Dragon Day

At some point between its origin and 1920, the festivities were banned by Cornell's third president, Jacob Gould Schurman, because campus Catholics were offended by the theme.

In 1974, artist Oded Halahmy threatened to remove his outdoor sculptures from the campus after some were splattered with green paint and moved.

[6] The week before Dragon Day, the freshmen architects can be found running through campus lecture halls, barely clothed and painted green.

The first-year students dress up and went through Cornell University libraries and engineering buildings (notably Duffield Hall) looking at books, attracting attention, and handing out quarter cards to advertise the Dragon Day event.

In an effort to reduce chances of violence, the group chose to create a rather passive phoenix bird to hover over the engineering quad as the dragon passed by.

Unfortunately, the helium filled giant metallized plastic balloon deflated by the time the dragon rolled around over two hours late.

[citation needed] Not satisfied with this mediocre performance, the group founded the Phoenix Society and vowed to annually meet the dragon with an engineering avatar.

[citation needed] Thus the knight survived to confront the dragon, his horse rearing on his hind legs and his sword raised into the air.

Following this first successful engineering confrontation with the dragon, a sporadic custom has developed, with varying themes: a Viking longboat in 1989, a cobra in 2001, a penguin in 2005.

[citation needed] In 1998 and 1999, an industrious engineer using 3/4" bolt cutters managed to steal the steering wheel off of the car that the architects used for the frame of the dragon.

This tradition was begun partially as a student response to budget cuts handed down to the Department of Theatre, Film, and Dance by the College of Arts and Sciences[7] and serves the dual purpose of establishing campus presence and proving departmental quality by submitting a float superior to its rivals.

The knight made its first appearance in the spring of 2011, when students from Cornell's Department of Theatre, Film, and Dance constructed a large knight-like figure brandishing a pole-arm and pulled it into Ho Plaza with the stated intention of "slaying the dragon".

The 2011 knight's final showing was a dramatic traversing of the Arts Quad, where the students alternated between chanting clever quips and singing "We Shall Overcome".

[citation needed] Incarnations of the knight in past years have included a skeletal horseman atop a rearing horse in the spring of 2012, and the Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail in the spring of 2013, featuring a moving head controlled by a puppeteer and arm stumps that sprayed water at the surrounding crowd.