A curious question about the Zoo TV Outside Broadcast & Zooropa tours

[salty72]

I saw the Outside Broadcast twice and at both shows there were two Trabants(a green one and an orange one) on cranes that would move above and out over the audience. I remember the first song they were used in the show was Until The End Of The World and I also remember one of those Trabants had a camera and blue spotlight on it and it rotated around the upper tiers of the stadiums during New Year's Day, projecting the audience onto the video screens. After seeing the Zoo TV Sydney show and seeing photos from the Zooropa European tour, I noticed those two Trabants were not used. Does anyone know why they weren't used in Europe and Australia?

 

[Kristie]

I'm taking a stab in the dark here, but maybe because those parts of the tour were in open-air stadiums (as opposed to arenas), and thus there wasn't anything over the audience to hang said trabbies from.

 

[Popmartijn]

I'm taking a stab in the dark here, but maybe because those parts of the tour were in open-air stadiums (as opposed to arenas), and thus there wasn't anything over the audience to hang said trabbies from.

No, that's not correct, as the Zoo TV Outside Broadcast tour was also in stadiums. Hence the name Outside Broadcast. AFAIK, those Trabants on cranes were not used during the indoor tour.
I think that for the Zooropa Tour U2 wanted to further develop their stage-show and thought the extra Trabants did not add anything to the show. It could also be that they saw the Trabants got damaged too much because of loading/unloading that they did not want to risk it taking them on tour across Europe and Australasia. (Side note: IIRC, the Trabants on display in the RARHOF in Cleveland never went on tour with U2 as the Trabbies fell apart after the tour ended. They were re-decorated especially for the museum).

I have to say I'd liked the extra Trabants during the Zooropa Tour. I never saw the ones on the cranes, except on the Fox TV special that aired late 1992. Oh well...

C ya!

Marty