As a youngster, I went to the SC State Fair with my dad almost every year. One year, they had a rude clown in a dunking booth. He would taunt the player with all sorts of put-downs (he called me “mama’s little butterball” at one point) and you would attempt to dunk him by hitting a target about the size of a bread plate with a baseball, 3 balls for $1 or something like that. From maybe 30 feet or so.
IIRC, I dropped his greasepainted butt two out of three times.
Knowing full well the narrow limits of my athletic abilities, it strikes me as somewhat unrealistic that I accomplished this feat on the level, but it has bothered me ever since because I can’t figure out how they would rig something like this.
Anybody out there know? The best I can come up with is they put some ball bearings inside the ball and the targets were wired with electromagnets.
Did you hit the target? I can see where they would be supersensitive, so any ball that even barely touched the target or arm would trigger the fall. But I think if you tossed some airball that landed twenty feet short and the guy came splashing down it would register amongst the spectators - and you, unless you were really, really young - that something was amiss.
FTR, there was some work function a few years ago where the managers had to get in the dunking booth, and there was nothing rigged about that one. We all got to take a close look at it, plus there were tons of coworkers that did not come close to dunking their boss with their three throws.
Dunking booths rae set up so that an operator can trip if, it there’s too much time between dunkings, of if the Priest, who can’t really leave until he’s had a couple of good dunkings, doesn’t get dunked in a legit way.
I worked at a theme park in my teenage years (Australia’s Wonderland at Eastern Creek near Sydney). They had one of these dunking booths. One of my friends was one of the guys that got dunked. He certainly never mentioned that they were rigged and I think it would be very unlikely that it would be possible.
BTW they wear a sort of wetsuit under their clothes, only work for short stints at a time and truly, truly hate children.
A local community group rented one of these dunking booths for a neighborhood fundraising event, and got local elected officials to serve shifts as the “target”.
At the start of one elected official’s shift, the opponent (who had lost a hard-fought election the previous fall) showed up, plunked down a $50 bill, pointed to his companion and said, “give him balls until that runs out”. We looked at the companion, and it was a starting pitcher for our professional American League baseball team! Needless to say, that elected official was dumped many, many times that afternoon.
But pointed out afterwards how happy the neighborhood group was about all the money they’d raised!
What would be the point of rigging it? I assume the success rate isn’t that low, so it’s not like people are going to get discouraged by never dunking people.
The local fire brigade put up a dunking booth at events in my village; it is most certainly rigged - as well as the drop being activated by the target, there is a foot pedal that one of the other firemen can press (they usually only activate it for very young kids who have quite a poor aim).
Based on my limited experience, they’re not rigged. But it is pretty easy for the dunkee’s “friends” to slip behind the scenes and screw with the mechanism so that he gets a few bonus dunks.