Card stunt

Large card stunt ^[1] performed at the 2004 Rose Bowl Game; instructions to performers are visible on screen at upper right

Card stunts are a planned, coordinated sequence of actions performed by an audience, whose members raise cards that, in the aggregate, create a recognizable image. The images they create can range widely and, through careful planning, the same cards can create a number of different images by systematically changing how the cards are held up. Although card stunts are now performed at a variety of events ranging from sports to political rallies, the card stunt is closely associated with American football, particularly college football, as well as football (soccer) where it can form part of a tifo. The North Korean mass games Arirang Festival, however, were the first to extend the card stunt to an art form, using flip-book cards to produce enormous hour-long animated sequences.

By country

North Korea

Arirang Festival in North Korea

North Korea's yearly Arirang Festival, also known as the Mass Games, in Pyongyang capitalizes on choreography and card stunt to create sweeping images across the stadium. The festival is famed for the use of this technique as part of the iconographic propaganda art of the regime.

Mexico

In Mexico's Heroic Military Academy, card stunts are done during various occasions, especially on September 13, the anniversary of the Battle of Chapultepec, where a program is made in honor of this great battle.

Thailand

Colored card booklets on a card stunt "plate"—the performers arrange the cards according to predesigned patterns in order to achieve a detailed aggregate image.

Card stunts (Thai: การแปรอักษร) are regularly performed in certain sporting events in Thailand. They are especially associated with Jaturamitr Samakkee and Chula–Thammasat Traditional Football Match, but are also employed in most school- and university-level sporting events where performances by the seated crowd often play an important part in the competition. In addition to plain colored cards, other objects such as umbrellas, flashlights and reflective surfaces are also used, and special plates with multiple tiles of colored card booklets are used to create detailed aggregate images.

The origin of such performances in Thailand can be traced back to Assumption College, a member of the Jaturamitr, where in 1942, by the instruction of Cherd Sudara, a teacher at the school, differently-uniformed students in the audience arranged to form the school's initials. This developed into dynamic messages by physical movement of the crowd and later the covering and exposure of specific-colored clothing. The Chula–Thammasat Traditional Football Match adopted the card stunt in 1957; in the following years, cardboard cards became the predominant medium for the stunts. As a part of larger events, performances by Chulalongkorn University students were featured in the opening ceremony of the 1974 Asian Games at Tehran, and eight thousand students from the Jaturamitr schools performed during the 1999 FESPIC Games in Bangkok.^[2]

United States

A 2006 Super Bowl commercial by Budweiser, titled "The Wave", features a fictional card stunt using computer animation. The crowd at the Rose Bowl performs a card stunt which shows a beer bottle being opened and poured around the stadium into a glass and subsequently being consumed one gulp at a time. The crowd finished with a collective "AHHHH".^{[citation needed]}

In February, 2006 the Gillette company sponsored the "World's Largest Card Stunt" at the NASCAR Daytona 500 with over 118,000 fans set to participate.^[3] During the singing of the US National Anthem, fans held up cards forming a patriotic design consisting of stars and stripes. Following the anthem, fans flipped the cards to display the "Gillette Fusion" logo. The card stunt was produced by JacobDavis Productions.

Other performances

College traditions

The first card stunt was performed by students at the University of California (Berkeley) during the 1910 Big Game, between Cal and rival Stanford University, and consisted of two stunts in total: a picture of the Stanford Axe and a large blue "C" on a white background.^{[citation needed]} While the card stunt is closely associated with college football, this first instance took place at a rugby match because all the major colleges and universities on the West Coast of the United States had briefly dropped football in favor of rugby during the early 1910s. As universities switched back, students brought the card stunts with them and by that time they became a national phenomenon associated with college football. While the tradition has subsided at many American colleges and universities, the University of California (Berkeley) maintains the tradition through the UC Rally Committee. Block I, the football student cheering section at the University of Illinois, also maintains the tradition by performing a 2000-member, 12-image card stunt during halftime of each home football game.

Card stunts have been the object of several famous college pranks, including the Great Rose Bowl Hoax and the 2004 Harvard-Yale Prank.

Olympics

A somewhat similar action was performed at the opening ceremonies for the 1988 Winter Olympics at Calgary. Instead of holding cards, spectators donned colored ponchos, which created images throughout the stadium. The poncho stunt was similar to a precursor to card stunts often performed at college football games in Pac-10 schools. During such stunts, rooting sections would often wear colored hats or jackets and arrange themselves in such a way as to display a school logo or other design.

During the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow at the Olympic Stadium (now Luzhniki Stadium), students standing in front of the presidium made many images with this technique. One of the most memorable was a Misha with a tear dropping, during the closing ceremonies of the event.^[4] In the final part of the opening ceremonies at the 1984 Summer Olympics, all the spectators who attended in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum made a colored card stunt which was a gift in the entrance. The stunt was an image of all the flags of the nations in attendance.^[5]

At the 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony, an effect similar to a card stunt was achieved by mounting a small panel with LED lights next to every spectator seat in the stadium, effectively turning the entire seating area into a big display for the audience seated on the opposite side. While the audience could not control the LED output, the panels were flexible, which led to some degree of audience participation.

Fiction

In 1958, the science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke published "A Slight Case of Sunstroke" (also called "The Stroke of the Sun"), a short story in which a diabolical card stunt was used to kill an unpopular soccer referee.^[6] In the story, a large number of hostile spectators aim reflective program covers at the unfortunate umpire, who collapses and dies from the concentrated solar energy focussed where he stood.

See also

• Audience wave
• Tifo
• Mass games
• UC Rally Committee
• Jacob Davis Productions

References

External links

• The Great Rose Bowl Hoax (1961): Students from Caltech play a trick on the card stunt section of the University of Washington
• Media related to Card stunts at Wikimedia Commons