I sit here glued to Twitter and CNN.com, frightened for poor Balloon Boy. Since I see the world through movies, I immediately flash on great ballooning scenes from the cinema.
Up: Indeed, many a joker on Twitter thought the initial story was a hoax promoting a re-release of Pixar’s latest feature film. We knew Ed Asner was an inspiration to kids, but the Colorado story takes it a few steps too far.
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen: Back when Terry Gilliam was still making good movies, he imagined a giant hot air balloon comprised of, as the British call them, women’s knickers. An aged Nigel Hawthorne and prepubescent Sarah Polley inside. Kinda creepy.
Night Crossing: In the pre-Touchstone 1980s, Disney made a few not-exactly-for-kids movies including Never Cry Wolf and this cold war curiosity piece. I actually saw it at the time, and all I remember was a family in East Berlin trying to escape over the wall in a hot air balloon. Seems a conspicuous form of travel, but who am I to judge?
The Jerk: Not exactly a hot air balloon, but the presence of a balloon in Steve Martin’s jacket pocket makes one of the strangest, funniest jokes in this comic masterpiece. “Do you have a balloon?” the sultry Bernadette Peters asks. “No, uh. . .yes!” and, voila, a balloon! Trust me, it’s funny.
Danny Deckchair: My mom swears this Australian film about a dude flying around in a chair is good. Looks like typical faux-art house nonsense to me.
The Golden Age of Ballooning: I don't know what it was about balloons and the Python guys, but one of the strangest (and longest) sketches ever on Monty Python's Flying Circus was ostensibly about the Montgolfier Brothers - but actually was a strange treatise about washing and the differences between a drawing room and a sitting room.
