Bastille Day Parade features a person flying on a board this year. What year is it? It’s the future, of course. Franky Zapata, a former jet ski champion and inventor, was flying above the parade on a personal, jet-propelled flying board with boot fittings. This July 14, 2019, in Paris, France along the Champs-Élysées avenue, advanced flying technology, so common to science fiction stories, hit the parade circuit. Parades are known to have a few things in the sky, such as balloons, flying skydivers, military plane flyovers, but people flying on a board, no.
It’s definitely, not 1789 a time when mobs attacked the Bastille Saint-Antoine prison and fortress, infamously known as a place for locking up political prisoners and helping further the French revolutionary movement. All this I read about in Charles Dickens’ fictional Tale of Two Cities and actual history books. The Bastille Day celebrations that came later and continue to this day have changed, though there still seems to be the spirit of anarchy at times. So now, not only in France, people are celebrating la Fête nationale (a.k.a. le quatorize Juillet, Bastille Day) in Belgium, United States, Canada, New Zealand, India, and other countries.
If you haven’t seen drones, personal flying boards, or even flying cars in parades like the Bastille Day celebration, then you haven’t been looking up. I kid……, no flying cars in any of the parades I know of, yet. But this flying board brought a futuristic quality to the parade. Maybe we do need children flying in round cars like in “Visitor from the Future” episode or flying yellow and black taxis à la The Fifth Element for parades to get that out of this world feeling. I know I sound cliché, but Marty McFly hoverboard-like marching band would impress. I mean I was impressed with the brass band playing instruments on horses and in 2017, the French army marching band playing Daft Punk for heads of state, but flying people, that's science fiction, right?
(*See the videos I reference, embedded below. If interested in more futuristic parade talk, visit my earlier H-Celebration "Ejected into space while orbiting parades" article.)
