Uncertainty Principles and the Failed Quest for the Worst Movie Ever

When I first started watching Mystery Science Theater 3000 on the Sci-Fi Channel back in 1997, after several black and white movies and a few color ones, all of a sudden episode featuring the film called "The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies" sprang up and caught me by surprise.  Sure, the movies before this one were quite laughable, but this one clearly stood out.  I instantly thought it was the worst film I had ever seen and that I ever would see.  But then a few months later "The Horror of Party Beach" shows up.  I still thought Incredibly Strange Creatures was worse, but Party Beach was a major contender.

Over the years I was exposed to more MST3K movies, particularly from earlier seasons, and man there were some bad ones.  I kept looking for one that was clearly the worst.  And titles like "The Wild, Wild World of Batwoman" were pretty much on par with Incredibly Strange Creatures.  Then years later Rifftrax comes along and boy, they really found out how to scrape the very bottom of the barrel.  Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny might have actually been worse than Incredibly Strange Creatures.  And of course later we start seeing titles like Rollergator and Birdemic, and more recently stuff like Suburban Sasquatch and The Amazing Bulk.  This stuff is utter trash.  So much of it could really claim to be tied for first place as the worst movie ever.  But the one that made me truly give up my quest for the worst movie ever in earnest was Fun in Balloonland.

Does that mean Fun in Balloonland is the worst movie ever?  Not really.  My exposure to it simply establishes that finding a movie that's definitively the worst ever is too vague of a question.  IS Fun in Balloonland even a movie?  It's slightly shorter than a full length feature, the credits seem to be limited or non-existent, and half of the movie is clearly just parade footage with no story whatsoever.  Fun in Balloonland is borderline a home video.  So can a home video even qualify as the worst movie ever?  I mean, it's not a real movie in that case.  The worst movie ever is not a movie at all.  So definitions start to break down.  It's like the uncertainty principle in physics.  You try to know momentum and you can't know position, and you try to know position and you can't know momentum.  At least that's how my untrained mind understands the principle.  

And with Balloonland, it's like you try to measure its quality and you sacrifice measuring how close it is to an actual movie, and you try to measure how close it is to an actual movie and you sacrifice how you can measure its quality.  Because you'd judge the quality of home movies differently than you'd judge the quality of regular movies.  At least I'd think you would.

For years I tried to put this uncertainty principle for bad movies into more mathematical terms, proving that attempting one type of measurement always disrupts the other, but have failed in my attempts to do so.  So I guess I've given up proving that there can be no worst movie ever, just like I gave up actively looking for the worst movie ever.  This is what Fun in Balloonland did to me.