Tuesday, April 1, 2014

‘Spaceballs’ Called It: Chinese Residents Line Up to Breathe Fresh Air from Bags

Breathing fresh air is becoming a luxury in some places… China currently ranks as the most polluted country on the planet. The scale of China’s notoriously polluted cities has reached such proportions that marketers are now using imported fresh air as a luxury commodity, as well as a stunt to drive tourism to less smoggy areas. The brunt of all this was predicted in Mel Brooks’ more hilarious-than-it-was-prescient Star Wars-spoof Spaceballs (dating back to 1987). The film’s plot was based around a scheme by the Planet Spaceball empire to steal fresh air from Plant Druidia. One of the gags portrayed the president of Spaceball (played by Mel Brooks) sniffing premium fresh air out of a “Perri-Air” can in his spare time. In present day reality, residents of Zhengzhou, one of China’s ten most polluted cities, and the capital of the heavily polluted Henan province, recently lined up in droves for a travel agency’s publicity stunt to breathe fresh mountain air out of bags, lest they get a chance to visit the mountains and breathe the real thing. The Week reported that some residents were so desperate to breathe in the fresh air “treat” that they wrung out the air bags to get the last gasp: A Henan travel agency brought in twenty bags of air as a publicity campaign to encourage the impoverished, smog-ridden community to take a load off and visit Laojun Mountain.



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