The Great Balloon Race is a 1975 children's book written and illustrated by Belgian author Gommaar Timmermans.
The book follows the improbable adventures of our heroes, Professor Aristotle Pilaster, his faithful dog Plato, and his young navigator Charles Montgolfier-Escoffier on the great international balloon race from France to Egypt.
They must try to defeat the evil Count Pommodoro in his war balloon, the Mako Shark PT-700.
Tropes:
- The Alleged Car: The Professor's Citroën 2CV: largely due to the damage inflicted on it while trying to find the starting line. When they finally arrive, the guard at the gate is astounded that it is running at all, only to discover that Charles has pushed it for the last 10 miles.
- Aristocrats Are Evil: The villain is the evil Count Pommodoro who systematically sabotages all of the other balloons in the race.
- Balloon-Bursting Bird: Count Pommodoro sprinkles birdseed atop the balloons of the Greek entry, causing birds to peck holes in the envelope.
- Canine Companion: The Professor and Charles are accompanied on the race by the Professor's dog Plato, whom Charles has to keep taking out to find a tree.
- Cool Airship: Pretty much all of the entries in the race qualify, with most of them being a Thememobile appropriate to their country of origin. Special mention goes to the British entry, which is an actual battleship suspended beneath a balloon.
- Dick Dastardly Stops to Cheat: Count Pommodoro could have won the the race if he had just continued on to the finish line while the Professor and Charles were repairing their balloon. Instead, he decided to stop and cut their balloon adrift to ensure that they couldn't finish at all. However, the Professor and Charles manage to get back into their balloon after he has caught it loose, and when he returns to the Mako Shark PT-700, he discovers it has been disassembled by the Arabs.
- Dread Zeppelin: Count Pommodoro's Cool Airship is the war balloon, the Mako Shark PT-700, which looks like an armoured flying shark bristling with weapons.
- Emergency Cargo Dump: After the Soaring Sylvia is shot while passing over Cyprus, the envelope is punctured and starts losing gas. Arostotle and Charles are forced to throw every nonessential item overboard in order to shed weight and stay aloft. Items jettisoned include their luggage, the cooking gear, and their sextant.
- Exploding Calendar: Used to show the time passing as Professor Aristotle Pilaster waits for someone to reply to his newspaper ad:"Wanted: a young adventurer with knowledge of navigation and French cooking."
- Follow That Car: In Egypt, Count Pommodoro hijacks a taxi and commands the driver:Follow that devilish dog-eared balloon!
- Message in a Bottle: The British entry gets stranded on top of a mountain. The captain sends out a message in bottle, with the bottle dangling from a small balloon.
- Midair Repair: After their envelope is hit by buckshot while flying over Cyprus, Charles is forced to climb up on to it and sew up the holes while the balloon is flying over the Mediterranean.
- Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Count Pommodoro's final act is to attempt to shoot down the Soaring Sylvia with a machine gun. He succeeds, but the balloon lands on top of the Great Pyramid of Cheops, which is the finishing line for the race.
- Pet's Homage Name: Professor Aristotle Pilaster's Canine Companion is named Plato.
- Reckless Gun Usage: When the starting cannon fails to go off, the mayor peers down the barrel to see what is wrong. The cannon then goes off and the mayor is carried off in a state of shock.
- Reliably Unreliable Guns: The Greek rebel leader on Cyprus drops his shotgun when his bicycle crashes, and the gun goes off, shooting the Soaring Sylvia.
- Running Gag: A civil war erupts on board the Bolivian entry and continues even after the gondola is no longer attached to the balloon. Every so often, the gondola will sail past the main characters; the civil war still raging. The last illustration of the book has the Bolivians now sailing up the Nile; still fighting.
- Sinister Scythe: In a Dick Dastardly Stops to Cheat moment, Count Pommodoro steals a scythe to disguise himself as peasant and then uses the scythe to cut through the mooring lines on the Soaring Sylvia, setting the ballon adrift.
- Thememobile: Most of the entries in the race reflect their country of origin. For example, the Greek entry has an envelope that looks like Greek columns, and a gondola that looks like a bathtub with prop modeled as a Archimedes screw.
- Trouble Magnet Gambit: Done twice by Count Pommodoro. The first time he sprinkles birdseed atop the balloons of the Greek entry, causing birds to peck holes in the envelope. The second time he sabotages his rival Aristotle Pilaster by attaching a Turkish flag to the bottom of his gondola; causing him to be shot at as he flies over Cyprus.
- Vehicular Sabotage: Count Pommodoro sabotages most of the other balloon's in the race. For example, the Dutch lose a piston, then a driving shaft, and finally the entire basket drops off.
- Wacky Racing: An international balloon race from France to Egypt, with little in the way of rules or oversight, a route that takes the competitors over an active volcano (amongst other hazards), and ends at the Great Pyramid of Giza, with the winner landing atop it (although that was an accident and not a victory condition).
