Post by Ally on Jan 6, 2022 5:32:02 GMT
So, I recently watched LSSQ's (LSuperSonicQ, in case you didn't know) video about a whole collection of mysterious and rare lost media, and the first short he mentioned intrigued me. I believe I have seen this same short as well, and would like to share my theory of where it might've came from.
But for those unaware: The "Balloon Short" in question was some user on a forum recalling that in sometime around 2011, they remembered seeing a short on TV where a kid holding balloons was being followed by a series of stick monsters. As they followed, his balloons began popping until he eventually realized he was being stalked, so he ran away, but not before his head becomes a stick monster itself, and it ends with the last balloon popping. As stated previously, I believe I remember seeing this short too, and I want to put forth the idea of where I think it could come from. Now, I could be totally wrong here, but I think this is worth sharing.
The OP of the thread supplied an image of what they think the short itself might've looked like, which is what I'll be using to describe my theory:
So, in the mid-2000s, a content creator known as Amy Winfrey (who I believe now works on Bojack Horseman and South Park) created an original flash webseries, called Making Fiends. The series was about an evil green girl, Vendetta, terrorizing the town with her "fiends," basically monsters that she creates in her own house, and a blue girl, Charlotte, who was oblivious to the fact that Vendetta hated her and wanted to be her friend. That was the basic gist of it. Well, in what I believe was the late 2000s, Nickelodeon offered Amy a chance to make her show a Nicktoon, and to make a long story short, the show was completely screwed over because Nickelodeon did barely anything to promote it and didn't even air it all too much anyway, and Amy lost all the rights to the series. Classic Nickelodeon shenanigans.
Now, here's how this relates to the short: in the show, the Fiends were often very simply designed, usually big fuzzy monsters with simple colors and shapes. And since the so-called monsters in the balloon short were purely black with very simple designs, I think that this could potentially be where the short originated from. And even the boy described in the short looks like he could've come from Making Fiends, as he has a very simple design. There even is a character in the TV show that looks very similar to him, though I can't really remember their name, I think it was Mortimer. They were even a very similar color of blue (because every character in the show was primarily only one color), though it was definitely a little darker (and it may be worth noting that Mortimer was pretty much just a background character in the TV show itself, he doesn't have any lines if I recall, he just was there, basically being the most "background character" a background character could get). Given all this, I think this short could've been a promotional bumper for Making Fiends itself, or maybe even just a Nicktoons bumper in general that was shown right before the show itself came on. The show itself is pretty obscure too, so I wouldn't be surprised if something like this slipped under the cracks.
And that is my theory, I don't really expect it to be correct, but I felt this was worth presenting.
