In Praise of Day-Glo Thrills
and Paper-Mâché Glories
A Rumination by E "Eddy" Edwards
Well, another seemingly seasonable season is soon to be a fevered memory, the official end of the Summer preparing already to leap upon us like a bi-polar hop-head monkey on a six-week corn dog, funnel cake, and Sno-Cone binge, dropping down onto our unprotected shoulders as if from some hidden trap door in the ceiling of the Santa Cruz Giant Dipper entry ramp, emitting as it plummets an eerily-mechanical scream, clawing at our necks with a full set of Lee Press-On Nails®, trying to get at the candy necklace we purchased moments before in front of the deep-fried artichoke heart and mushroom stand.And I think I speak for all of us in the themed amusement racket when I say: "Not a moment too soon." About the "end of Summer" thing, that is. The bit about the monkey we could have done without and will certainly have us in therapy for years yet to come. And who would sell Lee Press-On Nails® to a monkey anyway?
'Tis the season to blow off all of those high-faluttin' thoughts of "visitor experience," "experiential branding," "immersive retail opportunities," and "actually getting a summer vacation this year" and come to the realization that just because you have wandered into a business that survives because of tourism and vacationers and keeps you too busy during tourist vacation season to take time off yourself, you still deserve to have a little time away from the grind for what you hope will pass for fun.
So before it's too late, you should begin planting little hints that in the near future you will need to be away from the office for the day to do some "in the field research" on classic, low- to moderate-tech amusement/theme park attractions as a part of a top-secret, very hush-hush retro-entertainment project. An alternative cover story, should you be in an Academic-Lite® gulag of our "out of the home experiences biz" that eschews such things as big, fast, loud, FUN distractions from the nastiness of the everyday world (museums designers or some of the "hipper than thou" folks at WDI, for example), just say that you are going to document just how low, vile, and insipid such "rides" (voice dripping with contemptuousness) are and how insipid are the "tourists" (see line reading above) for actually finding such things to be FUN.
Either way: it's time to chow down on corn dogs, funnel cakes, and Sno Cones and then hit them rides, ye themed design drudge cats 'n kittens! There's FUN to be had.
Oh, sure: fully immersive, first-person virtual reality, state-of-the-art, organ-wrenching simulators, and $180 million dollar-plus movie-based, mass- and muti-media inflicted stimulation, and, of course, the endless parade of this year's tallest/fastest/most "hot damn, Edgar! Lookit the size 'a that sucker!" sitting-, standing-, crouching-, and laying prone-ride roller coasters are working their siren's call. And all this even after the rather nasty local news media headlined "Fast Ride to Danger!" and "coffins with lap-bar" roller coaster nightmares that have so colored Summer news doldrums of 1999 and 2000 . . .
"Yeah, but it's today!" exclaimed Mudhead (Dave Casman) in High School Madness (Paranoid Pictures, 1951). And indeed it is now that (mostly) all of those niggling safety/PR problems of yesteryear have been swept away! Onward to the high-speed, high-tech, horrendously high-budget more or less good times!
Or not. I mean, sure all that "Amusement Business" in depth report stuff is, like, nifty cool and all, but big-bucks, big-technology, big-danger, big thrill stuff is not the end all and be all of rider-dom, as we all know full well. All well and good, all that over-budget, two-years behind schedule, maximum thrills attractions hype, for it's all of that kinda front page (below the fold), guaranteed table near the front of the room, THEA Award®-winning fol-der-ol that keeps us if not rolling in the big, big bucks, then certainly helps to grease the couplings of the trickle-down gravy train on which many of us have handcuffed ourselves in hopes of never having to go out and try to get a real job in the real work force.
But at times like this, when the grease in the deep fryers is soon to be replaced with the fresh stuff for the Fall and nearly all of the welds on the Zipper have been spray-painted with a goodly thick coat of rust defying Krylon, my thoughts leave the astronomically huge themed entertainment dollars behind and wander to simpler pleasures and the $1.98 variety of thrills (and by that lofty financial figure, I suspect that I mean that to be the sum total of the yearly budget for the attraction up-keep and safety upgrades). By that I mean, of course, the classic dark rides.
Like so very many others on Earth today, since adolescence I have had a fondness for the thrill rides, Gawd hep' me, with their obvious attractions to wanna-be thrill-seekers ("a different breed of cat!" as Chuck "Second Baseman" Connors used to say) such as myself with no capacity or budget for drugs, reveling in the physiological games they play with our inner-ears and general floating viscera. I do so enjoy being spun, shaken, dropped, loop-the-looped, and plunged (and I like it even more when it is happening in amusement and theme parks as opposed to, say, on a Northwest Airlines flight.
Nevertheless, it's long been the lure of the oft-ignored dark rides, the bus-bar-powered, fire-trap-prone, Day-Glo passion pits that have served as the fun zone's clarion call for me.
Of course, I do indeed love them roller coasters. But while being endlessly fun, they are so obvious in their thrills, so out in the open: a public and hazardous-yet-friendly challenge of "Bet'cha Can't Handle It, Punk!" On the other hand, dark rides -- well, duh! -- hide their deep, dark, dank thrills behind seemingly "tells it all" come on lurid art work, the motto here being more of a "Mundus Vult Decipi" ("The World Wants to be Deceived"): "full disclosure," but not really, speaking to your inner-self.
With dark rides, usually, it's that "Peter Lorre in a trench coat / Heart of Darkness / fever dream / David Lynch meets vapid 8-page apocalyptic death cult biblical tract / dark secrets and unspeakable nastiness hidden just below the surface" aspect of dark rides that gets the satisfying thrills and chills job done. And, all that before you make the conscious decision to buy a ticket and get in line? Of course, the unconscious decision was made when? When you first realized that not everything in your pastel-painted, Fisher-Price world was out in the open and understandable? When you first discovered that your parents locked their bedroom door now and again for purposes unknown and unknowable? When happy Uncle Phil's usually reserved personality would change after his third can of yeasty suds on a summer evening and he'd start handing out cash and ranting about flying saucer conspiracies?
Or is it something that is hard-wired deep into that curious ancient knot on the back of our brains?
I suspect that yes, that is it . . . but only to a certain degrees. The darkness and the light of dark rides seems to start it's work there in the back, lizard brain but shifts quickly, then, to work on us in the frontal lobes at the same time. As we swoop and rattle and curve about in the UV enhanced darkness of a dark ride, the front and back of our heads are engaged in separate, but equal discussions:
Lizard Brain: "Gott in Himmel! Were I not trapped by this lap bar and had my arm draped around my main squeeze attempting a 'main squeeze,' if you catch my drift, my 'fight or flight' impulses, ingrained in me since Lucy Leaky did the Olduvai Gorge Two-Step so many millennia ago, would have me either A.) running in fright from this denizen of my deepest sub-conscious by way of the paper-mâché and Day-Glo paint section of the craft store or B.) leaping up to solidly bash this menacing bogey a quick one and by doing so attempt to save myself and thereby maintain my gene pool and impress the babes!"
Vs.
Frontal Lobes: "Dude! Way cheesy, yet way cool dumb-fun retro low-tech special effects! Let's go chow down on some Sno-Cones, funnel cakes, and corn dogs and, like, ride it again!"
This frontal lobe activity is the sort of thing that can very well get you in trouble when you attempt to communicate how such a thing works as a front-end to the Lizard Brain thrill in a situation - that is, darned near any and all outside of dark rider/pop-culture mutants such as yourself - if your intention is to extend the basic, over-arching high concept (yipes!) of "dark riderdom" to a client or a boss who has no practical background is such things or at least want to pretend to have not such experience.
A simple test: if you find yourself on the verge of saying something like . . .
"The energy of using a classic entertainment system - such as a dark ride - would help us to approach the over-all experiential experience in both a linear and multi-linear fashion. After all, even though the story of the Seven Year's War (note: just an example here, gang . . .) is accessible in a delineated fashion, the use of a super-linear narrative system as is at the heart of a dark ride would assist the visitor in making the leap from what might be looked upon as "old news" as a part of a new and startling paradigm."
. . . We suggest that you keep it to yourself until just before the lunch break when people are willing to listen to anything, just so long as they can then get to the mound of Chinese chicken salad.
As someone who spends much, too much time thinking about such things (and not nearly enough time about such incidentals as "artistic" growth, professional gain, and personal hygiene), and as someone with a person affinity for the low rent and second-class, I can't help but allow my mind to wander to the art of the dark ride.
Being a designer who couldn't sketch my way out of a soggy popcorn bag, of course, the use of the word "art" is meant in the general sense and not "Quick, Edgar! More Day-Glo blue! The inspiration is upon me!" No, for me it's more the considerations of what can be done with the oft-neglected "real world" dark ride.
I know I'm not alone here in these thoughts. But How many times can the dark ride be re-Imagineered as a $140 million Spielberg-ian fantasy? True: not nearly often enough. But in a world of lowered expectations and presidential elections, not often enough in the near future.
Sure, we are living in the age of the dark ride "re-thought for the more sophisticated audience of today." And indeed, re-thought it has been, but by and large by people who have never found themselves facing the reality of making effective designs in a way that would satisfy an audience or paying customers (and/or hopefully paying clients) and the real-world (i.e. "chump change") budgets that come with them as opposed to an audience with guys named Michael or the CEOs of multinational liquor conglomerates with a monumental surreal budget. That of course, after the hoopla and the "yeah, well lemme tell ya about what we got going" blather at the IAAPA cocktail party hosted by some former munitions manufacturer-turned-iron ride provider from Latvia. Later, of ocurse, it'll all get descoped and reduced to real-world, chump change budget.
Increasingly (and here I'm getting dizzy from the perilous height of one of the usual soapboxes upon which many, many of us stand to reach up to the bar for our fifth Latvian freebie Martini) we "pot smoking Martian" creative types" are coming back, thankfully, to the "old guards" of themed entertainment, rediscovering what the rest of the world never forgot about how to have fun in the (almost) dark.
So hold on to those black light posters form your college days. You may want to keep them around for inspiration.
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