Sony HoverDonkey

Will He not be frightened by modern transport? Yes. The Sony Corporation are interested in a sort of hover-donkey that could move at about a 110 miles an hour. Now, I’m told that the Japanese are more seriously involved than that. Er, in the militarisation of Jesus, yes. Given His consent, of course.

You’ll notice the word ‘Sony’ in the title of this but no visual representation of them anywhere. Purposely omitted because, well, you can’t be putting a multi-national powerhouse’s logo onto *anything* and expect to get away with it. And certainly nothing as mental as this. I don’t think it really matters, because Sony Mobility Inc. (developers of the Sony Vision-2 car series, on which this is partially based) division of the company doesn’t even have a logo and their Wikipedia page actually redirects to the parent company anyway. The other point of reference is the Afeela, which is developed by Sony and Honda (also mentioned in the sketch). Heavily AI driven(!), that one, so one step closer to Minority Report. Lovely.

Anyway, the HOVERdonkey. Peter Cook (as Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling) mentions briefly that Sony are interested in developing the unit in order to ferry around Jesus – he stumbles across his fossilised remains in the Promised Land and plans on cloning him, with aforementioned vehicle manufacturers (plus BMW) on board to help the project. Presumably the donkey element is to sooth him into modern technology by providing a familiar method of transport. From the tone of his words, it’s suggested that it isn’t yet a completed product, hence why it’s merely a prototype here.

Yes, I know. Utterly batshit. But the point of it being that it’s completely ad-libbed. When you consider that the whole ‘Why Bother?‘ series was made up on the spot, it really does take on a new dynamic. The other voice is Chris Morris, so it’s almost your seal of quality / insanity.

The design, as mentioned, is based around cars and all their sleek modern-ness and what have you. The thing at the top is a rough representation of the star of Bethlehem. The small print outlines the unit’s spec: 1 passenger, four hooves, etc. I initially put ‘power’ down as 0.5 horsepower as a joke that donkeys are half like horses, but then read up on it and found out that even a human can get to one horsepower. A horse can get up to 30+, so 15 seemed adequate for a donkey.

And yes, mixing imperial and metric measurement on there was deliberate. It just seemed fittingly wrong.