Behind the Bastards - The Libertarian Theme Park of your Dreams/Nightmares

Episode Date: September 2, 2021

Garrison Davis is joined by Robert Evans to discuss Action Park.Footnotes: https://www.themeparktourist.com/features/20150414/30160/rise-and-fall-and-scrapes-and-scares-class-action-park?page=5 https://weirdnj.com/stories/action-park/ Class Action Park- HBO https://www.newsweek.com/5-craziest-stories-about-new-jerseys-infamous-action-park-1516411 https://www.njherald.com/news/20181108/mountain-creek-announces-new-principal-owner https://www.mountaincreek.com/about https://www.njherald.com/article/20121027/NEWS/909027778 https://thecinemaholic.com/is-eugene-mulvihill-still-alive/ https://www.si.com/lifestyle/2019/07/01/action-park-new-jersey-water-park-rides-history-stories-mulvihill Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new

podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever

you get your podcasts. Daylight come and we start the pod podcast. It's a podcast and it's started. Jesus. I don't know why I committed to that so much. That was at no point. Was that good? This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast that's incompetently introduced by a hack and a fraud, i.e. me. And you know what? I had a great script. We were finally going to do the Will Wheaton episode. I wrote 40,000 words on it, really, really jarring, horrifying stuff, but I'm so ashamed of that introduction. So ashamed that the last minute I'm canceling our normal guest. We're bringing on Garrison. He's reading an episode instead. Nobody gets the podcast episodes. No, I'm ashamed. I was really looking forward to the four hour

Will Wheaton podcast, but six hours, six hours. Yeah, you know, honestly, I think it was too dark. I don't think Spotify would have put it up. There was just too high a body count. You know, we can talk about Mao or the British Empire or Hitler, but when you get to Will Wheaton, you know, that's that's a lot. That's a lot of corpses. That's a lot of corpses. Well, it's like several Rob zombies worth of corpses. Garrison's here. Hello. That was a house of a thousand. I saw somebody that said that when Garrison and Chris, come on, that they have to turn their podcast speed to half speed. I know you guys talk so much. Yeah, we're working on that. I mean, both of you and Chris are. No, I think that they need to get used to it because that's

how the youth. I think I think both Garrison and Chris need to slow down a bit. This is a process of learning. Everybody, everybody has a learning process with podcasting. That's what we're doing here. I think it's great. We're all, we're all finding our voice. You look, but listen to the earlier episodes of this show. It took me some time. It takes everybody some time and they're doing great. But yes, it is important to go slow when you're reading because I think they're great. The good thing is that I've only had two shots of espresso this morning. So that's good. Oh, so you're not even awake. No. And it is morning for Garrison. We had to get him up. I had to get up with him at 11 a.m. yesterday, which was just a nightmare for both of us to interview.

It was, and it was worse because we were both interviewing someone whose work we admire. And that was just, just the worst, just an absolute. Interviewing a competent person as you're struggling to keep your eyes open is not super fun. Oh, and the moment he came on the screen, it was David Wallace Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth, the instant he came on the screen, I was like, oh, that's a fucking morning person. That's a guy. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. No, earlier than nine in the morning. It was too well-dressed, too coiffed. It was just, oh, I felt like such a piece of shit. That is very true. Oh, that's funny. Yeah, that's very true. Well, yeah, anyway. What are we talking about today, Garrison? We're talking about amusement

parks, as a matter of fact. Now, I actually really like amusement parks, not so much as in like, I enjoy being in them, but more like I find their whole design, their structures, their engineering, and surrounding culture extremely fascinating. Yeah, I can see that. I've been to the beach with you on a number of occasions, Garrison. I can't fathom you at an amusement park. It's real funny. Maybe the Star Wars Disney. I'm excited. I've never been to Disneyland, but I like learning about it and its whole process. I can't imagine you in board shorts at a Six Flags going down a water slide. I've never worn board shorts, but I have gone to Six Flags. When I would take trips from Canada down to Texas to visit a family,

one of the highlights was visiting Six Flags over Texas in Dallas. That's a terrible place. I happened to be a really big, like, Looney Tunes and Batman fan, because those were some of the few TV shows we were allowed to watch as kids. Dallas is a Looney Tunes town for sure. The Six Flags there was the first Six Flags. It's all like Warner properties and stuff. The best part for me was going to the Gotham City area with all of its set dressing and Batman rides. Now, before you go poo-pooing, how Batman's a fascist or whatever, which he's not sometimes. He's sometimes not a fascist. There's a good video essay. There's a good video essay by a guy named Thought Slime about how

Batman isn't always flashy, but he is sometimes. The Batman at Six Flags is like the Tim Burton or animated series one, so it's fine. But it also means all of the sets and architecture look really cool, because it's gothic, neo-Ardeco kind of stuff. It's very fun. All this to say, the main ride they had there was called Batman the Ride. It was kind of like flying in the Batwing, but on a roller coaster. It was the first ever inverted roller coaster, so you're strapped into a hard harness and belt while sitting on a small seat and your legs are dangling in the air. It's a fun ride, but one of the things we talked about was that Batman the Ride had killed two people in its short history. That was always the best thing about Six Flags, because as a kid,

when you go with a group of like your cousins, you all want to go to all of the rides that have killed people. So you looked that shit up ahead of time to ride the rides that killed kids. She could be better than that kid. Like, ah, you fucking died on this ride, you loser. Like, what are you doing? So dying on a ride. So both the Batman the Ride deaths happened the same way. People actually ventured past the fence into the off-limits area under the ride, and riders dangling legs hit people in the off-limits area and they died of blunt force trauma. And a one, I think like a 17 year old on a youth group church trip was decapitated actually by the force. I mean, having been on a couple of youth group church trips, that's the best

case scenario for one of those really, is you get decapitated and you don't have to get back on the bus with everybody. So these, these deaths are not like 100% Six Flags' fault because like it was a fenced off area off limits, but the track could have easily been higher to not have like this risk at all. Like, you don't need people's legs close enough to the ground for this. And like, I don't know. I think we've got enough people as it is. So it seems like Six Flags did us all. Anyway, sorry. You're doing a casual manslaughter pill, okay. But like, amusement parks are kind of inherently dangerous, you know. Yes, they should be. You don't want to go to an amusement park that hasn't killed somebody. Because then there's no, there's no thrill.

At the same Six Flags that I went to as a kid, someone else died after falling off a roller coaster called the Texas Giant. Oh yeah, the Texas Giant. Oh man, that one sucked. Which is the biggest wooden roller coaster in the world. And someone fell under that and died. Only Texas. Because normal people are like, well, if I want to go on the biggest roller coaster, I want to go on the biggest roller coaster. And Texas is like, yeah, well, what about the biggest wooden roller coaster? What if it's made out of trees? The entire rest of the world goes, I don't really give a shit. That doesn't appeal to me at all. But Texas, it's like 80% of Texan identity is that we have the biggest wooden roller coaster. My god, are we proud of that

giant stupid wooden piece of shit? Oh, the Texas Giant. Oh man. At another Six Flags park, eight teenagers got trapped in a walkthrough haunted castle attraction. And this gets real dark real quick, Rafferty. And all of the lights went out, like the light also went out making the area pitch black. And one of the kids used a small lighter to see, which then caught some foam padding on fire. And there was no indoor sprinklers and the whole thing burned down with those eight kids inside. Oh my god, that's a nightmare. So I think that is the highest death toll from a single incident at any amusement park is that incident. Which again, it's not like it's not just Six Flags this fall, but like they should have had

sprinklers inside or something, right? If it's like an indoor thing. They absolutely should have had sprinklers. Like yeah, it's part of your job if you run a facility like that is to assume, to try and figure out ways in which dumb kids, because your entire clientele is dumb kids, will attempt to do things that could hurt themselves and then mitigate that. And you can't expect everything. Like in the case of like kids crawling under the thing and getting hit by feet, like yeah, you know, you can after the fact try to deal with it. But like it's just a horrible thing that happened. But in the case of like, well, yeah, you should have fucking sprinklers in buildings filled with flammable materials. Like you should just always have that for the

workers too. That's absolutely not on the fucking case. There's been very few like deaths at Disneyland. Like besides that, there's actually been like a number of suicides, but like... Well, that we know of. But it's a swamp. You can hide corpses in a swamp. Yeah, but in terms of like park guests, there hasn't been there many deaths. There has been a lot of worker deaths and like deaths related to like construction and stuff, because they don't really care about, you know, their workers and who's building all of the things. But like in terms of like the actual amusement park when it's operating, you know, deaths and injuries are often like a combination of negligence on behalf of the park, user error and sometimes

pre-existing medical conditions that maybe you shouldn't be doing super like extreme high-intensity stuff. However, there was one... Again, to a certain point... There was one amusement park whose inherent danger wasn't simply negligence or user error. It was designed into every single aspect of the park itself. And that's gonna be today's bastard. It's a little place about 45 miles outside of New York City in the small town of Vernon, New Jersey called Action Park. Oh yeah. Hell yes! Oh man! I first learned about Action Park a few years ago and was immediately immediately fell in love with this concept. It goes by a few other names, most popularly Class Action Park, Traction Park, Friction Park, Accident Park. I know we've actually talked about Action

Park a few times previously just because it's... Yeah, because it's just one of the funniest things ever. Like it's... You know what it is, Garrison? It's the kind of libertarianism that I respect. Yes, exactly. So that's kind of what I would be talking about today. Because I'd be honest here, I think Action Park rules. I think it's the perfect place for a teenager with my predispositions. It was absolutely... It has done innumerable harm to the world into a number of families and altered and ended people's lives, but it's pretty funny. Yeah. I'm gonna try to recognize how there's the very aspects of the park that make it charming to me also led to thousands of serious injuries and a number of preventable deaths, but there could have been more deaths

actually. It is actually surprising how once we finish this episode, it'll be surprising how few deaths there are based on how ridiculous things get. We're gonna start by discussing the park's founder, Gene Mulvihill, because Action Park really is just the direct spawn of this man, similar to how Disneyland and Disney World is like an extension of Walt Disney, and it's like a test ground for how Walt would like society to operate. Action Park is both an extension of Gene and a playground for his ideal weird, iron-randy and circus world. I think all of these kinds of parks that are built by a dude have that to them. There's another one in Texas called Schlitterbond, which was also just like a dude who had no business and no

experience designing waterslides, just making a bunch of giant waterslides, and yeah, people died. But it was also a pretty rad place to get drunk and roll down a lazy river. You fucking hammered at Schlitterbond, and it was clearly this man's dream to just design different water attractions, having never studied or gotten any sort of relevant training in how to do that, and then give people cheap liquor in order to ride them. Well, that's exactly what happens here too. Yeah, I love that thing. I love that kind of thing. It's always fun when that specific thing happens. There's a financial journalist named

Mary Pilton who described Gene as a mix of P.T. Barnum and Donald Trump, which is like like A.D.'s Donald Trump, but I think it's like a really good explanation of the bizarre man that this is. So Eugene, aka Gene Mulville, was born in 1934. He grew up in a working class neighborhood in West Orange, New Jersey. He graduated from Lehi University with a Bachelor's of Science in 1956, which he then basically never used again. But he also got a focus in business of administration when he was in university. After this, he served in the Marine Corps, in two different battalions or divisions, and he earned the rank of captain. According to his obituary, so spoilers, he's dead.

Mr. Volvo was a pioneer in the mutual fund industry and a venture capitalist and financier with a distinguished career spanning many industries, including cellular broadcast, cancer drugs, robotics, magnetic imaging technology, amusement park rides, ranching and real estate development. By all accounts, Gene started out with not much money to his name when he began on Wall Street, and he was evidently good at picking stocks. And a decent portion of his fortune was made through Wall Street investments in the 60s and 70s. And soon he actually found it. Yeah. And when you have that skill, when you're able to make money that way,

one of the things that says about you is that you are capable of completely cutting human beings out of the equation. Absolutely. It's a necessary thing to make a fortune as a stock trader and also leads to really fun water parks. It does lead to very fun water parks. I'm on board so far. Eventually, he founded his own Wall Street firm called Mayflower Securities, and then he went to co-found and develop a few medical research companies, which specialized in developing cancer vaccines. Now, spoilers, that did not work out because we do not have vaccines for cancer. Oh, that's a shame. I got excited there for a second here.

Instead, we got water parks. Well, you know. So, in the early to mid-70s, Gene got started getting into the penny stock schemes, also called the pump-a-dump frauds. Yeah, it's Bitcoin, but with a worse name. Bitcoin with a worse name and on Wall Street. Crypto with a worse name. Yeah, and on all Wall Street. So, it's a little... I don't know. They're both very insufferable in their own way. At least one you can buy drugs with. I guess, actually, you could also buy drugs at Walls. Never mind. Yeah. Yeah, you can have both of those.

Both of those you get drugs from. It's basically when a salesman would sell a worthless shares to an unknowing client for a lot of money. Now, Muvill was a very outstanding and charismatic character on Wall Street, and he applied this whole plan with a pal named Robert Brennan, who helped him start Mayflower Securities. Robert Brennan was another noted kind of Wall Street fraudster at the time, and an all-around pretty sketchy dude. He's going to come back a few times in this story, but in 1973, Mayflower Securities was suspended by the Securities and Trades Commission on the grounds of selling its customers worthless securities in a bankrupt electronics company,

according to a 1974 issue of the New York Times. Brennan continued to make other penny stock firms on Wall Street, but for Eugene Muvill, he was basically kicked off of Wall Street, and he was not able to operate there anymore. No one wanted to do anything with him because he was frotting people for a long time. Yeah, I mean, that's just when you retire, right? That's how every good Wall Street guy's career ends, is they get caught committing what for anyone else would be the rest of their life in prison crimes. Instead, it's just like, well, you have to at least temporarily stop working for Wall Street, and then they go on to become, I don't know, a senator. Well, he doesn't become a senator, but he has another idea.

Yeah, he has a better idea. He still has a decent amount of financial assets, and what he decides to do is buy two ski resorts in Vernon, New Jersey. Back in 1972, one of his Wall Street investments, Vernon Valley and Great Gorge Ski Resort went bankrupt, so Gene and Bob Brennan formed a company called Great American Recreation and purchased both of those ski resorts and combined them into one. The vacation resorts were popular in the winter times. You would have people from New York come down and do skiing and stuff, but they wanted a way to crank out income during the summer, and it was in 1976 when they arrived on the winning idea to build an outdoor summer

adventure park, which would soon grow into Action Park in 1978. This is how we get from Wall Street investor guy to this guy who buys two ski resorts on a mountain and wants to transform it into basically the first water park in the country, because Action Park was one of the original US-based, what we call water parks now. No one had thought of the brilliant idea of mixing the fun of a playground slide with the sheer erotic joy of being surrounded by other people's bodily fluids mixed in with poorly chlorinated water. There wasn't much chlorinated water in Action Park. Thank God. You love to see it. Gene wanted Action Park to be different from other thrill-based amusement parks where you just hop on a roller coaster. He wanted, as the Action Park

TV ads used to say, for you to control the action. That was the line they used. Gene's son Andy Mulville explained his dad's thought process like this, quote, Gene didn't want to do the same old shit where you get strapped in or something or twirls around. He wanted to take the idea of skiing, which is exhilarating because you control the action and transfer it into an amusement park. There's an inherent risk to that, but that's what makes it fun. So it's like, here, we want to like have the fun of skiing and do the same. I've seen similar ads for like very high-powered vibrators, and they have a similar death toll to Action Park. Cool. There's a danger in controlling the action. The one you have to put into a 20-volt plug, like the ones that you run an arc while

they're off of. Jesus Christ. Yeah, like those kind of vibrators. The first edition he made to the Ski Resort to make it, you know, the summer adventure park was in 1976, and it was called the Alpine Slide. It was almost a 3,000-foot-long track going down just a mountain. It's just like a big track going down a mountain. It was, you know, it was a part of the Appalachians. You were on this small cart controlled by a steering rod, and you had a brake that sometimes worked more on the Alpine Slide later. But pretty soon, two water slides, a car racing track, and a skate park were added. And over the next few years, we had more water slides, a swimming pool, like tennis courts, a softball field. And at the beginning

of the 1980s, the softball field was replaced with a gigantic wave pool. This was one of the first wave pools in the country as well. And we'll talk about this wave a little bit later. I'll bet it was very secure. It was very safe and well designed. Eventually, they got a whole nother race track, more ridiculous slides, a kayaking ride, a few bungee jumping sets, which are oddly enough like one of the safest rides at Action Park, was the bungee jumping ones. And, you know, various other like action-based attractions. In 1979, the summer section of the resort was renamed Action Park. And all together, the park ultimately had about 75 rides, 40 of them being water slides. And Action Park is still

considered one of the first modern water parks in the States. So the thing is, is that like, Gene didn't know anything about amusement parks. Gene didn't, like, the amusement park entry was still pretty new, but there was already like experts in it who like specialized in stuff. Gene did not. He was not an engineer. He didn't really know engineers. And random people just approached Gene for ideas for rides. No one had engineering, no one had engineering degrees. See, that's perfect because it's a pure meritocracy. You know, you don't have any kind of false divisions like having a degree, knowing how to make things safe, understanding the basics of physics. None of that gets in the way of making a truly great ride. Pure meritocracy. I

love it, Garrison. I love it. Gene would go to like amusement park conventions, and there'd be like ride designers who are blacklisted from Disney and Six Flags who would like talk to Gene. Because Gene's like the weird dude that you could get to build your crazy ride. Yeah. No one was qualified. However, and Gene basically greenlit every single ride that came to him. Hell yeah. But he would also do a lot of tinkering with the designs to make them more extreme, to push them a little bit further. Again, pure meritocracy. The ride was already not great to begin with, but then Gene would change it all of the time and just like make things just a little bit worse. Just like turn it up a little bit. And he actually designed,

or like designed, quote-unquote, he drew a lot of these on napkins. Most of the rides at Action Park was, he was the one that came up with the idea for, and he like made, you know, rough diagrams. Then he, you know, just hired contractors and welders to build them. They were, you know, they were made out of like concrete, cement, fiberglass, and PVC piping. That's what most of the rides were made out of. It's just gluing PVC pipes together and calling it good enough. That's basically how he set up his park. And Gene... Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things. Like you could spend a lot of time making sure it can like cover the, hold the weight of a human body or that people can travel down it without lacerating themselves or cracking bones. But

you're probably good at just eyeballing it, you know? Like, why go further? Why go further? To be fair, the rides did always have a testing phase. He would pay his teenager, he would pay his teenage employees money to test the rides, and many of them did not get past the testing phase. I'm guessing testing for Gene was not wildly different from how the SS tested vaccines on children and with a high body count. Yeah, that's basically what happened. So, like, the final product was a truly a mix of Ayn Rand and Lord of the Flies, which sounds amazing. Like, this is like the perfect place to be as a teenager. Like, this is the best combination of everything. There's no rules in the park, no regulations from the government. We'll get

into those legal issues later. Action Park was really only possible in a specific time in, like, like, like, Reagan's America. Like, it's very, very obvious that like, you know, this was like a zeitgeist moment. And Gene was actually friends because because of Wall Street, Gene was friends with future President Donald Trump. And according to parking employees, Trump was very close to investing in Action Park and actually dropped by one time to take a look. Upon seeing the park, he decided it was too unhinged to invest in. Oh, yeah. Captain COVID took one look at Gene's park was like, this is going to get people killed. Yeah. So the park was too wild for Donald Trump to invest in. And that's kind of that gives you a really good idea of what the whole what the whole

vibe is here. There are two other aspects that made Action Park the legend that it is today. Alcohol and the exclusively local teenage staff. These two things combined with the rides are what made Action Park the kind of the legend that it exists as now. Journalist Seth Porges, who's done most of the work digging into the history of the park, describes the park's atmosphere like this quote, a lawless land that was ruled by drunk teenage employees, frequented by even drunk or teenage guests filled with rides seemed to that seems to defy even the most basic notions of physics and common sense. And that is like that's that's the whole idea is that you're in this place that just ignores the laws of physics, ignores the laws of the country, full with drunk

teenagers who are both running the park and attending the park. And that's it. And that's like that's how you just get the result that we got. Also, they were totally ignoring all all labor loss. Jersey law requires right operators to be 16 years old. 14 year olds would would would frequently be operating these rides. Yeah, I mean, their little hands can get in and fix things better, I would guess. And all of the supervisors for kids like like starting at like 16 years old because because if you were 16 years old, that means you were already working at the park for two years because you started working there when you were 14. So like you get experienced, you get bumped up real quickly. You've seen a lot of death at that point and you can handle it.

One 17 year old was a security guard for three months and then he got bumped up to supervisor. So that kind of shows how fast that that progression goes in some cases. A previous manager has talked about how the teenage staff would like haze new employees by quote unquote, drowning them in the pool by strapping them to a board and then floating them upside down and leaving them in the pool. And he ends the story by seeing things happen at Action Park that we don't talk about. So that's fun. I don't think anyone died by getting hazed, but you know, it's kind of unclear. Do you know who won't kill you by hazing Robert? I mean, basically any of our podcast sponsors will happily kill you for a variety of reasons.

They're not going to duct tape you to a piece of wood and float you upside down in the swimming pool as a bit. Hello, fresh might. Look, they might. Okay, I'm not going to say that they won't because we've all lost a lot of friends to hello fresh. Look, that's all that's all I'm going to say about it. Anyway, I hope their ads aren't on this. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet

Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and on the gun badass way. And nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price.

Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck

with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, we are back and my god. I for one enjoyed it when HelloFresh threatened to hold our heads down under a wave pool unless we ordered their fettuccine Alfredo dinner for two. HelloFresh,

they'll fucking kill you. I honestly don't think we've ever even had HelloFresh as a sponsor. We had one of those food box companies sponsor us briefly. I think it was Blue Apron. It might have been Blue Apron. I don't think our fans are really food box people. This is hurting me and making it harder for ad-ops to sell us food boxes. Yeah, what? Can we not like pigeonhole ourselves? I don't know. Dick pills and sheets are all I want to sell.

Hey, guess what? You're not leading this episode. Garrison, continue. All right, Garrison, this is going to be, I think we're already going to my favorite quote that I have that I've pulled for this show. This is from weird New Jersey magazine, which is a great resource just in general. Is there a normal New Jersey magazine? I don't know, but this magazine was like staffed by a whole bunch of people who grew up to be like famous comedians. So it's actually a pretty cool site in mag. Anyway, but here's a quote about Action Park that really sums up the beauty of this place

and why I want to live there. It was truly a teen run show and it manifested itself in many ways. From right attendance, willfully ripping the entrance response from park attendees who misbehaved, to staff knowing all the places that one could get stoned and or drunk, to hide from supervisors, and Action Park got into legal trouble for letting undirected employees run rides too. So chances are your personal safety may have once been in the hands of a 14 year old tripping on acid, which is the best scenario that there was 14 year old operators of these rides just tripping on acid as they're leading you through this water slide.

I have a relative that's as detailed as I should get who very nearly died because he went to Six Flags with his friends and they all took a tremendous amount of acid and it was like a hundred degrees and there was a stroke problem. So I can only imagine that if they had, instead of just being at Six Flags, been running at Six Flags, it would have been a much safer situation. To make the whole weird teenage atmosphere even better, at the top of the alpine slide on the mountain, there was an employees only shed that's referred to as the sex shack or the weed shack. Basically, it's just tons of drunk, high and horny teens all dating each other while running an amusement park. There was massive Action Park employee parties at the end of summer, basically

a big all night bash where everyone stayed over at the park. People would get like blackout drunk and then wake up, go find your whistle and then go do quote unquote lifeguarding in the morning. That's just how the park was run and Gene was like, okay with it. He's like this weird libertarian dude. He was like, yeah, do whatever. You can go have sex in the shed and then run the park. How else are you going to run an amusement park like this? You can't hire adults. You can't hire real people. No adults wanted to work there. People are going to complain about how it's death trap. The children only care that they're getting beer money and are allowed to take assets and jobs. Robert, you think they're

paying for beer? There was so much free alcohol at Action Park. Again, this is how all of society should work. The free-form atmosphere was very inspired by Gene's libertarian ideals. He like a few times like fake killed himself in front of employees as a joke. What a fucking dude. Just pretending to commit suicide in front of his tripping employees. They still have blood on their hands from the last time somebody went down the slide the wrong way. The employees often refer to him as Uncle Gene. He sounds like an uncle. He sounds like a specific kind of uncle. He kept a Mac 10 machine gun in his office drawer. Good. Classic choice. Ingram is really, I mean, if you might need to host down a bunch of like

plainclothes feds trying to close down your water park in the 80s. That happened, Robert. That happened a few times in the story. What, that he hosed feds down with machine gun fire or the biggest cage? No, plainclothes feds show up in his park to collect money. Anyway. What a hero. He got this fake cattle prod and hatched an idea to stop people from riding the ski lift to the top of the slide without a ticket. You were supposed to have a ticket to ride on the ski lift. People just didn't care. They were just riding it. He's like, oh, they should be buying my tickets. He got this plan. An employee would pretend to be a park guest and he would get on the left without having a ticket. The operator would then ask for a ticket

and then when the Incognito employee didn't have one, the park operator would pull up the fake cattle prod and tase him so that would scare kids into like not riding the thing without a ticket. And he did this. This is a little skit that he did and it resulted in hundreds of parents calling in to complain that their kids saw someone operating the ski lift kill someone for not having a ticket. See, and I think the fact, honestly, my only opinion of this is that the fact that he wasn't really tasing people for riding the ski lift without a ticket is incredible restraint on Gene's part given the man that he is. Yes. Yes. So once enough rides were built, Gene went into marketing mode and started airing some amazing TV ads made by his daughter Julie starring the

park's teenage employees when a local TV reporter filming a live segment on the 70 foot bungee jump called the Snapple Snap Up Whipper Snapper. Cool name. So when this reporter refused to jump off because he was scared, Gene's youngest son, Christopher, pushed the reporter off the ledge. Excellent. He was so ready for the 21st century. It's a shame that he was born in the 30s and not like the 70s. He really could have gotten up to some shit these days. So yeah, onto like how the park operated itself. There were three sections of the park. On the mountain, we had Waterworld and Alpine Center. These had like all the slides, water slides, and like outdoor adventure based attractions. And on the close to the bottom of the mountain,

there was a section called Motorworld, which is like kart racing and like attractions that like required like motors to run essentially. Dividing Waterworld and Alpine Center and Motorworld was the route 94 highway. So a highway went right through the middle of the park actually, dividing the different sections up. We will start the deep dive into the into the rides by discussing. Wait, so so it's like if like there was a giant freeway in between California adventures. Yes, exactly. And this this this gets used creatively. So I when you said I'm like there has to be a reason why garrison is mapping this because yeah, there's there. There is it's not a great idea. It's convenient for like if you're running an amusement park, be like yeah,

you can just pull off off the highway in two two directions. You're both in all of the best places I've gone go kart riding have been right off of the highway. And the best like the danger of that is because I when I go to play when I go go kart riding, I go to hurt people, right? Like my goal is to make sure that if there are kids on the track, they don't graduate. You would have loved action park, Robert. Oh boy. That's the reason to do go go. Don't say this on the problem is when you get done go kart riding and you get right back on the highway, you have to really be careful to like the like deescalate the thing is, Robert, because if you've just been like permanently injuring like 14 year old, the thing is, Robert threatened to end high school, not end their

lives in their ability to graduate high school. Here's the thing. You could get drunk at a authentic German pub right next to the go-karts and then take the go-karts on to the highway. A paradise. What a Shangri-La. Uh-huh. Xanadu is real. What a Shangri-La. Ending high schoolers. So here's here's here's a list of the motor world rides courtesy of themeparktourist.com, the the the premiere source of info for amusement park rides. We had the bumper boats, which is like bumper cars, but boats. The engines of the the engines of these frequently leaked gasoline. There was at least one instance where a guest needed medical attention because too much of it went on to his skin. Also, the pond that they were in was filled with giant snakes.

Of course it was. Why not? Because why would you want snakes in the bumper pool? I bet old Gene went and got the snakes and put them in himself. People aren't gonna think it's authentic if there aren't snakes. Incredible. What a hero. Next to the bumper boats, we had the Lola cars. These were miniature race cars with an open cockpit on a long track. It cost it cost extra money to drive the cars, but people were willing to pay, especially the people who knew that you could raise the speed to dangerous levels without the right adjustment. You could stick your hand in the engine and like move a piece of metal that would make the speed governor like operate wrong. And you could get

up to like 70 miles an hour on these. So the park had actually. Jesus Christ. So well, and the best thing is the only way people found that out. You don't figure that out just if you're writing it a lot. You figure that out exactly. Yes. And then you tell your friends to go to the park and spread it to everyone else like that. Yeah. This started with park employees and it slowly spread to like, you know, the teenage like, you know, underground gossip thing. Something else Gene did, which one of his smarter decisions is that so like there is tons of alcohol everywhere at Action Park. Like there's like alcohol stands so many places they don't care what age you are. They don't care anything. But one thing he did as well is he dismantled a micro brewery pub in Germany

and moved it to Action Park. So from Germany, he moved the entire pub and he set it up right next to the race cars. What a perfect human. So after the park was closed, employees were known to break into the micro brewery, steal tons of steel beer and then take the race cars onto the highway. Yeah, of course. So next to the, and all of this, Gene knew all of this would happen. Oh, he knew what happened. He wanted to have, yeah, he's like, yeah, it's fun. Why not? No, he wanted, he wanted to pill those kids on libertarianism. You don't need fucking driver's licenses. I don't care what age you are. And if you can grab the alcohol, you can drink it. Oh, there was, there was like a slingshot, a bungee jumping ride where two people were shot

up in the air. And we were upside down. These are pretty common in amusement parks nowadays. Usually they cost more money because of like insurance issues. But Action Park had its own insurance set up, which we'll talk about later. So you didn't need to do that. Then we have a super, super go-karts, which is different from the race cars. Basically, people, people, because the race cars went so much faster, I mean, I say this, but like the super go-karts could also go 50 miles an hour by messing with, by messing with the speed governor, they would like shove, they would shove a tennis ball in the engine. So you would like move the governor stick. So like these, these go-karts still go

50 miles an hour, and they were often used as bumper cars. So gasoline fuel leaks were another, were another problem for, for, for the go-kart track. There is a quote from an Action Park guest, the quote, I still remember being able to, I still remember being able to be served Action Park beer at age 17 and then go riding the go-karts. If you knew how, and without burning yourself in the muffler, you reach behind it and pull the throttle, pass where the governor was set and just take off past the other kids. Amazing. Wow. There was another boning attraction called the super speed boats, which was a small pond, which also had snakes. No. People often fall out of the speed boats. So this was more of a problem with the snakes.

And also riders would, would, would also use the speed boats as bumper boats, which is a problem because these are going like super fast. There was a, the one really drunk individual needed to be rescued by a life card after, because the boat fully capsized. But people fell out, you know, often. I would, I'm not surprised. I would be almost disappointed if they didn't. There was a guy that, so there, there was a speed boat parked like in the dock and another guy who was racing was going super fast and he jumped his boat on top of the other docked boat while someone was still inside and they very nearly got decapitated. The guy that jumped the boat then ran off and people never found him or he never faced any punishment because he was able to run fast enough,

which is, yeah, that's kind of how you do it. If you do something wrong, if you run quickly, then it's fine. So that was, that was the speed boats. And one of, one of the best rides in the motor world, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe my favorite is the tank ride. This ride featured heavily in the TV ads back in the day, basically. Can we have Robert guess what that means? The tank ride? Yeah. I'm guessing like the weapons system, right? Like some child version of a tank. Pretty much. Okay. So like Gene built these motorized tanks and they had this whole like arena and for. Excellent. Oh man, I'm on board so far. For a small fee, he would let guests drive in these tanks for five minutes at a time shooting tennis balls from cannons at the other tanks. Don't

worry. Don't worry, Robert. It gets, it gets better. Okay. When hit a tank when I'm actually stopped for like 15 seconds, giving the other tankers and visitors with and also on the edges of the arena, also had cannons that people could just walk up to and shoot. And so yeah, you could, you could just shoot tons, tons of tennis balls. Now, often these tanks would break down and workers would have to go inside of the arena to, to, to fix the tank, but they didn't shut down the rock. So it was like the guy at a golf course whose job is to clean the driving range, did you say before the fucker? So everyone would try to hit the employees with the tennis balls. Of course, of course he would. This made the tank ride an unpopular work shift.

Yeah. No, really. And there was one time where a park attendee acquired, acquired gasoline from inside the park and soaked his tennis balls inside them, brought them into the tank and then let them on fire and started shooting flaming fireballs out of his tank. They were, they were kicked out of the park. Unfortunately, unfortunately, you see, that should make you manager of the park. This is where sea libertarians are never as consistent as they should. No, they're not, exactly. No, you should reward that kind of innovation. Shooting flaming tennis balls at employees. Come on. That's, that's amazing. Come on. If you get hit by one, just dive into the gasoline pool. You'll be all right. Hey, worst case scenario, you burn the snake set.

The snake set. Sold two problems. Oh, man. So the last time I played bumper guards, it was this place in LA that was, again, right next to a highway. And I was just, I was going out of my way to hit kids, as I usually do when I'm playing up bumper cars. I managed to turn around, so I was going the opposite direction and just driving it on at people. And it was like, it was like me, a group of adults who were horrified and these little kids. And I would just keep riding around and slamming the walls and just screaming, death, like the row here in the whole time. It was such a good day. God, I love bumper cars. It does sound real fun. We should,

we should go to Oaks Park sometime. No, I can't go back to go, to do more bumper cars. It makes me a bad person. He can't go back. He cannot go back. He's not allowed. I can't not. I just can't not. The only place I can do bumper cars safely is Mexico, because everyone there, everyone at Mexican bumper cars is on as much acid and as violent as I am. Or at least that's how I remember. I thought you were going to say on the 405 in Los Angeles, because that's basically what it is. No, 405, it's very polite driving. Very, very. That's why you need the bumper cars. You need to go hurt people on the bumper cars. You need to do damage to your friends. Oh, I miss bumper cars. All right. So you can't do it. We have, we have gotten most of the notable

Moto World rides. So we're going to move up to Alpine Center. This housed all like the sports related attractions and like all like the sports ball fields. And then, you know, tons of like other slides. It did have another bunch of jumping attraction that was 70 feet tall, which is one of the safer rides in the entire park. And Action Park was also briefly home to a skate park. Obviously, now not designed by an engineer or people who knew anything about skateboarding. So the bulls that riders skated in were separated by like black pavement and did it. And there was no smooth edges. So a lot of tumbles. An Action Park employee talked about the skate park. And he said a quote. So then they built a skate park, a masterpiece and design where the smooth bulls

were isolated by the black pavement between them. Who thought this was a good idea? The black top did not even meet the cement at a smooth edge. The skate park was responsible for many, for so many injuries that we covered up, that we covered it up with dirt and pretended it never existed. Amazing. Oh, that's libertarian. Jean's back in my good books. That's how you do. So we covered up with their pretend never existed and thought of grander ways to hurt people like the Honda Odyssey's. Now before. You don't even need to finish that. I'm just hoping he invented the Honda Odyssey. And that was his final method of revenge on the streets. Before the minivan of the same name, Honda made a four wheeled, a knobby tired go cart, which like predated ATVs.

And that was wicked fun. Mostly for the employees who would ride them through the park terrorizing everyone in our path. That's quoting former park employee Tom Fergus. So just chasing around park guests and ATVs and all the sidewalks after you bury the skate park because it hurt too many kids. Do you know, Robert, are you familiar with the people who don't drive ATVs at children at skate parks? Why would you not aim an ATV? So an ATV, Garrison, I come from the south. There's two purposes. I grew up in the prairies. I grew up in the prairies of Canada. We had, yeah, I know. Yeah, you and I have had this conversation with friends who are not ATV pill. There's two purposes for an ATV. One is to kill large chunks of family of your own family and terrible ATV accidents.

And the other is to use as a weapon against people who irritate you. And those are the jobs of an ATV. So yes, I can't imagine anyone not driving it at someone. I hope we do get a sponsorship from Big ATV soon. Because if they could send us free ATVs, we could have so much fun. They could, and we could, they could. We could get, we could wipe out whole generations in a single weekend away from home. So here, here's some ads from hopefully Big ATV. Sophie, get on that. Can we, can we get an ATV sponsorship? Please, please. I'll put that question for you. Here's the ads. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson,

and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the gun badass way. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI

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We're back. Oh, Soviet, do you think all this talk about injuring people, specifically children, is going to go badly with our audience? With our audience? No. Oh, good. Okay. We're good. With our employment? Probably. Well, look, you can't win them all, Sophie. I know. I don't know. There's certain, so there's some people who grow up and fun is doing things that are enjoyable for everyone involved. And there's some people who grow up and fun is damaging each other. Sure. And I grew up in the country, a decent chunk of my childhood. And so

fun often involved someone getting horribly injured. And, you know, that's just life. That's just life. And eventually, you seek to replicate that fun by having, I don't know, fireworks, fikes, and trying to go bicycle jousting and beating your friends with raw fish in public parks. You know, just good times. Great times. Great times. All right. We could have had some fun times at Action Park. We could have had some fun times at Action Park. I would have traveled to the state of New Jersey just to go to Action Park. I would have rented a house for a month. Oh, man.

So the Alpine Center has a lot of rides that never got through testing. Possibly maybe my favorite attraction in the entire park, which did not last super long, was called the man in the ball in the ball. It was a giant metal ball floating inside an even bigger metal ball with tiny wheels all around it. And you'd have someone in the very middle. The idea was to roll down a mountain in a ball on a set track. Now, the track was made out of PVC piping because no one knew what they were doing. And on human testing day, it was very hot. And PVC piping is plastic, so it expands. So as they were rolling the ball with a person inside down the mountain, the track completely fell apart. And the ball rolled down the mountain

over the highway and into the swamp with the snakes, with someone all inside. Excellent. It did not pass human testing, unfortunately. That's a shame. Yeah, I know. Well, you can't get everything. I know. Yeah. Another ride that did not last long was the so-called zero gravity slide, which was allegedly inspired by airplanes. Now, no one knows how. Love that, allegedly, doing a lot of heavy lifting there. So no one knows what a gravity or airplanes are who's involved with this ride.

The goal was you would have a slide that you gain enough speed and then hit a ramp that makes you glide through the air. Now, that's not how humans work. No, that's not how physics. But this guy doesn't know any of that. This man's never studied anything in his life. So the idea was like glide through the air and then land perfectly parallel back on the slide to go on another ramp. Like this guy's whole plan for building a ride is to drive to a home depot parking lot, say Trebaho, and hold out a napkin. And it's a testament to the workers he hired, to the day laborers he hired, that fewer people died than you.

I know. That's the surprising. Once we're done the episode, you're like, how did only X amount of people die? Like, it should have been more. I mean, there maybe is some way that we just don't know about. But like, it's weird how few there are. Man, it is very absurd. I don't know. As I've learned race and go carts, it's harder to kill people than you might think. So testing on employees went surprisingly well with the zero gravity slide. But then shortly after it opened, a small kid went on and got going super fast. And he launched so high that he missed the entire slide and the landing pad and was sent to the hospital and the ride got shut down. So it didn't last super long.

And probably one of the more infamous rides at Action Park is the Alpine Slide. It was the longest running Action Park attraction, and it was the first one built. It was a long, a long shoot on the side of a mountain that caused many, many major perils and injuries. It was ironically referred to as the safest ride there. Because because because because because park officials would talk to like the media and say like, no, it's safe. We saw a 90 year old grandma carrying a baby right down the slide. So that was the lie they kept using. Yeah, which is also very, very frightening to hear because these tracks were made out of concrete fiber fiberglass and asbestos.

Well, and also I am absolutely certain being the man that he was, if you'd called something the safest ride at his park, Jean would take it as an insult. Yeah, sure. Like how how dare you how dare you say that about my child. So like the windy bumpy track was made out of concrete cement fiberglass and asbestos. So anyone who took a anyone who took like even a minor hit tended to get like very bad like friction burns on their skin because you're rubbing on all these rough materials. And also like they were usually just wearing bathing suits. Like they didn't have much clothes on. This the sled had two speeds very slow because you're breaking the whole time or bullet fast like insanely quick.

And also the Alpine in order to get to the top of the Alpine slide, you need to get on the ski lift, which we are we already talked about with like the fake tasing, you know, the ski lift, same thing. But on the ski lift up, people would like play games, games such as like spitting on the people on the slide and trying to trying to hit them. Or when you're riding up the ski lift, you would like strap your sled onto the side. And what you would also do is try to drop your hard sled on people right down the slide. See, it's a whole theme park where everybody thinks the way I do it theme parks. This was this was I had a home at one point, Garrison. I had a home and I never got to see it.

Ever got to see it. This was a daily occurrence, people dropping their like 20 pounds. Literally, what else are you going to do? 20 pounds sleds on people riding down. So at the top of the slide, there was a gallery of bloody pictures of people who rode the ride previously. Oh, my God. And on your little slide, you had you had like a stick break, which almost never worked. Yeah, why no, I would that's the least important thing in the entire park is the brakes on anything. You really need the break to turn on the slide. So you're just going to fly off break. If you're a coward, Garrison, your brakes are the other

people on the ride. That's how you make it work. You use their bodies as a break. That did happen frequently. I'll bet even if you did break properly, the bumps could still send you flying off into like Rocky. It's like around the slide, it was like a mountain. It wasn't like soft grassy. It wasn't soft grassy hills. It was a rocky mountain. Yeah. There's the pile of rocks. So I bet they were soft rocks. It's the Appalachians, right? That's not the hard mountains. Broken collar bones, broken arms, many concussions. On an on an average day, there was 50 to 100 people injured on the slide. Double on the weekends. What an incredible place. But it's OK. You've got that brewery right there. You break your

collar bone, you go get fucked, and you can ride back on the horse that bitches. You can probably find acid from like a 14-year-old who's riding, who's like operating the water slide. Yeah. I feel like you would have to work to not buy acid from a 14-year-old at Action Park. That would be an achievement. You'd go back home and was like, yeah, I went to Action Park and I did not buy drugs from a child. It's like going to Guatemala. Near near the bottom of the Alpine slide was a so-called infirmary shack, specifically for slide related injuries. Inside the shack, there was a white there was a small white circle on the ground. And to help prevent infection after, you know, bad friction burns, they had a special spray,

which was just alcohol and iodine, that they would that employees would spray onto the open wounds caused by the slide. Now, if you could stay inside the circle as the employees sprayed you, you would win a prize. And if you ever had a big like traction burn or anything, if you ever had one try to get cleaned, especially by any like alcohol-based spray, you can imagine how extremely painful this would be. Like some of the worst pain you can imagine. Oh yeah. So one employee recounts over the three years they worked there, only two people ever stayed in the circle. And remember, there's like 50 to 100 people getting injured on weekdays, double on weekends. So only two people stayed in the circle over this employee's time working. And the prize was an

action park pen. So that's, oh boy, that's fun. That's that's worth it. Yeah. And here's where things get to start to get a little actually get darker. The Alpine slide was the first was the site of the first death at at the park. Okay. 19 year old George Larson Jr. was at action park with his family on July 8 to 1980. He was riding the Alpine slide and got thrown off the track and his head struck a nearby rock. After several days in a coma, he died. Gene Mulville tried to cover up the death by saying Larson was an action park employee and he snuck in at nighttime and it was raining when the accident happened. None of that is true. But this meant that since Gene claimed he was an employee who died, he did not need to report the death to state regulators. So

he just, oh wow, lied. So he didn't have to report it. That's very libertarian. You still see this lie reported in a lot of media about action park. You still see this lie repeated. Yeah, that an employee died. The first death was an employee snuck in at night, which just did not happen. So the Alpine slide only caused one death that we know of, but it was responsible for most of the lawsuits and around 40 percent of the citations against action park. Yeah, it was also one of the last rides to get shut down when the park closed. So now that wraps up the Alpine Center and now we're going to go on to Waterworld, the final area of the park. And oddly enough, the first Waterworld attraction we're going to talk about has nothing to do with water. It's

actually a skydiving simulator. There was a skydiving simulator like wind tunnel outdoors that was invented in Germany in 1984. The first one was moved to the States in 1987 at Action Park. Riders wore special diving suits, helmets, and earplugs, and they had an instructor there who would help you get over this giant trampoline with a fan, essentially. Most injuries at the skydiving simulator came because riders would instinctively try to break their falls by extending their arms. I used to be a parkour instructor. That's pretty common when people fall and they don't know how to. They try to use their arms and you get a lot of dislocated shoulders, wrists. Yeah, you're supposed to tuck and roll, right? Yeah, or just throw in

yourself out of the vehicle. Even landing flat on your back is better than landing on your arm. So yeah, this caused a lot of shoulder, the ride caused a lot of shoulder dislocation, severed nerves, and it almost caused some permanent arm paralysis and a few guests. But now on to the most famous, albeit short-lived, Action Park attraction, the Cannonball Loop. This one was designed on a napkin. Good, good. So we're off to a great start. You know how there's roller coasters that do a little loop-de-loop thing? You know, like the basic thing. It's fun, you know, a little loop-de-loop. Now, what is that, but water slide? Now, if you're saying, but that's not how water works, because you can't shoot

water up the thing unless you have like a hose running through it, which you didn't have, that doesn't matter, because Gene drew a little loop-de-loop on an napkin and then built the swatter slide. In the initial testing, he put down like crash test dummies, and the dummies came out with like missing limbs and heads. And then when they move on to human testing, Gene offered employees $100 to ride the Cannonball Loop, which was like... Will you be my flesh mannequin? It's like $300 in today's money. So if you're a teenager... No, it's not nothing. You could buy like, I don't know, 20 tabs with that or something. It's great, it's a great deal. I mean, and just speaking from a libertarian point of view, there's no greater joy

than handing children money to endanger their own lives. That's really, that's the peak of that ideology. So the Cannonball Loop never caused super bad injuries, actually. It's surprising how much it functioned because it was just drawn on a napkin. Because it looks like, look at a picture of the Cannonball Loop. It's like a Looney Tunes ride. It's out of its mind. So there were like, you know, concussions and stuff, but like, you know, it's a concussion. It's bad, but you know, it's not the worst. And there were some very unhappy testicles from having to like loop up, and then your body hits, you know, the side of the thing. Yeah. Don't feel great afterwards. But the ride was deemed safe enough by Gene. And you know, the sheer, just impossible nature of the

construction was too enticing to pass up. Yeah, no, you have to try it. Yeah. So right before you, when the ride opened, right before you got on, they would have like a garden hose to spray you down to help make you more slippery. They should have lubed people up. They should have lubed people up. Got in those big 50 gallon jugs of horse lube. Yeah. Initially, there was no padding at the top of the slide. This caused a lot of injuries, like smashing your head to the top of the loop. But then some foam padding was added. The next issue is that riders kept exiting the slide with bizarre cuts and scratches on their body. When the slide was inspected, they realized that human teeth were found stuck in the home padding from people smashing their heads in the top.

It's an incredible detail. Just other people's teeth are embedded so deeply in it that the teeth are biting passengers after them. Oh, my God. The cannonball loop was... Again, the only thing I would change if I were running Action Park was for everyone to be covered in lube at all time. It would have made the park a bit sick. That would have gotten rid of those deaths. Yeah. Yeah. So the loop was only open for a little over a month in the summer of 1985 before the state's advisory board on Carnival Amusement Safety ordered its closure. Too many teeth. You can't have this many teeth in a paintball cry. Got to get this number of teeth down by half. So moving on to other kind of bizarre water slides, there was one called the Aqua Scoot

where riders would have hard plastic sleds at the top of the attraction and go down a curved open slide. But on the track, they had little metal rollers. You have a factory assembly line, so you would roll across these on the sled and then try to skip yourself like a stone over a puddle at the bottom. So it was like you're a stone skipping, but you're the stone. If you weren't positioned just right, you would immediately face plant and the pool was not very deep. It was only like a foot deep. So you would slam into the bottom of this little puddle. Also, there was a beast nest inside the slide. He just couldn't help himself. I have to believe that every interaction of wildlife with injured people is purposeful. Was Jean being like, what else

could I stick in here? Fucking beast nest. One of the rides that looks actually super cool was called the Colorado River Ride. It was a group inner tube ride that was a white water rafting simulator. Now it began life as a lazy river ride. And Jean was like, you know what's more fun than a lazy ride? Not with action in the lazy river. It's white water. It's class four rapids. So early human test pilots came out of this ride unconscious. So the intensity was slightly turned down, but it was still a very intense ride. And Jean purposely removed all of the lifeguards there because, quote, there are no lifeguards at the Colorado River. Well, there you go. There you go. I mean, fair enough, my man. Fair enough. Incredible. There aren't, Jean. You are correct.

Nearby were the diving cliffs, like 25 and 15 feet tall cliffs over a freshwater pool. The pool was about 16 feet deep. Because the whole inspiration for Action Park was like, Jean says it was like the nature that he grew up in. And he figured if kids couldn't go into real nature, his park could be the next best thing. So this just meant, you know, a Colorado River Ride and jumping off cliffs. On the cliff-jumping one, you would often land on top of people because, you know, the danger of the ride was that the section of the pool where people landed wasn't blocked off at all. And people would just jump off without caring about what's under them. So there's a lot of collisions. And, you know, you're climbing people

over top of a 16 foot pool and people do not know how to swim. Now, of course, shoulders will get constantly dislocated. And the water was much deeper than expected. Eventually, they had to paint the bottom of the pool white. So it was easy to see bodies. Sure. Because it's just hard to tell with, you know. You know, you're running a good theme park when the sentence, so it was easier to see bodies, is added to an explanation of like one of your engineering changes. Now, diving cliffs were not the only place of attraction. There was another one where you're riding on the cliffs called Surf Hill. It was basically a giant slip-and-slide on a mountain. The original concept was to jump off a cliff and land on the side to continue the

ride. This idea was abandoned due to space limitations. But Surf Hill got its airborne wish via other means. So you had like little plastic mats to ride on. And employees would slide extra mats onto the slide to make the jumps and ramps bigger and more extreme. Eventually, a guest got too much air and broke their neck upon landing. And guests would, you know, slide down the slip-and-slope and land in this little puddle area. There was like 10 lanes, but there wasn't many like barriers to speak of between the lanes. So either there'd often be like criss-crossing and collisions on the slide itself. The seventh lane was particularly dangerous because that's the one that employees would stick the mats under. When Jean discovered that the

force of hitting the water at the bottom of Surf Hill could tear off bathing suits, he immediately took action by building a grandstand spectator section so people could watch... Oh, Jean. Every time I start to think he's not a great guy, he just does the best thing he could possibly do. So people could watch teenagers get their tops ripped off. Jean, what a perfect Libertarian. He is checking all of the boxes. He is the platonic ideal of a Libertarian. You've got borderline child molestation. You've got child labor. You've got paying people to endanger their own bodies. You've got a complete contempt for any sort of safety regulations. You've got everything Libertarians love. He's like their Zeus.

Yeah. Park employees often would sit by a nearby snack shack that offered a good view of Surf Hill, just excited to see all the injuries and lost bikini tops. Goddammit, Jean. Oh, man. Another water slide called Cannonball Falls, which is a completely covered water slide leading into a massive 10-foot drop into a pool. According to a former Action Park guest, there's a cluster of four or five short waterslides that ended by shooting you into a lake. Various kids would fly out at various times, landing on top of each other mid-air, or sometimes landing on a sharp rock nearby, because you wouldn't line up the jump correctly. Sure, right. Often, lots of these tunnels

had very abrupt 90-degree turns, not a 45-degree turn, so you would slam into a wall and keep going to the force of the water and just toss you in a different direction. It would shoot your young, gnarled body into a gooey pool full of crying kids and water snakes. It was awesome. Amazing. That's the end of the quote. They had another whitewater rafting ride called the Roaring Rapids. This one had rafts that they were trying to replicate a mountain swimming hole. Jean turned up the intensity to make it another class four rapids simulator. There was a responsible for report after report to noting fractured bones and dislocated body parts. There were also exposed bolts on the

underside of the tunnel and lots of traffic in the forks of the path that would cause people to get stuck. Yeah, there was fractured femurs, collar bones, broken nose into dislocated shoulders and knees all were inside reports filed by Action Park, just in 1984. They had a very steep waterslide called the Super Speed Waterslide, which was almost like a completely vertical drop where you would have to... Park employees would say they actually give instructions for this one because if you fell off, you would fall to your death very quickly. Sure. You got to have a teenager brush over what you're supposed to do to avoid that. Yeah. You would go super fast on this because it's a vertical drop. Most notably, it would shoot water up your ass and mess up your

junk. It was referred to by staff as the freshwater enema ride. So that's fun. Another popular traction was the Tarzan Swing. This was memorable for some good and bad reasons. It's exactly what it sounds like, a giant rope swing into a pool of water. If people held onto the rope too long, they would mess up their swing and go back into the jumping off point. That's just a problem with rope swings in general. The biggest cause of alarm, however, was the pool of water. It wasn't like a pool of water. This was a section of the mountain that River Runoff would go into. It was freezing cold. Lifeguards were forced to jump in and rescue people who forgot how to swim because they were so unprepared for the shock of the cold water.

Now, due to line placement, there was always a large crowd of spectators that would often heckle people currently on the ride. Park attendees recount the crowd chanting, Pussy! At bleeding injured riders after they climb out of this freezing pool. Also, the spectating area gave a great opportunity for people who were swinging to flash the nearby crowd with boobs or dicks. Oh, they had a kayaking simulator. It used giant submerged electronic fans underwater to help make turbulent conditions. The kayaks will often get stuck or tip over. And in 1982, someone fell out of a kayak, got too close to an exposed electrical wire in the underwater fan, and got electrocuted and died. This was the second visitor death in the history of

the park. The kayak ride closed shortly after. So someone got electrocuted because of underwater fans in 1982. And then around this time, they built one of the first wave pools in the country. So the wave pool was nicknamed the Grave Pool for reasons that will become clear very shortly. It was 100 feet wide by a 125 feet long pool that held between 500 and 1000 people, often like shoulder to shoulder. It's a nightmare. This was a wave pool designed by a not-to-engineer. The water was way too murky to see through. There was a mix of river runoff, body lotion, human waste, and other bodily fluids from open wounds. They got the waters really, really murky. The artificial waves would be like a few meters tall and they would go on for 20

straight minutes, which is way too long for a wave pool. That's not how we do wave pools. Usually it's like five minutes on, 10 minutes off or something. But 20 straight minutes of waves. That's plenty of time for a good swimmer to get into some serious trouble because you just keep getting hit by waves and the pool gets pretty deep. Visitors who could not swim well would quickly have water going over their heads. Experienced swimmers who were used to ocean water didn't realize that the pool was fresh water. It wasn't nearly as buoyant, which would make it a lot more exhausting to try to swim through. Every few minutes after the waves were done, they would clear out a particular section of the wave pool to scan for any bodies at the bottom. At the

special deep spot, they would clear everyone out to look for it. Former employees claimed that lifeguards at the wave pool would often claim 30 saves a day for each lifeguard. Your average lifeguard at a pool may only rescue one or two people an entire summer. I think there was 12 lifeguards on duty at the wave pool because it's massive. Easily one of the scariest attractions at the park. The first death happened in 1982, the same year of the kayaking death, and another guest drowned in 1987. Two deaths may not sound a lot, but that's the low tally, because lifeguards were saving so many people non-stop. There were 12 lifeguards on duty, saving about 30 people a day for each one of them. It's a nightmare because it was just so big,

so deep, so many people. Lifeguards and staff would then give out respans that say CFS, or can't fucking swim. If you have one of these, if you have one of these wristbeds on, you've probably already gotten saved that day. Also, in 1984, a man had a heart attack shortly in the Tarzan Swing pool. The cold water believed to send him into shock, and then he died in the pool because of just how cold it was. It triggered a heart attack. Then a few years later, in slightly related news, this isn't action park's fault, but I think it's worth mentioning, there was a bus crashed on the way to the park, killing five people on the highway. Were they headed to the park? Yeah, they were going to the park and it crashed. This adding on

to this press about the park. To a certain point, the more danger and death were reported in media, the more the local kids and teens just wanted to go because the magic and horror of action parks that you could leave with all of your dreams of fun and adventure and freedom come true, or you could leave in a body bag. It's this allura. It's what everyone really wants, is a chance to risk your life and also not travel more than a couple hours from home. Yeah. It's hard to say how many people actually got hurt here. The state only requires the park to report serious injuries, quote unquote. So unless you left an ambulance. Yeah, and we already know that he did. Decapitation wasn't the serious injury to this guy. So yeah. Unless you left an

ambulance, it was almost certainly not going to be reported. But stories like three months in the hospital and a six months in a body cast, and the same day we got there, a guy got stuck on the cannonball loop, another person broke their neck cliff diving. We're not uncommon. Those were common sentiments people would say, not to mention hundreds or thousands of dislocated joints, broken bones and concussions. According to Newsweek, quote, from an emergency room, a doctor at a nearby hospital, they claimed they admitted nearly five to 10 people a day from action park. Sometimes interesting reported. Awesome. Yeah. So injuries included like ankle sprains, broken bones, cuts, concussions, dislocations and head wounds. So five to 10 people in the

emergency room per day. And actually, the Vernon, New Jersey ambulances had to stop serving action park because they would keep busy the park all day. The city forced a gene to buy two of its own ambulances to have its own action park ambulance fleet. Oh my God. And I bet there's nothing that Gene was more responsible with than owning his own emergency services crew. The majority of police calls for Vernon in the day were for action park. There were many fights, many brawls, because you know, parks are due to the sheer abundance of alcohol. Now you may be thinking, wow, this park seems pretty dangerous. I bet their insurance bills are pretty expensive. Well, no, not really. Here's a quote from Seth, from Seth Porges,

the journalist who done most of the work on action park, quote, Gene didn't believe in the concept of insurance. Yeah, this guy is like the Archon of Libertarianism. He's their captain planet. Ayn Rand and her five best friends all got special rings. And then being a Libertarian, he abandoned them to make action park immediately. Gene thought if you got hurt, you should deal with that problem yourself. It wasn't his problem to deal with. Sure. But technically, he needed like insurance to run the park. So he did what any true Libertarian would do. He made his own fake insurance company in the Cayman Islands. He also used his fake insurance company in the Cayman Islands as a money laundering

scheme. Sure. Yeah, of course. Look, he already said he was a Libertarian. When a park manager told Gene, like the state says we can't do that. Gene replied, well, who the hell are they? They can't shut us down. Oh, Gene. Oh, you beautiful, beautiful animal. Surprisingly, this led creepy monster. Surprisingly, this led to a large scale federal investigation. Yeah, that's usually how large scale federal investigations start. That's that's generally the way. In the wake of the two deaths in 1984, they investigated action park and found all of these like financial fraud elements. This resulted in a three day hearing and a 110 count indictment. Gene refused to testify or appear in court. But through his lawyer, he eventually put guilty to counts of fraud, theft,

and conspiracy. And he was instructed to give up control of action park since some of it was operated on state land. So he hatched a new scheme. He decided to be the worst tenant he possibly could. He stopped paying bills and filing paperwork for all of his rent to the state because the state owned some of the land. He just stopped paying. He did everything he could to piss off the state landowners he was renting from. Look, the government can't own land, Garrison. The only people who can own land are weird Libertarians. He just didn't pay hundreds of thousand dollars in rent. And somehow this worked. By the mid 80s, the state got so fed up with Gene that they agreed to sell him the land for eight for eight hundred thousand dollars just to get him out of

the way, which he did. So then eventually he owned all the land action park was on because he just stopped paying rent. The state was like, fine, you buy it. How much was rent? It's unclear the exact amount, but it's a multiple hundred thousand multiple of hundreds of thousand dollars he just didn't pay. And they were like and they were like eight hundred. This is fine. Yeah, exactly. So it was it was probably around. He was that annoying that they were squeaky wheel with a lot of you who fires a bunch. Yeah, that's great. Like it's it's action park became like an important part of the local economy for Vernon. You know, it brought a lot of people into this small. Yeah, what else are you doing in Vernon, New Jersey? Yeah, like other businesses had

interests in keeping the park open and having good press. Gene would bribe public officials. He bought politicians houses. Sure. And he found a lot of ways to put people on his payroll, you know, because like he was employing because he was also employing all of their kids like all of their kids worked for Gene. And according to local reporters who personally knew Gene, specifically like got became friends with him at the end of his life, he was most certainly involved with the mob. There was a lot of sketchy friends Gene had and he would say a lot of like weird concerning things. He would he would have to make jokes with high level employees. Yeah, I mean, this is the guy who heard that teenagers were having their bathing suits ripped off and

said, Well, let's find a way for people to watch creepy creepy skates. I'm not surprised. He would have to make jokes with high level employees about how like certain managers in the new world, the bodies are buried. It's like they couldn't betray him. So like he said a lot of you know, those weren't jokes. Yeah, no. So with a fake insurance company, six deaths and an unknown but very high number of of injuries, you expect a lot of people to sue Action Park for damages. And they tried but barely anyone ever succeeded. If you tried to sue Action Park, Gene would always refuse to settle. He would take you to trial every single time and he would make the trial as long and as painful as possible. Action Park would win about 93% of cases and he got such a reputation

of being hard to sue that most lawyers just didn't even bother. And even when he lost cases, he just wouldn't pay multiple times US Marshal. Yeah, he doesn't pay the government rent. He's not paying you because he killed his kid times armed US Marshals came to the Action Park a lot to collect money. And like they like got to know some of the employees like the police be like, Oh, no, Greg's here again with the Marshals. All right, someone someone go get Gene. We got to we got to get a check or something. It's the US Marshals. Tommy Lee Jones is here with Robert Downey Jr. That was a US Marshals. It's a good movie. Okay, okay. That was such a great visual. There are like one or two incidents that Gene did have to settle related to like certain deaths,

but it was it was settling out of court mostly just to shut people up. And for not very much money, like I think the first death he settled for only like $50,000. So yeah, but the death, danger, and scandal of Action Park didn't immediately affect the park's ability to operate. And like unlike the actual death at Action Park, Action Park's Action Park's own death was like various, it was a very slow process. The 90s recession hit Action Park pretty hard. And then the 80s, Gene's parent company, Great American Recreation, actually opened two spin-off locations that they weren't quite as wild as the original. And both of those were forced to shut down in the early 90s. And as the 80s came to a close and people started growing up, the danger of Action Park became less

appealing to the new generation of parents. And the bad press deaths and lawsuits piled up and it started impacting the park's attendance in like the mid 90s. Yeah, people, they got what the problem is, Garrison. They took the lead out of the gasoline and parents started caring about their kids doing things as opposed to just just wanting them away. Yeah. That's when everything went wrong in American society, if you ask me. The real kicker was when Gene's business partner, Bob Brennan, was found guilty of fraud and money laundering and sentenced to 10 years in prison. So Gene's magical money tree ran out. And by 1995, Action Park declared bankruptcy. And at the end, their last operating season was the next summer. So then Action Park closed its

gates in 1996. So the political circle that Action Park was able to exist in had come to an end. Two years later, the ski resort and the park grounds were bought by another amusement park company named Introwest. Most of the old Jerry-rigged attractions were ripped out and it was renamed Mountain Creek. It became a generic small town ski resort, golf course, and water park. But the story isn't over just yet. In 2010, Introwest itself had to declare bankruptcy and sell Mountain Creek Water Park and the ski resort. And Gene, who is now in his late 70s, decided he wanted his theme park back. So he led a group of investors to gain control of the park again and he succeeded. But before he could fully enjoy turning Action Park back into, before he could turn Mountain

Creek back into Action Park, he died in 2012. He shouldn't have lasted into the 21st century. No, he was 78 years old. He died in his home in 2012. Two years later, in 2014, Gene's son, Andy, partially capitalizing on nostalgia, revived the Action Park name and added a few more kind of more actiony attractions and announced plans for a new updated version of the cannonball loop designed by real engineers. That did not happen. They're not actually building it. Because in 2017, the park filed for bankruptcy again. And then here later, ownership changed hands once more. A Vernon native and former Action Park employee, Joe Hesson, who worked at the park for 18 years, bought controlling and then he went on to become like a snowboarding business man or whatever.

He bought controlling shares in Action Park and he will have, he has exclusive year-round oversight of the park's ski resort and water park operations and he is the new CEO. But as of 2018, Mountain Creek was still in like $28 million in debt to the state. Mountain Creek is open, but it's like a boring golf course with a few water slides. It's not Action Park anymore. It's a totally different thing. It's a ski resort with a few other attractions. That's kind of the end of Action Park. In the last few years, it's gotten more popular on the internet. I know last year, there was an HBO documentary came out made by Seth Porges, who I only found after I did tons of research for this episode. I'm like, oh, someone already did a really

good job detailing this. That's convenient. It's a great documentary. You can find a whole bunch of weird articles on this. I would recommend you read the New Jersey Magazine article on it. It's just hilarious. That is the place that I wish I could live at. It sounds like a blast. It's everything that I actually want from libertarianism plus a bunch of things I don't want, which is what libertarian, it's always what you get. This is why he's described. It's a mix of iron rand and Lord of the Flies. It's like all of the things combined to make this weird 80s specific place that is almost like a fever dream. That is the story of Action Park. Probably the world's most dangerous amusement park. Not the amusement park with the most deaths,

but the most serious injuries, absolutely. It's shocking how few people we have reported died there based on how ridiculous a lot of these riots were. It's got to be because everyone was drunk enough that they hit limp. The one thing I understated is how many places you could get alcohol for mostly free over Action Park. So many alcohol stands. They would just give it to 14-year-old kids. It's just an absurd amount of booze. Well, you can't buy this. Have it for free. Look, the law says you can't purchase alcohol. It doesn't say you can't give it to you. It doesn't say it's nothing about drinking it. Get on them, go-karts. What's the state going to do? Stop me? They can't do that.

So, yeah, that's that. Last feds they sent died on the cannonball. Anyway, that is the episode. We ran a little bit long just because there's so much to talk about, but yeah. I've never loved anyone more. I've never been more horrified by the thought of meeting somebody. No, he sounds real creepy. His voice sounds exactly what you think his voice sounds like. Think of what we've all said. Now imagine him talking. You got it. That's it. You got his voice. Yeah. Well, do you have any pluckables, Garrison? You can find me posting about Catboy made rave outfits on Twitter.com at Hungry Bowtie. You do post about that stuff a lot. I do now. It's real fun. Yeah, just mainly Twitter,

I guess, at Hungry Bowtie and read that weird New Jersey article because it is hilarious. Yeah. Yeah. And shout out to Dan O'Brien, the only person from New Jersey I've agreed to know. All right. Well, welcome to the end of Behind the Bastards, the podcast that's over now. Goodbye. Bye. What would you do if the secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much

time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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