IIRC the airship in Stardust looked basically like a zeppelin, so I agree that it presumably contained some lighter-than-air gas. (Or would have if it were real.)
I don’t think Ebert intended to knock movies featuring zeppelins with this rule, not because the type of gas really matters in a movie but because I think what he was getting at was that having the heroes take off in one of these contraptions can seem like a forced attempt at whimsy. A zeppelin doesn’t have the same connotations.
Roger Ebert actually cited this movie as having the “most egregious use of a hot air balloon”, so I don’t think he would have considered it an exception to his rule. I’ve never seen it though, so I couldn’t say whether this was a fair judgment.
The book of Around the World in 80 Days does have Fogg contemplate using a hot-air balloon for the Atlantic crossing, but he rejects it as being too unreliable.
And not a movie, but one episode of Macgyver has him escaping the titles-sequence adventure using a hot-air balloon. Well, and a map.
Was Octopussy considered a good movie? Q helped with the invasion force at the end by flying around in a hot air balloon hooked up with a monitor to watch the action.
At one point he swooped down really low and basket-punched some bad guys, saving the lives of a few of Octopussy’s hot women soldiers, who then showered him with kisses. (I imagine it’s pretty hard to sneak up on a bad guy in a hot air balloon).
Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines features a dual between a Frenchman and a German while in teathered baloons. Once again the quality of the film may well come into question, but it was entertaining. Anything with Stuart Whitman, Gert Frohm and Bennie Hill has to be entertaining.
How could I have forgotten this one? The Adventures of Mark Twain, a Will Vinton Claymation feature, has as its central plot an attempt by Twain to catch up with Halley’s comet in a powered hot-air balloon. Excellent film, but someone whose work was, I think, underappreciated (think of an American version of Aardman animation), highlighting several of the lesser-known works of one of my favorite authors (the Captain Stormfield segment alone makes the filom worth watching). There are portions of it on YouTube, and the entire film has been released on VHS and DVD.
It’s not Death. The scene is a kinda-sorta adaptation of The Mysterious Stranger, a Twain clasic, and the angel, as he says himself, is “Satan”. He has no Moral Sense, so he innocently commits mayhem and destruction without realizing it. This issue of Moral Sense was a big one for Twain, and shows up in other works. He was just taking his childhood training about the moral universe and following it through to a logical conclusion.
Helluva good segment of that film. Sorry it didn’t work for you.
I also loved The Adventures of Mark Twain—and I did watch it as a kid in the 1980s. I do remember think it was a tad freaky, true. But this was also on the network that ran Return to Oz, the Unico movies, and Rankin-Bass’ Tolkien films. Yow.
Heh…checking some screenshots, out of curiosity, it appears the balloons in Those Magnificent Men…, Mysterious Island, and Around the World in 80 Days were all hydrogen/helium lifted. As well as the house from Up.
Perhaps we can chalk them cheating the hot-air-balloon-curse to some sort of eerie mystic reason; or perhaps to having more technical pedants in the production teams, and thus indicative of more attention being paid to the film overall. Or coincidence.
The Albatross from Jules Verne’s Robur the Conqueror (which the movie was really based on*) was an aeronef – a heavier-than-air flying machine kept aloft by a huge number of rotors, like a super-helicopter**, bot a balloon at all. In the book, however, there IS a balloon. I cannot recall if it is gas or hot air, though. Can’t recall if that made it into the movie, either. (Evidently it did, based on the poster: Master of the World (1961 film) - Wikipedia )
Robur came back in the sequel, Master of the World, which I guess they figured had a catchier title.Robur’s machine in that was a supercraft that could travel at high speed on land, in the air, on the water, or under it (therefore making this Verne’s fourth novel with a submarine). This craft was called The Terror
[Rick Moranis as Dark Helmet] "Everybody got that? Good![/RMaDH]
**The mind boggles at the amount of fuel (or electricity) that would be needed to keep The Albatross aloft. Verne very cleverly had Robur build his Albatross of composites – not metal or wood — because the material was both tough and strong and light. He din’t call it that – the word hadn’t been invented yet – but that’s clearly what it was, from his description. The material consisted of randomly oriented fibers inside a matrix that was cast and cured under high pressure. Apparently it was used as a substitute for steel in railroad wheels in Verne’s day. I’ve mentioned to Aero and Astro Engineering professors abiout this early example of composites as a material for flight, and none of them had ever heard about it. And this was almost 20 years before the Wright Brothers built their airplane out of wood and canvas.
I very recently watched Buster Keaton’s Balloonatic, although I’m not convinced it’s one of his better films. The title is a bit of a giveaway, but the balloon only features in brief parts of the film (mostly it’s about camping).
This is what I came to say. When it showed in the theaters, a local hot air balloon club had a gondola in the lobby, and info about the club, and ballooning in general. I joined up for two or three years, and crewed at the annual rally. When I crewed for an out of town pilot I got a free ride!
Cool! I helped set up OKC’s balloon fest for a couple of years and got to join in with a couple of teams.
Most movies with hot air balloons in them barely get even the basics right. That movie was all about the balloon. It could’ve been listed in the credits as a major character.
I think those were lighter-than-air balloons. You may recall that, after he had shot down the Frenchman, the German stood up - and punctured his balloon with the spike on top of his helmet. That wouldn’t affect a hot-air balloon.
And, of course, both balloonists landed in the manure pile.
