Nerding Day: Balloonatiks: Christmas Without a Claus (Patreon)

It's been nearly three years since I wrote about the Balloonatiks, the dogged attempt of one latex fetishist to make his living balloon superhero team into a transmedia empire. Like Sisyphus, Tony DiIoia pushed a giant balloon up a hill for decades, only to see it tumble back down over and over. The fact that it was a balloon and not, you know, a fucking boulder, makes it all the more pathetic. Why did he persist in his folly? A commenter on my piece named Keith — who was actually a participant in the Balloonatiks-industrial complex — explained.

But for an idea as flaccid and deranged as living balloons intended to put clowns out of business, the Balloonatiks have actually done pretty well for themselves since my article back in 2023. They've got a TVTropes page now! Nothing I have ever created has a TVTropes page. Maybe in thirty years time some autistic Gen Beta kid will develop a fixation on my hacky videogames work from the early 2010s and make a two hour YouTube video about it. More likely by that point they'll be doing stage plays retelling episodes of Hazbin Hotel to entertain mutated wasteland dwellers in exchange for potable water.

Speaking of lost media, the biggest development in the Balloonatiks community of late is the discovery of the first Balloonatiks cartoon — an animated special called Christmas Without a Claus, a title that the logic center of your brain will want to assume is a clever riff or pun, maybe on Rebel Without a Cause? Tell your logic center to take the day off. It will not serve you here.

Should I claim some credit for this? Accept some measure of blame? Or would this event have occurred regardless of my actions, a fixed point in the timeline? I don't know. But here we are. Somehow, the Balloonatiks have returned.

Right off the bat, Christmas Without a Claus fucks up the assignment. We don't have the alien Balloonatiks already settled into life on Earth and learning the true meaning of Christmas. Instead, this Christmas special is also a Balloonatiks origin story. It's unprecedented. Outrageous. Balloonacy.

"Ah," you're thinking, "what about Gremlins?" You fool. You fool. Gremlins is a feature-length film about blendable monsters that happens to be set at Christmas. Christmas Without a Claus is a 20 minute cartoon centrally about the abduction of Santa Claus, incidentally featuring the birth of animate latex golems.

As you will no doubt recall, the comicverse Balloonatiks were aliens from the planet Noollab, summoned to earth and filled with "balloon juice" by a wacky professor named "Pop." In Christmas Without a Claus, they are spawned into existence on Christmas Eve through a process so horrible, so disgusting, that it would make David Cronenberg say, "can't we just have them erupt out of James Woods' chest pussy like in a normal Christmas movie?"

Pop is alone on Christmas Eve preparing some kind of balloon experiment involving a big bowl of balloon sauce, when he gets a phone call. At that point, his dog sees an opportunity to scarf down some goop. I say "dog," but it's not that, really. It's some kind of half-balloon monstrosity he calls "Balloonimal." I think it used to be a human child.

While Pop is vamping in his shitty German accent about his long distance plan, Balloonimal slurps up his special slime with an expression that I find deeply troubling.

It's unclear what Pop's experiment was, but he's upset that he's going to have to start all over. Honestly, I think he's just mad he didn't get to see Balloonimal swallow his viscous paste. He's a lonely guy, Pop. But he won't be lonely for long, because his pet starts horking up rubbery orbs…

…which resolve themselves into humanoid forms.

Tony? I've got some notes on your thirty-year-old cartoon special. Like maybe you don't have your characters be sentient dog vomit. Just a thought.

This is so fucking bizarre that I actually admire the maniac audacity of it. Radioactive spider bites and dead parents are hack shit. You want a unique superhero origin story? You have artificial semen impregnate the stomach of a dog monster who then gives birth through its mouth.

The Balloonatiks immediately imprint on Pop, referring to him as their father. They also terrorize him with the glee of child-minded gods who have no sense of the frailty of mortal life.

Pop, for his part, makes Oscar Isaac's Doctor Frankenstein look downright compassionate. When his balloonspawn call for a family hug, he immediately shuts them down, telling them in no uncertain terms that he claims no familial ties to them.

Pop's created life by accident and it's so repulsive to him that he disowns it immediately. "I am a noble creature of flesh and blood," he says, "and you are worthless, hollow wretches, thin sheets of rubber stretched over naught but air. How dare you speak in my divine tongue." I mean, not exactly that, but that was the sentiment.

So the Balloonatiks fuck off to what seems to be the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade to look for their relatives, because the list of places the writer could have them encounter balloons shaped like things went: Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, no second place. It's hosted by "Grievous and Happy Lee," which, fuck you for writing that, Nicholas Hollander.

They call out a bunch of floats, including "Superguy," "Wonder Mom," and "Fat Cat."

Ok, I get it. It's a Wall Street fatcat. But this feels strangely bitter, too, like Tony's seething over the idea that Garfield has made Jim Davis richer than God while he's two hundred grand in the hole from trying to make Balloonatiks happen and a man keeps calling and telling him what his kids wore to school that day.

But people like simple, relatable characters, Tony. Garfield is lazy and gluttonous. That's real. It's a little harder to see the truth in five elastic freaks of nature who can't decide if they're the Animaniacs or the X-Men. But hey, we're halfway in with no characters actually established, so let's introduce some more.

While the Balloonatiks are fuming over the realization that they aren't related to the giant parade balloons, this poor, unnamed family watches the proceedings. But something is amiss — Santa Claus isn't in his sleigh at the end of the parade. The kids are a little let down, but the dad immediately loses his fucking mind. It seems like he was genuinely expecting to see the real Santa Claus, and now that he's realized that's not happening, he's going to go home and load four bullets into the gun he keeps under the floorboards.

So where's Santa? He's been kidnapped by the villains Needler and Barb Wire. Their plan, I guess, is to imprison Santa indefinitely, steal all of the world's gifts, sell them back to people, and then use the proceeds to "take over the world."

When the villains' evil plan in the Balloonatiks comic was to pop every tire on the planet simultaneously, that was fucking stupid. But at least it was on brand. This is nothing, because for whatever reason it seems like Tony began from the concept of a Christmas special and then tried to shoehorn his characters into the premise. Is it possible he was contracted by Fox to produce a normal Christmas special but then saw his chance to get the Balloonatiks on TV? If so, it would explain why the network only ever aired this once. I bet Haim Saban kicked the shit out of Tony for this stunt so hard that he was in a coma until 2006, when he finally woke up and said, "Get me a pen. I have a brilliant idea — it's called Balloonatiks."

Barb has her minions, the Pinheads, sing a little song, because sometimes this is a musical. It sucks, it's an excuse to reuse animation of the Pinheads strutting, and it has nothing to do with the plot or Christmas. They were struggling to hit twenty minutes on this thing and it shows.

Second and final song: the kids bump into the Balloonatiks while out on their own looking for Santa and explain the concept of Saint Nick to these newborn demons of the firmament. So they say he's a big dude who lives at the North Pole and delivers presents to good boys and girls.

Or they would, if anyone had put a tenth as much effort into this special as Tony DiIoia put into ensuring that children everywhere loved the Balloonatiks, wore the Balloonatiks on their shoes, played the Balloonatiks Tiger Electronics handheld game, ate the Balloonatiks brand cereal, got into schoolyard fights over Balloonatiks POGs, grew up to draw elaborate Balloonatiks fetish art, etc. No, the kids sing a song that opens with the lyrics: "He's weird, because he's got a beard. But there's nothing to be feared, because he's Santa Claus."

Great fucking job, dipshits. This song communicates less than Phil Collins' "Sussudio" and doesn't even contain fun onomatopoeia for sucking multiple dicks simultaneously. As if embarrassed on behalf of the writer, the children abandon their search for Father Christmas and go home. That's it. They just leave. It feels like this was supposed to be their story, about two plucky impoverished kids saving Christmas. Instead, the Balloonatiks watch while the Pinheads destroy the parade. The weird thing is, the mischievous imps do this by sawing apart the ropes holding the balloons down.

It's like Tony had some kind of extremely specific rule in the Balloonatiks brand bible that balloons can't ever be punctured. We mustn't puncture balloons, no, must be good for mother and never pop mother's balloons. But like the animator didn't, let's put a pin in that for now.

The Balloonatiks, bereft of any real purpose and abandoned by their progenitor, decide they might as well try to find Santa. They track Needler and Barb Wire back to their hideout and confront them. Every other character in Christmas Without a Claus expresses surprise or horror upon encountering these living nightmares, but not Needler. He knows he's the Mr. Glass of this world. That there exist superpowered, balloon-based rivals determined to foil his plans just makes sense.

And he doesn't waste any time trapping them with static electricity or shit like that. Needler isn't fucking around. And besides, there's about three minutes of runtime left. So after LA Tex uselessly sprays him with a water balloon, Needler impales him with a living missile.

LA Tex fucking dies. I feel nothing. But the Balloonatiks are driven into a righteous fury, pumping themselves up into giant-sized creatures with unsettling stomach bulges.

Then they combine into a giant tornado and cocoon the villains, presumably to feed on their liquified insides at a time of their choosing. You know, like a balloon.

The Balloonatiks rescue Santa, with neither party really understanding who the other is or why any of this is happening.

Freed from his helpless confinement, Santa uses his limitless magical powers to transform the unnamed poor family's depressing hovel into a Christmas bonanza, complete with traditional holiday balloons.

Oh, and Santa also resurrects LA Tex. How it is that a man with power over balloon life and death could be cowed and psychologically dominated by two perverts escapes me. Unless… this was all part of an elaborate sex game that the Balloonatiks ruined?

Having frustrated the erotic ambitions of two freaks and their elderly submissive, the Balloonatiks return to the place of their birth victorious yet still without having found a family, which again, was what the writer decided should be the driving motivation of this group of five siblings who came into the world as one and have thus far shared all of the same experiences.

They lament their cursed nature to Pop, who presumably went through some kind of Christmas adventure offscreen where he learned the meaning of family, because he immediately retracts his former loathing. "Regardless of what anyone is made of, at Christmas time we were all filled with family," he tells them, conveying that sentiment in the most unpleasant way I can imagine. Another big hug reusing the frames from earlier, because by Christ we are getting the most out of every twenty cents we pay those Korean animators.

"Make it a Balloonatiks family hug," Squeaker adds, pointlessly. But then, she is a balloon. It's in her nature to avoid poin— oh my god, did I just hit on Tony DiIoia's thought process? Fuck me. Merry Christmas, LA Tex should have stayed dead.

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