This weekend The Great Pork in Irvine opens up their giant gas spewing orange whoopee cushion to the public. So far the reaction has gone over like a lead balloon or a real bomb like the Hindenburg.
Orange County Register
July 13, 2007
FRANK MICKADEIT
You didn't think I would like it, did you?
I got an invite to join the media in today’s “pre-official” flight of the Great Park Balloon. Thank you, no. Remember the fate of Laika the Soviet Space Dog? (No? Well, it wasn’t pretty. Let’s just say she didn’t get a parade in Red Square.) Besides, this balloon extravaganza has “Hindenburg” written all over it.
When I first heard about this scheme, I had two thoughts, giving Agran, Krom & Co. all the benefit of the doubt: 1) They’ll come to their senses and/or 2) Maybe, just maybe, I’ll warm to the idea and learn a few things that will change my mind.
In the succeeding months, neither has happened, and as I passed by on the freeway the other day and saw the thing bloating up in the field like a goiter, I had this thought: Maybe an international airport wouldn’t have been so bad.
This has all the earmarks of the classic emperor-has-no-clothes situation in which one powerful guy comes up with a harebrained idea and nobody either has the courage or the juice to hack through his habitual bloviation to talk him out of it. Even Shea appears to have given up – or maybe she finally drank the Kool-Aid.
I’m not anti-fun. Or anti-orange. Or even anti-ugly. I drive around in broad daylight in an 33-year-old, Day-Glo orange VW bus for no other reason than it’s fun.
But let’s go to the stats. The balloon costs $1 million. Lennar, the master developer of the surrounding homes and businesses, is paying that. The annual operating cost, including insurance, is also $1 million. Lennar is paying about one-third of that. So the City of Irvine/Great Park Corp. (i.e., the public) is on the hook for about $660,000 a year. Look, I could be persuaded that $660,000 a year is not too much to pay for a smart marketing program. But is this a smart marketing program?
Maybe for Lennar. This giant pumpkin is essentially the equivalent of floating a Mylar whale over an auto mall or crisscrossing spotlights in the night sky to lure the gullible to a discount rattan-and-wicker showroom. Mainly, though, I think Lennar’s largesse will pay dividends because it adds to the general and wholesale sucking up it needs to do to in order to get Agran, et. al., to approve increased building density.
(And how ironic that the Irvine Co. and the HOAs it created have spent literally decades codifying and scrupulously enforcing a rigid, world-copied code of conduct regarding all manner of aesthetics, including signage, only to have an out-of-town developer come in and plunk this massive rudderless orb smack in the middle of all that perfectly planned beige.)
But what real value does the balloon bring the city of Irvine and its taxpayers? Oh, it promotes the park? What park? There is no park. This balloon is like the yellow brick road, guiding the naïve to the Emerald City in hopes of finding all sorts of wonderment, only to discover when they arrive that the balloon is all there is – well, that and this little wizard-like guy behind the curtain with some sycophantic munchkins.
And once there is a park, in 2009, is there any doubt all the free media and Caltrans signage will get people – lots of people – to the gates anyway?
Right now , this “park” has all the visual appeal of Dorothy’s Kansas. Which deflates the other possible reason the balloon might be worth $660,000 a year: It will be fun and exciting to see the “park” from a harrowing 500 feet above planet Earth.
Is there really anything worth seeing that can’t be seen from the ramp that connects the I-5 south to the 133 north? And at a somewhat lower risk? I tend to favor aircraft in which passengers are not essentially human ballast and can’t be compromised by a 10-year-old with a slingshot.
(Not that I don’t think tomorrow’s public “grand opening” won’t be entertaining, but only because there will be flyovers of vintage military aircraft at 10 a.m., noon, and 2 p.m., with my favorite grouping coming at the high-noon run: Hellcat, Corsair, Bearcat, P-51 and P-38.)
I got a kick out of the reports about how during the balloon’s initial inflation all manner of spectators were unexpectedly pressed into service to wrestle it into submission. Do you ever hear the flight attendant come on and say, “The captain kindly requests that all passengers now deplane and help push this sucker back from the gate”? Even on JetBlue?
I was sorry to miss that initial inflation, though. Especially, the part where they positioned Agran underneath it and yelled, “One, two, three … BLOW!!!”
Mickadeit writes Mon.-Fri. Contact him at
714-796-4994 or fmickadeit@ocregister.com
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