If you're going to travel through time, you might as well do it in style.
Style is a big thing with the people at On Location Tours.
The company has organized a tour inspired by Amazon's (AMZN) hit program "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" that drives people around New York City in a 1957 Chevrolet 210 to locations that appear in the show about a 1950s housewife who becomes a standup comedian.
Next Stop, Greenwich Village
The show, which has racked up as over 50 Emmy nominations and 20 wins, returned in February and is reportedly filming its fifth and final season.
Georgette Blau, president of On Location Tours, said, the tour visits over 20 sites in midtown and downtown Manhattan, including the original B. Altman’s location, the National Arts Club, McSorley’s Bar, and Lutzi’s Butcher in Soho.
Fans will also get to see Caffe Reggio, which opened its doors in 1927 and was the first such establishment to serve cappuccino, as well as the site of The Gaslight Cafe, where Midge Maisel does her act.
Real life artists who performed at The Gaslight Cafe, which closed its doors in 1971, include Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Phil Ochs.
We should probably mention here that the tour is not affiliated or associated with Amazon, which, by the way, did not respond to a request for comment.
Emily Magera was the guide on a recent tour and she helped set the mood by wearing a vintage outfit.
The Mrs. Maisel tour began in 2018, Blau said, and the company had wanted to include a classic car in tandem with a bus for a few years.
"When Covid hit, it was perfect for people who wanted to be on their own," she said.
That Chevy, by the way, has been around the block more than a few times, appearing in "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" and "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull."
'The Makeup of Our Lives'
Blau said that people love riding around in the antique automobile as "they really feel like they’re being transported back to the 1950’s!"
"Mrs. Maisel" is not the only tour Blau's company offers. There's also tours based on "The Sopranos," "Sex and The City" and "Gossip Girls" among others.
And just why are these tours so popular?
"Television and film are part of the makeup of our lives," said Aaron Shapiro, a professor with Middle Tennessee State University. "I think these tours are popular because they give us an opportunity to realize our fantasies. I mean that literally. To go and stand in a place that has existed for us only on a screen, only in our imaginations."
"There is something extraordinarily, almost mystically satisfying, about encountering something that was so familiar to you when it was inside a little box in the living room and finding it happening and being there in a physical geographical space," said Robert Thompson, a professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University.
Thompson said the tour tradition goes back before film, to the days when people took tours of great literary spots, which is why "museums are made out of Virginia Wolf's house or where Dickens had his fish and chips."
And before that, he said. people used to make pilgrimages to places depicted in ancient texts.
"Television seems to be particularly inviting for these kinds of tours because we do know these spaces intimately," he added. "With movies, unless it’s a movie you've watched over and over again, you might not remember a certain location unless it’s really distinct."
'A Living Set of Footnotes'
With television, Thompson said, "these locations are repeated over and over, from episode to episode, season after season, sometimes year after year, so that these places become really, really familiar."
"To me, 'The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel' is probably the perfect inspiration for a tour," he said. "It takes place in a different time, it does make all these references to actual space. It's almost like having a living set of footnotes to the show."
Thompson added that "we have a wiring that really does long for the authentic."
That is something to consider in a time of quarantines and the metaverse, where people can enter different realms from their computers.
"While, of course, people have been much more cautious during the pandemic, we still long for life, for contact with the world and with each other," Shapiro said. "If Covid caused a drop off in tour participation, I imagine it to be temporary."
As for the metaverse, Shapiro said "we’re pretty far from that being a meaningful substitute for lived experience."
"I’ve been to Cheers on the screen," he said. "I’ve seen Maisel’s Manhattan on TV. Seeing them again through a pair of VR goggles seems besides the point. We want to breath the air, get jostled by an elbow, order a drink and taste it. Meta just won’t cut it."
After all, he added, "there’s no there there."
