Remember the Chinese Olympics? Totally nuts. Also worth remembering this little gem from Anthony Lane’s coverage: 

In the National Stadium, as the sky darkened and eight o’clock approached, a multitude of figures scuttled forward, each wheeling what appeared to be an outsized laundry basket. For a second, I feared a monstrous pantomime: would a clown burst forth from every basket, tripping over a pile of sheets? I need not have fretted. They weren’t baskets; they were illuminated drums. Cometh the hour, cometh the glowing red drumsticks, the heaving sea of blocks, the Brobdingnagian scroll unspooling before our eyes, and other miracles of visual manipulation. In the course of a long evening, billions of viewers were induced not so much to revise their opinion of China as to realize that its formidable manpower could be harnessed to the cause of astonishment. China supports a population of 1.3 billion, and the knowledge of that resource was never far away; indeed, the whole evening became an exercise in number-crunching, as mass art was constructed from a mass of humanity. One townful of men and women would race on, swarm into a shape, and race off, to be replaced by the next; if, deep below the spectacle, there was an unspoken suggestion that it would be an extremely bad idea to go to war against this nation, it never rose to the surface, although one aerial travelling shot of fireworks exploding in sequence along the street leading up to the stadium, displayed for us on screens inside, was a ringer for bombing-run footage from the Vietnam War.

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