Podcast: The Ride - Action Park with Seth Porges

Episode Date: September 18, 2020

Class Action Park co-director and producer Seth Porges stops by to discuss New Jersey’s infamous Action Park. = Casamigos Tequila episode up at The Second Gate: Patreon.com/PodcastTheRide FOLLOW PODCAST: THE RIDE: https://twitter.com/PodcastTheRide https://www.instagram.com/podcasttheride BUY PODCAST: THE RIDE MERCH: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/podcast-the-ride PODCAST THE RIDE IS A FOREVER DOG PODCAST https://foreverdogpodcasts.com/podcasts/podcast-the-ride Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Forever. Dog. Warning. The following podcast contains things that make good boys very uncomfortable. Danger. Injuries. High-powered weapons. And most importantly, rude teens.

It's Action Park with Class Action Park Director Seth Borges on today's podcast, The Ride. Welcome to Podcast The Ride, a theme park podcast that will not be held legally responsible if listeners die from laughing. I'm Scott Gairdner. I take no responsibility. Mike Carlson does not either. Yeah, and I also don't take responsibility for anything that I do in my life i'm reckless now that's just that's that's a thing of what happened from the europe trip i think i wouldn't i didn't mention it but now i'm mentioning it anyway jason sheldon's here i'm here and i guess we should uh you know

mention we like a cruise ship that is docked in like a country that is constantly changing governments we are incorporated in the country from the terminal that no longer exists anymore. So we cannot be held liable. That's right. And while we can't remember the name of it, it is legally listed on a legal document. It just says the country from the terminal.

And yeah, if there's any legal beef with us, take it up with our holding company there, Manhattan and global absolvings Inc. It is a completely legitimate company with a very fancy name. And you, you know, to take it up with them, we do, we do have insurance, but we will not give you uh any of it um this is all we uh we today are talking about uh a notorious the notorious action park uh which somehow we has alluded us uh for the years we've been doing this podcast we're finally there you know how it's

alluded us it's because it was so dangerous and it's just we i think the three of us as you know everyone a good we're too good we would have been scared of this we wouldn't even be like it would have just like not even we wouldn't have acknowledged its existence because we would have never gone our my parent my mother i wasn't allowed to go to a normal water park i don't know why she would have like like duct taped me to a chair to keep me from going yeah if i sensed that a group trip was forming like oh i think i think there's a you know all the the boys choir or something i was in is all going to action park i would have just like well do i fake an illness uh what is my do i quit the boy choir before this has to happen what is my plan to get out of action park nervous crying into

nervous vomiting that was that always worked for me the chase and secret well it's a scary uh topic for us and so we need uh somebody to lead us through it. And I think we have just the person in action park experts. He is the co-director and producer of the documentary class action park. Now streaming on HBO max. Seth Porges is with us. Hello, Seth. Hey,

it's, it's awesome to be here. Yeah. So happy to have you. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Are you appalled by our point of view, by us,

but our good boy is working its way and like that, how there's, I think there's no chance that the three of us would have set foot in that. I don't want to speak for Jason maybe, but I think we would have been very scared of this place. If you can't handle a haunt and you can't handle a launch coaster the chances of handling an asbestos laden alpine sled that would leave half of your skin at the top of a ski resort in New Jersey it's probably out of the question well now while we let's point out we've made progress in these areas as I've just been

through I'm I am a launch queen and mike loves haunts and i love haunts now i will say though this may be like if this was still around this is maybe a decade later where i get there maybe maybe it's like i can feel the progression but i still don't think it's right right it would be right around the corner um let's just in case anybody doesn't know this just real quick what we're talking about this was a very dangerous water park. That's probably the most, probably the most dangerous, the most dangerous time in New Jersey.

I mean, yeah, the very basics of it that, yeah, it was in Vernon, New Jersey, many lawsuits, some deaths,

unfortunately. And it's developed this notoriety. And I feel like especially, I don't think that I ever heard of this place pre-2015. And somewhere around that point, there was a tipping point where suddenly I'm aware of it. It comes up every once in a while. I don't know if it was just like everyone was ready to be nostalgic for it,

but suddenly you're seeing articles and videos. And I think the things you were involved with seth uh that uh you know mentioned this place and all the crazy stories and the loop the crazy looping slide that is sort of the emblematic image reading you at the entrance of the park like a demented cinderella's castle the first thing you see when you walk up to the park the icon of the park a giant enclosed tube looping water slide that just instantly scrambles your brain because it makes no sense and when you saw people come go down it they would come out facing a different direction and that doesn't make any sense because what happens how does that happen it's very strange it's to be seen

understand yeah it really feels like i'm i'm just gonna say i'm just i'm sure it's this strange right it's to be seen to understand yeah it really feels like i'm i'm just gonna say i'm just i'm sure it's this is not an original thought but it feels like some a five-year-old made a roller coaster tycoon park the whole park and it's like the whole park like that and like they didn't put any thought into it and like it's like guests are complaining that they're getting dumped out the side of a of a inner tube or no thoughts but a ton of imagination so imagine like going there as a six or seven year old and you're used to parks where sort of like the laws of common sense and you know physics like regulate and dictate what rides you can have there and you

go to action park and all of your wildest fantasies like the things you would see in like itchy and scratchy land in the simpsons are like suddenly in front of you. And it's, it just, it messes with your head. Like you feel like anything, anything is possible when you walk up there and that's like in the air. And so it's not just these crazy slides. It's this,

this general sense of possibility and chaos and violence kind of like conspire to just put people in this mindset where they do things that they would never in the normal world normally do well and watching the footage like the the period footage you have in the documentary like as as someone who like reads and watches this stuff a lot everything was just a little off like it's like that's not how water slide like that ski lift is awfully close to that alpine racing thing like there's just little aesthetic things of like oh usually like raft rides that four people ride in there is a series of lifeguards going down and they use hand signals to say okay send another one this one. This one is clear.

And that just does just didn't happen. That next, next, next, next. And if you want to go down like six buddies at a time and get like clogged up in the tube, like that would, that would just happen.

That's like what life was like there and everything there. You're right. It's all these slides. You look at it now and you kind of seen versions of this, like Typhoon Lagoon or a normal water parks. But what made Action Park different was it was earlier. It was one of the first three or four water parks in the country, modern water parks country.

So you had like Schlitterbahn, you had Wet and Wild, you had Disney's River Country, and you had Action Park. First four water parks in the country. And so it's just kind of very early and sort of like the evolutionary tree. Like nobody knew what a water park was. So they're trying trying out all these ideas many of them not yet perfected and so they all kind of had issues and now you look at and it's like that's that's not right that's just like not right yeah i wrote i recall from learning about schlitterbahn and wet and wild how and i don't remember which is which but i know like there was there was a time where there

were parks operating for a long time before they figured out oh here's a softer material to make the slides out of don't just tear people's knees apart obviously there's a lot of trouble that is specific to action park but you're you're that's interesting context you're giving us that it was it was sort of a wild west of an area in general the water park it was a wild west and all of those parks like except for disney's river country clearly but like schlitterbahn and wet and wild and action park were all run by these kind of really big iconic personalities and there's this great like grantland article about this kind of weird frenemy relationship between the schlitterbahn and the wet and wild guy

the action park guy was like 10 times like crazier than than those guys and all these rides coming to action park we talk about in the movie but it was it was literally just like some random employee has an idea and they build it or the owner has an idea or they so they build it or they go to like iapa like an industry convention and instead of like the big display booths where like the real legit manufacturers are they go to like the little tables in the back where some dude has a doodle and it's like a ball that rolls down a hill and they decide to build it even though no prototypes had ever been built before and so you get all these strange rides that were just kind of you know thrown at a wall and what's going to work it's very like old timey coney island the way when you see you have to do

an episode in some way like like actually getting specific about, you know, like that weird footage you see where it's 20 people in full, thick wardrobe, all like on like a vibrating floor, like being slammed against walls. I'd like to know what that is and where it comes from and what the hell happened. But it feels like for the 1970s when there are more polished disney parks it feels extremely like there's never been a park of any kind before yeah it's like they're starting again it's like you know like this was yeah decades

after disneyland disney world was already there and this was in many ways like a direct response to the rise of orlando as a theme park destination. Like the owner was literally saying to himself, like, okay, Orlando is all the way down there. We're right next to New York City. We're right next to Philadelphia. We're not that far from Boston. Like half the country is within like a day's drive of here. Why don't we build Disney World here?

And so they had the ski resort. And of course, a ski resort in new jersey has like a three month long season like nothing right and so he wants something to within the summer and so they dreamed of building this four seasons resort it would be a ski resort in the winter and action park in the summer and in order to build it they would you know it was mostly funded via like a penny stock scam so they would call up like grandmas eating dinner at their table saying we're gonna build orlando in new jersey and that's how action park was built yeah i it's funny the scam stuff is very interesting to me like it's always interesting to us it's like an evergreen topic on this show but uh at the start of this documentary i thought you know uh mulville

the the guy behind action park he was going to join the pantheon of like you know john binkowski kind of miss the hard rock park guy kind of misguided but like i was optimistic or like david hare like completely delusional uh but mulville has a body count the other guys don't have like blood as literal blood on their hands uh dubious claim to fame yeah this is the second episode where the phrase near decapitation will be uttered though i mean i think that's worth but that was dog patch usa before david hare for all the things you could fault david hare for he didn't put up the wire that almost killed that guy. You guys like the dog patch episode? I was just like so tense.

Like, when are they going to get to the decapitation? Like, when's the decapitation coming? The answer was two and a half hours in. Exactly. You know it's coming. It's like, when's the trip wire and the off? And like, it has to come. It has to come. When are they getting to the fireworks factory?

Yeah, exactly. When's the fireworks factory coming? Wait, so you knew about Dogpatch. So is this your interest in weird, shady, dangerous parks extends, I guess, beyond just action parks. Yeah, I got a shady

theme. Do you guys know about Spree Park, by the way? This is... I know. Okay, it was this park in germany and it was like the only amusement park in east germany during the cold war and then after the cold war it was purchased by this guy who used it as a vessel to ship large amounts of cocaine inside ride vehicles so he'd be like transporting like carousel horses and they'd just be like loaded with cocaine uh it's like a totally wild story yeah oh my god that's wild that's like what robert evans was doing on the set of popeye with what mannequins oh yeah is that right uh i believe it was man yeah

yeah and and then like um you know hiding it in his his trunks and having to falsify a letter from henry kissinger that's a second gate one yeah there's a second gate episode clear but there's a park i think it's in germany that's built in a decommissioned nuclear reactor like the simpsons style like smokestack is like the center of the park and you're like in rides in the middle of it wild stuff out there man do you know anything is it cool is it a good point i bet i i hope it's cool and not very very hot honestly it's probably much yeah yeah yeah um i so do you do you have i'm gonna assume the answer is yes do you have like sort of a maybe a mount rushmore of these figures who have started these parks because these people are fascinating i think it's interesting because walt's shadow looms large and i think everyone in their own head thinks i'm gonna be

the walt disney of new jersey or i'm gonna be the walt like that's always fascinating to me how i think these people are reaching for that like yeah well well gene wovenhill the guy who created action park he was like trying like directly in many ways modeling so what i like this he was friends he was friends with trump and uh what i like to basically say is like when trump decided he wanted to be like whatever politician his friend gene mulvihill decided he wanted to be walt disney so like the thought experiment is like really what would have happened if trump had opened an amusement park and i think that's like exactly how action park played out but there's you know we talked about in the movie how amusement parks theme parks in particular kind of these like

embodiments of these eccentric auteurs often people have like this vision for the world like a petri dish maybe for how they want the world to work they want to create this little lab and they want to just like throw people into it and walt disney had this like very specific idea of this like fantastical very safe uh tame place you have disneyland and then gene mobil hill's vision was like anarchy and chaos and like lord of the flies and that's what action park was right and his background seems like it's stock trader insane pace just like no rules i mean you you basically detail all this in the movie yeah it really he he got his vision it was realized yeah he was you know he was this kind of you know

like jordan belfort era wall street kind of guy who was breaking all these rules and that's kind of like par for the course at that time in that place and he gets banned for life by the sec uh but prior to that he you know he had his hands in all sorts of businesses and he kind of buys up these ski resorts for cheap and basically decides he's gonna turn vernon new jersey into this big time resort destination and he quickly realizes that this like small town uh you know if the sec can't stop him what's the town of vernon gonna do you know like This attitude of ask for forgiveness, not permission, break every rule in front of you. These small towns, even the state of New Jersey, was just so helpless. The wheels of regulation, the wheels of government

move so slow. So if he didn't have insurance one season, maybe he just conveniently forgot to file paperwork. By the time the state got around to realizing it or saying anything, the season would already be over. And you'd be like, well, what are you going to do? We can't undo that season. And as you mentioned before, for many years of operation, the park operated with a totally fake insurance company that the owner created based in the Cayman Islands with the amazing name of London and World Assurance.

I think I want to print t-shirts that say that. That's my favorite detail, the insurance company in the Cayman islands uh and the name the name of it stupid word soup name what the hell does that mean it reminds me of king features syndicate no yes the company that owns all those comic strip characters something's fancy if you put a stuffy word like crown or london in it. Yeah. I think it was like designed to be a pocket of Lloyd's of London, clearly. So like some clerk in New Jersey is going through papers. Like that sounds like an insurance company sort of, right?

Yeah, for sure. You mentioned Trump, another character that briefly shows up in the documentary and i appreciate you contextualizing new jersey at the time of like atlantic city had only gotten casino gambling uh legally uh uh you know in the early 80s or late 70s or so early early 70s early 70s yeah and one of the first uh casinos on the boardwalk was the playboy club so then hefner yeah opens the playboy club in in north jersey too which um it's kind of like north jersey is always close to new york it's always associated with being uh close to new york a few years ago i think chris christie started giving out casino permits for casinos in north jersey while casinos were struggling in South Jersey.

So there is always shady business going on financially there. And in the 80s and 90s, you could go to Seaside Heights or you could go to Wildwood Beach and just bungee jump off a crane. And what was under you was maybe a small plot of grass or just the beach, just the mile-long beach? Very brief story that is not in the movie that I don't think anybody really knows. So the owner of the park, he had one of the first bungee towers of the sort at Action Park. It was actually sponsored by Snapple. It was called the Snapple Bungee Tower or something. But he had partners and was an investor in some other bungee towers along the

jersey shore and one he was on like the outs with one of his business partners or investors and so he planned an overnight carmen san diego style heist of this bungee tower so he literally in the dead of night steals an entire bungee tower from the jersey shore and then drives off with it and the person like doesn't even know until the next morning the entire bungee tower from the Jersey Shore and then drives off with it and the person doesn't even know until the next morning. The entire bungee tower is gone. He stole the thing. What happened after that? What did he do about it?

This is who this guy was. In 1994, towards the end of Action Parks Life, MTV Beach House, Hampton's Beach House, the grind around the pool, all that stuff. The MTV wanted to build like a really stupid, ill-advised

water slide that would go from the roof of the beach house into the beach house swimming pool. And they had like four days to get the beach house ready from when they took possession of it to when the show began. So they're thinking like, who can we get to build this really shady water slide without permits, without zoning, without permission with Action Park.

So they call up Action Park. And Action Park, the whole team drives from New Jersey to Long Island, to the Hamptons, and constructs this really shady water slide that went from the roof of the MTV Beach House into the pool. And if you look online at videos and footage from the 94 Beach House, you can see this big Action Park sign they put next to the house. So the best video is probably the one of Lisa Loeb performing. You just see this action park sign behind her in all of the B shots. But then the kicker to the story is the park, Gene, he had to supposedly pay the lumber supplier in Long Island for the wood they were using to build it. And he just decided he wasn't going to. He basically was like they're in long island we're in new jersey what are they

going to do about it and apparently nothing that's there's a whole documentary in just yeah in just how much he just flaunts laws yes like i just am almost, I'm just kind of fascinated how that works because I think we've talked a little bit about the show about, you know, we're following rules and everything. And the idea, I'm assuming that you touch on about 5% of just the court cases and the, the lawsuits that he just ignores.

And then like 90% of them do kind of go away. It seems like it... Nothing stuck. Everything went away. The park when it shut down, it was never because of legal reasons. It was bankruptcy. It was never... They suffered virtually no fines. Their citations, their entire existence. Here's a great

story. Almost none of this is in the movie just because it's a tight 90. You gotta tell a story. Yeah, exactly. Okay. Almost none of this is in the movie just because it's a tight 90. You got to tell a story. Exactly. Next to the park, they had a parking lot. Connected to the parking lot was a gate. You can walk through that gate to this mom and pop

restaurant. The mom and pop restaurant was closing and McDonald's wanted to take over the site and build a McDonald's. Gene didn't want McDonald's to open up because he thought it would eat into all his concession sales. So what he does is he concocts a scheme. There's always a scheme. He sends one of his attack dog lieutenants

to a town council meeting. And he has them say the following. He says, here's what's going to happen if you allow McDonald's to open. We're going to shut the gate that allows people to walk from our parking lot to that restaurant in order to get there oh the first thing you gotta know also is that a major highway ran through the middle of the park called route 94 says what people are gonna have

to do is they're gonna have to walk on route 94 on icy roads in ski boots they will slip they will fall they will die and the blood will be on your hands if you allow mcdonald's to open and they did not allow mcdonald's to open wow this i mean that's crazy and my first thought is like not to get too political you know but like this is trump's running the government of course like it's just like fuck you don't i don't care and then like are you telling me that action park is are you saying that action park is america is that what you're telling me uh at least at the moment but also i i will say is for the first i was trump but then i'm thinking this isn't that dissimilar to what disneyland did in anaheim where they were going to build a bridge from a new parking structure that was across from

harbor and disney wanted not not uh to have a little area so or access point so people could go down on harbor and go to those businesses and anaheim said no they should be able to access those businesses and disney said fuck you we're not building it so it's not totally dissimilar i think we keep coming across all this odd legality and like shysters and tricks with these because theme parks are such massive undertakings. Like there's no way to get one made without at least a little sprinkling of shadiness and maybe a giant bucket full of it. Yeah.

You need like a little bit of Robert Moses in you. I think like get any of these places built. You just need to like steamroll over people. Well, it man barnum and not like greatest showman pt barnum like maniac pt barnum not not singing and dancing hugh jackman pt barnum like a racist lunatic pt barnum it's too different but waiting for the sequel with gene too it's like he there's a face to all of these stories but with for instance like disney and anaheim there's not like one hulking figure that's like a uh we want to build a parking garage and you're gonna pay for it and then we're

gonna collect all the money and not give it to you like there's not one guy making a weird demand like that it's a corporation so it doesn't have a face necessarily, but they, they didn't get away with it. And maybe this is sort of similar to, this is like how the DNC is like, is facelessly shady and they don't get away with as much as when it's just some asshole who like is right.

Where's it is proud to wear it. Yeah. It's me. I don't know. Come at me and then nobody does right yeah they're very gene and trump are very yeah very similar and like i don't know yeah we'll see if like none of this will stick to me and it kind of didn't yeah it's basically challenging them like what i can imagine like the anaheim tough like toughs like going to like

an anaheim council meeting and being like, Hey guys, here's what's going to happen. Here's the deal. It's all thing. We're going to pick up shop. Iger sends like the, his Beagle boys to a town council meeting. This is when they hire all those,

like the social clubs that like grow main streets. Oh yeah. Yeah. Some heads. This is what, this is their moment. This is what they've been waiting for. Time to activate them. Yeah, they've all been

lying dormant, sleeper souls. The Hells Angels that are outsourced to police, like, of course, the famous horrible incident at Altamont and the Rolling Stones. It's the Altamont of Disney. They call, like, what is it, like,

the Waltz Gang or whatever they're called. All these groups that are just busting heads you know you don't you don't mess with those guys they just call it the california adventure food and wine festival that is yeah it's it's wild but it's uh yeah it's interesting it just you could you feel it more when there's uh a maniac doing it one maniac yeah what a uh what what a maniac i mean he certainly like holds the the piece together and and um like boy hearing his hearing his voice is really you've got a couple little moments of his voice and it's it's also very trumpian and that like oh he doesn't like look you didn't character he doesn't like seem sleazy

from his appearance does he don't know extremely he looks't character he doesn't like seem sleazy from his appearance does he don't know extremely he looks uh kind of like a sleazebag what does he like sound like and then there's one i wait i wrote i don't i i only wrote it down so i couldn't do an impression but the phrase i wrote down is uh we we got skin you know it's a beautiful asset does that sound familiar from your movie? Yeah. Or am I hallucinating? We got skiing.

We got all these nice, beautiful places. You know, we're a valuable asset. That's what he said. Oh, it's skiing. I wrote it down like skin. And I was like, what does that mean? I didn't drop it off on slide. Skin.

That's what I wanted. Is he like harvesting the skin of these people? Or it's skiing. Not in our movie. Yeah. You can hear it in his voice and something about this place. I feel like just emanates it that the, there's a defunct land about action park and they,

he, Kevin ends it on a clip of like a local news and it's just an anchor, the news anchor being so sleazy to the correspondent. I know, I know the clip. It's just so gross. And it's like,

did this guy get fired? Yeah. And then it's just seems to emanate from action park. Yeah, absolutely. We talk in the movie a little bit about some like the hanky panky that was going down at that park. One of my favorite. So there was, you guys ever heard the term? I never heard this. movie um a little bit about some like the hanky panky that was going down at that park uh one of

my favorite so there was you guys ever heard the term i never heard this i don't know if this is like just an action park thing but they call it pool scarfing and that's like when you just like raid the bottom of pools for like jewelry and money and all that kind of stuff like that's how they would make up yeah these employees are paid like three bucks an hour like whatever minimum wage was in the early 80s. And so in order to augment their pay, they would just like, first of all, they go poolscarfing. So hunting for gold and money and all that stuff. But more than that, they were basically trained by their superiors on how to steal from cubbies when people were on rides.

So that was like part of the job experience. So theft was a huge problem, but it was almost all employees stealing from people while they like put all their stuff in the cubbies while they're on rides. Like a New Jersey Oliver twist gang stealing from cubbies. I can't wait to spend a day in the wave pool. And I'll certainly want all my gold jewelry in my pocket as I do. I wouldn't dream of... Now, hold on. If you're in a wave pool in New Jersey,

those gold chains, no one is... He mocked without them. It's more common than Scott thinks. There's a bunch of gold chains at the bottom of a New Jersey wave pool. The ratio of gold to skin. Yeah, the A-frame undershirt and and the the gold chain the communion the gold chain you got as a communion gift stays on in the

way aspiring mr t's everywhere they would okay so they had this thing you know like you go to disney world and like people take photos of you by the castle and they try to get you the photo so they would do that at action park where they take pictures of like you with basically these like girls dressed like mermaids they were all about just ripping off ip so it was like right after a little mermaid came out they would hire all these people dressed in like mermaid outfits and you did your photo taken and they try to sell you the photo but even if you didn't buy the photo they would still develop the photo because that's you know wasn't digital or anything back then so all the photos that went unsold the employees would take the ones with the most um just a visually large guests and they put them onto a wall that they labeled the wailing wall

so they just built this monument to it was just such a like that's what this place was man it was just a lot of respect going around sleaziness. I found an article saying how, or this is, this is just a quote from this might be sports illustrated when Jean discovered that the force of hitting the water at the bottom of surf hill could tear off bathing suits. He took immediate action by building a grandstand. So spectators could watch this teenage burlesque show.

No, it was Jean's first stop. morning was surf hill i was told so he personally would like do the rounds and wind up there they built an observation deck you can sort of see that in like the headbangers ball clips we use in the movie where it's just like a crowd of people overlooking it but that ride kind of looks a little innocuous it's like a big slip and slide on a mountain you go down this like mat the original design for that ride original concept was you're going to jump off of a cliff and that mat was going to catch you and then you just kind of coast the way down that was abandoned because they couldn't find anywhere like appropriate to build it but the employees everything about this

park like every ride the employees would like the teenage employees would personally plus up in some really strange and erratic way. So this one, they would lift up the mat and they would place other mats or trash cans or just any like large bulbous object they could find under the mat in order to build a jump. So the last lane far in the right, it was like eight or 10 lanes of people racing down this hill.

They would just build up and build up and get more and more air until the guests eventually broke their neck as it happened. Everything at Action Park, it was like the employees found a way to plus it up, which is weird and creative. The laws of physics still apply, and that just makes the teenage employees furious.

I know. The only rules that anyone has to follow at Action Park. park yeah when you're saying all these stories it's like if somebody was like well hey tell me like why did Rome fall and they would be like oh well there was this water park and they sort of just pushed everything to everything went too far and then like obviously like it couldn't sustain past that everyone just lost their minds you know how like movies are given some weird title in other countries that's like sort of vaguely related but it's a little different um so i you know i was in like paris

when train wreck came out in a poster called a crazy amy which was terrible and offensive but they always have like some type like a little bit different the foreign titles i just imagine they're like other countries if they release their movie they're gonna call it like america park or something you know like park america how do we quickly translate what's so crazy like what's the spirit that this is tapping into it's exactly like america oh my god title probably the most accurate description and they go oh yeah we know exactly what that is we don't even need to see it we know are you telling me action park is a metaphor for america because again i just don't see it i just don't i don't see it i don't want to i want i

want the i want the listeners to view it themselves and decide i would never decide for themselves for them but if any of our listeners have just started college and are looking for an essay to write and need a thesis, this might be a good one. I was just going to say, like, I got so nervous watching this because I was really putting myself and I said at the start of the show, like, I was not allowed to go to my friend's water park birthday when i was 15 14 13 it would happen every year and my mom we would get we would like oh we're busy i'd have to say like we're busy that day and i'd be like because my mom thought this was too dangerous for me to do especially with a group of kids and the kid whose birthday was they were a little crazy they were a little reckless one of the kids had a bb gun and i just the whole this whole thing just gave me anxiety. And there's so many stories about like, you know, oh, fond memories of it.

I can't see it being possible for me. Then quick role play. I'm, okay, I'm you and you're your mom. Hey, there's going to be, there's a change of venue of that birthday party this year. This year, they want to do it at Action Park. What is that? That's like, I mean, it's a water park, but it's, you know, there's like a slide that loops all the way.

Like there's like a full, it does, like goes upside down. Okay, not going to that tell brian that it's our anniversary and we're all doing something that day but i told him that a month ago and i wouldn't i wouldn't go watch him show off his bb gun okay well tell him it's the anniversary of when we first started dating that was our marriage anniversary this is our dating anniversary but i used that when he wanted me to come over and he wanted to show me may west level sensuality on a black and white vhs i tell him we're celebrating uh uh the bicentennial

years later from that uh tell him we're late to it for 15 years too late tell him you tell him you died tell him that you plan to commit suicide very soon i think this this is not not this is accurate to what would happen i think oftentimes then i would just be like will you call and tell his mom and she'd be like okay and she would yeah of course she's going to if she listens to this she is going to dispute the story that we know well the the anniversary is absolutely correct that part is absolutely 100 correct and everything else is it's all hypothetical we're all we're imagining if you went to action park but yeah so what a place to spend an anniversary yeah what a place to spend an anniversary what was your danger tolerance as a child going on rides and water slides

i loved the thrills i did i really love the thrills but it's so weird i went to action park at like a super young age so it's kind of hard when you're six or seven years old to tell the difference between the artificial danger, like the imagineered story danger of like Tower of Terror, where, oh my God, these ghosts are attacking you and your elevators crashing versus like the actual danger of a place like Action Park. And that's why it's such a mind scramble and like messes with you so much. Because you go there really young, you're told these things are dangerous, but like that isn't you know it's an illusion and action park that it was like super real and i think when you're young you really can't tell the difference so you think like it's just like going on a roller coaster and it's within the confines of like a gated amusement park which is a place you kind of take for granted as it's going to be safe so all these things at action park were effectively like extreme sports within the

perceived safety of an amusement park and that's what made it so so strange i think but even then you know i went on a bunch of rides there but there were ones i i wouldn't touch ones i couldn't touch because you know they like the speed boats i think you had to be like 16 or have a good fake id to ride and i think we should talk about the speedboats for a second too yeah i don't know i don't know about those really uh yeah well was gene selling fake ids as a side business oh somebody had okay there were all the teenagers there had hustle so like this park it wasn't just employed by 16 years old which year which was like kind of common for regional amusement parks and like fairs and whatnot it was managed by them except for the really really top people like the people who'd manage like the entire section of the park would be 16 or 17 years old so they all had

hustles they all had schemes there were a lot of like pot plants growing up on the mountain uh the people who would be in charge of kind of like reservations at the hotels would just like pretend like rooms were booked and then they'd live in those rooms and throw parties in them like everybody kind of had a hustle they would you know scarf the bottom of the pool for gold jewelry and stuff kick a little up top and then throw parties with the rest of it it was a fun place it's a fun place wow i i am interested to know whatever did everyone basically you talked to have like... Well, I was also stealing big canisters of soda and I was selling them to a local restaurant for profit. Yeah. Well, there was... Some of the scams were like... Okay. So they had daily wristbands and

they'd be different colors depending on what day. So Monday would be orange, Tuesday green kind of thing. So if you collect it and people just tear off their wristbands and throw them in the parking lot. So you can really easily just collect all these colored wristbands. So not even employees, just like local kids would just scour the parking lot for used wristbands and then sell them to their friends. It was also really easy to sneak into the back of the park. Cause it's like kind of a wooded,

it's not, it's not like there's no gate around. There's no berm, you know, it's not like Disneyland or something like that. There's no berm at action park. So one not like Disneyland or something like that. There's no berm at Action Park. So one day, this dude escaped from a jail near Vernon. And he was hiding out in one of the condos that was like abutting the ski resort in Action Park.

And this, I think, tells you so much about Action Park and this idea that like rules and laws just don't apply here. He thought he was bored while he was hiding out as a fugitive from the law so he decided to sneak into the back of action park thinking that like the laws of god and man just like don't apply here or something like that and he was eventually busted while waiting in line for the colorado river ride didn't even did he not get to go on anything he was just standing around a a couple of runs one of the things that i'm sorry go ahead i i was gonna say no no no uh one of the things i think that action park probably had going for it is like you know i think people think of new jersey and they think the opening credits of the sopranos like the smokestacks of newark but in the spring and summer they call it the garden state for a reason

it's very lush very green and in a lot of the footage that does add some to me it added like okay that does the woods look kind of nice that stream looks kind of nice but like i mean there are water parks in the northeast that don't have like i the one in my hometown was just two tube slides and a swimming pool and on one side was i-95 and was on the other side was the smaller local highway that merged onto i-95 so it was practically on a highway island and you knew even as a kid i knew like i don't want to go there uh but i think if i saw action park from a distance i would be like oh okay yeah this looks nice kind of nice vernon is this incredibly bucolic gorgeous very lush area it's you know it's 45 miles from new york city but really like it was

a cow town just like farms and whatnot and then everything started to change in the 70s when hugh hafner built the playboy club and he wanted to basically turn vernon into the next atlantic city that never happened gambling never actually came up there and the playboy club slowly kind of fell into various states of disrepair in many ways the playboy clay might be a metaphor for something i'm not sure why i don't know i don't know uh but then action park the same deal it was like we're gonna take this area that has this beautiful natural surroundings what is a day trip from new york city and just kind of exploit that so you have this like natural resources and then just like new jersey personalities

and politics kind of moving in on it is really what made action park what it was it really is a facade of this is a nice cool place to go i mean you're right the jason the the seeming natural beauty of it and then that logo rules that rainbow color it's so simple but yeah pretty instantly iconic so you're watching those ads and it's got jingles that are akin to any theme park jingle we like, or the, the we've got it all at Woodfield. It's very like, it's, it fits right along any of the, there's nothing in the ads that tell you this is a shady land of chaos. It's not the, what was that? Like old SNL, like super,

like the bouncy ball the hell they adds like super um super fun ball super fun ball it's not like super fun ball with like 100 disclaimers at the end happy fun ball happy fun ball yeah happy fun ball yeah it's it's not yeah sing the song you know but it's not where it's like come to action park and then like three minutes of fast talking disclaimers which is probably what it should have been. And maybe another theme park tour might have like some entity might have said, you got to put a bunch of disclaimers in there, but the jeans not going to do that.

It would have made it more popular. I mean, the whole appeal of Action Park and why I am fascinated with the topic is that the danger was no secret. Like it was in the newspapers. Everybody, everybody knew when you go to the park in real time, you're hearing people talk about like, Oh yeah,

some kid got stuck there. Some kid died there. You're just like here. The people are calling it to your face. Like welcome to accident park. Welcome to traction park. Like it's, it's in the air.

And instead of scaring people away, that's what drew them in. And that's, what's so strange and i think amazing about action park was what happens when not only is the danger draw people in but then how do people act when they're in this environment where they know it's dangerous and they know there are no rules and that's really like it's not just any one thing it's not just this is a dangerous ride it's this is a dangerous ride and people know it's dangerous and they know

they can do things they shouldn't be allowed to do on it is what made action park what it was did to again bring up a sketch analogy it also it reminds me of the mr show sketch thrill world where it's alternating between i wonder if this was action park inspired where you're alternating between news reports about all of the calamity and death occurring at thrill world on their nuke on the devastator uh and then and then switching back and forth between that and adds for the devastator and the line only grows uh as it goes like like yeah it's not a deterrent it pulls people there's almost like no chance that one of those writers like isn't from the tri-state area and when you know it's it's like. It's so weird how the

cultural entrails of Action Park like Judd Apatow tweeted that the screaming that Steve Carell makes when he gets waxed in 40-Year-Old Virgin was inspired by the screaming he would hear when people were having their wounds treated at the Alpine Slide Shed.

It's just like... Whoa. Wow. It like wild and and crazy yeah like like you have to imagine i love the thing that is amazing about actual work is this thing that really shaped just like shaped this generation of kids from the tri-state area in in no small way like show them how the world works uh or doesn't work like traumatize them like you know push them to their limits maybe build their confidence did all these formative better or worse things to millions and millions of kids and many of them like they don't really it doesn't never comes up and i think that's why once action park kind of enters the cultural milieu it kind of has these

legs because all these people are like, Oh yeah, that I absolutely went there. And that, you know, I, here's a scar. Like I met,

I met, I met Corey Booker, the Senator from New Jersey. I met Corey Booker and he tweets about action park every once in a while. And I mentioned it to him and he just starts lifting up his pant leg and showing me his scars from like the Alpine slide. Like just like millions and millions of people like have these experiences and it's just kind of like this hidden trauma in the tri-state area well and there's that that ball the the i forget the

man and ball and ball yeah that they that the metal ball that someone got inside and rolled downhill and rolled onto the highway glass ball fiberglass excuse me I watch that that 80s romantic comedy a few weeks ago take me home tonight and that is a major plot point in that movie a fiberglass ball that rolls out of control that is

an act of bravery for someone to get into and I would you have gotten in the yeah would you have gotten in the man in the ball in the ball Jason? I think even I have my limits the man in the ball. Come on Jason get in the

ball in the man in the ball in the ball you do it. I don't want to that's your cool man tearing the highway that cuts through the park is what I even just hearing people talk about 94 like not 95 the major road you always hear about uh i-95 going through new jersey and it's like wait what there's a 94 like that that seemed off to me that made me uneasy just like yeah so so so about that

so route 94 kind of cut the park in half he had water world on one side that's all the water side didn't motor world on the other that's like the speed boats and the racing cars and whatnot and in order to get between them they had this real rickety shady monorail type thing they'd be like sitting on a bench and it would take you over the highway and uh gather told us a story that didn't end up in the movie when a friend of his or maybe it was him i can't recall was on that thing and it broke down it broke down over the road and caught on fire and either his friend or somebody had to jump down like into the middle of the busy highway because their monorail car was on fire as they're trying to go between

water world and motor world so that's Park. And that wasn't in the movie. That was not in the movie. That was on the cutting room floor. Just to give you guys a sense. I just want to give anybody a sense if they don't know anything about this or anything about the movie, that story is not in the movie. That is not even a significant enough

event to make it into the movie. Also, the Action Park Gladiator Challenge, you want to talk about IP rip-offs. That was a rip-off. That was not licensed. Gladiator's rip-off where guests could just joust

large men. A jacked-up two-name turbo. This was kind of that peak steroid bodybuilder like WWF below- below and up era. And Action Park was a huge hangout for steroid freaks and bodybuilders. So many of the stories, especially the ones involving fights from the security guards, involved just jacked bodybuilders.

And so they hired all these local jacked up steroidal dudes, gave them names like Turbo and Nitro and then you as a patron at the park could just joust them and fight them um and they got legal action uh was pushed against them from the actual american gladiators for just like the straight straight ip ripoff for that my my this is i think is my favorite thing that's there. And I found this from a newspaper at the time promoting it. The idea is a spinoff of television's American Gladiators, though there is no connection with the popular show. Well, I don't know if it is a spinoff.

There's another blank off word you might use. It might be more a ripoff. Are you allowed to just do that? Are we allowed to like spin things off? Italy, Italy, a movie land. I guess you could say the park we just did at our European trip spun a lot of different things off.

They're full of great spin offs. Yes. Yeah. And then a couple paragraphs later, the gladiator's attraction is run by Michael and Vince Mancuso, former bodybuilders. They end up being a former bodybuilder.

Like, that's not a, like, you can build your body anytime. There's no license that's revoked. What happened? Why aren't they bodybuilders anymore restraining orders or uh any number of bannings uh you can do this just not in new jersey go you gotta go over the state line if you want to lift the weight it feels like you could just like go in in the morning and be like hey i got a couple strong

guys uh can we have guests fight them tonight and he'd be like yeah gene would be like fine okay which part of the park sometimes they would almost you get the feeling like they're almost asking for for like these big fights and melees like fights would happen non-stop like the security guards you spoke to were just like every day just fights everywhere you let people stand up in the middle of the colorado river ride after the rafts bump into each other and just like have at it but one of the biggest fights occurred so a brief period like in the early days of paintball action park had some paintball guns and thought this would be a good attraction so they decided to orchestrate now they had a lot of guests coming in from the city meaning like new york and so they decided to orchestrate this year, Queens versus Brooklyn or Queens versus Bronx paintball match.

So, anybody coming in from Queens is on one team. Anybody coming in from Bronx or Brooklyn is on another team. And it was just minutes before the pistol whipping started and the fights. And it just became this all- like fight like blood everywhere kind of thing and was this like published like was this in the paper the next day or is this just sort of a story people told it was yeah this kind of stuff happened i mean it got reported it was widely reported you know we spoke to in the movie uh a former vernon newspaper editor uh who was you know she she dared report honestly about the park and kind of suffered the consequences

which you kind of go into in the in the movie uh here's another good story about gene i think it sort of builds off of one in the movie we very briefly have a security guard tell us that he had heard that gene kept a mac 10 machine gun in his desk the full story is that he actually broke into gene's office in order to look for this gun with the idea that he would shoot some cans and play around with it and have a good time with this machine gun. The idea being that if Gene saw the gun had been taken or was missing, he wouldn't report it because it's an illegal gun. What can you do about it? Well, when he got to the office, the gun was not there. And I only found out a couple weeks ago speaking to another former employee why the gun was not there and i only found out a couple weeks ago speaking to another former employee why the gun was not there that former the other employee basically told me that he had the exact

same idea just before this dude had actually broken into gene's office found the gun shot up a bunch of cans like had a good time stole a bunch of gene's ammo and he's pretty sure one of the guards who broke in with him stole the gun and that's why it wasn't there. So plenty of people were going after Gene's gun. And his door was locked on lock. Yeah, everybody knew. And Gene also had a panic button in his desk and nobody knew what it went to.

It didn't go to the local police. Like nobody knew where this panic button went to. Local toughs. His Beagle Boy, Gene's Beagle Boys. Former bodybuilders to the knights of columbus club you know what i mean i would pay money to know what that panic button went to i would that's like a mystery that i'm going to dedicate a couple years to solving i think i'm sure people psychologists or something have done this. And I'm fascinated by, in general, human beings' behavior.

Because there has to be some cognitive dissonance when you hear like, oh, there was a giant fight. Or there was a man firing a machine gun off at Action Park last night. And then you go, oh, I would like to go. I'd like to go. Because I think in your head you go like, oh, nothing's going to happen to me. Like, it's going to be fine. And I'm fascinated by, you could probably apply this to covid you can apply this to a range of different topics but i am fascinated that this only all these stories made this more popular

yes that's that's crazy to me because i was i've never been again i've never been like that but i think now especially you would hear all these stories and there would be this could never exist now the uproar the articles like it would be shut down in two seconds and i do think more people would be like oh my god that sounds crazy there's gladiator unlicensed gladiator fights happening it's not the real turbo it's not the real turbo but i think it's interesting to say that because i think like so you yourself would be like I this was a death trap I'm not going

anywhere near that so the place became self-selective so that like no good boys were going there was only bad boys it was a park just like full to

the brim of bad boys who were going there and then like what happens when you have a park that's nothing but bad boys that's actually right well

now it would be bad boys and vlogger like influence like you know people going to get stuff on camera right oh yeah can i get an incident yes and the two million views that will follow if i catch one oh they're just gonna go today they go there without a mask just for like the the clicks on their tiktok or something like as you know owning the libs or something i don't know the park is still open and it's actually kind of a cool place now um mountain creek you know a lot of the some of the old rides are still there but like they're you know modified a little like the colorado river ride you have to wear

like a lacrosse style face mask because so many people were smashing their faces against this cave that that ride by the way super important in the history of fake rock i will say oh so it was um so they were really early to gun night which is one of the fake rock materials basically get like a hose and you spray this stuff and when it dries it onto like a wire frame and it becomes rock and they were i think very likely the very first water park to use gun night in like any capacity and so gene himself was like super obsessed with this and would just spray shit building these massive like rides and so he was really intimately involved with the construction of most of these rides uh we talked about in the movie but oftentimes these rides ideas would come in and be somewhat tame and then he'd get his hands on them and he'd like plus them up in his own weird way

and make them just kind of truly insane so the colorado river ride was initially going to be something like a lazy river like a gentle day with your family on a raft kind of ride and he wanted during construction to be plussed up into a class four rapid simulation like the real colorado river and he didn't want any lifeguards on the ride because he like the real colorado river and he didn't want any lifeguards on the ride because he said the real colorado river doesn't have lifeguards which i love um and so that was so these rides that and roaring springs it was just this massive area so that whole area was called it was called i think the whole area is called roaring springs but they it was built in like 1984 and it was just like this gigantic gunite installation that kind of trying to create this like old timey mountain

Rocky swimming hole feel super important in the history of fake rock. Because maybe up until that point, water slides were just industrial looking tubes. And the idea, like what makes a typhoon lagoon special or any other well-themed water park is, is some environment environment and maybe it was i guess with it emulating the real colorado river it is the maybe the first themed water

slide potentially well or not slide but whatever it is water attraction yeah other than um river country which opened i think 72 the first water parks i mean like wet and wild was and most water parks are like a couple of towers in the middle of a parking lot you know they're they're just like we're gonna build some slides and you're not really immersed in this environment anyway what made action park kind of interesting from an environmental perspective was it was built on the side of a mountain and a wooden mountain than that so it felt very natural and very like serene but it would also use the slope of the mountain for the for

the slides so instead of modeling like maybe we here's what the exact angle of this ride should be for maximum effect and like safety it would literally be just whatever the slope of the mountain is that's what we're going to use and that that's how like most of the park was built wow and and it used just the real bodies of water that were there in some cases, which was a true shock to the system for people to just splash down and hit real chillingly cold water. Chillingly cold water. And it was shaded natural water, too. So those areas and that area, that's where like the Tarzan swing was and Cannonball Falls. That was open until like two years ago.

So that's stuff you could still do until pretty recently. With no restrictions, essentially? Yeah. Well, I mean, back then they were just throwing kids off. Okay, Tarzan Swing is not a ride that's innately dangerous

unless you... A lot of people slip and lose a hold of the handle and like hit their head against the platform they're jumping off of that would happen all the time but like in theory you're like on a rope and you're swinging into a pool of water if you do it safely you're fine the real thing that made tarzan swing so notorious was just like the atmosphere because like a hundred people from new jersey are looking at you and just taunting you and making fun of you and screaming at you and so even if you weren't

like a big enough kid to go on like the speed boats or the looping water slide you could still probably go into tarzan swing and still get like a taste of what this park was all about and i think that's why tarzan swing is so infamous and kind of lives on so much in the imagination because everybody could go into tarzan sway not just like the bigger kids yeah i mean they had stuff like that at river country um but it was a simulation of the old swimming hole you know there are plenty of lakes and ponds that do have a rope swing you know in the northeast that do have that kind of rope swing that you can go into a body of water a varying coldness and river country was like you know uh non-chlorinated famously like fed from yes uh the waterways around disney and they

had rope swings and everything but it's florida it's orlando that water is like bath water you know it's just constantly cooking you know so i my um this is like in my blood my my mom actually grew up on an old-timey swimming hole water park uh so that's like uh so she that was like her upbringing in the ozarks in missouri she grew up living and working on one of those kind of like swimming hole with like a tarzan swing water slide water park and you know that's all there was until the late 70s when like schlitterbahn and action park opened and tried to kind of commoditize these really like naturally occurring organic like places that's what it was yeah yeah and i mean river country was open i think

it was 76 like oh two years before action. And obviously a much bigger budget, much more imagineered. But you see the way the slides look, and they're pretty small at that point. And you see, like, this is what fiberglass, like, slides. This is what it looks like. And it does not look like that at Action Park. No. Yeah.

No. And they would test things. I mean, would and they would test things i mean every like they would test things in a way that you knew it was safe by the time because it was disney you know disney had decades of experience making rides and like testing rides action parks testing process was let's send some dummies down and hope they're not decapitated and if they're not decapitated we'll wave hundred dollar bills in the air and then send employees down and then we'll work out the kinks that way that was how they would test rides and somebody corrected me though only the older kids were given a hundred dollars they've got more uh bodies they're taller so you

give them more money what's not clear about that yes can you guys imagine go yeah that loop i'm sorry what were you saying like oh i was gonna say if you're saying about the loop i was just thinking about being this tall and going on that loop and it would just i would come out twisted into a cartoon pretzel like i would be all wrapped up like a present compacted it hurt yeah yeah i i'm trying to remember in the movie i was just gonna say was there stuff was there anything gene was like whoa whoa whoa whoa too far no he was probably the most um the most like to the right of the curve of anybody at the park you know so everybody under him was like trying

to temper his instincts to be like hey maybe we shouldn't do this and he was the guy was like trying to temper his instincts to be like hey maybe we shouldn't do this and he was the guy was like oh we're just gonna do it it's gonna be great it's gonna be so much fun and that was his thing and it's such an interesting that's why his character is so interesting because he he was this you know fairly well-off like wall street outcast who just like really immersed himself into like playing roller coaster tycoon and like coming up with these novel ideas it's something it's something strange about that so is it literally true that the the loop because the it's it's said somewhere in the documentary that the cannonball loop looks like somebody just did it as a doodle on a napkin and then that was built and that was what happened right like like gene drew one of the slide loops and then it happened.

Because it just, that's what's so striking. I remember when I first saw it, you know, as some thumbnail to click on, it seemed fake. It looks like an onion thing. Like it's like, it looks Photoshoppy, the actual photo of the slide in reality. It looks like Itchy and Scratchy Land. It looks like itchy and scratchy land it looks like something like beyond the simpsons or like life is hell back in the day it was gene himself who

drew basically a circle and a cocktail napkin and the only thing that comes to mind it's like in the hutzak or proxy it's like a circle napkin it's like you know for kids what else what could go wrong that's probably the most upsetting thing in the documentary is the phrase teeth pad in the loop second yeah the only other competition might be pond filled with gasoline and snakes yeah and dead fish too dead fish but the they had to put a pad in the loop to cushion people but then people kept coming out with cuts and abrasions and then they looked at the pad it was it was covered with loose teeth yes and there is like a lovecraftian monster so you go through it and the teeth would just like eat into you which is nightmare fuel

just terrifying it's the worst place in the world the top of that loop yeah that is the literal worst spot you can be i think scientists have studied it for years trying to understand this little spot didn't exist until 1978 and being an employee there like the stuff you would have to do so the alpine slide which it's widely thought to be like a concrete or cement track but it's actually mostly made of asbestos uh was this like a loose track built into the side of a mountain. And you take this cart and you go to the top on a ski lift. And as we talk about in the movie, it was a pretty regular practice for people to knock

their carts off their ski lift and attempt to hit people below them as like a sick game of target practice, because why not? But you make it to the top and you'd be greeted with like warning signs and photos showing you wounds and like gory, bloody bodies, like saying, like, keep your hands inside the track. Like, this is serious. Well, in the movie, we show like a quick shot of a newspaper article about this girl who got her finger cut off because she, I guess, didn't keep her hands inside the inside the track uh the girl who lost her finger wrote me after the movie came out uh thrilled because she'd been she's like nobody believes me that i lost this on a ride i can't find any documentation um and she sent me a video of her fingerless hand uh just like like she told me she got a nine thousand dollar payout for that um but uh she was she was like super excited to have her missing finger make a cameo

in the movie very strange the alpine slide we can put that into twitter afterwards by the way if you guys want to the video of the finger video yeah she said i could share it if you guys want the if the audience demands it yeah if the audience demands we're gonna blur it I think we're gonna blur it and put a bar on it we're too scared we're too scared I want to mention Action Point the Johnny Knoxville movie inspired by Action Park

so they kind of replicated the Alpine slide in that movie and first off Johnny Knoxville said making that movie was the most injured he ever got and the alpine the story goes that like on the alpine slide he flew off it landed on his face went to the hospital they checked him out gave him the okay to go home he went home blew his nose and his left eye popped out of his head so even the simulation even the recreation

of the alpine slide was was like dropping people the worst damage ever done to johnny knoxville yeah a man who gets damaged every point of johnny knoxville oh my god he got messed up making that movie like really messed up. I saw some article where he detailed some of that and said like and it wasn't worth it because the movie didn't do good. It didn't do. It fucked up. I think I didn't get hurt at all.

One thing that's odd to me in general about the places where people got injured and in fact killed uh you know action park did not invent the alpine slide like there's an alpine slide in big bear that i've done a couple times and i'm uh i'm a pussy and i did it and uh and so if that tells you like and i had fun i wasn't you could tell how if you just throttled it the whole time and were a little, you know, play it a little fast and loose with it, it could be dangerous.

And I was probably on the break a lot, but like it, it in and of itself, isn't this crazy idea. It's just like the way they did it in the negligent way, which similar to what I was just gonna say, the same thing about wave pools, there's plenty of wave pools in in the world but only there's only one that kept like drowning people yeah so compared to this you you um probably at some point in your life have had an automobile that automobile in itself is not dangerous but if you remove the brakes got drunk and tried to smash into the person ahead of you it would be a very dangerous Sure. And that's kind of what the action park outplanes.

That's a very good way to break it down. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and I don't, you also explain how it's, you had to like know all the curves. You had to like know it as if you'd done a hundred runs,

um, before you could just imagine that's even cool runnings where he's like in the bathtub memorizing and studying like all the twists and curves he's got to do it literally is the the there are three tracks and one of them was the expert track they called it and that was like that was extreme man that was the one where people just constantly just be flown off of that like you have to be crazy to go on that thing and that was one where if you went at full speed, you were going to fly off. You just were going to fly off. And this gets really dicey because part of the duties of the employees was when it rained.

I think it was super dangerous when it rained. So it was your job if you're an employee. They didn't want to wait till it dried naturally. That's like downtime. So if you're an employee, it'd be your job to dry it off by taking an alpine slide cart down the wet alpine slide with towels dragging behind it sopping up rain and you weren't supposed to break while you were doing this because for some reason or another the act of breaking was like super dangerous on the wet surface so you had to go down it without using

a break with towels behind you and i spoke to somebody who was doing this when the person behind them, their thing got messed up or they know what it was, was they couldn't resist the urge to break because every fiber of your body is telling you to break when you do that. So they braked and the person behind them ran over them, just like over them on the Alpine slide. Cause they're sending like four kids at a time down with towels, sopping up a wet alpine slide so she's seth when you go on like the matterhorn at disneyland do you just like yawn are you just like because you went to this place as a child

like it reset your whole danger level uh i mean yeah you know, yeah, yeah. Right. Like Matterhorn. Come on guys. Yeti's not even real, you know, right. Like there would have been a real, like, like there would have been a real animal at action park that was stuck

inside of the ride that would claw you. Dude, that would be one of you guys is from Jersey. Jason, you're from Jersey. Yeah. Oh, I,

I, yeah, from outside of Philadelphia, but spent a lot of time in Jersey. Yeah. Do you know about that? Like drive throughadelphia but spent a lot of time in jersey yeah do you know about that like drive-through safari attraction built around this time in jersey that they like had lions and stuff but they abandoned it and then like the lions and like tigers took over this

place do you know about this thing uh it's hard to say if i know about it because i think there's more than one i mean six flags i've i did the great adventure my family would do the you drive your minivan through the safari and don't put the windows down and also take the antenna off because the monkeys might take it if you don't yeah that was like a jersey thing drive through safari that was like a big jersey thing and And in recent years, they had a big, like, you know, Six Flags. They had an official driver off-road vehicle that would take you through this park. In times of COVID, they reopened it for like, and you know, the park's not open taken but um you know it it might be it it might be on the rise again as drive-through entertainment uh catches on yeah in the early days of action

park um when they were still figuring out what it was going to be the alpine side was the first ride they had before it was like any water size about they had like a roller skating rink and i think they actually had a petting zoo and they had like lions and stuff um so they were they were definitely like they weren't going to put a robot yeti and they were like everything was going to be real there everything was going to be real gene was looking for a real yeti he went out on an expedition he was going to find the jersey devil the jersey devil was going to be the the main draw gene would have gone around disneyland and been like gone on mr toad and been like remove this track let him drive the real car through the ride what the fuck is this like and then there's every ride i assume he would have real pitchforks people could reach up and grab them

ram them into the other vehicles actually going to hell yeah let's summon up some demons in here for real let's get a look at a crooked priest Let's get a crooked priest. I got a guy. I got a guy. Got a Ouija board over here, guys. Let's do this. Yeah, let's. It's Haunted Mansion himself. Turn it up to 400 degrees.

Get it to oven temp. Action Park is the real life version of the Jurassic Park line about like if the Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don't eat the tourists. Like if the Alibbean breaks down the pirates don't eat the tourists like if the outside breaks down you will you will get destroyed there's like no chance michael crichton didn't go to action park right like westworld and jurassic park like like half of the michael crichton canon is theme parks that go wrong like he went to action park right

huh that's i mean yeah like he was yeah he was probably born in what the 40s or 50s he would have been a little older maybe this was all born for a matter of this timeline might not be right because west world was maybe up but i like to imagine that it was his entire body of work was born from uh doing the tarzan swing and a bunch of jersey meatheads yelling you fucking pussy and he splashed hard and everybody booed him and made fun of him and he's like I'll show you I'll become one of the great

authors of this century 38 year old man doing the Tarzan swing getting yelled at the first scene in his biopic is him wiping out a Tarzan swing and he's just trying to get his comeuppance the thing nobody talks about about Action The first scene in his biopic is him wiping out a Tarzan swing and it's just trying to get us come up. And the thing nobody talks about,

about action park, this is going to be kind of gross is so, okay. It became like super popular, super quickly. They started running TV ads and then they got up to 15,000 people on a busy day, like a million people a year.

And it was this regional park and they didn't have enough bathrooms. So there was like a multi-year period in which they just didn't have the infrastructure to deal with all of the waste and so people were just like shitting everywhere so i had former employees tell me they would like clean out the grottos and the caves and everywhere you'd look they'd just be like shits like everywhere and that was like a big job for all the teenagers but they're like like hosing down the alpine slide really disgusting eventually they added more bathrooms though that's good eventually the food it's like a roller coaster tycoon when you don't have enough bathrooms and like weird

things start to happen it's just like that right yeah he sits on the coaster but like it doesn't the all the footage you have of a guy manning a grill or manning it looks disgusting like i love eating garbage but the food cooking footage is so unpleasant and it's crazy that like uh you know the the i always how do you pronounce his name again the head of mulvihill um that he like like a silvio or paulie walnuts was obsessed with community festival like that was another odd layer of him is that like he loved throwing the german festival polish festival irish festival and putting on the later hosen putting on the later hosen like that it was such a weird detail about this guy yeah

actually it was kind of historically significant some of the things he did in that regard they opened up one of the first micro breweries in the country and uh they'll they'll claim they kind of kick-started the micro brewery whatever but uh he went to germany and he had an entire brewery dismantled and shipped to new Jersey, including the brewmaster. They would claim that everything but the water came from Germany. And according to the book put out just a couple months ago by the owner's son, the brewmaster they brought in had previously

been Hitler's personal brewmaster. That too? If this park couldn't be any more cursed. It's just wild. Which they should have just leaned just leaned into like it's a crazy extreme place and just yeah hitler's brewmaster and you think that's a that's a clever name and they'll say no it isn't it's descriptive it's accurate it is true like a yeah how old was hitler's brewmaster he was like an old dude when he came in everybody's like he was like a pretty old guy by thatler's brewmaster he was like an old dude when he came in everybody's like he was like a pretty old guy by that point he's gotta make some like like that those beers

can't like the pot they can't like sting and bubble too much because it'll like nip at that stash it's he probably had to go a little mellower stash for a beer i've used this joke i think on the show before but it's like emperor I assume is Hitler's brewmaster was like Emperor Palpatine on Exegol and the last Star Wars movie the crane kind of Like just keeping him alive because He needs to brew more beer

And making beer with lightning That scene yes That scene that had to have been Somebody who like just wrote Forbidden Journey and it was like that's what that's what moves the emperor like a cuckoo arm whatever it's called like you know that's it right yes yeah so JJ Abrams

was interested in the cuckoo arm technology and he was like we're gonna put a cuckoo arm attached to Emperor Palpatine totally a cuckoo arm isn't it I think or so like the corner of the DVD box of Prometheus so like a Giger drawing just out of the corner of the DVD box of Prometheus. So like a Giger drawing just out of the corner of the eye.

And it's like, Oh, that's yeah, that's good. That's cool. You're based on my vague memory of this. Based on the thing, the DVD box.

What rides would you have guys, would you guys have gone on, like actually gone on any of them? That's what I was thinking about the whole time um i the tarzan swing i might do now as a kid i would have freaked out because i was freaked out of that high dive as a kid i could barely go off the regular diving board yeah i could not dive at all uh as a kid now i might do it um alpine slide the easy whatever the safest version i might have tried but that's still i don't know yeah i mean oh yeah i mean that one's dangerous um i like the idea of the colorado river and maybe today i would do whatever version of it there is but back then it seems kind of

deceptively i really like that aspect you can choose your own adventure that there's different paths i think like that is a water slide or water attraction asset is cool and that would make me want but i also feel like i might just like i might just slam my head on those innovative fake rags yeah yeah you don't really get to choose like physics chooses for you typically the tarzan one i think i now you know look as a a needy ass performer i think i would enjoy the being on the stage of the tarzan swing i would enjoy the audience i would would do something impressive, but I would maybe enjoy yelling at people. And maybe I

wouldn't even go off. Maybe I'd just go up there and taunt everybody and then get them to all boo me because I also like wrestling so much. I would feel like I would. That's a good move. You would have been the heel. You would have been the heel turn. Yeah. The Tarzan swing. You would have had your persona like, oh, it's that guy again. The guy just stands there

and holds up the line right making fun of people out there and then i got i'm like ready to go i pretend i'm gonna do it and then i turn around and then everyone boos me and i relish i then when you go to uh the gladiator experience everybody's excited that turbo gets to whoop you because it's like oh they got that guy that wimp That wimp from earlier. I get my... Yeah, I remember him. He held up the line. I don't think I would. You know what seems maybe safe-ish? Correct?

You might know more than me, Seth. But for the person playing more than the employee, the battle tanks sort of seem like fun. I would love to do that. But is there a way that I'm forgetting that it would hurt me no well unless the

okay sometimes the grates that like would close that would keep the balls from hitting you in the face wouldn't close and people get pelts in the face we did a drive-in screening of the movie in Brooklyn like a couple weeks ago right before it opened before it was released and we had a dude bring us a bunch of vintage action park ride vehicles including a battle tank so I got to like get inside of one and that was like I could feel

the ghost man that was that was it for me that was it getting inside that tank pretty cool I was like I'm home would you uh we talk a lot about owning pieces of the park would you want to own one of the battle tanks and display it proudly oh there's like a weird kind of underground collector scene you know it's not it's not like the uh you know the disneyland collector scene like at the van edin gallery or anything but there's people who collect old action park ride vehicles because something strange happened that when the park shut down i'm gonna get my timeline and my story mixed up here so like don't scream at me but um this one dude like bought up all of the motor world ride vehicles so the speed boats the lola cars which were the racing cars the tanks and they sat in this like storage container in vernon for like 20 years or so until i want to say 2015 he just sold them all

at once so just a couple years ago all these collectors started getting their hands on all of these rides so i've been in touch with like a half dozen people who have battle tanks so speed boats so lola cars and so we had a couple come to the screening it was amazing just wild stuff do these fetch a lot of money on an aftermarket i assume they fetch a lot of money but is it how how crazy does it get do you know i think it's i think it's closer to what the value of that would be as like a 40 year old speedboat than like as a nostalgia item you know i don't think i think it's like a couple thousand bucks um but i think you can get them to work is what's cool you know like a disney um you're buying like a space mountain car you can't actually ride that

if you're buying like an action park battle tank and you get car. You can't actually ride that. If you're buying an action park battle tank and you get it fixed up, you can actually ride that. I think that's what makes it so much cooler. Now I'm afraid I'm going to see one of those coming down my street. Firing at people who voted for whoever they didn't vote for.

With on-fire tennis balls. It's just Leno. Oh, in our area yeah yeah he's got a an airplane hangar full of old action park ride vehicles i'm sure you know oh my god i remember the east coast equivalent of jay leno is just collects this stuff

that's weird yeah um we speaking of vehicles super speed boats i have the wikipedia in Speaking of vehicles, super speedboats, I have the Wikipedia in front of me. The super speedboats were set up in a small pond known by park staff to be heavily infested with snakes. Yes. Yeah.

Yes. That was true. Good. Nobody died on that ride, at least. No one died, but that's a big moment in the documentary where the woman who was a life card talks about how one speedboat did not slow down went on top of the other speedboat and that's where a reference she was very concerned that this person underneath was going to be decapitated

and it just got a little cut a little well the prop propeller the motor was cutting into their neck and she was worried the hair like whatever mullet this guy had because you know the era was going to get pulled up into this thing and it's like get like scalped or something um but that that ride was was nuts and that position we talked about briefly in the movie but working being a lifeguard on that ride was the worst job that was like you're being punished nobody likes you you're not connected you're like not part of the cool kid click you're the lifeguard on the speed boats because if you had to pull somebody out you're diving into a pond just like full of snakes and oil just like snakes and oil all right so snakes and all do we know what was do we know

what has like changed like in the government local government now there that would prevent snakes and oil being in a pond that people would have to go in i honestly feel like there's no law on the books against that so you know i feel like i don't think there's a law about that so you could probably get away with that by the way um so snakes and oil is what evil ringo star wishes snakes and oil everyone they got a man from the snake comma oil salesman i don't know there's something oh yeah not snake boy it's no it's not you mis me. It's not snake oil in the water. It's snake hand oil. Snake comma oil sales.

The oil is not from the snake. Guys, you filled the... Yeah, we filled the pond up with the wrong stuff, guys. Sorry. That was the big revelation for me in the documentary. Because I think I first heard about it on the best show, hearing Tom Sharpling talk about Traction Park and the looping water slide and all the stories about that. But it didn't dawn on me that like, oh, the town, not only like, it wasn't that they ignored it,

like they full on like tolerated it and it brought a bunch of money into the town. Yes. Yes. Imagine like this park's been open, not just the park bunch of money into the town. Yes. Yes. Imagine this park's been open, not just the park, but the ski resort prior to that had been open for 15 whatever years, more than that, and just dominates the local economy. It's the biggest employer in town. All the foot traffic, a million people a year just shopping at your stores,

paying your tolls, whatever it's going to be. What do you do if that shuts down like what do you do and it's like it's like the you know the factory leaving town is what it'd be like so that resulted in i think a very high level of risk tolerance we'll say from the town for what the park had to offer it's so funny that it wasn't just like well we like having a park here just take the snakes and oil out of the water like just make a few changes why not you think the very i don't think it's a kind of park where without okay so now it's open under a different name and they got rid of most of the rides but at its peak it was the they claimed it was the largest water park in the world and more than 75 rides and attractions that's like a lot of stuff and the vast majority of them were

i think what ralph nader would have called like unsafe at any speed like there's no fixing them there's no way to like we'll just pay attention and this will be safe like there's something like innately flawed with the design or the concept of it that was gonna get people hurt you couldn't just be like we're gonna pay a little bit more attention now it was messy right like have more than half the rides were like unfixable it would be like well we can't plus up the ride where we just hand you a bag of rocks and you sink to the bottom of a 30-foot pool we're plus another ride by not killing it like it was a really it was a wild place after the park was shut down in 96 and then purchased

in 98 by IntraWest which owns Whistler Mountain, they mostly bought it for the ski resort, they kept the Alpine Slide open for one year and they forced you to wear a helmet and sign a waiver and I think that that only lasted one year in that form I think they realized either

this is too much or that defeats the whole spirit of the Alpine slide maybe. I don't know. It's also so crazy that, okay, so the first death occurs in 1980, 1981. The first of six all told, and then it's not closed till 96 and that has nothing to do with it. They just ran out of money nothing yeah and if you ask like yeah and and i think the death count which is you know single digits i

don't really think does justice to how incredibly dangerous the park was i think it's the injuries and like there should have been many many more deaths there just should have been on any given day the alpine slide alone would injure hundreds of people a day one ride one day triple digit injuries every single day day in and day out and i think that to me is a lot more astonishing than um than the number of deaths i think it's crazy in jet with the horrible things in our world with covet 19 and with um with mass shootings and stuff that people find comfort in oh well there was only this many deaths don't worry the rest were injuries

or they didn't die well that's still horrible like people are scarred physically mentally you kind of gloss over injuries in general I think yeah we don't want to minimize that and you know I think that was like sort of the purpose of our movie was you know Action Park has become become this urban legend and to some degree a joke because it's so surreal and absurd that it exists.

The only response your body can make after reading about Action Park is to laugh because it kind of short circuits your brain a little, the mere existence of it and i wanted a big purpose the goals of our movie was to kind of go beyond that a little and figure out like what was the actual cost here what was the toll what stories are being kind of like swept under the rug in in service of this myth in service of this legend and as you know it's on the movie we spoke to the family of a kid who was killed there who kind of walked us through the beat by beat of like what happened to them after their son died like what went wrong and then how the park responded to it that's kind of horrifying like it's very scary yeah yeah not to put a damper on the funnies well that's what's weird is what you have to do and like with it like so was that tough in the documentary to to make that turn and have that balance.

I mean, it became the whole purpose of the movie was this really sudden turn that we wanted to do. And it caught, I think, a lot of people by surprise. And it's something I think people, you don't really see that much in movies, I'll say. But it was kind of whiplashy by design as sort of a response to the legend and myth that Action Park has. But also because, not to over-explain my own my own movie but i mean say you are at action park and you're having like the best time of your life and action park was a place capable of giving you immense thrills immense joy immense happiness immense memories immense all these good things the distance between that experience and and getting seriously injured or even dying is like one second like there is no foreshadowing there's no there's no telegraphing it it just like happens suddenly and that was

sort of the idea there was like this is the most fun you've had until the minute it's not is what action park was right yeah right yeah there was no because i yeah if you were there the people that were there were probably not like us and not like, like nervous the whole time they were like having fun. And then something goes horribly, horribly wrong. Or incredibly desensitized to it. You know, unless you're actually seeing somebody get killed, you're, you're very likely going to see people get injured while you're at the park.

It just happened constantly. Like when you take the Alpine slide uh ski lift up the chances are really good you'd see somebody wipe out as you're going up just like see somebody wipe out that would happen and yeah that's what i was saying earlier i'm fascinated by human behavior like that and i think you can apply it to like covid and masks and you can apply it to are you telling me that action park is a metaphor for covid is that what you're telling me i first look i know again i told i don't make conclusions the listeners of our podcast do that i don't tell them what are you telling me that tell me what a metaphor is uh just keep hearing this word this literary device it's very fancy yeah it's like a simile it's very similar to a

simile um are you telling me that a place a place where the where the forces of fun and uh freedom in air quotes are up against common sense and safety uh is a metaphor for anything we're all experiencing today is that what you're telling me i might be walking down the road but i wouldn't tell you anything i'm walking down that road for sure. But it is interesting because I think we all in general in our lives have to do a lot of this ignoring stuff. You can't have all this stuff in your head. But like,

this is just general, like whether it's, you know, the chance of you, I don't know, getting in a car accident or something like this. You just have to put all this stuff out of your mind, but to see constant accidents and you're like,

huh? Okay. I'm going to go on that right now. Choose to go to a hot spot, essentially of accidents and injury potential. Yeah. That's like, that's like a supercharged version of what I'm saying,

where you just have to sort of put out the fact that like something bad is going to happen to all of us at some time but we just gotta go on with life that's what's so interesting about action park is for people who aren't from the area this seems like this crazy absurd how could this possibly have existed thing that people who grew up there it was so normal it was just just so, so, so normal. And that is what's so weird to me about it is I, and I think the whole state of New Jersey, I think like is super into this movie because it gives them this like validation, like, see how tough we are. This is what we grew up with, but it wasn't just that. I mean, New Jersey was a weird New Jersey.

It was a weird place. And even if you weren't from New Jersey, like just growing up in the eighties, people were doing stupid stuff and like getting hurt and running around. And today, everything about that seems so foreign and so absurd because we have like cell phones now and kids aren't like nobody's outside period now, but, and just how normal this all was. And it wasn't just like the injuries and whatnot at action park, working at action park, you're in this small cow town suddenly becomes this major tourist destination a million people a year coming in and just the things that happen when that many people come in and what you're exposed to so there's employees it's gonna get dark i'm sorry guys but so there's like

employees who i spoke to like they're 15 16 years old you're working the front gate there was uh an oil tanker like like uh upturned like had an accident like right outside the gates of the park and the cab got trapped underneath the tanker and they couldn't use the jaws of life to get the guy out because it would have sparked and caused an explosion so these like teenage employers are watching this guy who just like knows he's about to die and like how like what that does you and now they laugh about it and they joke about it because there's like really no other response the human body is just like capable of doing when when faced with that while still going on with your life

while still you know waking up in the morning and like going through your life right our brains do gymnastics a lot of times either to just to just mask like crazy trauma like that, or just, you know, if it's just like you're normally at a park where people are flying off the slide, you go, huh, that guy got hurt really bad. Never, here I go. And I think it's really, yeah.

I think it's important because when we like joke about Action Park, Gether put this really well in the movie, but nobody's joking about it who went there because they think this was good they're joking about it because that's the only response the human brain is like capable of doing when something short circuits it like that like what is like laughter from like an evolutionary perspective it's i just miss like narrowly escaping a saber to tiger you laugh about that's like what it is and i think that bit of like and it's such a weird strange type of laughter that is sort of um not really as as common as like

you know designed comedy and things that are designed to make you laugh are that kind of tap into that same instinct are but it's there and it's present and it's real and i think it's like it's so weird and that's what makes action like such an unshakable topic to me is that it kind of elicits that sort of laughter response well it seems like a lot of the people in the documentary are are tacitly acknowledging the the old adage about like tragedy plus time is comedy yes but then there are plenty of people in the documentary who it's just well no it's just tragedy plus time is just that it's just more tragedy i just keep thinking about the tragedy you know tragedy plus time plus like a little bit of distance like if it wasn't you or somebody super close to you i think it's what it was yes yeah um it's a weird place well the um you know

the mulva hills have a comment on all this. The son who wrote a book and kind of was tempted to be front and center when they tried to do the park again. And he's kind of kept the legend alive. I think this is also from the Sports Illustrated article. He says, as for the people who died, I'm sure dad has gone and looked for each and every one of them to say he's sorry. All right. Yeah, sure. Okay. Well, that

settles that. He certainly seemed like an apologetic man in his day-to-day. He declined to participate. He's like, what if he's in heaven trying to sue these people more? I'm suing you under heaven laws. Oh,

Oh. So this wasn't a movie. Oh man. The stories that kind of just filled my inbox after the movie came out. So we talk in a movie about how, if you manage to sue managed to win, like Jean just wouldn't pay unless the U S Marshalls literally collected the money.

A lawyer reached out to me who was like a client who had that happen to him and how they had to get the u.s marshals to show up but they had this big problem because the u.s marshals collected it literally went from like ticket booth the ticket booth collecting cash and put into a duffel bag but a duffel bag was the u.s marshal duffel bag and they weren't allowed to hand over u.s marshal property so this lawyer had to like go window shopping until he found another duffel bag to stuff all this cash into and then uh take gets to the bank and like try to deposit like a half million dollars whatever in cash wow story wow do you have enough you've given us a lot of stuff that's not in the movie but now that you're getting all these stories

do you have enough for like a follow-up as far as just a movie full of stories i mean yeah there's a movie full stories but what's the story you know so yeah right it's at least supplemental material on a dvd or blu-ray release oh man if only we had like dvds with supplemental material i would have had so much fun with this it was a lot i mean it just seems like ever like this is gonna sound corny but like everyone who went had a story everybody who went had a story or like 10 and like yeah right and it's so weird like you look at like the wikipedia page and like the stories that kind of become the action park lore and the action park canon and just like that's just like such a tip of the iceberg and most of those come from a couple like weird new jersey articles that's like patient zero like ground zero for most of the action park lore was like weird new jersey's coverage if you look at

the citations on the wiki page it's like 90 weird new jersey stuff it's like all it is um and that's just talking to a couple employees for those articles you talk to any employee they have just as many stories and now after the movie came out i'm like i was invited to these uh secret facebook groups that are all former action park employees. And it's like a thousand people in them. And it's just like gold, man. It's gold.

It's, it's wild stuff. Yeah. I, you know, I have, I was goofing a little bit on the Valencia teens who run six flags, magic mountain,

but they look like saints and angels, I think, compared to fairy level precision operating i don't think those valencia teens next time i see them yeah and i don't want to bash the teens who work there i mean they were they were all put in the tough they were spot yeah and yeah they were just living their lives they were coming of age they were doing their thing i don't think anybody can like blame the 15 year old kid for all the stuff that's going on around them it just becomes normal um they partied man those kids partied by the way like like they would regularly

just like show up to work three days in a row with the same shirt on either sleeping at the park after a party sleeping in some random condo because like all the condos that surrounded a park different people like access to them so they'd use them as like crash pads or just, you know, partying all night and then like go to work the next day at like age 16, sleeping at the top of the cannonball loop. And then it just hot boxing the entire loop, hot boxing,

the loop goes in the bottom of it and just fill it up with smoke. And they already had to worry about the normal problems jersey teens have to worry about uh cruising down highway nine um working on their cars learning that they blew up the chicken man in philly last night you know tan that's nebraska not jersey i think um but uh no uh wait um no but that was way too much um but also the tan and the hair i don't know it was it was a strange place and it's really amazing speaking to the place people who live there who live this who like grew up working there and how fond they all are of this

place and you kind of some degree i think it's like a little bit of stockholm syndrome but to some degree it's i think we all kind of take whatever we went through and we internalize it and we make hey you know this is this is our childhood it's a weird place yeah did did do we know did springsteen or even south side johnny go to action park okay i am sure that like like everybody did like from this area it was what you did it was what you did like uh like fallon mentioned on the show the other day like i know that um like i know that kimmel went there everybody who grew up like springsteen had to have gone there right like there's no way he's he's another a little older so maybe not but he was i mean he was he was still like very he's

probably very popular by the time this opened at least one member of the east street band went there i would bet oh at least one member we think it was was it was it little i don't think it was little steven i don't think was it weinberg it doesn't seem like max weinberg scene either he max is probably the most likely yeah little stephen probably broadcasted little stephen's garage from the reopen renamed cleaned up version all right we're gonna do some i'm gonna do some research and figure this out he's got a built-in difficulty though which is you don't want to get a bandana caught in one of these slides i was thinking about that like

once your bandana it's why you won't wear a mask on rides out because like it gets wet that that cramps your style like how do you how do you go down on a looping water slide in a bandana and little steven is just full of scarves as well so he has the bandana and the scarves they're fused to him now so he can't exactly take them off maybe that's where they come from is the scars. It's very possible. Yeah, so he's got to stay out of the size and he's got to stay out of that. If he gets yanked into a

turbine, then he's like then he stays down there with the snakes and oil. Yeah. You guys throw me a ride name. I'll give you a story that nobody's heard. We missed. What's the um the one that's spelled weird the uh aqua scoots i think that's one that hasn't been name checked yet okay there's nothing too crazy about that it did it was kind of a messy ride that was okay actually

i'll tell you something about that the aqua scoot was like warehouse rollers on an angle and you take this car you try to skip across the pond like a stone that was actually created by the same guy who made the man in the ball and the ball uh the same the same dude made that one that ride actually made it the prime time though a lot of people got um got like their toes like caught in it and stuff nothing that's like the most tame ride

come on give me another one only your toe oh man uh wait what have we not name checked uh and we've we've talked about a lot of them what go-kart i have kamikaze in front of me that's tame though uh kamikaze people people would people would fly off the kamikaze all the time because that was a ride that was built like into the natural slope of the mountain and the rails on the side of it were like three inches so people just hit these like

lips and they'd fly off and the ride we talked about in the movie that was like a prototype one based off of zero gravity planes where you go over like parabolic hills and get some air time was sort of like the amped up version of the kamikaze i think once they realized people were getting air and flying off the kamikaze they're like well let's just like milk that for what it's worth. Let's make that a ride where the goal is to get airtime. Surf Hill? Yeah, Surf Hill is the one that a kid broke his neck after they started building up the jump and just going

in the observation stands, all that stuff. Whiplash Falls. I don't even know what that one is. I'm just making them up now. I'm just trying. They have a lot of. I don't even know what that one is. I'm just making them up now. I'm just trying. They had a lot of rides that don't get much attention. If you look at old park maps, you're like, what was that? They had one called the Human Maze. What's the Human Maze?

Nobody talks about the Human Maze at Action Park. Well, that's just what I used to call having a nine to five, the Human Maze. I'm just getting lost. My life, man, the Human Maze. We're all just trying to navigate the Human Maze. five the human maze just getting lost my life man the human maze we're all just trying to navigate the human maze and trying to have some fun while we do it

you know I think I enjoyed myself talking about this old place and I thank you so much for being here Seth Porges you survived podcast the ride not as harrowing as a day at action park not in the least unless that microphone you have is near some water near some snake oil that could

somebody actually did die from electrocution at action park well there's look we've been hovering around darkness I'm like the world's worst like improv guy who like like yes and somebody died like just air out of the room I guess you could say when it comes to Vernon there's certainly darkness on the edge of town

it's like hey everybody how's everybody who did anybody get hurt today just Christ I'm that guy so never invite me to your improv chief guys well it probably is no longer an art form so that's not happening anymore for everyone to continue to live yeah someone should make a documentary about improv that'd be fun no that'd be great oh that'd be great that'd be the probably one of the great documentaries um anyway your documentary i'll do your plugging for you a little bit your documentary is on hbo max and

it's a lot of fun uh but but uh is there anything else uh you would like to plug or anything else related to the film uh no guys it's on hbo max uh you know social for me it's just like at seth porges with a p that's simple wonderful um and as for us we are at podcast the ride on the socials we have merch available on t public and for three and if you want three bonus episodes every month subscribe to podcast the ride the second gate at patreon.com slash podcast the ride um i mean, as far as parting words, I can't think of anything better than snakes and oil. Everyone

comma oil. I'm evil Ringo snakes comma separate and oil. That's new. Everything for us. Evil Ringo. If anyone has heard of people Ringo, feel free. I will be signing autographs. Sparks got everything.

Snakes, comma, oil. Everything. Everything. Opposite. He doesn't do peace sign. He does like this. He turns them upside down. Inverted. Inverted peace sign. He wears rings on his

toes. Don't do that on the aqua scoot. Don't wear toes on the aqua scoot. Seth Becker being here. Everyone else, thanks for listening. Bye-bye. See you next time. Bye.

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