(Roughly) Daily

James Coleman on the next best thing: that staple of kids’ birthday parties, the bouncy castle (and its cousins)…

My son turned 8 years old earlier this month. We decided to host a birthday party in our yard with a bunch of his friends from school. As if creating several hours of entertainment for a crew of rambunctious boys wasn’t stressful enough, a week of heavy rain and an ominous forecast threatened the whole event. I did not want to have that conversation with the excited birthday boy.

Fortunately, the rain subsided just as the primary entertainment was delivered: an inflatable bounce house called The Challenge, which we rented from a local vendor. The kids had a lot of fun, and I did too, eventually, after the stress subsided. Once things wrapped up, I offered to help the vendor go through the labor-intensive process of rolling and storing a 200-kilogram inflatable. I can’t say it was good for my back, but the experience made me curious about the larger industry.

Most sources attribute the invention of the inflatable amusement to John Scurlock in the 1950s. Scurlock, who died in 2008, was an electrical engineer, physics professor, and NASA researcher who specialized in plastics. While designing inflatable covers for tennis courts, he came up with the idea for a “Space Pillow” that children could use for acrobatic play. It was little more than an air-filled bag with protective netting, but later he would use the same basic principle to create safety air cushions for fire-fighters and stunt performers. The Scurlock family still manufactures and rents amusements as Space Walk Inflatables. In 2014, they had two hundred branches and managed roughly 35,000 rentals per year. This would put them on the large end of inflatable amusement rental companies, of which there are thousands in the US.

With $20,000 and a truck, you can start renting inflatables. The low startup costs make it an attractive option for many, and there is no shortage of influencers willing to share basic business plans. But the work is arduous, with most weekends spent in a mad dash to clean and deliver amusements. (Stressed-out parents, like myself, are also no picnic.) Because there are so many small players, it is difficult to get estimates of how much money is being made in the market as a whole. Space Walk officials peg it at around a hundred million dollars annually…

More on how they’re made and how they’re tested at “Notes on Inflatable Amusements,” from @jamestweetz in @the_prepared.

* Alan Rickman

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As we bounce, we might note that this was a momentous date in the history of another celebratory stalwart; it was on this date in 1995 that “Macarena”– more specifically, “Macarena (Bayside Boys Mix)”– hit #1 on Billboard‘s Hot 100 and remained on the chart for 60 weeks.

The original Los Del Rio recording of “Macarena” was a hit in Latin America but would not have gained much attention in North America if it weren’t for John Caride, a DJ at a Miami radio station. Having watched dancers’ enthusiastic reaction to the song at a club at which he was spinning, Caride wanted to add the tune to his radio playlist, but was refused by his program manager on the grounds that the station (WPOW– “Power 96”) didn’t put foreign language songs into rotation. Caride enlisted producers Carols De Yarza and Mike Triay to re-record the song with English-language verses and then remixed to make it (even more) “club-friendly.” It was this version– “Macarena (Bayside Boys Mix)”– that hit the top of the chart… and became the “No. 1 Greatest One-Hit Wonder of All Time” (per VH-1) and a staple of wedding receptions everywhere.