Original subtitles

[lighthearted music]

- [Henry] Did you know that there was a time

when cramming in college

could be crushingly painful?

- Everybody was literally like,

"Kids are jamming into a phone booth.

You guys wanna check this out?

Let's go."

- They're able to cram in 25 students,

which seems utterly insane.

- Do you remember when man's best friend was a skunk?

- Breeders start thinking,

could people buy them as pets?

- Or how the roller rink was more like a combat zone?

- Good skaters, if they collide with somebody,

it is like getting hit with a bowling ball.

- Some of these guys need helmets,

some of these gals need pads.

No one has them.

- These are the things we used to do,

for fun, for money, or maybe out of boredom,

that we'll never see again.

Were they dangerous?

Certainly.

Deadly?

Occasionally.

But, boy, wasn't it exciting?

[dramatic music]

[lighthearted music]

Of all the cultural crazes you can imagine,

who would've thought that one of the most hazardous

was sitting?

[lighthearted music]

- In the 1920s, there's this thing that's called ballyhoo.

And what it is is a way to attract people to your theater.

So you would have some sort of act or something out front

that would draw people to the theater.

- In the summer of 1924,

people gather around a movie theater

for what they think is just gonna be a regular old ballyhoo.

- [Henry] And when they look up,

what they see is anything but regular.

- There, perched 100 feet above the roof of the theater,

is a man, sitting on a flagpole.

No harness, no safety net,

just a man on a flagpole 10 stories in the air.

- [Kavitha] The man's name is Alvin Shipwreck Kelly.

He's a former sailor and part-time stuntman.

And he stays up there for 13 hours and 13 minutes.

- [Lance] There's a little platform up there

and he's just sitting on the pole.

They roll up food.

He's living his life on top of that pole.

- [Henry] The exciting stunt gives birth

to one of the strangest crazes of the 1900s,

flagpole sitting.

And the public goes nuts for it.

- Somebody would be like,

"I'm gonna go sit on that pole for as long as I can,"

and people would be like,

"Honey, you wanna go down to the town square

and see people?"

And they went, and they would bring picnic baskets,

and they would just watch a guy sit up there.

- [Henry] Flagpole sitting becomes competitive.

It's a race to the top to see who can climb the highest

and stay up there the longest.

- [Kavitha] In 1927, Shipwreck Kelly spent 22 days

on top of a flagpole at Madison Square Garden.

- [Hakeem] Two years later, he tops that by spending 49 days

on top of a 225-foot pole.

That's higher than Niagara Falls

and the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

- One Baltimore contest in 1929

pits multiple sitters against one another,

and the crowd is taking bets.

Who's gonna last the longest?

The victor holds out for 23 days.

- [Hakeem] Looking to top them all is Betty Fox,

the so-called Beauty Queen of Flagpople Sitting..

- [Announcer] Betty quickly draws a crowd

standing on a two-foot disc

more than 200 feet off the ground.

- [Hakeem] But she doesn't just hang out up there.

She actually performs stunts.

- [Kavitha] Betty skips rope and dances with her partner

as spectators watch these two balance precariously

atop a two-foot-wide platform.

- [Henry] But Shipwreck Kelly still leads the pack.

- [Hakeem] He attempts his most audacious stunt ever,

attaching a flagpole to the top of a biplane

and flying around the city.

- [Henry] If all this sounds extremely dangerous,

that's because it is.

- [Kavitha] One sitter, a guy named Joe Holden Powers,

sits atop the flagpole for 16 days.

And by the time he climbs down,

he's actually got six fewer teeth

because a storm smacked him headfirst into his own flagpole.

- [Hakeem] People have suffered from sunburns,

their sleeplessness, people start hallucinating up there.

And the man himself, Shipwreck Kelly,

he has two heart attacks while on a pole.

- [Austin] Of course the biggest danger is from falling.

You are spending days upon days

hundreds of feet in the air,

you start to suffer from fatigue, sleepiness, dizziness,

all while maintaining your balance.

Something's gonna go wrong.

- [Henry] By the 1930s, gravity finally wins

and the draw of flagpole sitting comes crashing down.

- [Hakeem] Eventually, people stop flagpole sitting,

but not because it's grueling or dangerous,

it's because it's typically a paid stunt.

And with the Great Depression in full swing,

nobody's getting paid.

- [Henry] A big part of growing up is trying to fit in,

and it's not always easy.

But there was a craze from the 1950s

where the problem was the exact opposite,

too many people fitting in.

- [Austin] The 1950s are a golden age

of college campus pranks and stunts.

Think the cow in the dorm room

or the dean's office put on the roof.

It's bored kids having fun.

It's basically like the movie "Animal House."

- [Henry] In 1959, college kids in South Africa

are looking for a way to have fun.

And what they land on, or should I say land in,

is something totally unique.

- So there's this group of bored students,

and they start thinking,

what if we tried to jam as many people as humanly possible

into a phone booth?

- [Hakeem] Legend has it that they're able to cram in

25 students.

And that is nuts considering that a phone booth

is only like three feet wide and seven feet high.

- [Jason] Next thing you know,

their feat is reported around the world,

and students in the US see this and like,

"Wait a second, we're not gonna get beat out

in the area of ridiculous stunts.

This is America."

- [Austin] Students at Saint Mary's College in California

decide they're gonna try to beat the record themselves.

And the school officials, they don't shut it down.

They say, "Let's do it."

They give "Life" magazine a call.

- [Hakeem] "Life" magazine sends a photographer

to document the attempt.

And they don't break the record of the South Africans,

but they do manage to pack 22 students into the phone booth.

- [Brian] Everybody from "Life" magazine

to the college administrators

to the kids going in that booth,

everybody was down to clown.

There was no wet blankets being like,

"I don't think you should do that."

It was literally like, "Kids are jamming into a phone booth.

You guys wanna check this out?

Let's go!"

- [Henry] Once the photo hits the news stands,

college students nationwide start chasing the record,

cramming more and more kids into a single booth.

- [Hakeem] The technique that people eventually find that's

the best is to start from the bottom

and you have people sit with their legs interlocked.

That way, you're not wasting space.

And then you start stacking up people

on top of those people.

- It's such a big deal now

they actually have captains

and there's a whole teamwork thing where they'll say,

"Okay, closing the door, ready?

Everybody, exhale!"

And everybody gets as tiny as they can,

and thinks tiny thoughts, and they close that door.

- [Hakeem] The records just keep getting made.

There's 32 people that fit inside one

in Modesto, California.

There's 33 in Oklahoma City.

- [Henry] Just because you can get 33 people

into a phone booth doesn't mean you should.

- [Kavitha] Phone booth cramming doesn't take into account

that these are human beings.

They can't bend every which way

and they need space for, like, their lungs to expand

and contract when they breathe.

- [Hakeem] One of the craziest parts of the danger of this

is the fact that the phone booth is made of glass.

And imagine if you're facing outward

with your face against the glass and the glass breaks.

You can cut your face, cut your neck.

It could be really bad.

- [Kavitha] In Pennsylvania, high school girls

cram themselves into a phone booth and got stuck,

and they have to call the police to come and rescue them.

- [Brian] Ironically, you can't even pick up the phone to call

911 when you need help getting out of the phone booth.

There is something to stupidity as a binding agent

between you and your friends.

And I think there is something beautiful about that.

- [Henry] By the end of 1959, phone booth cramming

finally hits the one limit it can't overcome,

college kids' attention span.

- Phone booth cramming turns out to be a pretty limited fad.

After all, there's only so many ways

you can cram people into a phone booth.

- [Henry] For college kids these days,

it's hard to cram into a phone booth

when you've never seen one.

- [Henry] Now, if you were around in the early 1970s,

you probably remember a craze that was everywhere,

from movies and TV to schoolyards and playgrounds.

As the song said, everybody was kung fu fighting.

- By 1970, the US is hit with a kung fu craze

embodied in one man, Bruce Lee.

Bruce Lee is a martial arts master turned actor

and action star.

- [Henry] Kung fu mania sweeps the nation.

And soon, kids everywhere want to learn moves

like the butterfly kick or the eagle's claw.

- You start seeing all these ads in comic books

and magazines for martial arts schools

that basically promise to give kids superhuman abilities.

- [Jason] They promise that you can take out two attackers at

once, you can turn your hands into an explosive defense

mechanism, or you can take out a 200-pound attacker

with just one finger.

- [Brian] They'd have names like the Death Touch.

If I saw an ad today that said

we could teach you to kill someone with a touch,

I'd be like, "Yeah, I'd wanna know that."

- [Henry] After the Death Touch,

the kung fu craze introduces America

to another Bruce Lee staple, nunchucks.

- [Jason] Nunchucks are just two pieces of wood

held together by a string or chain.

They don't seem that dangerous,

and so it's very easy to go out and get them.

- Nunchucks are used in

hand-to-hand combat for centuries,

and then suddenly in the 1970s,

high school students are bringing them to school,

and no one cares.

[dramatic music]

- The force and speed of nunchucks

make them a devastating close combat weapon.

You can fend off swords, crack knees and skulls.

And if you're not trained,

you can crack your own skull just as easy.

- [Jason] Nunchucks are super dangerous.

A swinging nunchuck can reach up to 150 miles per hour

and have the impact force

of a bullet coming out of a pistol.

In some states today, you can get arrested

just for carrying a set of nunchucks.

[dramatic music]

- [Henry] And it doesn't stop with nunchucks.

Any kid with an indulgent parent and a catalog

can order up a razor sharp wheel of death,

commonly called the throwing star.

[rhythmic music]

- [Jason] If you don't know what a throwing star is,

imagine like a buzz saw blade but miniaturized,

with sharpened edge around it,

that you throw kind of like a Frisbee.

But instead of like a Frisbee

where you would catch it

and everybody would have a good time,

it sticks into wood or into your neighbor.

- [Brian] It was $2.50 for a throwing star.

I remember, like, people's garbage cans

would have little holes in it

'cause you'd walk by and just chuck 'em at it

and it would stick in.

And we'd bring them to school.

We would just throw the throwing stars into trees

and teachers would be like,

"All right, time to go back inside."

We just carried them around and teachers were fine with it.

- The injuries that come along with martial arts are crazy.

Emergency rooms are now getting sprains.

There're strains, there are things that are broken,

concussions, even things as bad as liver lacerations.

- [Henry] But for the true wannabe Bruce Lee,

a liver laceration is just a warmup

for something even more extreme.

[dramatic music]

- [Natalia] In Chicago, there's this character

who goes by Count Dante.

His name is John Keehan.

He's retired military, he trains in Kung Fu,

he opens a dojo,

and he markets himself as the deadliest man alive.

- [Brian] Think about "The Karate Kid"

and the leader of Cobra Kai, Kreese.

He was Count Dante,

that strike first, strike hard, no mercy, kill.

That's Count Dante.

- Count Dante is known for these brutal initiations.

Like, if you want to advance, he throws you into a dark room

and you have to fight,

and then at certain point, sticks and knives come out.

[fighter hollering]

- [Hakeem] Count Dante would allegedly start bar fights

to train his students

by finding the biggest guy at the bar,

knocking his drink out of his hand,

and then blaming his trainee for it.

And if the guy was with the group,

his trainee would have to fight all of them.

- [Henry] And if these initiation rituals

sound unhinged,

wait until you actually join the dojo.

- [Brian] One night, Count Dante gets in his head

that a rival dojo across town has insulted him.

And the only thing he knows to do is to gather his troops,

get over to that rival dojo, and call them out into a fight.

I don't know what they thought was gonna happen.

- [Jason] As soon as the door opens up, it's chaos.

Guys start yanking weapons off the walls,

they're grabbing samurai swords, battle axes, maces.

It becomes like a medieval melee with karate.

[dramatic music]

- [Austin] A 26-year-old student of Dante

is first stabbed with a sword,

second, impaled with a spear.

His carotid artery is punctured

and he stumbles outside and dies.

- [Henry] Few dojos rack up a body count like Dante's.

But the writing is on the wall for the kung fu craze.

- [Austin] The kung fu craze is so out of hand

that states start passing legislation.

Nunchucks, throwing stars, they're banned.

- [Rebecca] Nowadays, we really have all the protective gear

that you would see in wrestling or fighting.

You know, there's a mouth guard, there's head protectors,

you have to wear gloves

so that you don't rip people's faces off.

- [Brian] When I was a kid in the '80s,

you were talking to people

who had lived through the '40s, '50s, '60s, '70s.

They didn't care if we were carrying throwing stars.

That is not around today.

We've gone from helicopter parents

to a helicopter society,

and I don't see how that's any better

than a throwing star society.

- [Henry] Now, decades before the kung fu craze,

there was another fad that had people fighting,

to stay on their feet, for up to five months straight.

[dramatic music]

- [Natalia] In the 1920s, dancing is really popular.

And this woman, Alma Cummings, has an idea.

She wants to see how long she can go

dancing the most popular dances of the day.

- [Martin] Alma dances for 27 hours straight.

That attracts media coverage.

Soon, everyone wants to see if they can outdo her record

and dance longer than she did.

- [Austin] Alma's 27-hour record

is broken nine times in just three weeks.

- [Martin] This leads to the birth of the craze

of the dance marathon,

and it sweeps the nation from coast to coast.

- [Negin] Pretty soon, they go from hours to days to weeks,

and there's even a thousand-hour marathon,

which is actually a month and a half of straight dancing.

- [Henry] Dance marathons soon become a full-fledged frenzy

and participants push their bodies to the limit.

- [Lance] This is an endurance contest.

It is physically very grueling.

People will be dehydrated.

The idea is to dance until you literally collapse.

- [Negin] You have to dance for 45 minutes of every hour.

When you take a break in those 15 minutes,

I guess you can pee.

- [Martin] They eat, they wash their faces, they write letters,

they even shave while dancing.

- [Negin] But people have to move their legs constantly.

Some of them even learn how to sleep standing up.

- [Austin] You definitely don't wanna sleep for too long,

because if you do, the contest officials will wake you up

with smelling salts or ice water.

- [Lance] In 1928, a dance competition in Iowa

goes on nearly three weeks.

A young man got psychotic, punched his partner in the face.

At least one person collapsed from exhaustion and he died.

[dramatic music]

- [Henry] For the contestants,

victory is worth a lot more than bragging rights.

- [Martin] If you win a dance marathon, you might draw a purse

that is equivalent to a year's salary.

And so people who are desperate

see this as their one and only shot at making enough money

to change the trajectory of their life.

- [Henry] As the Depression takes hold,

the promise of life-changing money

pushes contestants and promoters

to even more extreme limits.

- [Natalia] The most extreme dance marathon is in 1933

in Somerville, Massachusetts.

A guy named Callum deVillier

and a woman named Vonny Kuchinski,

they just keep dancing and dancing.

It goes on week after week, month after month,

and the organizers are actually trying to get them to quit.

- [Martin] They begin shortening the breaks

and providing them less time for meals.

They're speeding up the music,

hoping that somebody's gonna fall out

and we can finally end this thing.

[dramatic music]

- [Negin] By the time they call it quits,

this one couple has been dancing for five months,

dancing for 24 hours a day.

- [Henry] No one else proves to have their staying power

and dance marathons seem to be on their last legs.

- [Austin] The toll is immense.

The exact number is not known, but people are dying.

At least half a dozen have been recorded.

- [Natalia] By the 1930s,

cities finally start banning dance marathons.

But it is not because of the health hazards.

It's mostly because cops hate the huge, unruly crowds

that they attract.

- [Henry] They danced until the music gave out,

or their bodies did, whichever came first.

- [Henry] Today there are dozens of dangerous animals

that are illegal to keep as pets in the US.

But that's not how things used to be.

At one time, it was fashionable

to have a certain questionable creature as a pet

without anybody making a big stink.

- Throughout the 1900s, having strange pets

is definitely an American fascination.

President Calvin Coolidge has a pet raccoon.

Elvis Presley has a chimpanzee.

Tippi Hedren, the actress, Melanie Griffith's mother,

has a pet lion.

I mean, this is something that's definitely a status symbol.

- [Henry] But in the 1950s, an unconventional animal

becomes America's latest obsession.

- One bizarre animal that became a pet for people to own

is the skunk.

- [Hakeem] Skunks are the smelliest animals out there.

If you get one of these in your neighborhood,

you can smell it from a mile or two away.

But somehow they become pets.

- Skunks have been a comic trope for decades.

They're in Abbott and Costello, they're in Disney movies,

they're in The Three Stooges,

and of course one of my favorites, Pepé Le Pew.

- [Hakeem] Because cartoon skunks are so cute,

people are starting to soften to them.

So some enterprising breeders start thinking,

"Hey, skunks are having a moment.

Could people buy them as pets?"

- [Henry] It turns out they will.

- [Rutledge] So how do you market a skunk as a pet?

Well, you tell people they're easily trainable,

they're smart, cuddly, kind.

- [Natalia] People buy them at fairs, and shops,

and even through the mail.

Sears and Spiegel, two big mail order catalogs, sell them.

- [Rutledge] The idea for a lot of people

is that you could get a skunk and train it.

You could put it on a leash

and, like, take it for a walk around the neighborhood.

Everyone's gonna love it.

They're gonna wanna come up and pet it.

- Oh, baby, baby, what am I going to do with you?

[lighthearted music]

- [Henry] Soon, skunks are so coveted

pet shop owners can't keep them in stock.

But what about the smell?

- [Jason] It might sound insane, but these are skunks

that have had their stink glands surgically removed.

[dramatic music]

- [Henry] But while these skunks

might lack their stink glands, they still have their teeth.

- You would think that a descented skunk is safe

because it's basically had its ammunition taken away,

but the thing is that it can still bite you

and it can still scratch you.

- [Hakeem] Skunks can become aggressive when threatened.

And they can pack a punch.

I mean, their bite is strong enough to break your finger.

[dramatic music]

They have nearly one-inch fangs

that can cause deep puncture wounds,

and they also have these long, curved claws

for ripping through soil and roots

that can also slice you open pretty easily too.

- [Henry] But scratches and bites

might be the least of your concerns.

- [Jason] Skunks are actually the most common

carrier of rabies.

And they're actually also the most common animal

to transmit rabies to humans,

which includes you, their owner.

- [Natalia] These bites happened fairly often.

By the time the CDC starts tracking them in the 1970s,

they find nearly 200 incidents.

- [Dan] If there's a chance, you have to treat it seriously.

And so, for a person, at that time,

that means 20 shots of the vaccine in the stomach,

really painful, no fun at all.

- [Henry] As rabies scares rise, the government steps in.

- [Natalia] Due to this concern over rabies,

there are ordinances all over

that don't permit them as pets.

And right now, the vast majority of states

still have those on the books.

- [Hakeem] Today, we got all these no-flaky pets like cats

and dogs that are hypoallergenic or bred not to bark.

Don't you kind of miss the days

when you could just pick up a catalog

and order your children a rabid, wild animal

for just 25 bucks?

- [Henry] Owning a dangerous animal is one thing.

But in the 1930s, there was a craze that swept the US

that involved having your pet and eating it too.

- [Adam] It's March of 1939

and there is a freshman at Harvard University

in Cambridge, Massachusetts

by the name of Lothrop Withington.

He tells his friends

that he is going to swallow a live goldfish.

- [Austin] His friends laugh.

They don't believe him.

And they plunk down a $10 bet,

that's $200 in today's money,

saying, "No way, Lothrop, you're not gonna do this."

- [Kavitha] And so he picks up a goldfish

and kind of wriggles it around in front of his face.

- [Adam] He holds it over his mouth.

It writhes back and forth once or twice

and then he drops it in, swallows it.

[dramatic music]

- [Henry] With that one goal,

the biggest craze since dance marathons is born.

- [Austin] The craze spreads to other schools.

But now it's not just, can you swallow goldfish,

it's how many goldfish can you swallow?

Just around the corner at MIT,

one student reportedly swallows 29.

At rival Ivy League Penn, they swallow 42.

The record allegedly is 89 goldfish in one sitting.

[dramatic music]

- [Henry] But as anyone who has rolled the dice

on sketchy sushi can tell you,

raw fish sometimes bites back.

- The safety issues around goldfish swallowing,

I think, are pretty clear.

- [Kavitha] Trying to quickly swallow 89 of anything

is really not a good idea,

let alone a live goldfish that's flopping around.

It could cause you to choke if it gets stuck in your throat

or can cut off your airway if you accidentally inhale it.

So goldfish are really not meant for mass consumption.

[dramatic music]

- [Austin] Things get so bad the US Public Health Service

steps in and warns everyone goldfish have tapeworms.

Tapeworms are going to give you anemia.

- [Henry] The only people who don't seem concerned

are the colleges themselves.

- [Adam] What's crazier

is that some of the goldfish swallowing events

are actually campus-sanctioned.

- [Lance] It's news.

They're in "Life" magazine.

Why wouldn't you swallow goldfish

to get into "Life" magazine?

So no one's putting the brakes on this.

- [Negin] In one particular case at MIT,

a hundred kids come to watch it and three policemen,

not to break it up,

but to actually enjoy the spectacle of goldfish eating.

- [Henry] But once a craze draws big crowds and the cops,

the next thing it draws is serious scrutiny.

- [Austin] In April, 1939, a member of the Massachusetts

legislature introduces a bill to protect and preserve fish

from cruel and wanton consumption.

- [Henry] But what really kills goldfish swallowing is time.

Like all fads, it simply runs its course.

- [Lance] Years later, they tracked down Lothrop Withington,

and now he's a successful businessman

who apparently is not swallowing live animals anymore.

And he said that it was a case of mind over matter.

He didn't mind and the fish didn't matter.

[dramatic music]

- [Henry] Today, this kind of stunt doesn't go over very well.

In 2019, a young man allegedly swallowed

another student's goldfish.

He was arrested.

- [Henry] For young people in the '70s and '80s,

the place to be on Friday night was the roller rink.

It was part dancing, part dating ritual, part blood sport.

- [Natalia] Roller rinks really boom in the 1970s,

particularly in the suburbs.

There's a lot of space, and parents want a place

where you can drop off your kids

for a semi-structured activity to have fun.

- The thing that really supercharges the roller rink

is disco.

[upbeat music]

Disco added just a little sexy je ne sais quoi

to the whole movement of roller skates.

And it made sense.

- Roller skating is definitely a non-controlled environment.

I remember roller rink visits

that were to the soundtrack of Xanadu.

There were just older kids that could shred it.

It's chaotic.

It's a bit of a free for all.

- Pretty soon, over 25 million people are on roller skates.

That's nearly 10% of the population

- At this time, you have the introduction

of polyurethane wheels.

And that means that now,

you can go way faster than you could before.

- [Henry] To skate to this new kind of music

on fast new wheels,

people start mixing flashy moves and high speed.

- [Martin] The roller rink was way too intimidating

with the advanced skillset people,

and I was on the learner skillset,

and they would skate circles around me

and then do the thing that I could never do,

which was to skate backwards,

and then do that thing where you flip around.

- [Negin] There's this thing called crack the whip.

There's like a sort of leader,

and then people hold onto that person's waist,

and then there's a whole line of people holding on.

And they're going in and out and zigzagging,

and it kind of creates this whipping motion

to literally crack the whip.

- I did crack the whip.

I almost killed myself with crack the whip.

I remember that.

[upbeat music]

- [Rutledge] Some of these guys need helmets.

Some of these gals need pads.

No one has them.

This is not an era where safety is among people's concerns

for almost anything.

- [Hakeem] And don't forget, these skates are rentals,

which means they're probably not being well maintained.

They have loose axles, worn toe pads.

So your wheels can come off while you're skating.

- [Nicole] Good skaters can definitely get some speed.

I mean, they can go up to about 25 miles per hour.

- [Martin] I saw the melee for myself,

and the person frequently crashing and falling

was also myself.

It's not a matter of if you're going to

collide with someone,

it's a matter of when.

- [Nicole] Advanced skaters, if they collide with somebody

is like getting hit with a bowling ball.

- [Rebecca] Hospitals start seeing broken wrists,

broken or sprained elbows.

And sometimes, when people really face-planted,

there are concussions as well.

In 1979, one hospital in Seattle

treats 35 fractures in just a few months

only from roller skating-related injuries.

- [Henry] Eventually, changing music tastes

and lawsuits over defective equipment

cause the wheels to come off the roller disco craze.

- [Nicole] The biggest difference of a roller rink

today and the '70s and '80s heyday

is the long waiver you sign when you come in,

ensuring that you won't sue them.

- [Rutledge] I mean, they're a lot less sketchy,

but maybe you wish for just a hint more danger to it.

- [Henry] Back before we worried

about things like liability insurance,

it was pretty easy to open a roller rink.

But there was another earlier recreational craze

that was even easier to break into.

[upbeat music]

- [Austin] In the 1930s, a gymnast named George Nissen

invents the modern trampoline and people go nuts for it.

There's just one problem.

It's sort of a luxury item.

It costs $200 back then,

which is over $2,200 in today's money.

- [Jason] A few years later, a former trampoline salesman

actually has a genius and slightly crazy idea.

What if you could make trampolines

cheap and accessible?

So, for just a couple hundred dollars,

he buys this vacant lot.

He lines the vacant lot with trampolines.

And for just a buck an hour,

you can jump as much as you want.

- [Henry] The park is an instant hit,

and the locations, which come to be known as tramp pits,

jumpstart a national trampoline craze.

- [Negin] These trampoline parks

start popping up all over the place,

especially at gas stations.

And they're there to sort of service families

that are doing long road trips,

and they need a little break,

and the kids need a way to get their energy out.

- The kids are bored, they need something to do.

The parents see an opportunity

to allow 'em to burn off a little energy

so that they could have a little bit of peace

on the road trip.

Why not?

- [Henry] Sounds like a blast, and it was.

Just don't look too closely.

- [Hakeem] Here's the thing.

These trampoline parks are being built

by so-called entrepreneurs

who don't know the first thing about trampolines.

[dramatic music]

- [Adam] And so these trampoline pits

are not constructed by engineers.

It's a hole in the ground

with a pseudo-trampoline stretched across it,

basically sort of a springy tarp over a grave, over a grave.

[dramatic music]

- [Jason] These days, there are all sorts of regulations

and licenses if you wanna build a trampoline park.

But back then, it was all kind of DIY.

All you really needed was a vacant lot,

a shovel, and a dream.

- [Negin] The kids loved it.

You can jump, flip, get competitive.

I mean, everyone wins.

- [Hakeem] But the real problem is the trampolines of the 1950s

were much more powerful than the trampolines you find

in people's backyards today, which meant that the jumper

can go to some incredibly high heights.

- [Rebecca] If you bounced on them just right,

you could launch yourself a good 10 feet in the air.

And if you fall down,

it would be like being in a car accident.

[dramatic music]

- [Henry] And what these parks lack in safety features,

they also lack in oversight.

- [Austin] With no one keeping an eye on anything,

lots of injuries happened

and people start getting reckless,

multiple jumpers on a trampoline.

People are eating food, drinking soda.

- [Jason] Just imagine jumping on a trampoline

with a glass bottle in your hand.

All sorts of things could go wrong.

- [Rebecca] They were placed usually encircled

by some sort of concrete.

And on top of that, not only is there no padding

in between these trampolines,

but the trampoline itself has massive springs,

and bolts, and metal pieces.

- [Adam] Famously in Chicago, a little girl's bouncing around

and sprains her ankle.

Her dad is really upset about this,

and tries the trampoline out, and breaks his back.

[dramatic music]

- [Henry] By the late 1960s,

injury lawsuits against tramp pits stack up,

causing insurance rates to skyrocket.

Pretty soon, operators start abandoning their pits.

- [Austin] Even George Nissen, the inventor of the trampoline,

who made millions off of these trampoline parks,

turns against them.

He thinks that their shoddy business practices

have tarnished his invention.

- Trampolines eventually transform with safer designs.

Now they're elevated off the ground

and there's a safety net around them.

And trampoline parks, those are all indoors.

There's a ton of rules and foam padding.

And you have to sign a waiver.

- [Henry] Now, a lot of you who were kids back in the '60s

remember trampoline pits fondly.

And gas stations have never been the same since.

- [Henry] When you were a kid,

did you ever accidentally let go of a helium balloon

only to wish you could grab hold of that string

and float away with it?

Well, if so, you would've been daring enough

to try one high flying fad from the 1920s.

[dramatic music] [plane roaring]

- Aviation in the 1920s is this really exciting space.

It's unregulated, it's young, it's dangerous.

And in 1927, Charles Lindbergh

flies across the Atlantic Ocean.

America is completely captivated with aviation,

but flight training and planes are really expensive.

- Innovators start to think, what if there was something

that would allow you to enjoy the thrill of flight

without having to buy a plane

or take a bunch of lessons to learn how to fly?

- [Henry] It turns out there is a way

and is about to become America's next craze.

They call it balloon jumping.

- Jumping balloon, or hopper balloon,

is invented by the lighter-than-air

division of the US Army

based at McCook Field, Ohio.

- [Natalia] Here's how it works.

First, you put on a harness

and then strap yourself to a balloon

that's nearly 20 feet in diameter.

- Next, you fill it with helium, but not all the way full.

You want just enough lift

that a jump becomes a long floating bounce.

- [Dan] Originally, balloon jumping is a practical tool

for getting work done.

If you're trying to inspect a blimp,

it's a really easy way to get up there quickly

and have a look.

You can even do some maintenance with it.

- [Martin] It's a little bit like a pogo stick bounce

except it's a lot slower and you go a lot higher.

- [Dan] Ideally, the person jumps up, gets to a height,

they stay up there for a little bit,

and then they come safely back down.

[dramatic music]

- [Jason] So suddenly journalists start writing these

pieces and newspapers start publishing stories

about how balloon jumping could really change modern life.

Right now, when I go to work, there's all this traffic.

If I'm balloon jumping,

I could just jump over the traffic, right?

It's easy.

- [Martin] It sounds amazing because you could jump

across a beach,

you can jump over a building, you can jump over trees.

You can perform physical feats that the human body

is incapable of performing.

- [Henry] As it turns out, balloon jumping

is a little more complicated than advertised.

- [Dan] Balloon jumping has a lot of serious risks though.

One is just gusts of wind.

You're completely at the whim of that to take you sideways

into whatever field that you didn't intend to go to.

- [Natalia] There's no real training or licensing necessary.

But there's also no steering mechanism or brakes.

So you can hop, but you can't really aim.

- [Martin] Another risk here is that you're strapped

to a 20-foot helium balloon.

What if it develops a leak

and the gas inside of it begins escaping?

We know how they behave when you let the air out of 'em.

They kind of zip and move in different directions quickly.

This can happen to you.

- [Henry] So how do you get the public

to literally jump onto this budding craze?

You need a balloon-hopping Lindbergh.

Enter rainy Brainy Dobbs.

- [Jason] Ernest Brainy Dobbs is one of the biggest proponents

of balloon jumping.

He's a parachutist by trade,

but he's really a showman at heart.

And he loves nothing more than showing off

this new fad to the public.

- [Natalia] Dobbs is practicing jumps in north London

and this police officer is watching him.

He realizes he's getting really close

to some electrical wires.

- [Jason] Dobbs isn't at all worried about this.

He tries to leap over those wires, but his feet get tangled.

And this is where things go south for Brainy.

- [Natalia] In order to untangle his feet,

he reaches down and touches the wire and gets electrocuted.

[pensive music]

- [Dan] Brainy's death really just takes the wind

out of everybody's sails.

It's not fun anymore.

It's way too dangerous.

And so the whole sport is basically just dead.

Later on, balloon jumping is still used by the military

for things like repairs.

But this dream we all had

that we were gonna all wear balloons

and bounce around town and be able to fly,

that just never really gets off the ground.

- [Henry] Like air rushing out of a punctured balloon,

that craze deflated fast.

- [Henry] In the early '80s,

American teens went wild for breakdancing.

Everybody wanted to bust a move, including me.

But moves weren't the only things we wound up busting.

- [Natalia] Hip hop was born in the South Bronx in the 1970s

thanks to a bunch of underground parties

with new types of music and dancing.

- [Hakeem] DJs don't just play the records.

They remix them live.

And when they extend that part of the music

that's that raw, drum-heavy part that we call the break,

suddenly dancers have a spotlight

to show all their moves and make the crowd go wild.

[upbeat music] ♪ Hey

- [Henry] These moves become known as break dancing.

And pretty soon, kids can't get enough.

- [Austin] Soon, breaking goes mainstream.

1983's "Flashdance" features a couple of scenes

related to breaking.

And then the next year, you've got two breakdancing movies,

"Breakin'" and "Beat Street."

[upbeat music]

- [Adam] America really embraces it.

Madonna puts it in her music videos.

It becomes a stamp of youth authenticity.

I'm a kid from Brooklyn.

I had the parachute pants.

I had this black and red nylon suit.

[upbeat music]

- [Henry] And while the dancers on screen

are professionally trained,

the kids trying it are definitely not.

- [Austin] You've got suburban kids with zero practice

attempting to emulate windmills,

and one-hand stands, and turnarounds.

This is hard stuff.

- I cannot breakdance.

The best I could do is sit on my back,

and have one of my friends grab my foot,

and, like, turn me around and around,

and I can end up doing one of these.

All laws of physics seem to not exist.

These people are spinning around on their heads.

I don't even know how they do it.

It's like a magic trick.

- [Henry] Pretty soon,

breakdancing becomes breaking everything else instead.

- [Adam] Kids are spinning, they fall off balance,

and all of their body weight

comes down on their cervical spine.

They end up snapping their spine,

busting a vertebra, tweaking their spinal cord.

I learned the word quadriplegic from my mom

in relation to breakdancing.

- [Kavitha] Doctors even coined the term breakdancing neck

after the New England Journal of Medicine

publishes a report about cervical spine injuries

caused by headpsins.

- [Henry] But spine injuries

might be the least of your concerns.

- [Rebecca] One of the more serious complications

is called testicular torsion.

And it is as painful and horrible as it sounds.

- [Adam] There are certain moves called the scramble,

the blender, or the windmill

where basically one testicle

would get twisted around itself,

in essence strangling it and damaging it.

- [Brian] Look, they called it breakdancing for a reason.

They'd spin and they'd spin

and they'd be doing all these moves,

and suddenly there'd be in an interior part of the man

that just got twisted.

- [Henry] As the gruesome injuries pile up,

so does the negative coverage.

- [Austin] Suddenly, news broadcasts are warning

of the breaking epidemic.

And municipalities start passing laws

to make it difficult or even illegal to breakdance.

- [Adam] Eventually, hip hop music changes

and dances change with it.

- [Brian] I wasn't good at it, I could get hurt doing it,

but I am so grateful for my childhood,

with all its dangers, and all its traps,

and bruises, and cuts, and breaks.

These are the experiences, these are the scars

that add up to a life well lived.

- [Henry] Looking back on the fads that we got swept up in,

from pet skunks to ninja stars

to cramming ourselves into phone booths,

sometimes "Hey, everybody's doing it"

wasn't always the best reason to join in.

But these crazes are also what made our hazardous history

such a sensation.

[dramatic music]