Boards of Canada - Everything You Do is A Balloon

I have been on a bit of a Boards of Canada kick lately and I happened upon this little video featuring BOC's - Everything You Do is A Balloon. I quickly found myself mesmerized by the strangeness of the footage combined with the melodies of the BOC track. This result challenges even the great Aphex / Cunningham duo for downright creepiness.

After some research I found out the video is based on an actual children's bicycle safety film released in 1963 called "The One Got Fat". In the film, ten friends who are children with monkey masks and tails, plan on going to the park for a picnic. They all ride there on their bikes, but each one meets a different fate on their way to the park as a result of their failure to follow specific bike safety rules (like not making hand signals, not reading traffic signs, not riding with traffic, riding double, or riding on the sidewalk). One by one, each of the friends makes a mistake and suffers an interesting fate. In the end only one of the friends (who not only followed all the bike safety rules, but is also a normal human, whose face is not shown until the very end) makes it to the park and eats all the food by himself. Thus, as the title says, "One got fat!"

One critic described the film as "a concentrated dose of lab-purified nightmare fuel."

Even the names for each of the Monkeys are downright comical
1. Rooty-Toot ("Rooty") Jasperson
2. Tinkerbell ("Tink") McDillinfiddy
3. Phillip ("Floog") Floogle
4. Mossby Pomegranate
5. Slim Jim ("Slim") Maguffny and Trigby Phipps
6. Nelbert ("Nel") Zwieback
7. Filbert ("Fil") Bagel
8. Stanislaw ("Stan") Hickenbottom
9. Orville ("Orv") Slump

If I had saw this film when I was a child it would have gave me nightmares for weeks. The combination of track and the Film is priceless.

Boards of Canada - Everything You Do is a Balloon



One got Fat (1963)