YMMV / Fun in Balloon Land

• Accidental Innuendo: Various reviewers such as The Cinema Snob and RiffTrax have made jokes about the woman narrating the parade being a little too enthusiastic over the balloons and her constant use of the word "gay"^note  Technically, the term "gay" being used to describe homosexuality originated during the 1960s, so it still doesn't help! during the same time even when she could have just used "happy" or "cheerful".
  Narrator: You slidey, slithery snake! Slide along past me!...You have lots of clowns to charm you; I'm glad I'm not walking with you! (moans loudly) You are too long! Too long—yes—for me!
• Accidental Nightmare Fuel: From the overly-detailed faces of the various balloons, to the woman narrating the parade sounding overly excited and possibly turned on over the balloons (provided she doesn't make you laugh your ass off), and the poor quality of the music (to the point where the intro song played on an organ unintentionally invokes Creepy Circus Music), and the scenes that actually had a plot having creepy undertones due to the poor budget not really making the film convincingly fantasy-like, the whole movie is this!
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • The Accidental Innuendo leads to such about the woman narrating the parade.
  • The Cinema Snob in particular also joked about the "King of the Ocean" being a pedophile due to the budget making it look like a very fake scene set built in a garage to lure children in:
    The Cinema Snob: I know that I often confuse the bottom of the ocean with a creeper's garage! Just because his name is Albert Fish doesn't mean that you're under the sea!
• Fridge Horror: During the ocean scene, when Sonny shakes one of the tentacles of a most likely violent octopus balloon, he threatens to squeeze him with his tentacles and kill him. Does this mean that all of the already-creepy balloons are murderers?
• Ham and Cheese: The woman narrating the parade. Whether you think she's horny, psychotic, or drunk, she's so ridiculously enthusiastic about the balloons that she's the most memorable part of the "film" (despite the fact that the parade doesn't even belong in the movie anyway).
• Memetic Molester: The "King of the Ocean" has been said by multiple reviewers to come off as a child molester, in large part due to the movie's very low production values making his realm look like an unconvincingly-disguised creepy sex offender's lair.
• Moe:
  • One of the few balloons that doesn't look horrifying, a two-headed cat near the end of the parade, does look surprisingly cute.
  • The elephant balloons are also pretty adorable, if in an Ugly Cute kind of way.
  • The dog balloon in the "Farmer in the Dell" scene too — the Puppy-Dog Eyes certainly help.
• So Bad, It's Good: If you can get past the horrifying designs of the balloons' faces and unintentional creepiness, it can be quite unintentionally entertaining to watch. Kevin of RiffTrax thinks so. Special mention should go to the obviously fake Sea King somehow simultaneously being monotone and somewhat hammy at the same time, and especially the lady narrating the parade, who overacts so much it borders on sexual arousal.
• Special Effect Failure: The movie was very clearly recorded in a warehouse with the balloons not being animated in the slightest, and the sound quality is very poor, and the piano was obviously recorded on the set. The beginning of the movie was also presumably supposed to take place at night, since Sonny's mom was reading him a story, but it doesn't look like at night at all due to the lighting, which makes it either look like it's in the warehouse or on a cottage porch in the middle of the day. There's also the fact that more than half the film isn't even the movie itself, but a pre-recorded Thanksgiving parade.
• Sweetness Aversion: One of the main reasons this film is considered to be among the worst, though given the way the balloons look among many other creepy aspects of the film, some would argue it doesn't even succeed at being saccharine.
• Unintentional Period Piece: And not just for the effects or the vocabulary! Due to being a prerecorded segment filmed on site, the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in front of Logan Square where the parade segment was filmed has been altered and renovated over the decades and no longer resembles what's seen here.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: The faces of the balloons tend to be overly detailed with small fish-eyes and having lips and even blush that give them unintentionally Gonk appearances. There are a few balloons that aren't hideous, with one of them (see Moe) even being cute, but those are very few of them.
• Values Dissonance:
  • One of the balloons in the parade was a frog (who is supposed to be the Frog Footman from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland) who the woman said told a parent to "Speak roughly to your little boy, and beat him when he sneezes! He only does this to annoy, because he knows it teases!" Of course, that was intended to represent bad parenting on the part of the Duchess in the book. (This is the first verse of the song that the Duchess sings in the original book, but the narrator erroneously says that the Frog Footman said it)
  • A few of the balloon costumes are horrifically racist caricatures of Native Americans. Even during the 1960s when First Nation people were beginning to join the Civil Rights Movement, it's just plain unacceptable.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: Like other infamous children's films from the 1950s to the 1970s like Santa Claus (1959) and Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny, Fun in Balloon Land itself isn't violent or raunchy, but it fits this trope unintentionally due to ultra-saccharine elements of the film coming across as unintentionally creepy, with the balloons having absolutely horrifying faces that children would most likely be terrified by.

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