Acid Flashback Friday: The JumboTron

From the moment you walked in to the stadium, your eyes couldn’t help but be drawn to it. Almost hovering in the sky just below where the Baseball Gods reside, it’s where thousands upon thousands of eyes became fixated.

For this week’s Acid Flashback Friday we take a look back one of the Skydome’s most infamous attractions, the JumboTron. 

At the time, the JumboTron was the largest video display in North America and second largest in the world at an astonishing 33 feet high and 110 feet wide. It was one giant piece lit up by 420,000 light bulbs.

Some fun facts about the JumboTron: just to put the massive size of the screen in perspective, the JumboTron was as wide as a blue whale.The screen had seven camera inputs and required a team of 26 people to operate.

The screen itself was made by Sony, and at the time cost $17 million dollars to make. By comparison, the same size LED screen would only cost $3 million dollars to make.

Once Rogers Communications purchased the Blue Jays, they did just that – as the screen was replaced with a Daktronics ProStar screen in 2005 which was the same dimensions as the JumboTron.

Just like the Skydome, I prefer to look back on the JumboTron as a modern marvel of baseball architecture. While it might not be the most impressive piece of technology today, the sheer size of it was and still is something to be in awe of.