Touring Freak Shows

As museums joined other emerging amusement organizations of the 19th century, exhibits of human curiosities changed. The first touring Freak Shows were simply traveling museums in wagons.

In the Railroad Circus heyday of 1880 to 1910, huge road shows? carrying as many as 1200 people were the ultimate cutting-edge entertainment. And Sideshow was a big part of the income derived from it
 
Every large Circus had a Sideshow, and that became the major venue for Display of Human Oddities and Marvels: The Tattooed Lady, the Living Skeleton, the Bearded Lady, the Sword Sallower and the Siamese Twins!
 
1910 three dozen shows utilizing over 375 rail car were crisscrossing Country in the black of night. The Human Oddities would still show in me Museums, but it was the Circus Sideshow that became the place to see largest collections.
 
With the advent of competing entertainment phonographs, movies and radio circuses diminished in size almost simultaneously with the end of Vaudeville. When the Golden Age of Circus ended, touring carnivals picked
 
the slack. During the Golden Age of Carnival?1934 to 1950?the large shows had up to 100 rail cars and upwards of 500 people on the road, and every Carnival featured a Sideshow.
 
But as society entered into a more sophisticated era, many saw the Freak Show  as the exploitation of human birth defects. Respectable people began to turn their backs. Where once the Freak Show had been the Midway's main attraction, by 1950 it was losing its audience. Even more entertainment options became available to people, and Dime Museums, Circuses and Carnivals either split into smaller units or vanished.
 
Twentieth century science began to undermine the Freak Show by medicalizing and explaining human variation, thereby stripping exhibits of their mystery. Advances in science, medicine and world exploration? fueled by new technologies brought rapid change to the amusement world. This and the social changes that resulted eventually ushered the Freak Show out altogether.
 
In the 1950s, Human Oddities still occasionally showed up with Carnivals and fairs, but by the 1960s, Freaks and Human Marvels were a seriously endangered species. By the 1980s, you could count the remaining Sideshows on one hand. Most of the old-time Freaks were either dead or retired to places like Sarasota or Gibsonton, Florida. Circus Sideshow acts had long since faded away from being contemporary entertainment, replaced by movies, video games, and rock bands. By the early 1990s, entertainment had become sanitized, corporatized, approved and insured for the masses. Safe, with no sharp edges.

There was a whole new generation of people who had been raised on rock-and-roll, and they knew absolutely nothing of the scream- and faint-inducing Human Oddities and Marvels of yesteryear.

That is, until 1992 when a modern Circus Sideshow blew onto the scene.

Freaks

They weren't born Freaks.

No, they were self-made, by choice.

Human Marvels.