Walter Rohrl, Hans-Joachim Stuck, Hurley Haywood, Tom Kristensen, and Doug DeMuro walk into a room. That room is full of water balloons. Walter Rohrl, Hans-Joachim Stuck, Hurley Haywood, Tom Kristensen, and Doug DeMuro proceed to have an epic water balloon fight. This isn’t the setup to a cheesy joke. This is part of the premise of Audi’s newest commercial-turned-film that Audi scrubbed from the Internet.
I try to avoid covering ads unless they’re extremely egregious or contribute to some larger discussion I’m trying to have, but Audi’s new “Led Balloon” film is an exception. This commercial is 13-minutes long, so it broaches more into short film territory, and it’s definitely shot as such. The whole purpose is to celebrate Audi’s past, present, and future in quite possibly the most incredible way possible.
Of course, the water balloon fight isn’t the whole story of this commercial, but it definitely keeps the tone light. Instead, Audis from all generations become the method of transportation for and shielding against a water balloon fight that rages for most of the film’s 13 minutes.
A personal highlight of the film, for me, is watching water balloons shoot out of the exhaust pipes of an old Auto Union. There are some things I never knew I needed in this world, and that is absolutely one of them.
There are tons of great car cameos in this film. The Audi E-Tron Sportback and the Audi Q8 are both the main stars of the show, but you’ll also see Demuro’s 1994 Audi RS2 Avant along with a 1919 Audi Type C Alpensieger, a1927 Wanderer W25 K, a 1938 Horch 853 A, a 1956 DKW F800, a 1967 Audi 80 Variant, a 1975 Audi 50 LS, a 1976 Audi 80 GTE, a 1984 Audi Sport Quattro, an 1936 Auto Union Type C, and even the 1936 DKW UL 700 motorcycle.
But the film didn’t last long on the internet; it was soon turned private despite Audi of America spending a serious amount of money on it. One rumour alleged that Audi AG didn’t see the point in the video and didn’t like how it depicted Audi’s products. It’s an unfortunate decision considering the fact that the video was a hell of a lot of fun and rejected Audi’s traditionally stuffy atmosphere.