The Doomed Cleveland Balloonfest of 1986 [video] | Hacker News Reader

The Doomed Cleveland Balloonfest of 1986 [video]

theatlantic.com

The thing that strikes me is how deep the pathos about Cleveland runs as the newscasters hype the event ("Cleveland is no longer the mistake by the lake!" as the balloons fly). And that everyone seemed so entirely sure that dumping a million balloons into the sky would somehow make everyone stop laughing at the city. And then of course they all landed in the lake anyway.

I think the Onion did a good job of capturing that here

https://www.theonion.com/cleveland-finishes-construction-on-...

The "newscasters" are Big Chuck and Little John which were a local TV comedy duo (similar to Almost Live! in Seattle). Its probably one of the more Cleveland things to happen in Cleveland though.

Random aside - local shows like that are pretty sorely missing now.

Man, I miss those guys almost as much as Ghoulardi.

HASTILY MADE CLEVELAND TOURISM VIDEO[0]

Hastily Made Cleveland Tourism Video: 2nd Attempt[1]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysmLA5TqbIY

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZzgAjjuqZM

"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0742671/quotes

I almost forgot, fellow babies..."Booger!"

Funny to see this on here. I believe Clemson and UGA actually started this trend.

In 1983 Clemson announced it was going to set the record with a release of 250,000 balloons. Georgia, being competitive announced that the next week it would release 300,000.

Both releases happened and after Georgia's attempt to steal the record, Clemson released official numbers that were about 360,000, allowing them to hold the balloon release record and making UGA's attempt to 1-up the release a wasted effort. Clemson and UGA was a big football rivalry at this point with both schools having won titles in 1981 and 1980 respectively, while being located only 90 miles apart.

Shortly afterward, Disney decided to take the record with a launch of 1 million balloons which I believe preceded this Cleveland event.

EDIT: Yep, Disney in 1985 release 1 million.

https://www.ocregister.com/2015/12/02/mr-anaheim-remembering...

I was at that Clemson game. It was unreal.

here's a video of the Disney event in 1985 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8QCrvDt7yE

Made me think of the doomed "10 cent beer night", another Cleveland event that suffered from unintended consequences:

https://youtu.be/CFtR38Mlscc

That one is commemorated on a t-shirt I've seen locally.

Semi-related - the YouTube clip in the article was linked to on a little subreddit called "Obscure Media", https://www.reddit.com/r/ObscureMedia/

A wide variety of stuff shows up there, some of which might be interesting to the HN crowd.

>"No one is quite sure where they went, but at least they are no longer posing a threat to fish and wildlife and they are not littering the lake"

Victory for Cleveland!

Nowadays, I can't look at any helium balloon release and not think it's littering. “Pretty” and out of sight, but still littering. You're throwing plastic into the nature and environment.

Not to mention the waste of an important non-renewable resource.

The helium used in balloons isn't actually useful for much of anything.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium#Applications

> You're throwing plastic into the nature and environment.

It's usually latex. Still littering, but it degrades into mush pretty quick.

If you go into the woods almost anywhere near a city though, you will see mylar balloons in the trees.

Out of sight, out of mind, huh? It degrades into smaller pieces of latex, polluting the ecosystems.

If it was pure natural latex it would be not much different than a natural rubber tree dying in a forest. I'm sure they add some synthetic stuff to it though.

There was no circumstance in which this could have gone "right".

yes! Big Chuck and Little John:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Chuck_and_Lil%27_John

I grew up in Akron in the 80s and loved watching them

Here's another fun idea gone horribly wrong courtesy of Cleveland:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohvjLTZnH48

Don’t have the time to watch it now, could anyone quickly summarise in text form? Thanks!

10 cent beer night at the ballgame. 8 innings of increasing shenanigans and then a riot broke out in the 9th inning. The refs called a forfeit and the Cleveland SWAT team had to be called.

Not sure I'd want to fly a helicopter near that.

Unrelated: I recently found out The Atlantic is owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of Steve Jobs.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/07/emerson...

I didn't even know a person could own an entire ocean. I should get off the internet and start working on that first billion.

After this video, I finally got the joke involving Great Ohio Desert (artificial desert that was intended to be landmark of Ohio) from Wallace's 1987 "Broom of The System". Maybe it even inspired his idea with catapulting trash to Canada in his "Inifinte Jest".

I wasn't aware of this. So they launched 1.5 million balloons to set a Guinness World Record only to have Guinness not recognize the record and have 60% of the balloons fall into the river and eventually make their way to Canada. Crazy times back then.

if this had happened today the president would have announced a 50% tariff on the Guiness Book of Records

YouTube direct link:

https://youtu.be/n0CT8zrw6lw

More information is in this article from the 25th anniversary of the Balloonfest:

http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2011/09/twenty-five_years_ag...

I wonder if this contributed to the "Don't Litter" movement in American culture. It looks like a lot of people had no concern for the aftermath or the environment.

In hindsight it seems people didn't think about the future as much... maybe this changed that.

This was grossly negligent on so many levels, I find it hard to believe that was televised live with enthusiasm just 32 years ago.

The weight of each uninflated plastic balloon is apparently 2.5g.

That's 3.75 tonnes of plastic they released into the environment.

Should be renamed to litterfest

> most of the balloons ended up in Canada

in these tense times, Prime Minister Trudeau should look back with an open heart to the days when a great American city gave the Canadian people thousands of free children's toys.

More like "hundreds of thousands of free choking hazards".

trying to figure out the downvotes here. was it the Cleveland thing? do people not think Cleveland is a great city?

Jokes are mostly not welcome here. It's possible to make a humorous remark that gets upvoted (or ignored), but the element of politics in this specific remark doesn't help. Politics is also mostly not welcome here and political humor is nigh impossible to do without being offensive to somebody.

It’s a very silly comment on a very serious forum

Reply on news.ycombinator.com