99% Invisible - 143- Inflatable Men

Episode Date: December 3, 2014

You see them on street corners, at gas stations, at shopping malls. You see them at blowout sales and grand openings of all kinds. Their wacky faces hover over us, and then fall down to meet us, and then rise … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. So just Velcro's onto the base of the fan and then we're just turning on the unit. We'll be up in a minute. You see them on street corners at gas stations, at shopping malls. You see them at blowout sales and grand openings of all kinds. They're wacky faces hover over us, and then fall down to meet us, and then rise up again.

Their bodies flop. They flail. They are men. Men made of tubes. Tubes full of air. Producer Sam Greenspan is full of more than hot air. You know these things. A vinyl column perched on top of a fan

with skinny little arms and a big dumb grin, blowing around goofily on a street corner near you. People are familiar with it, but when they're driving by, it's just that you have to look and turn your head. And, you know, four is it's the best return on your advertising dollar you can spend. If by some stretch of the imagination you have never seen one of these things in person, you have probably seen them around the internet or on TV. I am learning some amazing moves from this guy. They are either full of ridiculous, joyful exuberance or the tackiest thing in the world,

depending on your tastes. A number of cities across the US have actually banned the use of tube guys. In Ordinance and Houston, enacted in 2008, proclaims that the Dancing Tube Guy, quote, contributes to urban visual clutter and blight and inversely affects the aesthetic environment. End quote. I want you to go ahead and try to imagine an origin story for these things. Used car salesman buy some tarp in a leaf blower and messes around in his garage. No. Slided bounce house designer goes rogue determined to show them all. No no no no no.

The real story behind these is so much better and it all starts with this guy. so much better. And it all starts with this guy. I am Peter Menshaw, born in 1941. The world was at war, so were my parents as a result of which I was taken in my mother's womb to Georgetown, Ghana, where I was born in the general hospital in the embrace of her family and brought back to turn it out shortly thereafter in her arms. Peter Mitchell, ladies and gentlemen, were now in Caribbean artists who could easily have a second career narrating nature documentaries for PBS. I'm an artist, stroke, Mossman.

This is a word indigenous to Trinidad, which is where I'm talking to you from now. In Trinidad and Tobago, a Mossman is someone who works in the Carnival Arts tradition. Peter Mitchell made a name for himself in part by making these larger than life puppets that dance through the street to the beat of a steel drum band. His work was featured in a book called Caribbean Festival Arts, which wound up in front of someone on the steering committee for the Olympics,

which is how, in 1995, Peter Mitchell found himself in a stadium in Los Angeles, working with a bunch of different artists, trying to figure out ideas for the opening ceremonies at the Atlanta Games, the following year. As Mintle tells it, he was trying to do something using inflatable tubes. But it wasn't working out. It was a total failure.

But there I am, sitting in the bleachers with a little notepad, and there are all these tubes side by side going up and somewhere out of the haze I just sketched two million flatable tubes and joined them at the waist going into one tube which is a torso and divided them again at the top with arms and a bit of a head you might get an incredible, undulating dancing figure. Boom! The Dancing Tube Guy is born! Mental realized these figures made from a tube hooked on an air source, with dance, just like the people did back home in Trinidad and Tobago.

And so, it might, to another person, seem like a great leap of the imagination. To me, it was like jumping into water like a little duckling. Peter Mitchell knew how to make giant figures, but they had always been powered by people, not air. And so while Peter Mitchell was in that moment able to glimpse upon the possibility of giant, undulating, inflatable dancing tube guys, and so while Peterel was in that moment able to glimpse upon the possibility of these tall boys, he knew he needed help. I got a call from the Olympic Games from Peter Minchel,

and he asked me if I can create a human shape. And I told him, yes, it's definitely can be done. This is Doron Gazette, another artist, who, like Peter Mitchell, had gotten known in the Olympics planning scene. He had done some work in the 84 games in Los Angeles. And if there's one guy who knows about making things full of air, it's him. Dorone Gazete first got interested in inflatables when he was a college student visiting the US. Gazete is from Israel.

He saw someone making balloon figures on the street and got obsessed with doing that himself. He sold balloon animals on the streets in Jerusalem, and to this day he still carries balloons around with him in his pockets. And actually I like to say that we don't use the B-word. It's all about inflatables. Gazette founded a company called Air Dimensional Designs, which basically serves to populate the world with his inflatable objects and sculptures. And so after he got the call, Gazette and his team headed over to meet Menshal and see if they could make the Tall Boys a reality, which actually turned out to be a pretty big engineering challenge.

I had to find the right strong powerful motor that will be able to give me enough CFM in the right torque. You get the idea. Engineering physics. Gazete futs around with the materials and the methodologies. And eventually, these tall boys came to life. And they looked very much like the tube guys we see today with two major exceptions. One, they were bipedal, their legs divided at the base, each with its own fan. And two, these things were enormous.

They were 30 or 60 feet high, depending who you ask. And that was the first the world had ever seen of these inflatable men. The 1996 Olympics in Atlanta came in went. And so at this point in the story, the two guys, the tall boys, are out in the world. But how did they go from a thing we saw at the Olympics once, basically as an art piece? How did they go from that to a thing you see at like every used car lot in America? Here is where the Minchel camp and the Gazette camp begin to diverge. By Peter Minchel's account, a few months after he returned home from Atlanta, he got a call from one of his collaborators at the Olympics. He recalls him saying,

Oh by the way, that fellow in LA who made those things I do believe, in LA who made those things. I do believe you'd sort of better watch your back because I think that he's making them to sell. Later on, Minchelcott win that Jerome Gazete had gotten a patent on the Tallboy, the dancing vertical inflatable. Gazete says that he wanted a patent because he put a lot of research and development

into making the tube guys work. And he was already starting to see other people rip off his efforts. The Chinese company just took my designs and was quickly that they could just imitate it and copycat it. Doron Gazit was awarded a patent for apparatus and method for providing inflated, unilating figures in 2001. Gazit reversed them as fly guys. Peter Minchal and Doron Gazit both agree that the dancing inflatable figures were Minchel's idea, and they both agree that Gaseet turned that idea into a reality. Where they disagree is whether or not it was cool for Gaseet to get a patent on it without

informing Minchel. He had the vision. He was asking for it. It didn't exist before that, and then a very, very, very much respect Peter Minchia, an amazing other actor and artist, and doing beautiful work. And it was an honor for me to work with him. Gazette says his attorney told him that in the eyes of the law, Minchia would not be considered an inventor. And so Gazette was surprised to learn that Minchal had been angry with him.

He says that since then, he's reached out to Minchal a number of times, but never heard back. Peter Minchal says that it never occurred to him to seek a patent on the tube, guys. I don't, please, I'm an island boy from Krinidad. I don't know if the law is, my instinct tells me that before he could do any such thing, it is his duty to consult with me. Gazette, meanwhile, continues to make money off of the tall boys, fly guys, whatever. He licenses his patent to other companies, like Look Our Way, which sells inflatables here in San Francisco. That's who you heard from earlier. This is Look Our Ways Nick Sanovic. Yeah, so the technology we license from them has to do with the way the air escapes the inflatable.

The air escapes both from throughout the top of the head as well as each one of the arms. So that, you know, after testing, that is what gives it its dynamic motion, kind of the special sauce and why it's so effective. Look Our Way has their own name for these things, air dancers. And even though they may be licensing pre-existing technology, they also invented a whole new use for them. It came to them by way of a farmer in eastern Washington state named Gary Long. So little setup. Gary keeps apple orchards on his property, and he started having a really severe bird

problem. Starlings were eating tons of his apples, like literally 10 tons a year. Once he's in, he lost 20,000 out of 40,000 pounds of honey crisp apples after they had been pecked out by birds and rendered unsellable. And so Gary Long was looking for ideas. I was talking to a person that was selling his products that he grew on his ranch when in a fruit stamp. And so he wanted to attract people to come to his fruit stamp. So he put one of these air dancers out there that wails and jails and hoping that people would see that the

dancers would come over to it and come to his fruit stamp. Well, it didn't bring any people in a very quantity, but the thing that he noticed was the birds didn't bother him. They weren't coming into his fruit stand and pecking on the fruit. Long story short, Gary bought a few air dancers from Look Our Way hoping to keep the birds out. The result? The dancers started dancing, they took off. They went to a neighbor. And so I said, hey, this looks like it's got possibilities.

With the air dancers in place, Gary was able to get the bird damage down from 20,000 pounds to, you ready for this, they got bird damage down to zero. Zero damage. Gary long called up Nick Kusanovitch from Look Our Way and made some suggestions for how to turn the air dancer into a bonafide scarecrow. They added bits of reflective material to the head, gave it some angry eyes and some scary teeth, and transformed the thing from an air dancer to an air ranger. The air ranger section of the Look R Way website reads,

Dynamic Unrepeatable Dancing Motion keeps birds away time after time. I mentioned the air rangers to Peter Minchel. It was the first time he had ever heard of them. Well that's brilliant. Next time I open up a packet of cornflakes, I'll smile. Yeah so no bitterness on Minshal's part, even though he's not making any money off of these things. Actually, he loves seeing the two guys around. Could you imagine how I feel when I'm driving down, I don't drive actually, when a friend is driving me down from a house in town to where we are, a factory building place in Shagoramas. And I see a sort of diminutive version of a tall boy dancing up a storm by a gas station.

I thought, my God, look at where we reach. And I'm suddenly aware that they're dancing up over gas stations all over the planet. A part of me can't help but feel delight that, you goodness, little fella, look at what you and your Ivan have given to the world. I don't know how much money Daron Gaseet is making off of his tube-guy patent, but whatever it is, you can't really say he didn't earn it. Sure, maybe it was Peter Mitchell's idea, but Gazette actually made this thing. And, as Gazette really wanted me to point out, he's done a lot of other work with inflatable since then. But I also love knowing about Peter Mitchell, and that these things are kind of like shopping plaza ambassadors from the streets of his Caribbean island.

Because that is how he dances. Limpid in mind, the inflatable figures, the tube guys, the tall boys, the fly guys, the air dancers, the air rangers, I've discovered a whole new joy in them. They probably won't convince me to buy a new car, but I will delight in seeing them try. And when I look upon them, I will know to listen for the distant whisper of a calypso band. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Sam Greenspan, with reporting from Sam Dean, who wrote about the tube guys previously, the online magazine Reform, ended by our friend Sarah Rich.

The usual crew of Katie Mingle, Avery, Truffle, and Min and me Roman Mars, we helped out, special thanks to Todd Gulick and Barry Standick. We are a project of 91.7 local public radio, KALW and San Francisco, and produced at the offices of Arxan, in architecture and interiors firm in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. You can find the show and hang out with other people who like the show on Facebook. All of the 99 PI producers are on Twitter, so search for 99% of visible and you will find us and you can follow us.

But you're always welcome at our place at 99pon. you