Fire! Doesn’t it just make everything better? There’s something primal about watching flames, and setting fire to almost anything seems to spell excitement.

Fire turns even the most humbling of failures into a ‘daring attempt’ and when a stunt works it adds a whole new level to old tricks.

Obviously this stuff is not to be tried at home, or indeed anywhere. But thankfully you don’t have to because some lovely crazy people have already taken all the risks for you. So sit back and enjoy the burn-free entertainment with Mpora’s five favourite fire clips…

Freefalling

How do you improve the thrill of falling out of a plane at 125 mph? With a flare gun of course!

Stuntman Troy Hartman cooked up this crazy idea for MTV show Senseless Acts of Video back in 1999. Dropping out of a plane, he pulls his chute and then proceeds to fire a flare, at point blank range, into the canopy.

“Troy is not insane. Or at least not stupid.”

If you can hear it over the cheesy heavy metal sound track, the X-Games Gold Medallist cheers as flames engulf his parachute and then plummets to earth. After a mild heart attack for the show’s presenter Troy pulls his backup chute and glides away.

This must be one of the only documented examples of a man joyfully watching his own parachute go up in smoke. However Troy is not insane, or at least not stupid.

With a degree in aeronautical design and several inventions under his belt this pyromaniac proves that the line between genius and madness can be very thin indeed.

Bonfire

Traditionally a bonfire is supposed to be a communal event that draws people together instead of making them run away screaming. However, as this video from the good old US of A shows, bigger is not always better.

Now bonfires are one place you would expect to find fire, but you can have too much of a good thing. After liberally dousing their pile of wood with gasoline, our American heroes set off their own miniature apocalypse.

“After liberally dousing their pile of wood with gasoline, our American heroes set off their own miniature apocalypse.”

In slow motion you can watch as a tiny mushroom cloud of gas ignites and races across the garden, setting fire to the lawn, part of a tree and the neighbouring cornfield.

Looking back at the scene, the empty chairs surrounding the fire and ominous words from the camera man ‘I’m going to step back now’ should have been enough to tell them that this was a bad idea from the start.

Surfing

For the second flare based clip of the day, we bring you the strange pastime of fire-surfing.

This Red Bull treat is part performance art, part extreme sport as Bruce Irons takes to the waves with flares strapped to his board.

The result is quite impressive, like an incandescent brush making burning stokes across the face of the ocean’s dark canvas.

Or as Bruce describes it:’It’s kind of flarey, and it turned out cooler than I’d ever imagined. It’s kind of hard to explain how that look looks.’ We’ll leave you to decide.

Skateboarding

Apart from the great skating going on in Burn (courtesy of brothers Jonathan and Jason Bastian), this skate video mixes two important elements, fire and slow motion.

The only way to make fire look even more impressive is to watch it in slo mo, where every single flame can be seen curling round the board and creeping across rails, and there’s even a spot of firebreathing on a quarter pipe thrown in for good measure.

It seems that director Darren Dyk knows just how to throw a hot edit together.

Tennis

Yep you read that right, tennis. In a prime example of how fire can make even the most conservative of sports instantly more entertaining, we bring you fire tennis.

The Slow Mo guys, undisputed daddies of the slow motion YouTube clip, thought this little gem up. Dipping a regular tennis ball in gasoline and then serving it in front of a 2500 frames per second Phantom Flex camera (that’s around 1000 times slower than your average movie) they’ve created something strangely beautiful.

Watching the cloud of igniting gasoline follow the tennis ball is mesmerising and it just makes us wonder what other sports could be improved by a generous application of pyrotechnics; napalm golf, exploding snooker or even land mine curling spring to mind.

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