Balloon Land (1935)
Two balloon children ignore warnings and wander into the forest home of the pin-wielding Pincushion Man, who invades their town and pops its inflatable citizens until a balloon army repels him with gumballs and golf balls, launching him off the planet.
Also known as The Pincushion Man, Balloon Land turned its premise of a world built entirely from balloons into one of the more visually inventive ComiColor entries, memorable enough that Paul Reubens later borrowed its imagery for The Pee-wee Herman Show and Pee-wee’s Playhouse.
Background
Also known as The Pincushion Man, Balloon Land was released on September 30, 1935, as part of Ub Iwerks’s ComiColor Cartoons, a series of twenty-five shorts he made between 1933 and 1936 using the two-color Cinecolor process, with music by Carl Stalling. The cartoon imagines a town whose entire population is made of balloons, including caricatures of popular entertainment figures of the day such as Laurel and Hardy and Charlie Chaplin, and builds its plot around the threat posed by a sharp-pinned villain from outside its borders. It became one of the more visually inventive entries in a series that, by the mid-1930s, was struggling to compete with Disney’s technically superior color cartoons.
What to watch for
Two balloon children wander into the forest home of the pin-wielding Pincushion Man, who follows them back to town and begins popping its inflatable citizens until a hastily assembled balloon army drives him off with gumballs and golf balls. Among the townsfolk are balloon versions of Laurel and Hardy and Chaplin, rendered in Cinecolor’s muted two-color palette rather than the fuller three-strip Technicolor Disney was already using. The imagery stuck: Paul Reubens later borrowed Balloon Land’s visual conceits for The Pee-wee Herman Show and Pee-wee’s Playhouse, giving this minor Iwerks short an afterlife well beyond its original theatrical run.
