EMERYVILLE, Calif.--You might think sitting in a flying armchair would be a blood-pumping, adrenaline-rushing, and terrifying pastime. But I'm here to tell you that it's pretty darn smooth sailing.
I know because on Friday morning, I got a chance to take a ride on, yes, a flying armchair. And while I didn't crash it into power cables or cause a major blackout like Larry Walters, aka "Lawnchair Larry", I did take some serious air.
This was a rare opportunity to take part in what I suppose is the little-known sport of cluster ballooning. Ultimately, it was part of a high-flying promotion for the forthcoming Pixar animated film "Up."
"Up" hits theaters on May 29. As IMDB puts it, "By tying thousands of balloons to his home, 78-year-old Carl Fredricksen sets out to fulfill his lifelong dream to see the wilds of South America. Right after lifting off, however, he learns he isn't alone on his journey, since Russell, a wilderness explorer 70 years his junior, has inadvertently become a stowaway on the trip."
According to Disney spokesperson Raquel Baldwin, "Up," Pixar's tenth feature film, and the first done in Disney digital 3D, included 20,622 hand-animated balloons that Fredricksen uses to hoist his house aloft. Of course, Baldwin added, researchers at Pixar discovered it would actually take several million normal-size balloons to get much lift on a house.
Still, what better way to promote such a film than to hire two world-class cluster balloonists (Troy Bradley and Jonathan Trappe) to conduct simultaneous tours around the American West and East, respectively, giving local media rides in an armchair suspended from dozens of huge, brightly colored balloons.
I arrived at Pixar's campus here at about 5:15 a.m. Friday, just as a woman named Devony Corry, a longtime commercial hot-air balloon pilot, was holding onto one of the large, helium-filled balloons. It was clipped onto and tugging insistently at a belt loop on her pants. "This is what we need for guys who wear their pants too low," she joked, adding, "I'm just afraid it's going to rip the belt loop off my pants."
