The first segment of each episode of the early episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000 was the "invention exchange", hearkening back to creator Joel Hodgson's background as a prop comic. Joel and the bots would show off one of their recent inventions for a quick goofy bit of prop comedy, and then the mad scientists down in Deep 13 would do the same. Notable inventions from the early seasons included the 3-D pizza, based on the 3-D chess game from Star Trek:
Or the Chocolate Bunny Guillotine for enjoying your Easter candy with no mess:
Or the Musical Chair, which is a chair made out of a xylophone:
Or the abstract art paint-by-number kit:
Or the life-size “Operation” game:
Or, in the more recent Netflix revival of the series (which was still pretty damn funny), the Turkey Theremin:
MST3K is one of the most influential comedy series in the history of television (not least because it was the flagship show that helped launch the cable network that would become Comedy Central) and, if you forced me to pick the single funniest TV show ever made, in terms of what has actually made me laugh the most often, hardest, and most involuntarily, I would pick this immediately. But it wasn’t really because of these bits. The invention exchange was not part of that influence, it was a goofy quick segment to set up the show before getting to the good part: watching an appallingly bad movie and riffing on it. Generally, the more time you spend on a prop gag, the less effective it is, especially if that time is spent going into details on the mechanics of the prop itself. MST3K was smart enough to hit it quickly and move on.
What the 1948 Newbery medalist proposes is, what if we made a whole novel out of the invention exchange?
The Twenty-One Balloons, by William Pene "W.E.P. Dat Boi" du Bois, is the saga of William W. Sherman, a professor who hated teaching so much that he decided to circumnavigate the globe in a balloon since that was the mode of transportation likely to keep him away from work for the longest period of time. So right away, you're thinking "wow this sounds like something kids would really love and relate to", and you’ll end up thinking that multiple times as we work through the story.
Sherman has a delightful trip for a few days before an accident causes his balloon to crash on the island of Krakatoa, which was a real place in the Pacific, but du Bois has created a bizarre and fantastical fictional Krakatoa populated by twenty formally-dressed expat families from San Francisco all living under incredibly convoluted rules to protect the island nation’s secrets. You may be thinking “what?” which, again, will be something you will think multiple times throughout the course of the novel.
The fictional Krakatoa, as it turns out, sits on an enormous diamond mine, containing more wealth than any city could hope to spend over generations. The amount of wealth under the island is so significant that, as du Bois writes, there is no incentive to take the diamonds off of the island and spend them elsewhere, as that would immediately flood the diamond market and make all diamonds worthless:
“If you took your share of diamonds, loaded them in a freighter, and carried them with you to another country you would be making a horrible mistake. Diamonds are priced as high as they are because they are extremely rare jewels in other countries. Unloading a boatload of diamonds in any other port of the world would cause the diamond market to crash; the price of diamonds would drop to next to nothing; and your cargo would scarcely be worth more than a shipload of broken glass.”
You may, after reading a detailed paragraph from a children’s book about the dangers of flooding the market and how that can lead to inflation, again be thinking “what?” and “wow this sounds like something kids would really love and relate to”. You’ll also be saying that during bu Bois’ detailed, chapters-long description of the island’s restaurant-based system of government, which is not a joke, that is how the twenty families have chosen to live their lives:
“We have an unusual Constitution. It’s sort of a Restaurant Government. There are twenty families on the island, each running a restaurant [with each restaurant serving a different cuisine starting with one of the first twenty letters of the alphabet]. We made it a law here that each family shall go to a different restaurant every night of the month, around the village square in rotation. In this way no family of Krakatoa has to work more than once every twenty days, and every family is assured a great variety of food.”
Each family has also renamed themselves after a single letter of the alphabet, and at this point you may be wondering what this 1940s author was high on when he wrote this book (laudanum?). But this isn’t even the bulk of The Twenty-One Balloons, which is mainly “descriptions of inventions”.
Are you getting excited? Have you picked up your copy of The Twenty-One Balloons eager to hear of some splendiferous aeronautical escapades? Get excited, it’s time for the awe-inspiring, pulse-pounding description of the hot air balloon merry-go-round invented by the children of Krakatoa:
“The rest of the children stood up and carefully deflated their balloons and folded them up in their boats without letting any part of them touch water. They folded them lengthwise first, then rolled them from the top toward the bottom where the gas escape was, thus forcing all of the gas out of them and making small neat bundles. They opened the little lockers in the boats, where the sails were, took the sails out, and replaced them with the folded balloons. Each boat had one mainsail.”
Obviously, we’re off to a fast start with a description of how each balloon is folded and bundled, but believe it or not, things get more thrilling from here:
“First of all, the children detached the boats one from the other at their bows and sterns. When this was done, they were still attached to each other by the poles which formed the spokes of the giant wheel. These poles were obviously the masts when the boats were used for sailing. The children, two on each pole, all pushed together toward the center hub until the poles slid out through the brass oarlock rings on their boats. Then, still working two on each pole, they unscrewed the poles from the brass hub in the center.”
Yes! Tell me more about how many people were on each pole and at what point in the process they were unscrewing pieces of metal from the brass hub! I hope this goes on for paragraphs! And it does!
“They all unscrewed their poles except one boy, the boy who gave the commands. He pulled his pole in with the hub still attached to it, unscrewed the hub in his boat, and put it away in a separate locker.”
Oh my goodness a SEPARATE locker???? Imagine reading this as a child and just being overcome with breathless wonder.
“Now that they each had their masts, it was a simple problem to put them into the mast holes…only the need for a boom was absent from this compact invention. We lowered the centerboards and lined up.”
If you think this is thrilling, you'll positively vomit with excitement at the detailed descriptions of all the various household inventions on Krakatoa, like a bed that changes and washes its own sheets, or armchairs that can move around the living room. And rest assured that each of these inventions is accompanied by detailed descriptions of how they're each powered and mechanically fit together in the various homes and restaurants that, again, form the fictional restaurant-constitutional government of a place that actually existed in real life.
Let's go back to the prop gags in MST3K for a minute. When Joel shows us the 3D Pizza, we don't spend a lot of time discussing how exactly you need to preheat the oven, and whether it should be a gas or wood-fired oven, or if there are any specific differences in the recipe for the dough compared to your traditional 2D pizza. You certainly don't stop the rest of the episode to go on for pages and pages of this. Because none of that would be funny or remotely interesting. The joke is "this is pizza that looks like a thing from Star Trek", you hit that joke once, and then you move on with the rest of the show. You don't get bogged down in the details that take away from the story, and you definitely don't set all of those details against a brutal and horrifying natural disaster that actually happened but that you've repurposed as a quirky plot point.
I'm not really sure there's a good way to explain how The Twenty-One Balloons handles the final third of the plot. Here's my attempt: say you wrote a novel about a bunch of people from the midwest who moved to this magical place called "New Orleans". New Orleans is a place that exists in real life and has its own unique culture and history, but you just ignored all of that to write your own book about a completely different New Orleans located in the same place as the real New Orleans but otherwise completely different. And then, towards the end of the novel, you have all of the characters go "darn, we'd better get out of here, Hurricane Katrina is going to happen!".
Hurricane Katrina really happened, and was actually a very bad thing that was very bad for a very large number of people, notably the people who were killed or displaced by a brutal natural disaster and the botched government response. But say that Hurricane Katrina was just a plot point in your weird quirky novel where you spend fifty pages explaining how to fold balloons. And everybody who lives in your fictional New Orleans - people who bear no meaningful resemblance, physical or otherwise, to anyone who would have ever lived in New Orleans - gets away and ends the novel saying "Hurricane Katrina, that was pretty wacky, huh?" Would readers think that was a good novel?
The volcanic eruption of Krakatoa actually happened in the 1880s and killed tens of thousands of people (some estimates put the death toll in six figures). It was one of the most severe volcanic eruptions in recorded history, if not the most severe. Krakatoa is in the Pacific and people could see the ash in Europe. The sky in Munch's famous painting "The Scream" possibly reflects the red sky over Norway after the eruption. The volcano continued spewing ash for five months, and the resulting tsunamis, felt as far as South Africa and the English Channel, killed thousands. The island of Krakatoa doesn't exist anymore; the eruption was enough to destroy and sink basically the entire island. An entire indigenous people was eradicated. Naturally, du Bois saw this as a great fit for a plot device in his gently comedic novel about balloons.
In The Twenty-One Balloons, Krakatoa does erupt, and specifically du Bois is depicting the 1883 eruption. But the pleasant restaurateur San Fransicans who make up the entire population of the island activate their contingency plan for escaping using an elaborate rapid-inflating multi-balloon contraption, the layout and filling procedure of which is described in excruciating detail. And as tiring as it is to hear yet another long description of a wacky balloon-related invention, I do not know how to process one of those descriptions set against the backdrop of one of the worst natural disasters in history that was felt around the world and killed thousands and thousands of people. Sherman parachutes into the ocean from the balloon craft, and after returning to San Francisco, says that he's exhausted but can't wait to go ballooning again.
The Twenty-One Balloons is a novel about a real natural disaster that surgically removes anything bad that happened as an effect of that disaster. It's a novel about a real island that surgically removes the people who lived on that island and literally replaces them with rich white people. Read in 2022, these choices by du Bois are horrifying. Strip them out, and you're left with long-winded explanations of balloon mechanics. du Bois may have wanted to inspire readers who were so awestruck by this fantastical world that they would want to imitate William W. Sherman and go exploring. I personally am ready to imitate William W. Sherman and get so fed up I try to hide from the rest of the world for a year.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 2012 medalist, Dead End In Norvelt by Jack Gantos.