger.

They've gotten better.

The lighting, the hydraulics, the motion.

He's never been satisfied just to say, hey, we got it, let's coast.

He wants to keep going.

- [Narrator] Blaine's enthusiasm for his ideas, his art and his showmanship is irrepressible.

You get a sense of that when you see the way he often performed his signature solo dance up and down the length of a grand ballroom floor at the Alla ball.

- Blaine's creative spirit is on 24/7, it does not shut off.

He talks in his sleep.

He's all like this in his sleep.

He is is waking up and writing down ideas.

He is a constant stream of consciousness and thought, it does not shut off.

- [Narrator] The iconic floats that the super krewes rolled in their parades were another giant leap forward for Blaine Kern Artists.

- The first year we started the Smokey Mary and I think we had three cars and we've added on that now we have eight.

We have the Trojan Horse, we have the Leviathan, so those are our three main.

- Leviathan changed the way Mardi Gras looked.

Its animation.

Its smoke, its sound.

Its sculpture.

- [Narrator] Among Endymion standouts?

Captain Eddie's SS Endymion, Pontchartrain Beach Then and Now, Club Endymion and Endymion Welcomes You to Mardi Gras.

Bacchus has the Bacchasaurus, the Bacchawhoppa, the Bacchagator and the family of Kongs, among others, all created at Kern Studios.

- What he's been able to do is create iconic floats that are representative of Mardi Gras that are endless, timeless.

- So all of a sudden he's building the three super krewes plus Rex, which is a really prestigious group.

And so he's got all the prime products in Mardi Gras, but he's still been able to maintain some difference in character for the parades, too.

- [Narrator] In 2000, Staci Rosenberg was watching a friend riding in a parade.

- And he just looked like he was having so much fun and it just looked incredible.

And I thought, you know, I'd really love to be in a parade.

- [Narrator] Within days, she and some friends were talking about starting their own parade, even though they had never even been in a parade.

- And I said, let's just make it for women.

And we did keep hearing, well, you know, Kern, they're, they're the big dogs.

They're the biggest.

They're the best.

- [Narrator] So they met with Blaine, Barry and Blaine's second-in-command Pixie Naquin.

- We were impressed right from the beginning that Blaine's right hand man was a woman.

Pixie was really an amazing presence.

She really kept things going over at Kern and had a very integral role.

And Blaine would sit there really laughing, and he loved our ideas.

So of course, we loved that.

And I think he really appreciated our creativity and the fact that we brought out a different point of view, a feminist bent that had not really been seen before.

He seemed to believe we were going to make it as a Mardi Gras krewe, which there seemed to be a lot of skepticism about that.

So we felt like it was a good fit.

- [Narrator] Once again, Kern Studios was producing what became another hugely popular signature parade with an iconic, irreverent identity.

- We love double entendre.

As an example, the Pussyfooters, the Camel Toe Steppers, the Bearded Oysters.

Those were formed for Muses.

- Now Blaine Kern is a character.

He's a very talented artist.

I say he's a combination of Michelangelo and P.T.

Barnum.

- My God.

Pretty heavy.

I'd take either one.

Both were geniuses.

- And it is the P.T.

Barnum side that's part of the story because he was always the huckster, always able the guy to go out and promote things.

- [Narrator] In the '80s Errol Laborde wrote a column for Gambit Weekly under the name Rex Duke that critiqued the carnival parades.

- It wasn't uncommon for Rex Duke to criticize a parade for having cheap rental Blaine Kern floats.

And so Rex Duke could be pretty tough on Blaine Kern.

- [Narrator] And yet, when Laborde ended the column, leaving Gambit for New Orleans Magazine, he says Kern encouraged him to restart the column, even offering to help finance Laborde's own weekly if he would write the column again.

- I'm thinking, why does this man want to help finance a column that criticizes him?

OK, well, then I found out he was going to those captains and saying, look what they're saying about you.

You need to get better floats.

OK?

OK, yeah.

So he was using it as a technique.

So this kind of shows the chutzpah of the man there.

But I think why he was able to build the way he did.

- Hey, it sounds like me but I didn't do it.

I wasn't on top of it like that.

- [Narrator] Blaine puts a slightly different spin on why he wanted the Rex Duke column to resume.

Because it was a sense of competitiveness between the krewes, and it made the quality better.

- Every year he would sell to these captains the biggest float ever built.

I'm like dad, eventually, we're not going to be able to build that big, right?

(text whooshing) - [Narrator] When the Louisiana World's Fair came along in 1984, Blaine and Kern Studios were all over it, including daily parades.

- We had King Kong parked there as a photo op.

We had Mardi Gras World, which was actually just a trinket store.

- I built the gondola across the river.

That went from Algiers over to the New Orleans side of the river.

- It was a ride across the Mississippi River, as high as the bridge.

There were many exciting rides and many fairs.

This was the granddaddy.

- [Narrator] Unfortunately, the World's Fair did not turn out to be the cash cow a lot of investors expected.

But there again, Blaine was at the beginning of it.

Let's go get it, you know?

And that said, some dreams don't come true.

- That cost me so much to stage each parade a night that I lost money.

- [Narrator] But among the good things that came out of the World's Fair was Mardi Gras World, which began as a gift shop at the exposition.

When Blaine realized people wanted to see how Carnival parades are made, he transformed his den in Algiers into Mardi Gras World, offering behind the scenes tours of floats being built, and it became a venue for big parties and events, with lighted floats decorating the hall.

For many years, Blaine's late sister Betty Rae Kern ran Mardi Gras World.

Fast forward a decade to the '90s when lawmakers were preparing to legalize gambling on boats.

Blaine's imagination went wild when he discovered Spain was getting rid of an aircraft carrier like this one.

- The hangar decks were as big as two football fields.

- So I went over there, I bought the carrier for a nickel.

Then I had to buy the fuel.

The fuel cost me $364,000 but I brought that carrier to New Orleans.

- [Narrator] But according to Blaine, when he refused a key state leader's demand for a piece of the business, the law was changed to say the ship had to be built in Louisiana, killing his plan for a huge museum and casino on the water.

- I still think it would have been a great gambling ship.

- [Narrator] As early as the 1950s, Blaine Kern began expanding his reach beyond Carnival in New Orleans.

He staged an inaugural parade for President Dwight Eisenhower.

Later, the U.S. State Department hired Blaine to stage a parade in Havana for Fidel Castro.

Right after the dictator seized control of Cuba.

- I guess initially Castro was our friend, right?

I mean, that was the deal.

- I went down there with the State Department with three Rex floats.

- And when they got to Havana and they went to where they were going to store the floats was an American electric company's building, and the doors were not big enough to fit the float into the building.

When the soldiers saw that, they took a half track truck and they drove through the wall of the building and my dad, he said, and it took our government six months to figure out this guy was a bad guy.

He goes I knew it in 90 minutes.

- [Narrator] As Blaine's reputation grew, his business outside of Carnival in New Orleans exploded.

- Who do you think's the only one that does Euro Disney, Tokyo Disney, really big with Universal Studios.

They do a major Mardi Gras parade.

- [Narrator] In fact, the company Blaine built and that his son Barry is now moving into the future, is doing business in cities across the country and in nations around the world.

- I think that our reach you know is pretty far.

We're working on a parade in Beijing for Universal Studios, which will be the biggest parade ever built for a theme park, the longest one ever built and certainly the most expensive parade probably ever built anywhere.

(wind howling) - [Narrator] Late August, 2005, Katrina and flooding that follows when flood walls fail, devastate the greater New Orleans region.

Wide swaths of the area are wiped out.

It will take months, years to recover and Fat Tuesday is just six months away.

- A lot of people were talking about canceling Mardi Gras.

You know, a lot of the krewes were having a hard time.

You had a lot of people dispersed.

About 250 of our members were displaced.

And we only had 275 at that time.

- [Narrator] Just days after the devastation, Blaine was responding to a question that became controversial.

Will New Orleans celebrate Mardi Gras with parades in February 2006?

And my dad immediately said, Mardi Gras is going to happen.

Mardi Gras is going to happen in New Orleans.

Go to bet on it.

- Mardi Gras is positively on, and I think we need to do it.

You know, this is our coming out party.

My gosh, we've been down, but we're certainly not out.

- Now none of our customers were paying us.

Nobody.

I mean, nobody was thinking about Mardi Gras.

- We weren't sure we were going to parade or not.

- The Zulu members, because they had so many members who lived in the Ninth Ward, had more deaths than any other organization, and Zulu as an organization really had a hard time making that decision to parade that year, and they weren't going to parade because they felt that it was a dishonor.

They are a social aid and pleasure club, to spend that money to put on a parade and have a good time while so many of their members were still suffering.

- And Blaine Kern helped defray some of the costs that we had.

- We were able to put together some krewes and help them raise enough money to put on the parade so they could use those funds to help their members out and still put on a parade.

Because, in our mind, to the national audience, how would that play with the rest of the world if just Rex went out on Mardi Gras Day or just Zulu, I mean, vice versa?

It was not the message that we wanted to send.

- [Narrator] And Barry says Universal Studios agreed to pay a year in advance for future projects, enabling Kern Studios to put people back to work building floats.

- For a company to do that was really one of the most wonderful things that they ever did and getting their people to give over a million dollars in donations to the hospitality fund here in town.

- My dad was one of the ones beating the drum, saying we need to move forward, need to make this happen.

- [Narrator] Mayor Ray Nagin wanted to show the nation New Orleans was open for business.

- He didn't want nobody to believe that the city had shut down.

- And we decided to parade because the city wanted us to parade.

- We took a lot of heat for that nationwide.

And how you can you fools be parading in the street when you've got people drowned, you know?

But it was important for our soul.

We've got to come back.

We're doing this for us.

- Katrina knocked us down, but she didn't knock us out.

- And I would like to ask for just a moment of silence and remembrance in honor of this event on behalf of those we are thinking about, just for a minute now.

- Mardi Gras after Hurricane Katrina was, I get goosebumps talking about it.

It was so great, so needed, and it lifted everybody's spirits.

- And I think those two krewes, Zulu and Rex, when we hit the streets, everybody was just happy about it because there was a lot of sorrow with Katrina.

People got hurt.

People got killed, lost lives, lost everything.

It gave them a sense of normalcy.

When two krewes got together and they paraded on Mardi Gras Day.

But Blaine Kern made it happen.

- It brought everybody back to life.

They enjoyed it.

- That was the greatest Mardi Gras ever, because one, it was, what it did for the spirit of the people in New Orleans and two it sent the message that we can survive.

Never did we need to have a Mardi Gras celebration as badly as 2006.

- It was a very emotional Mardi Gras.

I mean, I saw people, instead of the signs, throw me something mister, it was thank you, you know, thank you for parading.

(crowd cheering) (text whooshing) - [Narrator] At Blaine's side at Blaine Kern Atists for 47 years was Pixie Naquin, helping him keep his wilder ideas in check as they built his business into a multimillion dollar operation and transformed Mardi Gras.

- I am creative, but I'm not the sharpest tool when it comes to business decisions.

All I know is Pixie was with me and guarded my back all those years.

- Blaine as a business man?

He's a great artist, and thank God he had Pixie all those years.

He has all these ideas and that and he's not really worried about business, and he's just let me do this and he doesn't think about the cost of things and where Pixie would think about it.

He would start having these dreams.

I'm going to do this and I'm going to do that.

And then, I mean, voice right on the other side of the room would be, no, you're not.

She would just be the voice of reason.

- She wouldn't tell him what he wanted to hear.

She would tell him what he needed to hear.

And he respected that.

- Blaine's former executive assistant, Debbie Frombola, worked closely with Pixie.

- She was the perfect balance for Blaine.

Blaine loved the notoriety, he loved the celebrity and Pixie hated it.

So while Blaine would come up with all these crazy ideas, OK?

Pixie was the one that implemented things.

- Pixie was the organizer that my dad was not.

He would say that she was his conscience also.

- Anything you needed, you went to Pixie.

I mean, it was like Pixie was Blaine Kern, so to speak.

- She was not only his right hand, but his left hand, too.

He's Mr. Mardi Gras, she was Mrs. Mardi Gras.

- [Narrator] Jeralyn "Pixie" Naquin was vice president and second in command of Blaine Kern Artists when she got sick.

She later died of cancer in June of 2010.

- It left a huge void.

- [Narrator] Barry had been shouldering more and more of the business.

And later that year, in October, a bombshell.

(glass shatters) Barry filed a lawsuit against Blaine, claiming he was mismanaging the business.

Their feud for control of the business sent shockwaves through the Mardi Gras community.

- A lot of people felt like that family fight was more than just about family.

It was about the whole city.

Mardi Gras couldn't be held hostage to a family fight that had to be resolved.

- It broke my heart because I love my son.

- [Narrator] A legal agreement resolved the dispute in 2015, with Blaine selling his 50.1% stake in the company to Barry, who continued as president.

- It was a tough time.

It was an unfortunate time from my perspective.

It's water under the bridge.

I know from my dad's perspective it's water under the bridge.

- We're fine again.

All that's behind us, we're very, very close again.

- I think a lot of feelings were hurt, but eventually they survived and so has Carnival.

(text whooshing) - [Narrator] Despite the shakeup, it was evident that Barry's leadership of Kern Studios was guided by Blaine's influence and innovative approach.

- He did things that people had never seen and we've continued and this company has continued in the vein that he taught us to do things that people would never, ever see and to always be thinking of what is the new thing for Mardi Gras?

What's going to be the new look and the new thing that's going to get people's attention?

- [Narrator] Under Barry's leadership, the business that Blaine built is paying tribute to Pixie with a robot named for her that creates Styrofoam masterpieces like the Ducks in the Muses parade.

- I thought that was just an incredible tribute to her because you program it and it just works and works and works and works until the job's done.

And that was kind of how Pixie was.

- [Narrator] And Kern Studios was building more new parades.

Gwen Rainey was surrounded by Mardi Gras growing up.

Her dad George, King Zulu 2019, had served many roles with his social aid and pleasure club.

And when she wanted to start the Mystic Krewe of Femme Fatale in 2013, she went to Kern Studios.

- My father's restaurant was not too far from the den on the West Bank side.

And so Mr. Blaine would come over to the restaurant, eat lunch with my dad.

He was always very nice to us, you know, to our family.

He was always, he always embraced us.

- [Narrator] At Kern, she says Barry helped Femme Fatale build a successful parade and a krewe of 800 members.

Barry advancing his dad's legacy.

- I would think his legacy is it has broke barriers.

It has included women of color.

It has included Jews.

His legacy has broken all of those things down.

- [Narrator] Barry isn't the only one inspired by his dad's work and accomplishments.

Blaine's influence is also evident in his other four children.

- More than anything, he gave me the gift of knowing that there isn't anything that I couldn't do if I put my mind to it.

- [Narrator] His oldest son, Blaine Jr, worked in Kern Studios, and after the World's Fair, he turned Mardi Gras World into more than just a tourist attraction.

- I'm the one that started doing events there and created the parties at Mardi Gras World.

That's how they got into the event party business.

- [Narrator] Then Blaine Jr struck out on his own, building his business, Mardi Gras Productions, into a year round event business.

We do around 400 events a year and we have over 10,000 props now.

We have a lighting division, a floral division, a wedding division.

We do a couple dozen balls.

We produce Endymion, Bacchus, the larger ones.

- [Narrator] Blaine Jr also took over the old Mardi Gras World in Algiers, turning it into a state of the art movie studio.

- We've had NCIS.

We've had Selfless, Mudbound, dozens of other events.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Blaine lived the life of seven men, his daughter Thais says.

To me he was a legend.

Thais shyly declines to speak on camera, but says she values the years she spent working for her dad.

He never stopped expanding my world and life and the lives of those he met along the way.

She says she enjoyed working with the Carnival krewes and the royal courts, especially because it's where I met my husband, Dennis, she adds.

I was also proud of working with my dad on fundraising for the Blaine S. Kern Library at the University of Holy Cross in Algiers.

- I love to work from my imagination.

- [Narrator] Like her dad, Blaine's youngest daughter Blainey is an artist.

- My dad believed that he could do anything that he could think of.

He wasn't scared, and he had this incredible perseverance to do whatever his dream was.

And that is a gift that I believe that I got from him.

- [Narrator] Blainey says she loves making sculptures and collages.

- This is not completed yet, but when I'm working on it.

As I've been working on it, it reminds me of a skirt and a big costume coming down the street during Mardi Gras.

- [Narrator] In 2013, Blaine's youngest son, Brian, relaunched the Krewe of Boo, the Halloween parade his dad had staged for several years after Katrina.

- Everything I know from sales to, you know, doing events, to doing a Halloween parade, I learned all that from him.

- [Narrator] Brian has built the Krewe of Boo into an annual tradition.

- The crowds are incredible.

The people come out, over a hundred thousand people in the streets of New Orleans.

I do other things besides the parade, but the parade is something I'm passionate about and I love.

- [Narrator] In retirement, Blaine was still dreaming and still making art.

He and his wife, Holly, produced a children's book together.

Blaine illustrating the story that his wife wrote.

It's called A Tree in the Sea, and it became popular with kids.

- I think it's wonderful.

I'm so happy we got to do this book.

- Oh, it was fun to do.

Look at the tree there, and there's old King Neptune here.

- [Narrator] Blaine sketched everywhere he went, even creating elaborate works like this each year, when he attended the Manresa religious retreat.

He especially enjoyed sketching with his granddaughter Lucy, who, like her mom, Blainey, has inherited his artistic talent.

- That's an incredible gift for me to have, I'm sorry, to have my daughter to be able to draw with him is pretty incredible.

It's amazing.

They don't even really talk that much, they just sit and they draw together and they look at each other's work.

It's been an incredible, incredible experience.

- [Narrator] Blaine carved out a career that made him millions of dollars, but he said that was never his goal.

- Hell no.

Money's never been a big deal to me, not ever.

Sounds dumb, but true.

Money's always just come in automatically.

It always flowed in.

I couldn't miss, man.

- For him, it was always far more important to get attention for what he did on those floats.

You know, listen, he's an artist.

He derives his energy from the accolades of the people.

- [Announcer] Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the captain of the krewe of Alla!

He is Mr. Mardi Gras.

Blaine Kern!

- [Narrator] Blaine said what made him proud were his contributions to Mardi Gras.

The colorful animated floats, the super krewes, opening Carnival to everyone and the way all of that has transformed the celebration.

- It was like dynamite.

Everything exploded.

All of a sudden it went from a $250,000 industry, 250,000 to a billion dollar industry, and it's still growing and getting bigger all the time.

- You have to give Blaine most of the credit for where Mardi Gras is today.

- He's taken a family and neighborhood celebration and he's created one of the greatest engines the economy of New Orleans, billion plus industry every year.

- [Narrator] But when asked about his accomplishments, Blaine gave credit to a higher power.

- Because man, all I am is what God wanted me to be.

I'm nothing without God almighty.

- [Narrator] Carnival historian Arthur Hardy calls Blaine the greatest influence on Mardi Gras in the 20th century.

- I think he's one of the most influential people in the entire history of Mardi Gras.

He's Mr. Mardi Gras, and I think the city is better for him having been involved with this.

- [Narrator] When you listen to his story, you realize Blaine spent a lot of his high voltage career bringing to life many of the ideas and dreams his imagination conjured up when he was a poor, sickly kid growing up in Algiers.

- And that is his accomplishment to me, letting us share in those dreams and bringing them to life and also allowing the average person to participate in Mardi Gras who couldn't prior to that time.

- [Narrator] When Blaine Kern died in June of 2020, it made national headlines.

For his memorial at Gallier Hall.

The Rex and Zulu organizations each placed a float in front of the marble building where Mardi Gras royalty are toasted on Fat Tuesday.

This place also serves as a kind of shrine, where the region's most distinguished citizens often lie in state.

People wore protective masks and attendance was reduced due to COVID-19 pandemic restrictions.

Louisiana's Lieutenant Governor Billy Nungesser remembered how Blaine, the visionary dreamer, often encouraged him not to give up on his dream.

Nungesser's dream was to build a business out of metal shipping containers he converted into portable living quarters for offshore workers.

Nobody thought it would work.

- Even my dad said those containers had been around 100 years, somebody a lot smarter would have thought of that.

Blaine would stop by in the evening.

Ask me how I was doing.

When I thought back on those times, I didn't know what that meant to me.

How many times I thought of giving up on that dream.

And those moments, I'm sorry.

When he would come in that yard at least once a week just to check on me and tell me never to give up, never to give up on my dreams.

You know, there's a saying that no great thing is ever achieved without passion.

God, we could use some Blaine Kern passion.

Because he surely had that.

- [Narrator] Nungesser's dream became a multimillion dollar business.

Blaine's widow Holly said their nearly 50 year age difference never mattered.

- Blaine was so kind, affectionate and gentle.

His whimsical spirit, storytelling and charming demeanor, I couldn't help but be smitten.

- [Narrator] Blaine's sons were among the pallbearers carrying him down the steps of Gallier Hall, as Rockin' Dopsie and others celebrated Blaine Kern's life, as well as his contributions to the greatest free show on Earth and the city he loved.

♪ When the shadows of this life have gone ♪ ♪ I'll fly away When darkness fell after he had been laid to rest, the Superdome was bathed in purple, green and gold.

To honor the poor kid from Algiers who became Mr. Mardi Gras.

♪ I'll fly away, oh glory ♪ I'll fly away ♪ When I die, hallelujah bye and bye ♪ ♪ I'll fly away (upbeat music) - [Announcer] Support for this program comes from, the first super krewe, Bacchus 1969.

Thank you, Blaine Kern, for your vision and genius.

Bacchus Sunday is a night of spectacular, iconic floats, sparked by imagination.

From designing floats to helping create krewes, Blaine Kern was one of a kind and the krewe at Endymion is proud to honor his legacy by supporting this program.

The krewe of Hermes was founded in 1937, to spur economic activity after the Great Depression.

In line with that mission, the krewe is honored to celebrate Blaine Kern's contributions to the growth and development of Mardi Gras.

The krewe of Iris, the oldest and largest all female carnival krewe in New Orleans is proud to support this program and honor the legacy of Blaine Kern.

The krewe of Orpheus celebrates our dear friend Blaine, thank you for your friendship and creativity.

Cheers to you, Mr. Mardi Gras.

Program underwriting also from the Krewe of Alla, and the Legion of Mars.

The Krewe of Tucks.

And by Reve Realtors.