Recreating That Flying House Scene From The Movie, “Up”

And you know what scene that I mean. The one where former explorer-to-be Carl Fredericksen, voiced in crotchety old age by Ed Asner, lifts himself and his contested tract home up out of nonentity and off to new adventures by using several hundred helium-filled balloons. I think that scene has entered into film iconography, much like certain scenes from Casablanca, the original Bedazzled, The Wizard of Oz, or Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Almost immediately after Up debuted, the whiz kids all over the planet started thinking about how to lift a house up with balloons like Frederickson did. Check this Slate Explainer article from 2009:

In the new Pixar film Up, a crotchety old man named Carl ties thousands of balloons to his house and proceeds on an awesome flying adventure to South America. This left several Explainer readers wondering: Just how many balloons would it take to lift a house?

Between 100,000 and 23.5 million. The lower figure comes from the Wired Science blog, which took a crack at the calculation last week. After consulting with a house mover, Wired estimated that Carl’s home in Up would be about 100,000 pounds. (Most houses weigh between 80,000 and 160,000 pounds.) Given that 1 cubic foot of helium can lift 0.067 pounds, it would take 1,492,537 cubic feet of helium to lift the house—or about as much as would be contained in 105,854 balloons, each 3 feet in diameter.

Dizzying. Reminds me that biology was my favorite high school science course.

By the way, this is NOT the house that went up, but somebody else also decided to recreate the house in Utah:

Well, two guys in the above video from Sunday’s Good Morning America finally decided to recreate that scene themselves. GMA and ABC are owned by Disney, so you know that they have a vested interest in showing how this turned out. And in stages, the guys found out was that it wasn’t as easy as Disney-Pixar made it all out to be on film. An adventure in itself, it appears.

Good morning, all.