Post
by JRobb » Wed May 01, 2019 11:35 pm
There is a fantastic YouTube channel called “Defunctland”, written in the same script font as Disneyland (dare I mention the “mouse house” on the only MGASC forum in the world?)
Anyhow I wanted to direct any fellow theme park anthropologists to said YouTube channel. The Producer/Director does very detailed mini docs on Disney, Universal, Six Flags and Cedar Point theme parks, primarily in the US but there are a few in Japan, Europe and China.
I feel a tad desultory this evening as I just departed the Defunctland channel and brought up CA GA in Santa Clara on Google Earth. The images must be very recent because the park is still technically in “off season” (today is May 1, 2019) but the footprint of the classic, beautifully themed park that we all know and love from May 1976 up through the jarring final days of the Paramount disaster has never appeared more ramshackle or less identifiable. On the old Yankee Harbor & Yukon Territory side of the park, the only identifiable landmarks remaining are the red and white striped lighthouse that was the obelisk shaped hub of Yankee Harbor and the two covered bridges are still in place. I can remember eyeing the girls circa 1985 walking under those bridges, while wearing a new bandana I’d purchased at the Rock Shop in Orleans Place near the Orleans Orbit (one of the last OG rides to see the 21st Century). That side of the park where the inextricably intertwined flume rides spilled water from the flumes on hot days, that side of the park was quieter and less frenetic but it had an ambience that was so unique . I can still smell the fried battered fish and packaged tartar sauce tang of Yankee Harbor and my mind skips like old VHS tracking to the commercial shot on the Lobster in the late 70’s. I can still feel the leather bodabags and smell the dark interior of the Yukon Trading Post. True, all the thrill rides were in County Fair but I always associate the Demon side of the park as hotter and drier.
The current ad hoc slapdashery of roller coasters would crush such sweet adolescent and young teenage years far less painfully if the various park owners had either opted to completely raze the theming and rebuild an amusement park or even better, left it intact which would logically embrace the namesake of the park 43 years after the doors first opened. When one looks at the blotches of mismatched paint of randomly constructed tinker toy pile of steel that today have all the charm of of metropolitan regional “county fair” it is almost woefully nostalgic to realize that 43 years ago next week the San Francisco Bay Area public (a public that hitherto had Santa Cruz Boardwalk, Frontier Village and the original Marine World, Africa USA in Redwood City) next week it will be 43 years since thousands of wide eyed First year attendees walked through Carousel Plaza, bought a lemonade then proceeded under the train tracks into Hometown Square. Maybe a couple agreed to share a Carnation ice cream Sundae after a spin around Willard’s Whizzer? Perhaps grandma and grandpa opted for a sit down lunch at the charming farmhouse style eatery that was tucked under the Whizzer’s green girder column?
I can hear the chipped chirps of plastic rings dinging miserably off of two liter soda bottles made of glass and attenuated in various keys of “money wasted” (depending on how much water the games attendant filled the bottles with that morning before the Country Fair opened). I can still see crumpled brown cups with French Fries decorating them, both inside and out, tossed around the garbage cans and perhaps under a few tables too. The tantalizing sound of Atari video games blasting, Dig Dugging, Tempesting, Tetris-ing...and the Galaga mothership sucking up the space fighters in the purple tractor beam which meant you were either about to double your fire power or you were one hit away from “game over.”
Yes. It’s hard to push even the sharpest mindscape of memories back 40 plus years to realize that what now looks like a ghetto mall at one time employed artisans who blew glass, sculpted pottery in cute shop windows and force ones memory to see the ankle deep wood chips and heat in incongruent cacophony of a chainsaw cutting native totems in the shade of Yukon Territory trees while dolphins clicked, clapped, chattered and splashed mere feet away. Can anyone else almost hear The Maple Leaf Rag punctuated by the pings of flashbulb “bullets” hitting the fry pans that hung for almost two decades above the stooped piano man consigned to the same song, in the same shootin’ gallery, summer after summer? Quarter after quarter? Token after token?
Gone are the days of stopping on your way out to the car to pick up those plastic key fobs that provided a souvenir picture of your friends or family or date just a few hours earlier...a few hours that have added up. To forty three years next week.
Wait! Let’s go catch the last screening of the IMAX film before we leave. There’s like no line at all. The cute seventeen year old female employee would make her introductory remarks into a chunky plastic Motorola CB-style handset that always made her voice sound just a bit more breathy, a bit more compressed and self assured as the lights would dim down to pitch black and the first breathtaking frames of “To Fly” made our stomach muscles tighten. And our hearts ache a little. As we fly through pitch black dark in a massive theater long long gone. To a movie that is the same, yet different in every imagination who reads these words forty three years after the movie ends.
robbersonjon@gmail
. I was in this special 
