366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

DIRECTED BY: Joseph M. Sonneborn, Jr.

FEATURING: Balloons, marching bands, parade floats, clowns, and more balloons

PLOT: During an especially drowsy storytime, a boy has dreams about large parade balloons that cavort and loom over him; we then see the balloons in their natural habitat, the 1964 Thanksgiving Day Parade in Philadelphia, with play-by-play from a possibly inebriated narrator.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Exhibit A in the case for advertising’s malign influence, this hour-long promo for parade balloons is both horror show and monument to boredom. Viewed through the ironic shades of nostalgia, it’s gleefully ignorant, but as a relic of its era, it’s a searing indictment of the utterly misguided definition of “fun” among the City of Brotherly Love’s cultural elite.

COMMENTS: Perhaps you started your day today with a viewing of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, a hours-long march of giant helium balloons, high school bands, and uncomfortably cold Broadway performers hiking through the streets of Manhattan. They (and you) are partaking in a tradition that goes back to 1924, but that’s not even the oldest Thanksgiving street party there is. That crown is held by Philadelphia’s parade, created by Macy’s rival Gimbel’s back in 1920. So it’s more than appropriate to turn our gaze toward that venerable Turkey Day bastion, and see how it inadvertently spawned a turkey of a very different kind.

Fun in Balloon Land wastes no time in delivering off-putting weirdness with the shockingly atonal theme song, sung by a man backed by a group of faux-enthusiastic children and the world’s saddest roller-rink organ. Through slant rhymes and methodical destruction of meter, the “tune” previews attractions to come like the Marrying Turkey, suggests that a teddy bear has fallen arches, and just generally shreds the auditory nerve. Already, we’re off balance before we’ve even seen the opening credit for “Giant Balloon Parades Inc. Presents,” a declaration that doesn’t augur well for artistic achievement.

The film kicks off in earnest with the sleepytime dream of Sonny (whose name we won’t learn until the last 10 minutes of the film), who rises from bed to stand in the corner of a book of fairy tales like a punished child and starts imaging a series of locales that correspond perfectly with Giant Balloon Parades, Inc.’s product line, including an undersea kingdom, a farm, and a culturally insensitive Old West. Sometimes these scenes are accompanied by amateur dances, but occasionally the film gets ambitious and tries to tell a story, as when the boy dons a gold lamé diaper and blows off a couple of Philly-accented mermaids. The “magic” of the balloons is meant to be self-evident, so there’s no attempt to reference any actual fairy tales or stories of adventure; they’re just generic milieus. All of this is accomplished with the skill and enthusiasm of a first-grade pageant, and it’s around this point that you realize a horrifying truth: somebody had to plan this. Somebody scripted it. And somebody watched it and concluded that it absolutely should be shared with the public.

If you think of Fun in Balloon Land as an infomercial, then it’s only logical to see the product in action. For Giant Balloon Parades Inc., that means a real live parade, and so after 17 minutes of quasi-sketch product demos, it’s off to downtown Philadelphia, where we are cast in the role of bystander, watching from the sidelines as the company’s signature products roll by. I mean this literally: the camera is locked down at Logan Square, as the parade moseys down the Benjamin Franklin Parkway and hangs a right onto 20^th Street. Aside from occasional closeups, this will be our vantage point for the next 40 minutes. And this is where it’s useful to note the state of parade balloon technology in 1964. Basically, the one proven shape was a sphere, so every helium-filled creation is essentially either a great big circle or a bunch of circles and cylinders sewn together. This means that many of the company’s products are quite disturbing, especially those intended to look vaguely human that turn out to resemble enormous inverted matryoshkas. What’s more, far from the colossal (and dangerous) flying characters in Manhattan, Philly’s balloons are strictly earthbound, dragged along by various clown-styled handlers, meaning parade viewers get a direct view of these bubble-chain horrors.

One of the more curious production elements is the choice to use natural sound, even for dialogue and narration, meaning everyone had one take to get it right. This is particularly odd during the dream sequence, which appears to be wired with exactly one microphone, so that the dialogue for the anthropomorphic balloon characters is being delivered by someone in the back of the warehouse yelling their lines. But nowhere is this approach more catastrophic than during the parade itself, when an unseen narrator tries to make hay of the various inflatables rolling by, in much the same way that a parent reading a book to children will occasionally break from the text to comment on the action. She only speaks when there are balloons on display, meaning large chunks of parade go completely uncommentated upon, giving the unfortunate appearance that our narratress is deeply distracted, like someone offscreen has to keep poking her to remind her to do her job. (Some have identified her as Dorothy Brown Green, who is also alleged to be the narrator of Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny; if true, she has much to answer for.) When she does speak, it’s with a forced enthusiasm—the kind you get at gunpoint—and her free verse accounts of these “beloved” characters (The Pig with a Ring in Its Nose? The Marrying Turkey???) read like the most desperate improvisations. Half are for characters that nobody knows but whom she insists are institutions, while even the familiar ones are presented so completely out of context that the play-by-play might as well be manufactured on the spot. Some have suggested she’s drunk; I think it more likely that she’s shivering in the Philadelphia cold and is desperately waiting for the go-ahead to leave and get some coffee. But I get why some viewers want her to be blotto: if you were watching this parade, wouldn’t you want to be?

Fun in Balloon Land is a dumbfounding concoction, and the weirdest thing about it is the delightfully deranged notion that any child would want to watch this. You can imagine putting together a sales reel to entice potential clients, but once Giant Balloon Parades Inc. decides to tell a story, the whole thing descends into the madness we see here. And yet, it is a joyful madness. A mistake made more interesting by virtue of being a fully committed mistake, Fun in Balloon Land turns out to be the perfect table-setter for the relentlessly branded, rapaciously marketed Christmas season. These inflated monsters are a welcome antidote to the pervasiveness of the holiday industrial complex. Put up the tree, kids. The Marrying Turkey is on his way.

Since it’s in the public domain you can experience Fun in Balloon Land free on YouTube or similar services; it’s probably more frequently view in the comic Rifftrax version, however.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a very strange ‘60s oddity that seems to be made for children, but in reality, it’s stealth propaganda for balloon manufacturer Giant Balloon Parades, Inc… there are so many weird and disturbing images here that it’s hard to look away.” – Mitch Lovell, The Video Vacuum

“.Very weird indeed. It was probably made to advertise the Giant Balloon Parades Inc., or maybe psychedelic drugs.” – Kris Davies, Quota Quickie

(This movie was nominated for review by B Pullen, who said it “looks and feels like a mental patient’s way of entertaining himself.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)