For a brief period in the 20th century, unicorns walked the earth.
Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus trotted out the mythical beasts across the country in the mid-1980s in front of mesmerized audiences, perplexed media and suspicious animal rights groups.
“The animals arrived at our show in Houston in July 1984. We don’t know how or why, but they were just there,” a circus spokesperson said cryptically at the time.
Lancelot, the star of the show, made his grand entrance at — where else? — Madison Square Garden, where he paraded for the press amid flower petals and feather-plumed dancers as the “Rocky” theme song blasted in the background.
His arrival set off a media circus — and a firestorm of debate. Were they surgically-manipulated farm animals? Or living legends, the stuff of centuries-old folk tales?
Ringling Bros. Vice President Allen Bloom assured everyone they’re the real deal.
“They are the only unicorns in the world. They’re priceless,” he said. “They are all males, and I believe they’re brothers.
“We don’t know how they reproduce. I think they’re between 3 and 5 years old,” he added. “But because unicorns are ageless, they may be hundreds of years old. “We just don’t know.”
Even Mayor Ed Koch entered the ring, saying that while he believes in unicorns, this “doesn’t mean they exist.”
The ASPCA went into attack-mode — urging a ban of the show and demanding the truth behind those hefty horns.
Dr. Gerald Toms, a vet with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, inspected the creatures and determined they were goats that had undergone a surgical procedure as kids, leaving them with a single horn.
Were they surgically-manipulated farm animals? Or living legends, the stuff of centuries-old folk tales?
“But if you want to surrender to whimsy, then they’re unicorns,” he said, adding that he did not believe the beasts suffered pain during the procedure.
Animal-rights groups weren’t convinced.
“The issue is still whether a humane, cultured society can justify what I call surgical mutilation purely for entertainment,” said John Kullberg, then-director of the ASCPA.
“This year it’s a unicorn; next year someone may decide to play around with eye sockets and make a cyclops. Where do we stop?”
The Ringling Bros. fought back with full-page ads that cried: “Don’t Let the Grinches Steal the Fantasy!”
The “Greatest Show on Earth” will perform for the last time in the Big Apple Friday at the Barclays Center.
About 10 weeks later, the circus will be gone for good following a farewell show in Uniondale, LI — ending a storied, 146-year run.
Much has changed over the years: tents were traded for stadiums, the elephants were retired and even the three rings disappeared at one point, making way for high-tech additions like 3D special effects.
But there have always been animal acts. Bears that bounce on balls, tigers that leap through hoops of fire and acrobatic dogs that jump rope with scary precision.
One of the first circus creatures to capture America’s heart was Jumbo, a six-ton African elephant purchased by P.T. Barnum in 1882. He was already a sensation in England when he traveled across the pond and made a splash at Madison Square Garden.
In 1884, he was one of 21 elephants to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, proving to New Yorkers that the structure was safe and sturdy enough for humans.
The next century saw the rise of Gargantua the Great, a 460-pound gorilla brought to Boston from Africa by a sea captain in 1931.
An angry sailor had thrown nitric acid on him, disfiguring his face into a permanent scowl — and he generated so much interest the circus was saved from near-bankruptcy.
But in recent memory, perhaps no circus animal has piqued the public’s interest more than those unicorns.
Oberon Zell, the artist-writer-wizard who brought the horned beasts into the world, said one thing about his unicorns cannot be debated.
“It’s a very different kind of animal,” the 74-year-old told The Post recently.
Call them what you will, but the unicorns didn’t appear by magic.
Their origins can be traced to a bohemian enclave in the forests north of San Francisco, where Zell dreamed them up with his late life partner Morning Glory, a fellow adventurer fascinated by such creatures.
“For most of these legends there’s some true story behind it,” explained Zell, who now runs a museum and learning center called Academy of Arcana in Santa Cruz, Calif. “We thought it would be cool to write a book on that subject, so we set out to start research.”
They fixed up an old school bus and traveled around the country, eventually ending up at the University of Oregon in Eugene, where they stumbled upon an article about animal horn growth by biologist Dr. Franklin Dove.
Dove had discovered he could easily manipulate the horn buds of bull calves just a few hours after birth, bringing the two buds together so they’d eventually fuse and grow into a single horn.
The changes to the animal weren’t merely aesthetic, according to Zell.
“It automatically became a herd leader,” he said. “It was this magnificent powerful thing. [Dove] came to the conclusion that unicorns had been developed in ancient times to defend the animals again herds.
“They were fighters, they were warriors.”
Zell and Morning Glory quickly shelved the book idea, and devised a new plan: create unicorns of their own.
But they wouldn’t use calves — they wanted theirs to resemble those in tapestries of yore, with long, silky white manes and trim, little beards.
After a couple years searching for the right angora goats for the project, Lancelot, their pride and joy, was finally born in the spring of 1980.
Zell performed the horn procedure on Lancelot without a hitch, and a second unicorn was born on the “next full moon.”
“Their horns developed beautifully,” Zell gushed.
Despite concerns from animal-rights groups, Zell insists the surgical procedure, which he patented in 1984, isn’t at all painful.
“It’s a very superficial process of cutting and shifting around the loose skin on the forehead,” he explained.
At the time, Zell and Morning Glory were spending their days in the bucolic splendor of a 5,600-acre “hippie community” in Mendocino County called Greenfield
Ranch. But the couple’s unicorns weren’t destined for a life of anonymity in the peaceful woodland of a hippie homesteading community.
They appeared in countless renaissance fairs. There were TV appearances, county fairs and pagan festivals.
The unicorns delighted children at schools and libraries, and even impressed Lone Star state Governor Bill Clements, who in 1981 dubbed Lancelot the Official Unicorn of Texas.
By 1984, it was time for their Big Top debut.
The unicorns’ manager — yes, they even had one of those — negotiated a four-year contract with the Ringling Bros. worth about $500,000.
“Down deep I knew this was perfect for the Circus,” said manager Jeffrey Siegel, a graduate of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Clown College. “It was the modern opportunity to play P.T. Barnum that drew me to take on the management of the Zells and their unicorns in the first place.”
Four of Zell’s nine unicorns were shipped off to the big top — Lancelot, Galahad, Avalon and Percival.
“This became the largest publicity event in modern circus history,” Siegel said.
“ ‘Saturday Night Live’ did sketches, Johnny Carson spoke about it, there was international press coverage. NYC circus attendance and revenues soared. Andy Warhol wrote about Lance the Unicorn visiting Studio 54.”
All the while, the Ringling Bros. insisted the unicorns had appeared out of thin air, hooking up with the circus because they were homeless.
“It arrived mysteriously,” Lancelot’s handler Heather Harris told The Morning Call in the summer of 1985. “I don’t know whether it flew here, or walked or took a train. But, it seems to be very comfortable and at ease here.
“Every so often, a real live unicorn comes on the scene like a good omen. Ringling was lucky. The circus was looking for a unicorn to include in its famous show of wild animals and this particular unicorn was looking for a home.”
Zell and Morning Glory wanted to share the real story with the public.
“They wanted to control the publicity,” Zell said. “We just assumed we’d be in on it. We were completely cut out of the picture.”
Eventually the unicorn hysteria died down, and within two years the circus moved on to new attractions, like King Tusk, a 12-foot-tall elephant.
Lancelot returned home in 1987, and never quite adjusted to life out of the limelight.
“He was generally pretty depressed, because he loved being a show animal,” Zell said.
“I built a barn and corral just for him that we dubbed ‘Fort Unicorn.’ We took care of him until his eventual death a few years later, in 1991, at the age of 11.”
Zell and Morning Glory had mixed emotions about the circus adventure — though it allowed them to share their otherworldly creations with millions of young children.
“It was a huge event in our life,” he recalled wistfully. “But it all seems to have forgotten about it.”