Fun in Balloon Land is a No Budget children's film from 1965 that is essentially documentary footage of a Philadelphia Thanksgiving parade
note with a 15-minute scripted prologue added in an attempt to provide some semblance of a plot. It presumably was only screened in regional or local theaters during Saturday matinees before vanishing from the public eye, only to resurface in the Public Domain around 2009 through the efforts of Something Weird Video. In 2014, the film was mocked via RiffTrax.
A little boy named Sonny falls asleep as his mother reads him a bedtime story, and then sleepwalks out of her lap and into Balloon Land, a world inhabited by living balloon floats. There, Sonny meets a diverse array of floats, visits a farm, meets mermaids and lobsters under the sea, and saves a stagecoach in the Old West. The rest of film consists mostly of straight parade footage, with occasional shots of Sonny watching the floats. At the end of the film, Sonny leaves Balloon Land and sleepwalks back into his mother's lap.
Not to be confused with the 1935 theatrical short Balloon Land.
"Look at these Tropes, Ain't they Ducky?":
- All Just a Dream: Although Sonny doesn't fall asleep to have the dream so much as to sleepwalk into it.
- Cold Ham: The King of the Ocean comes off as overacting despite speaking in a monotone voice.
- Follow the Bouncing Ball: There's not an actual bouncing ball, but all the lyrics to the "Balloonland" song are shown onscreen as it plays, invoking this trope.Right Through Balloonland
We Said Balloonland
Down in Balloonland U.S.A. - Have a Gay Old Time: Nearly every other sentence coming off the narrator's mouth has the word "gay" in it, giving RiffTrax and The Cinema Snob plenty of jokes. It doesn't help that although this was the '60s, "gay" had begun to be used as a euphemism for "homosexual" around the time.
- Large Ham: The woman narrating the parade is incredibly enthusiastic about it, doing so boisterously.
- Mind Screw: From the way the plot is set up, the movie seems to be Sonny's dream since his mother was reading him a bedtime story, and that would explain the parade being shoehorned in, since he actually "wakes" up from that at the end of the movie, but he doesn't actually lie down and go to sleep, he walks up to a tall standing storybook and just stands there and gets magicked into Balloon Land. And then when he wakes up, he goes back to sleep in his mother's lap AGAIN!
- No Indoor Voice: Sonny speaks his lines loudly, something that is amplified by the acoustics of the warehouse the first fifteen minutes of the movie was filmed in.
- Kevin Murphy: Guys, is this movie even legal?
- Public Domain Feature Films: The film's copyright expired 17 years before its rediscovery in 2009.
- Shout-Out: During the parade sequence, a lot of fairy tales and nursery rhymes are mentioned. The Show, Don't Tell moment with the crying Walrus is from "The Walrus and the Carpenter" from Through the Looking Glass.
- Show, Don't Tell: At times during the parade, the woman will say something about a specific balloon character that isn't shown on screen:
- Humpty Dumpty is mentioned by the narrator during the parade despite him not being on-screen due to the camera being zoomed in too close. However, he is clearly visible during the guessing game at the end of the movie.
- Another example is when the Walrus balloon shows up, she says the Walrus is crying (which is not shown, because we only see the Walrus from the back) because he ate the oysters that he promised to take a walk by the sea. This actually did happen in the poem by Lewis Carroll that it was based on, but the neither the poem or the book Through the Looking Glass are mentioned at all.
- She also claims that a balloon named "Ms. Hippo" was blown away by the wind, even though no articles about a giant balloon belonging to Giant Parade Balloons, Inc., being blown away have surfaced. It could just be a tongue-in-cheek case of Unreliable Narrator. Especially, since she caps off the anecdote with "It's true! Just ask me!"... after, you know, she already said it.
- Two Decades Behind: If you had no clue when this was made and had to guess a year, you'd probably say 1949 or so, with the unpolished color cinematography, cornball tone, and the archaic style of the "Balloonland" song. There's absolutely no way you'd guess that this was a product of The '60s.
