Biggest Air Cannon… So Far – The Ellen Show Audience Gets Blasted with Giant Smoke Rings
Let’s start with a huge thanks to Ellen DeGeneres and everyone at the Ellen Show for inviting me back for more fun and a few science experiments. It was a great show with an extra level of buzz backstage because Matt Damon was Ellen’s special guest. I was especially excited to get to share my latest discovery with Ellen and her viewers – the biggest air cannon I’ve ever seen! Take a look…
On behalf of the entire Spangler Science team, we want to thank our friends at Colle+McVoy for allowing us to use their baby. The big air cannon was originally created by the very creative people at this ad agency to help celebrate a milestone for one of their clients, Erbert & Gerbert. What you didn’t see in the video above is all of the other vortex rings we shot into the audience using the big air cannon. The audience went nuts, but all of this additional video was unfortunately edited for the final show.
Fear not, everyone at Colle+McVoy are allowing us to babysit their air cannon for a few more months here in Denver because we’re featuring it at the Weather & Science Day event at Coors Field on May 11, 2011. (See what happened with Weather & Science Day 2009). We’ll cross our fingers for a day with lots of sun and no winds so that we can really show off the most amazing smoke rings we’ve ever seen.
Take a look at the original video of the Candle Cannon that caught our attention a few years back…
As you might imagine, the air cannon was a monster to haul from Minneapolis, Minnesota to Colorado (for a quick rehearsal) and then to the Warner Bros. lot. Huge thanks to Jeff Brooks and Brian Firooz for devoting five days just to travel with the prop. But we knew that it would be a tremendous amount of fun for the Ellen Show audience, and we were just crossing our fingers that the giant smoke rings would be as awesome on television as they were in person.
And finally… a few approved behind the scenes photos of what it took to make it all possible.
How can you not just love it?! Totally awesome! I know it took a lot of effort, but it was certainly well worth it. Kudos to Jeff and Brian for making it all possible. Steve, you never fail to entertain us!
These are fair Science demos but you infer that you originated the presentation or it was the result of some clever challenge you made to your staff. For those of us that have attended NSTA Conventions and seen and done a number of these demos, it is clear you have based much of your “discoveries” on basis of work performed by Don Herbert (Mr. Wizard) and others like him. What made his work special was that he involved children, the use of every day materials. There was an element of discovery that was fun and entertaining as well as educational. The packaging and “classroom sets” of materials are convenient but take advantage of the ignorance of customers, that they can buy the necessary materials from a hardware store and use/recycle some household materials and equipment to serve the same purpose.