We all remember the Halloween classic “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!“. But after watching this bizarre video you will be saying… My God… What did I just watch?!
Genießen!
This lost classic short film of 1990 is a post reunification Nihilist allegory of the tensions between the immigrant worker population of Germany and the natives who still long for Heimat. When foreign bullies cajole a young German man into trying to kick an American football. Hilarity ensues.
Good Grief! Cancer Boy! is a strange little film made by Todd Graham in 1990 that reveals the utter futility of Charlie Brown’s very existence- in German!
Todd shows us what Charlie Brown might have become if Charles Schulz had allowed him to grow up… I guess it’s a good thing he never aged!
What you see there is called the Muat Ka Kuan in Hindi, or, in English, the Well of Death (or sometimes, the Wall of Death). And yes, that’s a car in it. And yes, the car is driving on a vertical wall, perpendicular to the ground, defying gravity.
The way it works is simple, albeit too close to insane for most to try. Cars or motorcycles start at the well’s bottom, traveling counterclockwise while picking up speed. At the base of the well’s walls are inclines, and the drivers carefully (carefully!) make their ways up the ramps. As they accelerate, it becomes safe (relatively speaking) to enter the nearly vertical walls, as centripetal forces keeps their vehicles adhered to the sides and out of gravity’s — and harm’s — way.
In other words: Yikes.
The stunt has its origins in the United States. In the early 1900s, motorcyclists at Brooklyn’s Coney Island took to the boardwalk, climbing the walls of much less steep motordomes. The fad waned in the United States but not before it spread to Europe. If you are in the UK, you can still experience motorcycles (with their drivers decked out in helmets and safety pads) climbing near-vertical walls at traveling carnivals. But performers in India have taken the stunt to another extreme: cars scaling nearly 100 foot high walls as their drivers take to action without any safety precautions.
As for why local authorities allow the stunt? There actually have not been many efforts to regulate the Well, as exhibitors rarely suffer serious injuries.
More images (including a larger version of the one above) are available at All That’s Interesting.
Bonus fact: The Well of Death does not actually involve death, at least when done correctly. The same cannot be said for the Euthanasia Coaster, a project designed (but thankfully not built) by a PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art in London. The Coaster, seen here, has a huge lift followed by seven inversions of decreasing size. Taken together, it is designed to kill its passengers, as its name suggests. In theory, it would do so by denying oxygen to the passengers’ brains for a prolonged time, leading the passengers to black out and, ultimately, die while unconscious.
A Bizarre and Dangerous Wedding. Filmed in Toulouse, France, this couple have decided to get married on a tight rope, high above the ground. There is no net and the vicar climbs up a fireman’s ladder. All very weird and dangerous! Date Unknown.
Extremo the Clown is a Portland, Oregon-based artist who has created what he calls the city’s strangest van. It’s covered with what appear to be bronze sculptures and symbols. I can only guess about their meaning.
