2751: March Madness

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March Madness

Title text: My bracket has 76 trombones led by John Philip Sousa facing off against thousands of emperor penguins led by Morgan Freeman.

Explanation

This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by a PENGUIN OVERLORD - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon. If you can address this issue, please edit the page! Thanks.

Randall has created yet another single-elimination tournament bracket. March Madness is a college basketball tournament played each spring in the US. Everything in the bracket relates to March (March Madness, Ides of March, Imperial March, etc.)

The first section has things that are named after March. March Madness is the tournament inspiring this comic. March Hare is the rabbit from Lewis Carrol's Alice in Wonderland. Middlemarch is a novel by the English author Mary Anne Evans, under the pseudonym George Eliot, titled Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life. The Ides of March is March 15th, infamous for being the day Caesar was assassinated.

The second section come from the lyrics of "Seventy Six Trombones" from the 1957 musical "The Music Man," about the instruments in an imagined parade. The opening line of that song states that "76 trombones led the big parade, with 110 cornets close behind". Later in the song the lyrics "there were more than a thousand reeds springing up like weeds" and "there were fifty mounted cannon in the battery" inspire the next match up.

The third section are more things named after marches, in the form of March of [blank]. March of Dimes is a non-profit that aims to help women and babies. March of the Toy Soldiers is a song from The Nutcracker Suite by Tchaikovsky. The last march of the Ents is from the Lord of the Rings when the ent males go to battle. March of the Penguins was a 2005 French nature documentary.

The last section are things named after March in the form [blank] March. Wedding March is a song by Felix Mendelssohn. A Funeral March is a genre of marches that are slow and generally in a minor key.The Imperial March is a song from the Star Wars series written by John Williams, initially used as Darth Vader's theme. The Nissan March is a super mini 4-door, also marketed as the Nissan Micra.

In the alt text, Randall claims his bracket has 76 trombones being led by Sousa (who the lead character in "The Music Man" claims led the supposed parade) against the March of the Penguins, led by Morgan Freeman (who narrated the English release of the film).

Transcript

This transcript is incomplete. Please help editing it! Thanks.

[A tournament bracket tree is shown with 16 competitors, 8 on the left and 8 on the right side]

[Left side:]

Madness

Hare

Middle

Ides

76 Trombones

110 Cornets

1000+ Reeds

50 Mounted Cannon

[Right side:]

Dimes

Toy Soldiers

Ents

Penguins

Wedding

Funeral

Imperial

Nissan

Alt Text: My bracket has 76 trombones led by John Philip Sousa facing off against thousands of emperor penguins led by Morgan Freeman.

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Discussion

Difficult

An hour, and still no explanation. Is this harder to get than usual, or is it just me?

Left top two are march [word], next two are [word] of march, bottom left section all reference Seventy-Six Trombones, which is apparently a common song for marching bands. Top right section is March of the [word], and bottom right is [word] March. NyanSequitur (talk) 19:15, 17 March 2023 (UTC)

Well I was going to say something, but now I find myself doubting my ability to find patterns and understand references. This man is on another level. Toriski3037 (talk) 19:29, 17 March 2023 (UTC)

Not confident enough to edit the actual article directly, but I can get the gist of these references:

- March Madness (NCAA Basketball Tournament)

- March Hare ("Mad as a march hare" being a common idiom in English, and the March Hare being a 'mad' character in Alice in Wonderland)

- Middlemarch (novel by George Eliot)

- Ides of March (March 15th, aka Julius Caesar Assassination Day)

- aforementioned "Seventy-Six Trombones" references - the first three lines, followed by an impressive option later in the lyrics

- "Seventy-six trombones led the big parade"

- "with a hundred and ten cornets right behind"

- "there were more than a thousand reeds springing up like weeds"

- "there were fifty mounted cannon in the battery/ thundering, thundering, louder than before"

- (possibly worth noting: the first version of the song ends with "the kids began to march/ and they're marching still, right today!" - it was a pain to confirm this, since the reprise of the song is much easier to find)

- (also worth noting for the title text: the song is introduced with the character claiming that the 76 trombone parade was from the day when several historical notables, culminating in "John Philip Sousa", "all came to town on the very same historic day")

- March of the Dimes (charity)

- March of the Toy Soldiers (musical piece from Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker)

- March of the Ents (from Lord of the Rings)

- March of the Penguins (documentary about emperor penguins, narrated by Morgan Freeman, also relevant to title text)

- Wedding March (musical piece - per Wikipedia, the "here comes the bride" piece which I thought of is actually the "Bridal Chorus" from Wagner's Lohengrin; the most famous Wedding March is from Felix Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream, used more commonly at the end of weddings)

- Funeral March (musical piece - most famous version is Chopin's)

- Imperial March (musical piece by John Williams for Star Wars)

- Nissan March (model of car; Nissan is also the official sponsor of March Madness)

Hopefully this will help someone look up properly cited references! 172.70.134.144 19:53, 17 March 2023 (UTC)

nice work! Iggynelix (talk) 12:51, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

I hope the previous contributor doesn't mind that I tidied up their layout. I hope the ExplainXKCD Police don't object to the way I did that. :) 172.68.210.5 00:46, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

March is not another word for parade. 172.70.130.84 01:27, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

It can be. I wouldn't call a Mardi Gras parade a march, but I would do an Orange Order one, for example. And the defining characteristic of a "band parade", above even a mishmash of men just shuffling along the road in a group, is (generally!) walking in lockstep (keeping the music in lockstep), so that (frivolity and syncopation aside) it is as much a march as anything. I mean, I'm not the OA of that phrase linking the sense, but there's clear overlap that cannot be denied as intended. 172.71.242.12 09:59, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

For the second bracket in the top left quadrant, "Ides" refers to "Ides of March", which implies the structure used here is "___ of March", which means that the reference would rather be "Middle of March" (rather than Middlemarch), which is used in crossword puzzle as a clue for the word "arc". 172.71.178.186 12:23, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

Since the "Ides of March" and "Middle of March" are almost the same, this bracket will settle that question. I do not see any relationship between "Ides of March" and the novel "Middlemarch." Therefore, I agree with "Middle of March" over "Middlemarch" for the explanation. TCMits (talk) 14:46, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

Why does there need to be any kind of relationship between Ides (Of) March and Middlemarch, other than the "March" bit? And "Middle Of March" is weirdly generic/obscure for a humourous reference, anyway. If you ask me, Randall just missed a trick to put "Ides Of" in that spot, for the sake of pedants. Or deliberately didn't as a pedant-snipe, perhaps. I'll live with Middlemarch as a good enough basis for what is written, because it's perfectly in keeping with other bracket-oddities we've seen. IMHO, HTH, HAND, TTFN. 172.70.162.46 15:55, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

"Middle of March" is not a specific thing, and there's no reason to think the bracket would be aiming to "settle the question" between two things that are "almost the same" in exactly one pairing. This is clearly a reference to Middlemarch. 172.70.179.124 15:36, 23 March 2023 (UTC)

The note about the (effective) oxymoronicity of "Middlemarch" is nice to see, but note that the Midlands (more or less) reflect the ancient kingdom of Mercia (a "march"/borderland, in its own time, where the heptarchy of the Anglo-Saxons butted up against those they) and the rather middling-midlands location would be considered a 'modern' instance of mid-Mercia. We have a lot of such legacy placenames. (Though I think I prefer Torpenhow (which is "Hillhillhill"), Pendle Hill (likewise), etc...) 172.70.90.100 23:19, 19 March 2023 (UTC)