Podcast: The Ride - Kings Dominion with Eliza Skinner

Episode Date: October 2, 2020

Eliza Skinner (Earth to Ned, Regarding My Lovers) joins us to talk about Virginia’s Kings Dominion. Featuring all your favorite Paramount properties! Universal Cruise Line Episode up at The Second Gate: Patreon.com/PodcastTheRide VOTE! Verify that you're registered and make a plan to vote on or before November 3rd 2020. Find voting resources here: https://foreverdogpodcasts.com/vote 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

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Forever. Dog. Warning. The following podcast contains eating meals while robots watch, stomach scrapes, Wayne's World land, and one of the hosts reveals a childhood love of shuffleboard? Which host could it be? Eliza Skinner joins us to talk King's Dominion and much, much more on today's podcast, The Ride, the theme park podcast where sometimes we are so despondent about the state of the world, we wish we could hide underground in the land of the dews.

I'm Scott Gairdner. Don't you feel that way, Mike Carlson? Yeah, I was just saying this to Lindsay last night, that that's exactly where I would like to go. There are a couple places in the place we're talking about today that I think you could hide, though. I won't say the specific one that Jason Sheridan, who's also here, is very excited about. Yeah, this is a big park for me and i i don't want to contradict what you said scott but uh researching vintage uh king's dominion maybe the most at peace i have felt during uh the pandemic uh except i will say this is the only theme park to give me a semi-permanent physical scar.

Whoa. We'll get to that. Yeah. It's like your action park. Kind of. Well, not quite. Yeah, not on that level, though. It's pretty minor.

I think it's faded at this point. Okay, so faded, but there. And I believe that our guest is a big fan and enthusiastic about this place as well. She is the producer of Earth to Ned on Disney Plus, and she has an album out called Regarding My Lovers. It's Eliza Skinner. Yay! It's me! It's me! I forgot to get even the, like, slight amount of memorabilia to set up my...

Wait, yes, you have a hat on that you didn't have when we began. Whoa! King's Dominion, it says. My Co-King's Dominion hat! I'm not... I have a bun on, so I can't really wear a hat. That's a really, like, world-brightening aqua color as well.

That's a beautiful shade. Yeah, ita color as well. That's a, that's a beautiful shade. Yeah. It's corduroy. Oh, like you want your, your summer wear to be your summer hats. You want them in a, in a,

a nice corduroy, nice woolly corduroy. Yeah. That's that summer heat up there. Yeah. Yeah. In the, in this quarantine

As I have been putting on quarantine weight I've been replacing the clothes that fit me With oversized T-shirts from Old Theme parks Why am I Having such a problem talking?

Bush Gardens And King's Dominion. Yes, exactly. Jason has just shared his screen with maybe what you're talking about. This one is shipping to me as we speak. What? Because I did that, too. Yeah.

Yeah. It's a very mom shirt. It kind of, yeah. I mean, it's very 90s. It is, of course, a Paramount's King's Dominions, which was how I knew it. I predate that. You predate it. I'm going for the Hanna-Barbera stuff.

Right. I'm going for anything that looks like the animal that would have been attacking me in the world of that ride. So, like, you're Grizzly. You're... This is mostly the Grizzly, because everything... Oh, this is mostly the Grizzly, because everything else is the Shockwave, Avalanche, the Rebel Yell, which have they renamed that?

They should rename that. They have renamed it, yes. Yeah, it's called Racer 75 now, and is still standing. And they did the rename not even recently, like not even in the last year, as part of, oh, everyone should do these kinds of things. It was several years ago, seemingly

completely voluntary and out of nowhere, so good for them. Has Billy Idol changed the name of his, the Rebel Yell song? Do we know? Yeah, I think it's Defund the Police now. Oh, okay.

He's pretty progressive. Wow. He really switched. I'm glad he in England is tapped into our issues. I guess it's their issues too, probably. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, all right. So you were on Doughboys and you were talking about King's Dominion on there,

which caused a listener on Twitter to set up an arranged marriage between us. You must have Eliza Skinner on. Why haven't you had Eliza Skinner on? And my only answer is because we haven't met. But let's meet quickly and then we can do this. And we did it. We've made progress. So you're welcome, whichever person that was.

Yes. Yeah, I'm very pleased to be here. Wonderful. Wonderful. Yes, I'm very pleased to be here Wonderful, wonderful And now I've not had a chance to listen to that Doughboy So I don't know your specific Oh, it's mostly me shit-talking this podcast So yeah, you should have listened

It's just, what do these guys think they know? What a bunch of doinks Yeah My biggest fear is of what they think. It's why I avoid it on the regular. I turned it off at that part. I was like, I should circle back around to this, but I don't know if I have time.

Yeah. I mean, it's kind of a way of getting more podcast bookings. I just neg other podcasts on each podcast appearance. And by the way, never not funny we're like never funny you know we'll get rid of the not I should get him talk to him next week okay but so you are you did grow up with Kings Dominion you're so you're from that area virginia i don't know where it this park is close to richmond and kind of close to dc yeah i'm from richmond okay so it felt like so king's dominion was the closest but it was it felt to me as a child like i was just

right between king's dominion and bush gardens and that's pretty much how i classified my place in the world um was this like your number one park as when you were a kid or was it like just low it was close this a little of both i mean i did bush gardens williamsburg seemed like the fancy one because it's themed um european So like each place you're going to is a different country. And it's like, ooh, but King's Dominion, you had more rides for your inch, square inch. Also, as a little kid, they had a much better kids area. So they had like a bunch of kids rides and a kid's roller coaster that sort of like could transition you into the world of roller coasters um the scooby-doo

the scooby-doo yes a big favorite of mine yeah kind of big it was it was like a it's not exactly a super small kiddie coaster like it is a decent sized wooden coaster but that's what i rode a number of times to uh work my way up to the rebel yell now racer 75 which is very large yeah yeah no yeah it's not like those kiddie coasters that you see you know on a boardwalk that'll just be like oh they're going around in a circle a little up and down it's a legit coaster that just Got shrunk down slightly and doesn't Have any loops but

Yeah I felt like a real grown up Once I was riding the Scooby Doo There's not a ton in that genre Like the step up like the PG-13 of Roller coasters it's a kind Of a it's kind of a bare area It's sometimes either a bare area.

It's sometimes either just kiddie or full tilt super scary one. Yeah, yeah. So I feel blessed, honestly. Big Thunder is a little bit of one, yeah. I would agree. I was maybe the type of kid who Big Thunder was an R or even an NC-17.

Whoa, really? Yes yes i would say that's scandalous uh but then i was a very wimpy kid can i ask what age you were when you went do we talked about this before when you went on big thunder oh um maybe not till 13 it wasn't i get well i guess so maybe you classify it as a pg-13 that reason. Yeah, for comedy's sake, I was hoping you said 17 or 18. It was last week. It was recently. That would have been good. Made them stop the ride halfway through. Got scared. Just waving your arms up.

Please. I can't handle this. I can't. No. Can I be airlifted out, please? Dear God. You threw clothes on the track to trigger the sensors to turn it off you only have so many tools at your disposal you have to sort of mcguire it yeah i don't have that many things on my person right um anyways uh so yeah scooby-doo

was like a kind of bridge the gap uh but there are are some pretty mighty coasters in this place. How were you, Eliza, on that spectrum? Are you afraid of these things? Were you down for any of them? No, I was very into it. Very into them. I mean, when I was... Before the Scooby-Doo,

I was terrified of all of them, but then I got really into them, rode all of them. Definitely had ones that I preferred. Did not enjoy the shockwave, which I believe has been replaced because it murdered people. But that's the mark of a good park to a degree. You know?

Almost every park at some point in time. You try to avoid it, but it shows that they're taking big swings, I suppose. Yeah. I mean, fewer people than a highway and people are on those all the time so yeah that's true it is it is i think we you know we've done this podcast now for a couple years and we'll we'll talk about some dark topics like that once in a while but it is funny to just remember that we are they're building giant

steel contraptions to whip human beings around. Like the, this is very strange. It's strange enough that we've done this podcast for years, but think about what human beings have created and continue to make new, faster, crazier versions of. Yeah. And I mean, I think that's the fact that it fact that more people aren't gravely injured on them. That's kind of the amazing thing. Yeah, the ratio is pretty good. It's a 0.00001%.

Yeah. And hopefully there isn't some turn where just suddenly, I guess during COVID, they just let everything rust over and then they opened everything back up and it never worked again. Yeah, Trump dereg like some sort of code for rust on tracks which honestly like not that far out of the realm of possibility like we're ending the rust we're ending the stoppage of rust on roller coasters that is i know the super villainy is such that yeah like you know he might be pro roller coaster accident i don't nothing would surprise me anymore.

Yeah. As long as we're as long as we've taken this turn into comically awful, it would feel wrong for that not to be included. Yeah. Like, yeah. Also, like poisonous cotton candy made out of bees or something. Yes. If you're dressed as a clown in a theme park, you also have to carry a knife. It's just it's a weight balance thing.

You'll fall. You need to balance things out with a huge saber. And he made a point of, alright, if there are bees that help the environment that we need, they should be killed off immediately. But if there are bees that surprise people and attack them, especially within children's candy,

we should breed them far more aggressively. Yeah, that's how we get stronger as a country we've genetically engineered candy apples to have a razor growing inside of them from a seed from a seed a razor seed yeah yeah and you know why because why you can't stop us from doing it that's why because that's america yeah well these will all come true in a week barrel lecture it's all of it uh uh i you know actually just a quick side trick from king's dominion because you also talked about wait it's bush gardens williamsburg correct yeah um the only time that that's come up on the show before is that we did an entire episode about the Fabio goose incident. Right. I didn't know that that was there for a long time. I just found that out kind of recently.

That was there. We had this confusion. We had Dave Ferguson on about the sister park of King's Dominion, King's Island. I think he always thought it was there. But in fact, it was bush gardens so then you were if you didn't know it was there then this was not um a story that like shook you to your core as a local this wasn't like heartbreaking to see not as a local i remember hearing about it and being like that's hilarious but i didn't remember that it had happened maybe maybe i was still in a place where i was like this is the whole world virginia is all there is. Of course it happened in Virginia. Where else is it? You didn't like call any friends to make sure they were okay.

No, yeah, no. And we didn't have that feature on our phones yet. So now, obviously, if something happens to Fabio, everybody can just click that thing, check in and be like, notify your friends. You're okay. We all have the alerts. We're all concerned about Fabio danger at all times. Anyway, so with that as a side check, yeah, Kings and Maids. So when did you go for the first time?

What are like early memories? Early memories include going with friends when I was, again, very small in the kiddie park times and having to have a stack of books in the backseat of my mom's car to read on the way there. So I wasn't just like so excited to get there that I was like, are we there yet? Are we there? Oh, my God. So I would like plan out my, OK, you've got a couple of Snoopy pendiums that you can go through here. This is, you're going to make it. Um, and then my sister got a job there when I was,

I guess I must've been like nine years old, 10 years old. She was in one of the shows they had. Okay. So one of the big things that, uh, King's Dominion did for me was give me a love of eating near animatronics i just like that that stepping into a very air-conditioned place with these like clicking old animatronics trying to get you like worried about something i loved it and my sister worked speaking our language yes we all are not in agreement yeah i have i mean i've also priced old tin and aluminum statues and animatronics from uh king's dominion before

and i'm like i'm still not there in my career um oh really wait how crazy does it get where did well there's just there aren't there aren't a lot out there um people are holding on to their old singing mushrooms and stuff because that was a big feature they had singing mushrooms oh i yeah yeah yeah i have a little singing mushrooms clip we'll get to that oh good because i saw a picture of those and i i was uh uh you know this is a big park for me but somehow i had i remembered quite a bit of it. Did not remember those singing mushrooms. I don't know how that escaped my ear. They were right by, I believe, like a merry-go-round or bumper car.

Something that had like a roof over it. So it wasn't. I think it was a station for the gondolas, the like sky bucket kind of thing. That's what it was. I remember the roof. Yeah. So, I mean, I guess they were entertaining if you're standing there waiting to get on a sky gondolas the like sky bucket kind of that's what it was i remember the roof yeah so i mean i guess they were entertaining if you're standing there waiting to get on a sky gondola but um but my sister got a job at a show inside of this um jungle themed restaurant that had a bunch of um

you know different animals and explorers like popping out of different parts of the room being like well i'm a snake you better get a hamburger you know that kind of stuff and the show that she was in on the stage there was a um uh like it was like a review of fairy tale princesses so sometimes she played cinderella sometimes she played um a little red riding hood sometimes she played you know umiding Hood. Sometimes she played Rapunzel, all that stuff. Inside the jungle themed restaurant, which made no sense, absolutely no sense. But when you're looking to make shows for a theme park, you're going to be dealing with a glut of pretty teenage musical theater girls. So why not write to that why not put together some shows that are like this is definitely we can pull this off with the uh the high schoolers in town as opposed to some

jungle show like because then you need people to play like uh you know like old explorers and like the big white hats or that's that's more of a stretch for a 16 year old girl probably yeah yeah or animals you know some sort of budget jungle book type of thing they could have done. Sure, sure. But then your face paint budget goes through the roof. Yeah, yeah. And your animatronics are doing most of that work for you. So why double it up?

I did not learn about this jungle animatronic restaurant. This is very delightful. Yeah, yeah. There was definitely an explorer that like popped out of a stew pot at one point it was it was pretty great yeah explorer stew pot what a weird old trope that i feel like there used to be like uh 70 movies a year that can that yeah yeah and you know i mean obviously there's there are racist connections so it has it's has, it's

good that it's died off. But I also, I feel like Bugs Bunny did a lot to make it stick around. I feel like Bugs Bunny was just always ending up in somebody's stew pot. Yeah. Rabbit stew, you know? Right. Was that, was the stew pot like the really of six, 70 years ago? Yeah.

Well, I think actually we referred to it as a, that's got to hurt. Got it. Which I hate to be hacky, but being cooked in a stew pot, that's got to hurt. That's the whole point. Yeah. Look, when it's true when it's true it's true um i did your uh did your sister enjoy her uh her role in this uh in this show did she do it for a while she just did it for one summer and then she went to work at hershey park the summer after that oh wow what happened yeah the big show we've covered

that she did a 1950s review so she was was sometimes a nerd, sometimes a cheerleader, you know, sometimes a poodle skirt kind of Bobby Soxer. What was your reaction? Were you like, this is awesome? Yeah. I was like, oh, my God, this means I get to go all the time. I can go anywhere I want in the park. I can get in for free. None of those things were true.

None of them were true. It was a huge disappointment. I think I got to go like twice that summer. And one of the time, the first time I went, I actually won a prize at one of those games where you have to hit a mallet onto a thing and it makes this little rubber frog flap onto a lily pad. And I won, I think it was like a stuffed alligator. I was very excited about it and gave it to my sister to take home so that I didn't have to like walk around with it. They don't let park employees take home prizes. I didn't get that alligator. Like insider trading or something. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

So I, I was so upset about that for years and still when i see that game some part of me is like maybe i get it back no no the time has passed um i would be heartbroken that would never leave me if i had that happen to me that's also some ridiculous like king's entertainment company like red tape that doesn't she didn't you won it she was like holding on to it for you like but they had no proof of that and i don't know maybe you could get really good at the games if you worked there and game the system with their bad cheap prizes i mean it's not like they were giving out watches you know yeah this is not equivalence to mcmillions they're not this is not a massive although if anybody does want to invest

in that type of a documentary i'd be willing to go along with it yeah yeah 10 episodes minimum how much can we stretch this documentary into we haven't talked about games, I think, a lot, like prizes from carnival-type games and even stuff like this where they cheap out, I feel like, on plush. There's like styrofoamy crap in...

This was better than a lot of those. Like a state fair prize, definitely. It's just like a cardboard box inside of it. But I do remember that this was probably the best stuffed animal that's ever been and was perfect and beautiful for me you're like half hour spent with it yeah yeah that's what that's what got taken from me the best stuffed animal ever was it the hannah barbara alligator though what is his name guys it wasn't it was just generic no yeah just generic

yeah it's really now i didn't realize we were opening up your like loss of innocence story it's okay thank you but uh yeah i also went camping there one time with girl scouts camp there yeah they had a campground and they had this big girl scout thing where just tons of girl scouts went and camped out. And I was, again, so excited that I could not sleep and it rained horribly. So our tap flooded and I was just like, you guys, can you believe that we're going to ride the grizzly tomorrow? This is going to be so great. And everyone was like, you're making it worse. This is truly awful what you're doing.

But yeah, it felt like, that felt like really being an insider at the park. Did you ever consider also trying to perform there? I mean, you're a very good improviser, musical improviser. Did this, did you go, I got to get on stage here too? No, I didn't.

Because at that point, by the time I was a teenager teenager i wasn't really doing that kind of performing i wasn't really doing musical theater stuff and um it seemed like it didn't seem like my sister had a great time it seemed like kind of a grind and i was like well i wouldn't want to turn something that i love into that plus i didn't know that i had the chops for it i don't know i mean interesting my sister's been tony nominated since then i can't know that I had the chops for it. I don't know. I mean, interesting. My sister's been Tony nominated since then. I can't say that. Oh my God.

Yeah. In hindsight though, or right now, is there any role in a Disney park or in King that you would go, you know what? I do this for a couple of weeks. That seems good. Yes.

Uh, the, I would definitely play like the weird comedic part in any of them. Like the girl who runs in and is like, what a time machine guys, we can't do that. And then like someone else is like, stop it,

Carla. We're doing whatever we need to, to go find them. Hits of the past. Um, yeah, that's a, so that one is about like collecting all of the greatest songs of all time.

Yeah. Time travel. That would definitely work, right? Yeah. That's pretty like what theme park shows are. Yes. Yeah. Like we've talked about those Disney Cruise Line musicals.

That's almost exactly what they're like. Yeah. Or like the Universal Studios show with all the or i guess it's islands of adventure maybe show where it's like different monsters performing in a band coming up on podcast yes beetlejuice's graveyard review oh yeah but um they have it year-round in the one in florida it's not a seasonal thing and it's not so much about it about the year review. It's just like,

Hey, it's me. The bride of Frankenstein. I think I could probably play guitar. Oh yeah. Cause I'm the wolf man and I can play drums. And then they do. Yes.

They bulldozed it a few years ago to build a very, very poorly received fast and furious. Uh, slap. That was that. Oh no. Oh no. Oh yeah. We'll get into it.

Uh, yeah, we'll get into it in that episode. Uh, geez. Hmm. Um, I will also,

you have to think that, um, being in a theme park show is the opposite of improvising. I would say there is no room for improvising typically. Yeah. Well, yes, Mike, I'm just going to save typically. Yeah. Well, if you... Yes, Mike? I'm just going to say maybe the genie in the California Adventure Disney's Aladdin show

where he's dropping topical references, I do think he has a little wiggle room to throw some stuff out. But that's the exception that proves the rule. Like everything else is pretty well coordinated. How much wiggle room is there with the jungle cruise patter? That's a good question. I feel like you could probably get in like a couple sentences here and there. I've,

I've been on different cruises where I go, this is, I've been on one where it's like exactly what you think it is. And then I have been on ones where they're throwing stuff in, in between the normal script so i think you can probably get away with it you just have to be smart about it there was a strange time where uh they were they rethemed everything to the 1930s due to the indiana jones ride and they outlawed topical references. If it's not something from the 30s, you cannot

bring it up. And audiences hated it. The people working there hated it. This was a failure across the board, and I think they reversed it at some point. That's awful. Was it all just like a pre-Nazi kind of jokes? Like, it seems like

something weird's happening in Germany, but look! A hippo! It was mostly about that, yeah was mostly pre nazi turnover movies in color get this one to the loony bin scott how many how much improvising were you doing on the studio tour how much because scott was a tour guide at universal um would you was percentage wise how often would you go a little off script just for to say something that might have you saw and wanted to comment on uh i wanted to do it i did more than i was supposed to because they threatened that they would secret shop you and you could get in trouble um i definitely tried to but boy if you were uh if you were feeling lazy

there was a way to do it the barest bare minimum humanly possible there were like certainly ones where it's like yeah it's too hot to be funny fuck it um but my favorite thing for sure was like making up uh false info if i could. Like fun fact? Yeah, yeah. I forget if I've said it on this show before, but I made up this whole thing. There was a montage you could show about bloopers, and I made up all this stuff about how bloopers

were named after a guy named George Bloop because he was the first actor to make a mistake on camera because he transitioned from the silent era to the talkie era and he forgot that he had to say lines out loud uh so from then on they were called bloopers and that one was so like dry and what movie facts are actually like that i would watch faces at that one like real interesting like I think that one traveled I think friends and family the

first blooper was actually oh shit I forgot I have to say things they were extremely profane. Fuck! Cock! Sorry. God damn it. Oh, I'm sorry. Is this a clean podcast? No. It is not except that there's at various points guilt about people's parents, our own parents, maybe

hearing it and being shocked that we've turned to profanities. Listen! Mine don't because they're still on like Burner cell phones like they wouldn't know how to Get a podcast if they had detailed Instructions but Other ones do Jason and my mom Jason's mom

They don't care for the cursing I'm sorry No you're fine you're fine It's just Jason jason and i yeah it's on you guys yeah my mom sent an email about it saying like it's not just me who doesn't like it young people don't like it either and that was after she listened to a live recording of a sold out show that we had just done but were those the people who buy tickets so they can boo every time you curse uh okay there was a little of that and i was wondering what the explanation for it

was so yeah yeah that's what young people do it's cancel culture the original cancel culture yeah profanity cancel culture is yeah mainly about getting people to stop saying crap Please, I'm here and I'm a kid So, sorry Alright, we'll be good, we'll be good from now on We'll be good Well, let's be good by watching some Like, some very wholesome entertainment

As alluded to From the singing mushrooms And in fact, this is some very Like, entertainment as alluded to, uh, from the singing mushrooms. And in fact, this is some, this is some very like parent approved material because that's, uh, exactly what they're singing about. And the voice that you'll hear at the beginning is a frog who is

introducing, uh, some four singing mushrooms, uh, who are multicolored. Here's a clip. Wake up boys. You're on. I want a girl

just like the girl that married dear old dad. She was a girl like the girl who married dear old Dan. It's about wanting a woman who's like the woman. So that's pretty wholesome, right?

Yeah. I think he says, he kind of grades him on the performance. Let's hear it for the mushroom. When I said I was moving to Los Angeles, this is what my mom dreamt of for me is to be a frog in a top hat. With a collar. With like a dick. And a collar with like a cigar and a cigar yeah he's like a sleazy promoter like he's gonna get the payment

run out on those mushrooms yeah he's a lot more mobile than the mushrooms for sure yeah he's like that partridge family guy the dad who no he wasn't a dad Scott are you talking about Reuben Kincaid the manager of that partridge family guy the dad who no he wasn't a dad scott are you talking about ruben kincaid the manager of the partridge family there was maybe a point in time i could

remember the name ruben kincaid but i feel like ruben kincaid was not crooked that's my memory of the partridge family but i could be wrong it would have been a much darker show right yeah um yeah i mean that's for the child trafficking coming yeah i don't think he was selling off partridges for other purposes for me you see when i say you sing seven-year-old he was not like lou perlman i don't think we're not with them but maybe with some other families who he felt he could exert some more control over. Scott, when you work on the young Ruben Kincaid spinoff for Peacock, you can do whatever. Kincaid.

You can do whatever you want with that IP. Okay. Jesse Plemons, I think. I think that's right. Yeah. Yeah. Complicated. Depth.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you get the choice. You get to pick which classic rock song is slowed down and whisper sung over the trailer oh yes yeah well it's gotta be come on it's gotta be like partridge fam like come on where's the song yeah that's good singing it's got to be something like right come on get happy yeah piano single ironic to hear come on piano key really sad

yeah one key yeah from scott gardner very stirring finally my turn to dark showrunner but it still involves uh bell bottoms so uh everybody's happy um that's one form Of entertainment Another that I'm very Fond of that I'll just throw out I'm curious if Jason or Eliza Ever got to see When Paramount came in

So this was not a Paramount park Much like King's Island you can check that Episode out from a couple years ago But Paramount bought This park at some point and started installing Paramount properties. And I think they really announced their arrival for the first time in a big way with Paramount on ice.

Did anybody get to see Paramount on ice? For sure. Yeah, it comes out on the King's Island because that has the Star Trek ice skating sequence. Yes. Did we talk about it in the star trek one too uh a little bit there's a big star trek little zone um i i mean skating thing at king's dominion yes yes yeah this is a park that is only open in the summer this is not like a year-round park this is yeah it's welteringly hot yeah but like why why bother put it make it a put it they've got a lake right there make it a jet ski show that is a weird idea such a thing they did they had a water stunt show for a while

oh like water skiing and yeah just put those people in star trek outfits that's good they had it i guess they had the facilities uh wait jason yeah where you're well i was gonna say i think part of the appeal of the ice skating theater i remember going in there and the appeal of a lot of indoor places at parks located on the east coast in the summertime um virginia gets very muggy virginia gets super hot and super humid uh so anywhere i feel like my family yeah we saw the ice skating show and i just remember eating at a country kitchen a lot because it had like food that you could tell was cooked like it was good like it was fried chicken and barbecue and everywhere else i don't as a kid i was very happy to eat pizza for most meals but uh my parents were a little frustrated by that. That said, I did find a King's Dominion map

where it just listed food items and a long list of pizza, funnel cake, ice cream, hot dog, and it would tell you every place you could get that one item, and I don't know how that didn't become a theme park map standard. That is a great idea to get a child to stop screaming yeah i they i don't know if this was an era thing or a um king's dominion thing or what but i do remember getting popcorn shrimp for the first time at king's dominion which seems like kind of an an odd theme park food choice and it was from this stand that was like primarily popcorn shrimp

like that was you know they have those little round ones with the with the different lines can come up and they just have buckets of the same kind of food inside yeah it's like a popcorn shrimp stand i also remember at some point trying popcorn shrimp and it's seeming like exotic and me thinking that this is adult food i bet as so as an, I'll mainly be existing on popcorn shrimp. I'll move out of this whole chicken finger era that I'm still in right now. Having gotten past the chicken nugget stages of my youth and eventually arrive at popcorn shrimp.

A true adult. I could never, never a full roasted j those that's for elderly people oh yeah maybe before i die but it'll be breaded up through my 50s i'll be married and uh have matured to the tender period of my life oh nice very sweet yeah um i well that here wait just really quick before i move on from the ice show. My, my favorite thing about the ice show is that it's, it's a lot of, uh, I did like Shazam what some of the songs were, because it's not quite like Disney where you recognize the melodies. Um, like I didn't know maybe other people without Shazamming,

it would know the theme from terms of endearment. I didn't know that score. Oh, wait. Yes. experiment i didn't know that score oh wait yes i think so wait that's a pretty famous melody i guess yeah i mean if i'm right i had a music box of it that was one of those um i was a real music box head when i was a kid too so a lot of the hits that way you know how many music boxes right um like at least a dozen i started collecting i was i would also as soon as i had two or three of something be like i'm a collector of this thing now i must complete it and so every time i saw a music box on sale uh no matter what it was i would be like yep we go. You'd be surprised by what the musical contents were.

It's not like you bought it because it was in terms of endearment. No, no, no. And it would very often not have anything to do with it. Like the outside and the inside. But yeah, I was like, oh, great. A sale Dick Tracy music box. That will be what my allowance goes to. For sure.

Do you still have that uh i don't know my mom contacted me recently and was like what are you doing with these music boxes get them out of my house so i might still have them i should i should find out um it's a general stress for everybody the what do i do with my childhood belongings that the pain you're like how do i it's hard for me to make this a priority to solve it especially for you guys who grew up across the country i don't like to think about even the stuff i have out here in la i was a collector too eliza and um still have only partly shaken that habit and it's ruining my fucking life i have to do something with this stuff yeah yeah i went through a big action figure phase when i was in high school also that

just give the box away just like yeah i wonder i wonder what it's like to have a really bad i wonder what that could be like but But we used to like drive around We knew which days the shipments were At different toy stores and we would like Drive around and look for specific Short stack action figures Which figures Were they?

Usually they were I mean this is part of why I was into it Usually they were the female characters The short stacks would be So they would stack them in a box And you know they would have like this size of a stack of um batman and like this many wonder women's so the the female characters were worth a little bit more so it would be like any any popular thing like batman or like whatever female character was in the line of that yes exactly yeah um yeah like i think i had some earthworm jim stuff even or no the tick i had uh the the

queen bee from the tick and a lot of different star wars things yeah it was uh it was weird but you know when you don't have anything to do when you're a teenager, you're like, yeah, sure. I'll spend Tuesday night driving around looking at the toy sections and Rite Aid and Toys R Us and see if I can dig up something that feels special. First of all, I miss doing that during the pandemic. Yeah.

Yeah, eBaying and Amazoning isn't The same thing exactly I Okay so One more thing about this ice show It's mostly like kind of love ballads And stuff but then there's a funny part With Frank Drebin from Naked Gun Where

Which they convey It's like any ice skater With a white wig And he's like Doing Ice skater with a White wig And he's like trying he's doing Like a parody of a romantic Pairs figure skating But he keeps like falling over And tripping on stuff and pulling

Curtains down and like yanking parts of her Clothes off and her wig And it's good it's really Funny brought me A lot of joy I was like ready to judge it and dislike it but it was uh just very sincere good ice physical comedy the ice clowning section of the show yeah yeah yeah you gotta do it because if it's all if it's too serious to uh and or too scary with all that star trek stuff and those klingons sure sure sure i mean a lot of

is it a simpsons joke of like a theme park show called hooray for everything like that that is what like theme especially king's dominion or hershey park where they're only booking for like the summer season and they have a small cast it is a lot of like ages 8 to 80 sort of stuff so are you getting a lot of brill building like classics at least back in the 90s you were getting a lot of standards and like early rock songs and then like there might be one like 80s rock song and that's the like oh that's that's to switch it up a little before we get back to to do Ron Ron. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

We had a budget and we decided we had to decide which songs to spend it on. So, yeah. Look, if someone can think of a motorcycle thing, we got a bunch of handlebars from when we did a leader of the pack song last year.

So, Oh, we still have my boyfriend's back. Also great. Can we build something out from that? Perfect. The, Oh, we still have my boyfriends back also. Great. Can we build something out from that? Perfect. I'm curious what was going on musically in this show. Flintstone Follies.

What a delight. I would love to know what the rest of Flintstone Follies was. And it's not just the Flintstones. Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear. Jabberjaw. Jabberjaw? Hong Kong phooey hong kong phooey phooey yeah it's everybody i mean the whole uh you alluded to it at the beginning eliza but hannah barbaro was was part of this park at least in the early days and i think i got 35 years. Oh, 35 years. Hanna-Barbera characters were there for 35 years. Even after Paramount they stuck around.

Why is just some of... Oh, sorry. Scooby-Doo and a Corvette? Yeah, this is my favorite. Yeah, I've not seen this luxury car. Scooby-Doo is posing next to it. Just like behind a building. Just like a place you'd go sneak off and smoke cigarettes

and with a license plate KD Scoob And my other favorite photo In Hanna-Barbera world is Here's the gang here's Scooby and Barney Rubble and Fred Flintstone and a Really strange flattened Yogi bear his head is too

Small that's not the Proportions of I mean he looks like A rock landed on his head and crushed it down by F. Well, I mean, hanging out with the Flintstones, who knows, right?

You know what you're getting into. I have, I had framed pictures. Well, my parents have had framed pictures. They might've switched them out of me at different ages. One with Fred Flintstone and one with quick drama, graw. one with Fred Flintstone and one with Quick Drama Gras.

And I believe the Quick Drama Gras was partly because the friend that I had gone to Kings Dominion with, her brother was working there, her teenage brother was working there as Quick Drama Gras. So I remember talking to a guy in a suit and being like, hey, or no, I think maybe she wasn't with me, I just knew it. Cause I remember going up to the some teenager in one of these suits being like hey or no i think maybe she wasn't with me i just knew it because i remember going up to the some teenager in one of these suits um being like are you are you sally's

brother i i know her and the guy was like yes i can't but i can't talk but stop um he was doing a lot of shrugging and a lot of like uh trying to communicate no to me um that's the theme park uh celebrity is a weird fleeting like it's the biggest kind of so the most accessible kind of celebrity when you're 12 and yet completely meaningless in the broader spectrum and there was some local celebrity crossover in that there was a, I believe Q94, um, which was the big, um, you know, pop music radio station booth at the bottom of the Eiffel tower at King's Dominion. So sometimes they would be broadcasting live from King's Dominion. And so when you're walking around, you can be like, Whoa, that is a radio DJ. Oh my gosh, what is this, Hollywood?

Come on. I bet he could see me and is probably talking about me eating these warheads outside staring through the glass. What are you showing us here, Jason? Okay, so this photo of a bunch of hannah barbara characters you know the whole gang this yogi looks pretty good scooby looks like he has hives on his face but yeah he's like yeah he has an infection he's like beet red i just remember as a kid like this photo was on all the promotional stuff and i feel like i stared at this photo like i know this photo better than pictures of extended family members like i loved this so much

and this might be a good time for us to talk about because i cannot state how big this park loomed in my mind as a child like i lived three hours away I checked the drive from my childhood home to Kingsman was just over three hours. So it felt far enough away. That was an event when we were going, but it, it was close enough. You could drive to it.

You didn't have to fly to it like Disney world. And would you stay overnight there? Yeah, we would stay overnight and usually make it a few day trip of a couple nights at the and i found this i'm so glad i found it the best western king's quarters motel just on the other side of the parking lot um i am so was so excited to learn that not only is it still standing the pictures from the last few years show that it has not changed very much, for better or worse, besides I think it's a Wyndham now. But they had an arcade.

They had shuffleboard. It probably goes without saying, I was a big-time shuffleboard kid. What? Yeah. I mean, it does, and yet I'm glad you said it. It does, and yet. So I was so thrilled to have an arcade and a shuffleboard, and you got on a shuttle bus that would take you right to the entrance of the park.

I believe Eliza, the campground, I think was adjacent to the hotel or was in the neck of the woods of the hotel. But King's Dominion was the home to one of my favoritest places in the whole wide world, Yogi's Cave. Yes. Let me try and share this picture and walk through this is what would greet you um this guy right here yogi himself is outside fishing and unfortunately it seems like all he ever catches is a boot i believe it was just up and down with that boot up and down with that boot. Up and down with the boot. But yeah, Scott and Mike, I sent you a link.

There is a walkthrough video online of Yogi's kick. You want me to share that now? Yeah, if you want to share that. Where we find out it's 35 minutes long. I wish it was. He wants all of them. I could do an hour on Yogi. Eliza, it's good that you're here or else i would just be telling my memories of this park and telling them to shut up

is there anything particular you'd like are we just going to enjoy this i honestly would rather see uh you playing shuffleboard as a youth so it's just like we're walking through Yogi's cave here and it looks like, you know, it's fake rocks, which we love on the show. Yeah. And there's families and there's like hieroglyphics in the cave. Yeah. How he

evolved. And there's Yogi footprints. So you could be like, I'm going to walk exactly on his footprints. There's gems. There's gems in the wall. Did Yogi find gems on the cartoon ever? Wasn't he just looking to steal someone's lunch?

This is just where he crashes, you know? This is where him and his friends hang out. He could have been rich. He actually could have been rich, yeah. I don't know. I mean, it also might have gotten ugly. Those do appear to be uncut gems probably just as well so wait yogi then is sandler in this metaphor well he's he is the

calmer version he didn't go down that path. There are animatronic frogs in this too. So many animatronics. You can stop it, Mike. Because Yogi is not actually in the cave, really. He's outside kind of greeting you. Those frogs move.

There are more frogs. More frogs! Boo Boo is conducting them. It's really quick yeah are they all playing they're all sharing one big harmonica sharing a big harmonica what this is not actual this is

like extended yogi bear verse because this never appeared in any cartoon there was never like his magical cave that was huge he was just like a bum that would run around and terrorize the ranger right like there was never anything but that's what they did with et's ride that's true universal yes not in the original source material i mean yeah i guess that's kind of what you want is to expand the

universe show us more show us more you show us more this is also this um i watched an interview with the like former head of King's Dominion, and he described this place as a tilt house because it's built on a very slight angle. So you are off kilter the whole time. You're leaning. Yeah. And it's just a walk through.

And I would just go in the, this was one of the first rides where I was just go through the entrance, go through the whole thing, out the exit, wave to my family and go right back into the entrance just again and again like why i just loved it i just loved i loved the music i love the waterfalls and the gems it was just like it was so were you were you a big yogi bear fan in addition to this i mean i think everyone probably watched the cartoons and had

some affection for yogogi and Boo Boo. But were you a particularly big Yogi fan or was it just the actual cave itself that kept you coming back for more? I liked all the Hanna-Barbera cartoons. I mean, heavily syndicated when we were all growing up. So like, it was very excited to just go into a character's house, I guess.

And also, this is likely an early exposure to the theme park smells. It's very cold. The water smells. I was about to say with that waterfall part, I would remember you would get a little mist from that. So when it was really, really hot, that was a whole reason to go through that alone,

just the cooling waterfall mist. Yeah. Going into the character's house, I will say now that brought up a memory of that being like an obsessive thought I had as a kid. And I didn't have Toontown because we went to Florida, we went to Disney World and they had like Mickey's birthday land, which had a little Mickey's house, but it wasn't Toontown, which I would read about. And I thought, of course, I'll never go there.

We don't go to California. So I was like obsessively thinking like, you're going to go into Goofy's house? I love Goofy. I'd love to go in his house. I want to see what his bed looks like. Yeah. Disney cribs.

Yeah. Yeah. Yes. So I get that. So it was Yogi. It was like Yogi's crib. Yes. Yeah.

And Boo Boo was there. There was a couple of generic bears just kind of around too just because so they could kind of pad it out but i think i just like the off kilter feeling and the uh yeah just seeing some of the hannah barbaric characters and it's called a tilt house that's what he called it i never heard the term before i i think like fun house kind of uh yeah we just heard the term madhouse for the first time in the on the europe episodes which is like a whole like when it what was it described as when like the the walls kind of spin and keep the where you are stationary yeah i'm wondering if tilt house and madhouse yeah i like the house genre is something we need to investigate more yeah for sure so like when where you are stationary. Yeah. So I'm wondering if tilt house and mad house. Yeah.

I like the house genre is something we need to investigate more. Yeah. For sure. So like when you would see yourself walking, when you'd see people inside, when you were outside and you're getting ready to walk into it, they all looked tilted because they were tilting to like keep themselves. Right. Balanced.

So it had kind of a like oh like mess with your equilibrium yeah yeah yeah which was fun and that was great this is like in camera effects yeah and they i think the very first time i went i was super like kindergarten young and would have been i we might have gone once right before paramount took over and then paramount took over and that to me it it just in my mind it just like upped the game because like i started to know like movie studio like i was like oh disney is movies universal is movies paramount is movies too so then when you get hannabar characters yeah it's legit so then i became a weird little kid who didn't want to just tell all its relatives about yogi's cave he wanted

to tell them about the days of thunder simulator attraction you might remember days of thunder the 1990 tom cruise nicole kidman wait that's what that was i definitely wrote that oh yeah i remember when that was new and it was like a big fucking deal and yeah it was all the radio commercials were like days of thunder yeah yeah yeah yeah so you were excited about that just as much as you were about yogi's cave days of thunder and yogi's cave and i really like the motel even though we would constantly be switching rooms because my mom would be like we asked for non-smoking there's ashes there's a full ashtray and it smells like cigarettes in here you're in virginia yeah that's what i well the funniest one we had to we checked

in once and we're like the floor is uh has popcorn on it. What's up? Did you not want it like that? I did not want it. Did you not want a popcorn room? Okay, well, specify. Just in a bag or on a shelf or I don't know what you're expecting. Yeah, Virginia,

you're going to have smoking sections everywhere. When I was a kid, also we would have more than once, multiple times I had field trips to the Philip Morris plant and you would get to tour and see them. Yeah. See them making those. And then you would get, um, when you left, every kid would get this big pen that has all the names of the brands around it. So it'd be like Benson and Hedges.

So everybody's house had tons of these huge oversized novelty pens with cigarettes. And apparently apparently according to my sister teenagers would actually be given cigarettes as they're leaving yeah great wow we should have done this as a topic for today's episode that's a themed experience yeah you're on a factory floor watching people make cigarettes wow sure but you did ride a little there was a little tram that they would you know ride and drive you around in the cigarette tram wow so that means in virginia you could go to the philip morris factory tour and then go to bush gardens and go to the beer brewery tour yeah wow and and that would have been on the way too i believe well sort of yeah not not

quite but um you definitely could do that in one day here's your future uh cigarettes or beer or both you choose the future is bright and then go hang out with some navy guys um that that is uh yeah that was our full trip we would do a couple days at king's dominion couple days at bush gardens and one begrudging day at colonial williamsburg which i was a nerdy kid i liked history but when you go up grow up in the like original colonies that it is a little it's like well it's everywhere it's interesting i like this but it's not a theme park like come on you're not gonna compete with yogi's cave and days of thunder get out of here yeah i mean what so you see somebody make a candle and that's the highlight of your day when

in the distance you can see bush gardens that would be the thing that would drive me crazy every time i had to go to colonial williamsburg for anything i'd be like i can literally see the fun it's that close why can't we just go do that instead my parents made a lot of um my my dad's a filmmaker and so my parents made a bunch of films for the jamestown yorktown foundation know, like when you go to a museum or reenactment place and they're like, this is what it was like. Here's the story of Jamestown. My dad made those.

So I had to spend a lot of time there just like hanging out in break rooms, watching reenactors drink diet Cokes in between their shifts. And I was like, wow, if this couldn't couldn't if i if any kid thought this couldn't get more boring guess what it can well for little scott i was a history buff i talked a long time ago about how i um there was a video that i saw at the independence hall in philadelphia and my mom and i liked it so much that we bought it and made my class watch it when we returned and it was like this is from Scott and Mrs. Gairdner and then it's the dullest most morose what smoky old movie you've ever seen so I would you like about it um I don't remember

now um because now I like it because it's weird and sad and morose but why would i have liked it then i think it was like i think ghosts were involved i think it's like john adams walking around these grounds where i used to step and where i dreamed of democracy paranormal that's a fun twist on it yeah it was probably that ghosts of history appearing to me uh yeah I'll send you a link to one of my parents' one. Somebody sent it to me recently and was like, hey, there's this thing where I was an extra in your parents' history movie. It's streaming for free now. And I was like, well, okay. Yes. So it was like period movie. It wasn't about like,

here's what James sounds like now. It was like, here's a full period. I think I would have loved this the yeah the skinner family output yeah they made one and then they like had to do an update on it and then there was at one point they also reenacted the voyage and my dad made a documentary about the reenactment of the voyage which that was more about like here are some modern day sailors on an old ship what was it like um but i wonder if my mom has even seen these things independently and she's a teacher she probably she may have shown these things to her students well my dad's day job was working for the state department of education in virginia making educational films

so they're so probably wow yeah any like crazy ones but like not doing drugs or not huffing paint. A lot of those, a lot of things about like, here's a new way that we teach math. Here's a like, so it would, it would both be like things to show kids and things to show teachers and things like about what's happening in schools. I was definitely in a, in one about something about like guidance counselors. I remember trying to be like a cool kid and being like, what do you even, what's a guidance counselor even for that kind of stuff. It was your idea of what a, like what the cool character is in the theme park show.

I guess you have like, it's like to, to really pop and be cool. You have to have this, uh, the voice has got to go up an octave. You need a little attitude that's that's that's uh that's 80s acting i think it's not anywhere close to like organic in the moment it's like hey guys also there's a lot of crossover between just general child acting and theme park acting that's the same oh yeah dial in many ways that's the bridging the gap like scooby yes it's like it's performing and in many ways that's the bridging the gap like scooby yes it's like it's performing and being confident but it's not you're not exactly doing noah bombach

style yeah the of the very understated uh flintstone folly you know now that i say that i'm like why would i pick him of any way that basically is theme park acting now that i say it it's sort of better or more nuanced filmmaker i want to see a theme park show now that I say it. Insert a better or more nuanced filmmaker. I want to see a theme park show about a teenager trying to silently process his emotions about his parents' divorce. The Squid and the Whale starring Bam Bam

and Pebbles. And Jabberjaw. And Jabberjaw. Hey, you're no whale. He's a shark uh there were uh so you guys don't like the sad theme park stories i'm getting oh i don't know what do you what do you got i'm curious we'll do we just did action park where a bunch of a ton of people died so we you know we're mired in it right now this

is maybe sadder than people dying and also this is uh kid rumors you know i think this actually might have made the news though uh there they had a dolphin show right underneath the shockwave which was the stand-up coaster and those dolphins died those dolphins died because that's not where dolphins are supposed to live underneath the stand-up coaster yeah well i mean similarly there was that we haven't talked about lion country safari uh a whole like lion drive-through lion place that they had and lions don't want to have cars by them or know how to deal with it so yeah eventually like they would just start standing up on the cars and go to sleep on them for a while so then it became a monorail through a grounded monorail through i guess you you've done this at some point in time yeah i did that monorail um and i i think i did it once and

just hated it and i also i do that is one of the things that every now and then i'm like where where was that where geographically for the rest of the park, was there suddenly a safari? I have no idea. Yeah. I was trying to remember a lot of these parks, these older parks that I went to as kids. I,

I, a lot of times I will think back to them. And then when I find videos of them, it's like, Oh, I was nearly right, but it was reversed it was on the left side of the Eiffel Tower it wasn't

on the right side like for whatever reason I did remember a lot of the King's Dominion stuff when I found old pictures and videos but I whatever for whatever reason I pictured everything was to the right of the Eiffel Tower and it's like no that was

smack in the middle like some stuff was left some was behind some was to the right of the Eiffel tower. And it's like, no, that was smack in the middle. Like some stuff was left. Some was behind. Some was to the right. I would guess that's probably that that was the route that you like to take. Because for me, if I'm, if I'm entering and I'm looking at the Eiffel tower,

I think everything is to the left. You said the right, right? But that would be, that's because when I first started going there, that's where Hanna-Barbera land was. Yes. So that would be that's because when i first started going there that's where hannah barbaro land was yes so that would always be where i'd had yeah um and then you go through that to get to there is a lot of um a lot of mountains and rocks like when you said you

liked rocks there are all of you i guess that there they had tons of fake rocks at this place there were three rides they were all inside one mountain, supposedly. That was the best. The Haunted River Smurf Mountain for a period of time. Wow. And then I forget the third one. Well, it changed around. There was Mount Kilimanjaro for a while,

and there was the Time Machine, which I think Mount Kilimanjaro became the haunted river um the time machine was one of those ones where it spins around and it sticks you against the wall yeah um and so it so that one didn't the line didn't move very fast for that one and i liked it a lot so i remember being in that line a lot and it would go from being in the line outside to being in the line inside surrounded by all this fake rock, which is all absolutely covered by inches and inches of gum. Um, that was like part of what you did at King's dominion was stick your gum to

the wall by the time machine. Um, and, uh, yeah, before the Smurfs were the Smurfs, they were the doozers. Oh yes. Oh, yes.

Well, from my opening joke, yeah, there was a ride called Land of the Dooge, Journey to the Land of the Doos. That's D-O-O-Z. And it's so confusing because, all right, Smurf Mountain, that is the real Smurfs. Now, is that like Doozer like Fraggle Rock? No, it is not. Oh, they were just weirdo skin people. They were just these weird little like gobliny.

Like you want your little things to be fluffy, I think. Right? Yeah, that cubes them up. This was not that bad. They were not fluffy. Yeah, weird little. I was describing them to my wife as like little ziggies. It's a whole race of ziggies.

Yeah, they didn't even have like. A little more bulbous than ziggy i believe yeah because they were all bald too right they were yeah yeah i think so like pretty uh pretty hairless for the most part um and they wear like weird hats and it looks like wigs essentially but the point of the the doozies is that they are a tribe of creatures who live beneath the surface of the earth and they make the world work so they crank big gears that make the world turn they push up plants which makes them grow they die the red sea um they manufacture water and air they i guess they clean the statue of liberty's, which are not actually underground,

which was a surprise to me when I found that out. Wait, yeah, I have a shiny thumbnail of that. They're putting nail polish on it. Do you have that available? I didn't see that. Pull that up. Hang on. I'm not into foot stuff or anything. I just wanted to see this picture. Yeah, why are to see this picture yeah you're making me do work to see

these feet oh wow yeah i did not see that that's weird yeah wait the feet well they stole the feet they're foot freaks yeah um when you're that little i mean this is combining several fetishes i think well yeah there are like a couple of them in the background jerking off on the feet so at least there's acceptance um yeah this uh so they're the proletariat is what we're saying and forced to live underground in poor conditions and they uh don't individually get credit in the way that professor back and forth does. Um, faithful probably for,

for no money. Maybe they get tossed a Yogi gem every once in a while. So how much can you do with that? Yeah. So, yeah, when this became the, I'd never liked the Smurfs.

So when that ride became the Smurf ride, I was like, Oh, so the bad ride became the i'd never liked the smurfs so when that ride became the smurf ride i was like oh so the bad ride became the worst ride no thanks yeah oh this by the way is uh some sort of uh design card like ride design for one of the things that was at some point in that mountain was like a a journey through atlantis early earth yeah supposedly that's amazing you're like yeah you're showing us a real nice like framed uh art like concept art here that's well it's it's a shitty frame and it doesn't i i put it in there myself um but yeah where did that come from ebay so i was like it might not be real but i think it looks cool either way so i'm putting that up yes you have delved into like king's dominion merch and history wow yeah i'm not wearing my uh i have a i have a little necklace that has you remember

those spoons that you would get places they're like your novelty uh um uh souvenir spoon you're talking about i know what you're talking about yeah so on the top of those the cheap ones it would just kind of have a little stuck on button that was like that would say whatever it was and they would also sometimes make jewelry out of those stuck on buttons i'm taking a long way around here but it's how i thought of it i've got a necklace a king's Dominion necklace also that has the Eiffel Tower. It says King's Dominion. And it's so teeny tiny that people can't tell what it is. So they're like, oh, nice necklace.

And I'm like, well, it's from a gift shop and it costs $3. And I'm a real freakazoid to be wearing this at a fancy party. Can I get... We think that's cool. Yeah, I know. Yes. No freakazoid here. Can I get your thoughts on this current uh ebay item for sale it's a little frog it's a little magnet frog that you can hang up

he says yeah paramount's king's dominion are you bidding on that jason no i thought about it i don't know what i'd do with it he's just got felt i guess he ain't supposed to hang him on a doorknob i kind of remember these being like souvenir things you supposed to hang them on a doorknob. I kind of remember these being like souvenir things. You would hang them on a doorknob and then you get a little bit happier all the time. I mean, anything that they can do that. I mean,

so here's my Loch Ness monster hat, since this is a visual podcast now. What's Loch Ness monster from? Oh, that's from Busch Gardens. That's a big coaster at Bush Gardens. Oh, gotcha. And I'm trying to see if I have this one other thing.

I've got to... Oh, yeah. Here we go. It's the wrong Bush Gardens, but... Let's see. Bush Gardens, Tampa, Florida. Ooh, a big, like, platter? Mm-hmm.

From Tampa? Yeah. Tiffany Iceberg. I got a lot of this junk. I'm like, especially now like whatever will make me happy. And the theme parks of my childhood are what make me happy. When I was a little kid, um,

I was just so obsessed with theme parks and no one in my family liked them. So I remember my school lunchbox was a Walt Disney world lunchbox and I had never been, but I was just like, this is the dream. I would collect pamphlets from different theme parks and just like lay them out and look through them. I'd be like, someday, Hershey Park, super duper looper. I'll know what you feel like. Have you made it to all the ones you wish to have made it to?

Or are there ones that have eluded you? Yeah, I think so because also the once the once so many of them transitioned to um Six Flags I was like not as excited I like I like a uh a standalone place I haven't been to Action Park and that that does that that that said that that eluded me but um Knott's Berry Farm that would be that's that does that, that, that said that, that alluded me, but, um, Knott's Berry farm, that would be, that's, that's a fun one. Also, I like the ones that have, um, characters and shit that aren't attached to anything.

So the fact that Knott's Berry farm, when I was like really little, I had a comic book of Knott's Berry farm that was about the Knott's Berry bears. Yes. We've talked about that. Yeah. And that was another thing I would's Berry Bears. Yes, we've talked about that. Berry Tales, yes. Yeah, and that was another thing. I would sit and read it and be like, man, sometime I'm going to visit these bears. And you probably didn't make it

to Berry Tales because they've been going for a long time. Berry Tales, though, is coming back. Yes, but in a weird way. I'm suspicious of what it is, aren't you? Well, of course, it's a 3d like cgi buried tales ride but it's not gonna be it picks up the story um again it's another uh i guess this is a quite a genre the factory of like maybe

undervalued uh you know like individual personalities are not encouraged there's a lot of like just uh sad begotten factories in theme park i guess i'm projecting that they're sad but i don't know those deuces uh of all the theme park factories i've seen the deuces seem among the most miserable uh well scott you mentioned sad factories but it it was a poor city safety ordinance that injured a young jason sheridan i'm of course talking about nickelodeon splat city uh i will share a picture with you guys so some background as we said paramount um took over ownership of these parks at a certain point and they started adding more and more stuff your days of thunder your wayne's world your nickelodeon um and they added this nickelodeon

play area which you can all see now um it's perfectly safe i don't uh see what the issue was that at the same time that they had it at the um mall of america uh i i wasn't because mall of america has gone back and forth on nickelodeon and snoopy so i'm not sure on the uh timing so um but this got added like by the hannah barbarus stuff and it's big water play area and so somewhere in this maze, it's kind of a little maze you go through and you get blasted with water from pipes. There was a chain link fence covered in like green plastic.

If you can picture like that sort of green plastic, you would see it like athletic fields and stuff. And I ran by that fence not realizing there was a jagged piece of it sticking out and it kind of like cut me along the stomach not deep not deep it cut like very fine like uh mike yeah you talked i maybe talked in the past the pro wrestling term blading where someone hides a razor blade and does a very fine cut i essentially bladed across my stomach and it caused not a lot okay it wasn't a lot of blood but it was just a continuous stream of blood like and i first off

i had to get out of the water maze, so I got blasted with chlorine water a couple times before I could get out, and then I found my parents are like, oh, yeah, that's not good, and we were like cleaning it up, and it would not stop bleeding, so I had to go to first aid,

and they used that like liquid bandage on it, and it sealed it up, and it did like heal pretty easily easily i didn't have to go to the hospital or anything again but this was like an inch and a half long like white scar i had on my stomach for years wow really yeah that's like dr grant taking the velociraptor uh claw at the start of like that's where i was basically like if an animal was going to kill you that's where they would have attacked pretty much yeah a warning shot from a lion or anything i think i probably started like really detailed like okay so okay king's dominion added

an additional nickelodeon area that in addition to the existing nickelodeon stuff there's a busy world of richard's scary cafe uh next to that is a water it so there's a chain link fence like i probably gave them the whole step by step yeah it's near yogi's cave have i told i have told you about yogi's cave okay got it uh yes the child date talk. Jason, have you checked? You don't need to do it here, but is it completely gone, the scar?

I think it might be gone. It's hard to tell because I have a hairy belly now as a man. It's hard to see. You call it a belly? Well, what do you want me to call it? I have a hairy belly now as a man. It's hard to see. You call it a belly. Well, what do you want me to call it? I have a hairy belly. But for years, I had that white scar.

That was always a reminder of King's Dominion. And otherwise, I don't think we had a lot of like, oh, so-and-so got sick after this ride. I don't think we had a lot of like, besides just the general heat, like, oh like i want to go back to the hotel like i don't remember a lot of like friction at king's dominion i lost 20 in a bathroom there once like i left my wallet in there and i think then i got the wallet back but it was minus 20 that was that upsetting. That's the worst as a kid. That was so much money. Yeah.

I just recently remembered when I lost $80 when I was 16. And I remember it was like a bigger crisis than anything has been in the last five years. Like nothing in having a baby was as stressful as the 16 year old losing $80 at the time. Yeah. It was so much money and you're so disappointed in yourself. And yeah. Oh yeah. That's it.

It's what you run through mentally. You idiot. You stupid idiot. And you're ugly too. No one's going to date you either. You'll never see that money again. I had an even stupider version of that happened like same about age like 60 or 80 bucks thought i lost it and it turns out i just wedged it in the vhs box that i used to constantly tape the daily show with john stewart and so found it

three months later when i went to reuse that tape again. Well, that's just a treat for you then. It was a happy ending, but I was like, why would I shove money in a VHF? What was I thinking? You're mad at yourself now, just like all of us.

Yeah, these are raw memories. I just wanted to laugh, you know? I just wanted the money and I just wanted to laugh. Play clips of hypocrisy, dreaded politician hypocrisy. It can't get worse than this, I said. Ah, the irony. It's a different time. Jason, you brought up something, and now I can't.

You said the sweetest words, and I can't not go into it now. I figured I teased it, because I think it came up just when we were in conversation about doing this part. Oh, boy. The sweetest fruit of this Paramount takeover. The Outer Limits Flight of Fear. the sweetest fruit of this paramount takeover, the outer limits, I'm the most mad I didn't get to experience, that I didn't get to experience a themed Wayne's world area, a Wayne's world rollercoaster.

Oh my God. The hurler. I'm so delighted that this existed. And I think what I didn't realize until I watched a commercial with Mike Myers himself as Wayne is that this was an entire themed area. That there was the restaurant, too. There was the restaurant with the hockey player and the little, like, the speaker booths where Wayne does his hijinks. You got to, if you did it in person, you got to tell me what was up with wayne's world i was young enough that i

i knew wayne's world from like tv commercials but it didn't it didn't really track for me like i didn't really that was an adult movie yeah it was an adult movie i may have seen mike myers because they just showed so i married an axe murderer on Comedy Central so much when I was a kid. That's right, yeah. But yeah, I remember the hurler. I thought it was a funny name for a roller coaster. It's so good. I love that there was this and that there was a themed restaurant to go with it.

It looks so perfect. There's also apparently something called the rock shop where that was like decorated with huge logos of bands, uh, of your, your nine inch nails and your chili peppers. Uh, and then my favorite thing I discovered about it is that there was for the

opening day, uh, you, they had from the cast of the film tia carrera and uh not mike myers or dana carvey but rather impersonators here you are looking at a fake garth uh and a a fake wayne who looks like the one of the Lawrence brothers. I'm not sure if it is. He really resembles him.

And then my favorite thing is fake Wayne riding the hurler with a visibly annoyed. Like so put off by this guy, which you can only, I mean, I just, the point of Wayne, I don't,

Wayne seemed very like good natured and sweet but the way this guy's doing it even just from the photos he seems to be kind of a a pest and just imagine if you're trapped with this guy on a ride and he's like saying swing over and over preventing you from leaving and she's not playing cassandra she's playing tia herself she's not she's not part of the cosplay yeah she's really from the movie she's just she deserves better than to be palling around with a you don't get the feeling from this photo that she knew that there were going to be impersonators there what if um she the worst thing would be if she like got on the ride he was facing the other way she's like oh did they get mike to come in costume and then he turns oh no

uh yeah wrong he said schwang that's not it impersonator sucks yeah it's um that he mean he does while he might not be getting the best wayne attitude across he is getting the best king's dominion goer attitude across like this just looks like every guy who was at king's dominion all the time oh no yeah wait were you there in like teen years and like uh like wanting to date or avoid dating i was there more like pre-teen by the time i was a teenager i was like a punk rock kid so i was doing that instead but when i was like 11 and desperately wanted to be a teenager in love yes while there would be teenagers waiting in those you know zigzaggy lines to go on a, making out or putting each other's hands in each other's pockets or playing with the fringe on their fringed t-shirts. Um,

I was the weird tubby little like 10 year old behind them being like, yeah, look at how in love they are. Someday it'll be me. Yeah. Somebody kisses me in the line for the grizzly someday um and uh never happened guys never happened you ever have like a you know because i always wanted to go on the matterhorn which had lap seating and i'd go like when i can date i'll have a girl of my dreams in my lap and that'll be romantic and not like just strange for 20 seconds was there like all right the place in king's dominion would be i don't think there was a the place but it but definitely just like the general concept of a teenage boy in a sleeveless metallica shirt

kissing me up against those those steel bars that you're waiting for that made the maze to get onto the ride. And there's an eight-year-old me going like, let's keep the line moving, folks. Come on. Come on. We have rides to ride. I'm bleeding from the stomach. I'm bleeding from the stomach.

The action theater is closed. I'm not going to get a chance to ride Stan Lee's The Seventh Portal. You know, I'm not in a good mood. Don't make out against just anything. Might cut you at the stomach. Yeah. There was also a kid rumor that there was someone whose job it was. I think this might be what I said.

Someone whose job it was to go around at the end of the day every day and hammer the nails back into the grizzly. That was one of the two wooden coasters. As though if that person wasn't there for their job that day, we're all going to die. There's just nothing that could be done. It shakes the nails all out of it. Be like slept in and didn't go instead of just being there,

but stoned is like, yeah, there was also an old West stunt show. That was weird. And that was way before it was paramount. There was no, um, movie connection at all,

but they were still like, we're going to show you how people pretend to fall off of stuff. You get the, like the whole side of the building falls and you land in exactly in the window not that good um yeah it's too that would have been too complex the um there there was some very odd the paramount stuff just got odder and odder over the years of course the italian job turbo coaster uh eventually renamed to the backlot stunt coaster the one that sticks out in my mind uh we were there the summer

it opened and i remember my dad he wrote it himself and i waited at the exit and i just thought it took forever and did something happen and it was just like oh no i just didn't have a watch and i uh didn't know how long 40 minutes was the outer limits flight of fear an indoor uh launch coaster which i could not get anyone to tell me if it went upside down as a child i was scared of going upside down but this ride almost came up on the mummy returns episode because it was the first launch coast indoor launch coaster that used linear induction motors which we admitted uh we do not know how that works but was kind of historic uh and then yeah very cool and premier rides the manufacturer would go on to make the mummy revenge of the mummy ride so yeah uh

outer limits is isn't that pretty old that's a weird theming choice yeah i don't know if i've ever seen an episode of the like it's like i don't either twilight zone it's like the runner up newer versions of it i think there were i think there was a syndicated yes, there is. I googled it. A syndicated Canadian version. Okay. Like Hercules and Xena? Something like that. Or Tia Carrera's Relic Hunter? Yes.

Oh, hey! Came back around. Hmm. Strange. I don't know does that does that like read those rides that taking a flight of fear is that the kind of thing that would happen on the outer limits well it was like an area 51 sort of setup and actually by making it very generic when paramount stopped sponsoring stuff and they had to like just rejigger a lot of rides they were just like i just dropped the outer limits just called flight of fear done that one's easy a lot of the i was kind of i kind of want to go back you know they didn't open this season

because of covid but um i kind of want to go back because they uh racer 75 still there flight of fear is still there um there uh the scooby-doo is still there it is called the woodstock express now because it's new because it's all cedar fair owned now so i was surprised how much is still remaining what do you think yogi's cave is well they renamed it to treasure cave at some point even before they stopped the hanna-Barbera Association but I think it is I'm not going to say that that doesn't make sense it does make sense is it the same are there

still like frogs singing they just took all their gems out but besides that it's belong to Yogi the only treasure item in there they removed that and then it might belong to the ground because I think that got bulldozed. When was the last time you were in that cave, Jason?

Well, here's what happened was like after we went for a few years, my family joined the Disney Vacation Club. So as I am a young child going like, we got to go back to King's Dominion. There's a James Bond ride and Judi Dench, Judi Dench is in it and Q's in it. And they're like,

we just joined the, we're not going to a different theme park. We made our choice. We're going to Disney World. Like we made our commitment. But we get to see actor Desmond Llewellyn portraying Q in a theme park. Mother.

Mother, a few years after that, Desmond Llewellyn portraying Hugh in a theme park. Mother. Mother. A few years after that, they'll put in a generic Stanley superhero thing that looks like a reboot ripoff. I've missed all this. Wait, there was a James Bond. It was in that, so that's where Days of Thunder was

and then they did a James Bond thing for a while. Yeah, they would slot in and out different 3D movies there. And some of them were just those movies was and then they did a james bond thing for a while yeah they would slot in and out um different 3d movies there and some of them were just those movies that were on a circuit like those that that 3d theater for a brief time dave and busters had 3d theaters which is like this theater was like a slightly nicer like 40x d-box sort of experience so you could go to a dave and busters and go like hey is that the james bond movie that plays a king's dominion too and they wouldn't know if it was but they were you could ask oh yeah they'd want me to stop talking about some sort of cave in virginia

um here's uh i i have this fun little thing when you're talking about mashups of the world of hollywood and king's dominion this one really surprised me uh here's i'm going to share the screen and uh in fact not show the first frame because that will reveal the hollywood talent who was hey baby well you saw that uh the the holly The Hollywood talent hosting this 1986 King's Dominion commercial. There's just one place where $32.95 gets you a season pass good for an entire summer of rides. Like Rebel Yell, Whitewater Canyon, even the new Shockwave roller coaster. You actually ride standing up. And for just a few dollars more take in concerts by

the biggest names in rock country r&b all this and more yeah there you go william h macy shilling for king's dominion and i was just i was thinking out with a shot this close of him i just expect him at the end to put a gun in his mouth um no but uh probably get caught in a frog storm of those magnetic frogs that you were considering oh yes oh yeah it's raining velcro frogs yes um yeah i had a a season pass. That was one year I only asked for that for my birthday, so I had to get it, but my parents still wouldn't drive me there, so I just had it.

You would go to JCPenney's to get it certified or something. So, yeah, I was very excited to be a season pass holder one summer. What was your peak? When was it the best for you was like when i was like 11 so that would have been like around like 90 sure sure right before paramount um or wait are you a punk at that point no i was 11 i was a girl scout so like that was when I was like camping out there with Girl Scouts, probably had friends that would, had parents who would drive us there, had enough money that I could,

I think that was when I had my season pass. So like I could pay for food in there and I had my little season pass. So that was probably about it. But then, yeah, a couple of years later I was just going to Fugazi shows. That's right. Who probably didn't like Jimmy Buffett play at King's Dominion.

No, but I remember when Richard Marks did and I cut out that ad and had that on my bulletin board being like, oh, man, how do I make this happen? With my nine years old amount of money, how i get myself to this richard marx concert at king's dominion what could be better it's all the best things at one time did you pull it off there you go no absolutely not i uh when was the last time you went i think gosh i don't i don't think i've been since i was a kid i i've definitely driven past when was the last time you went? I think, gosh, I don't, I don't think I've been since I was a kid.

I definitely driven past it. Cause you can see the Eiffel tower from the highway and considered it every single time I've driven past, like on tour as do it doing improv or as a standup being like, Hey, you guys want to go to this theme park that you definitely don't want to go to no okay uh never mind um the pain of being the only one yeah because it's a it's a hard wall for a lot of people if they that they're totally unwilling to cross i think we found a lot of people on the

other side of the wall that's what this podcast is about but yeah i did a i did a tour um i was on a show called totally biased and then when we got canceled me and the two other female correspondent and writers um did a stand-up tour down to disney world called the greatest tour on earth and uh so we did stand-up shows all the way down and so we drove past this on that and i was like hey so maybe i mean obviously we like theme parks and they were like no we don't have enough time to do this but to go to a show but further down the road we did pass south of the border and we did get off you guys know about that place right wait yeah what

is it where where is it is in the carolinas yeah it's it's the border between south carolina and north carolina south of that border is this place called south of the border that's like very racist at this point i don't know this at all oh my god it's just like a lot of those what is that metal that all those things were made out of like those those mushrooms and everything is that tin is that aluminum whatever it is there's tons of those statues of different animals wearing sombreros and the main building is shaped like a sombrero and they have like a reptile attraction and like i want to say maybe like a massage place because it's also a place where like it's a place where truckers could stop you know when

you're just like a weird themed truck stop that became a place that all the kids in my elementary school loved and would talk about and have like t-shirts from and i'd never been there before um you guys should look this place up it's nutty it's real nutty it's one of those things where you see pictures and you're like i can't believe this exists how how did this ever exist and how is it still existing they should change this like a robot like no robot animals no they're not moving animals they're just they're just statues of man so you can like take your picture next to him so it'd be like oh there's a kangaroo in a sombrero there's a big snail in a sombrero didn't make a lot of sense but and a trucker could get a massage there i believe so yeah or you could go like hold some snakes um a few

different restaurants definitely fireworks we bought fireworks that's why we stopped because that's that's between the truckers and the fireworks that's probably the the genesis of it because suddenly once you get into south carolina you could buy fireworks um so people would go south of the border and stock up on their fireworks on the wikipedia i like that in the very functional see also area that it's a see also tourist trap ethnic stereotype yeah yeah it's it's See also tourist trap Ethnic stereotypes Yeah It's wild

This is a Bizarre place I don't remember it Depicting any sort of cultural Stuff like At least it wasn't like Acting out any kind Of historical thing very badly.

It was in my memory, just animals and sombreros still not respectful, but bizarre. Wow. It could have been worse. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And probably was at some point. That's fair. Yeah. Probably saw a toned down version. Very fair. Almost undoubtedly. point that's fair yeah very fair almost undoubtedly um so uh if if you could go would you be

especially after all of this this terrible time and being cooped up uh uh for so long is this anyway is this on your list of things would you go do this as comfort food uh now would you fit this into a traversing of amer? I don't know that I would do Kings Domain because I think I would probably be too sad at how different it is because of how many times it's changed hands and rethemed I would probably

do Busch Gardens again because I know that that's still the old country it's still just Italy and Scotland and Germany, Okoberfest all that yeah those names so you can't we can't go to any of those places right now so it would be a little more like visiting my childhood that i think king's dominion would i think king's dominion would be like when you see an x and they're just like completely different and you're like oh what was who who was the person that i was with it's not you you know like the the volcano

the the mountain not being there anymore is like the equivalent of like oh he lost his hair yeah exactly um interesting what do you do for what's the big draw if you go to bush gardens what's like your uh what do you make a beeline for oh loch ness monster loch ness monster all-time favorite roller coaster best roller coaster does does a double loop you get an indoor section that does a spiral thing it's the only indoor coaster that i'm not scared of and it's not indoors most of it's. It does a little underwater thing. I have a phobia thing. Phobia makes it sound fancy, but I get irrationally scared on indoor coasters that something's going to

pierce my eyeball. Something's going to like fly out of somebody's pocket or like a bobby pin. And it could happen just as easily on an, on a regular roller coaster. But like, I guess I would see it coming and dodge. It doesn't make a lot of sense. I get that. That makes sense to me.

But the Loch Ness Monster is really... And it's Loch Ness Monster themed. That's great. I mean, it's pretty close to a dinosaur, but it's got the urban legend aspect thrown in. It's very much my shit. It may be where a lot of my shit comes from um it may that might be the origin story the ride i used to love there though um i mean it was never better than this but never better than the

lochus monster but i did really like even as an adult because i did go back to bush gardens more more recently uh the big bad wolf but it murdered uh a worker so they had to take it away but that was a great ride it was like a hanging thing where like so you're sort of in almost like a ski basket like your legs are swinging but you're seated oh one of those ones where you like lie down and it's not a standing on one so it gives you like an extra aspect of the the swinging back and forth as you're zooming around oh my family was a big fan of the roman rapids if you remember that bush gardens see i hate all water rides but yeah that was a pretty exciting one my mom got so wet on it once she walked off the ride went into the gift shop bought an entire new set of clothes and changed into them yeah there i remember that there were lots of clothing gift stores around that ride

specifically like when you were because i would i wouldn't go on it so i would sit there and wait for people and it was like being at the intersection of all these different t-shirt stores so i think it probably wasn't just your mom. Jason, did you then put her wet clothes on so you had double wet clothes because you love it so much? Jason loves wet clothes after a ride. Do you?

Yeah, he does. That's not a joke. Oh, I hate it so much. That used to be my online dating profile thing. it would be like hey i like movies and go to the museum and i hate the water rides at theme parks and it would filter out all the guys who are like why you shouldn't i love them or like what's your problem like that's not a very nice first first line yeah a lot of fellows do that though and they'll they'll find something and they think they're asking you a question about it

when really they're poking at it. And it's like, you know, you can't tell the difference. Ah, that's, that's, this is sad for you fella because you don't know what you're doing, but you're being a dick. The dynamic will be like when we date, it'll be great. I'll challenge you on stuff all the time. Exactly. Exactly. I'll think we're just having a conversation and you'll feel constantly

attacked and defensive. Really like harmless things you tossed off, not meaning much by it. Yeah. Sounds like equivalent to like just Twitter in general. Yeah. Yeah. Can I fight you all day about something that you don't remember?

Yeah. You tweeted already. And similarly, when you're like, I don't like this, they're like, what did you expect? It's Twitter! Yeah, not this. This isn't, clearly

by me not liking it and telling you about that, this is not what I expected. Twitter, not as fun as King's Dominion. Glad we could escape to a little fantasy theme park for a little while, though. Now we'll segue into the part where you maybe say your, your Twitter name.

Uh, but first I will say Eliza Skinner, you survived podcast, the ride. Uh, thanks for being here. Uh, let's exit through the gift shop. Is there anything you would like to plug? Uh, yeah, my,, my album regarding my lovers. It's 10 tracks of stand-up comedy, five tracks of original songs, and Earth to Ned on Disney+, which I was a head writer for, and I like it a lot. It's very weird.

And there have been discussions on Reddit from Disney fans saying that there should be a ned feature at uh disney world so i saw this on a twitter like a theme park twitter news place posted this the idea because there's this thing the monsters inc laugh floor uh where characters are funny and interact with you and yes it made me could stand a refresh and And you've got this new cast of characters. It seems to be really well liked already on Disney+. So that must have been cool to see. Yeah.

I mean, except the actual article was like, I mean, I don't know why anyone would want this. This show is garbage. But I found a whole bunch of people who want it. And I'm like, OK, we didn't need the editorializing. We have a lot of opinions about different theme park news aggregators and maybe even that one. I won't say, but it was probably nice to see a picture of the show on your Twitter.

Can I ask Eliza this show? So if the audience doesn't know, this is a, this is a show, Henson's show With a very cool puppet, many puppets You said you liked eating around Animatronics Did you get to eat around these puppets

And feel the same feeling? I did, but it wasn't the same feeling Because they're better than animatronics Because part of the thing with the animatronics Is the reassuring robotic clicking You know, like the head can only go this far and only go that far it's almost the same feeling that you get like when you have to put a baby to sleep and so you drive around the block with them and they're they're like so it's

a little bit of of motion and excitement but controlled very controlled right my puppets our puppets were are they can do well there's a lot they can't do I was going to say they can do anything but that's Not true, one of them doesn't even have legs But they They can definitely Move a lot more I did take lunch in the studio When it was cold and quiet by myself

Frequently Just a lifeless ned Sitting there Clods everywhere scattered about. Oh no, the clods always wrapped very carefully in their satin. And like we had clod wranglers who I would be like, Hey,

can I see a clod? They'd be like, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa,

Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa,

Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa,

Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa,

Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa,

Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa,

Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa,

Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa,

Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa,, Whoa, for you i don't know if we can let you hold it i'm like come on and then they started trusting

me eventually but i i took a lot of pictures of the different what do you think this is a dues yeah i mean they were everything it was it was weird like we had to book a lot of time with with each guest because partly because the puppeteers have to take a rest every 15 minutes you know because they've got their arms up and they're, or they're being smushed in some weird position. But also partly because sometimes the puppets would break and we would have to send somebody up with a screwdriver and poke around in Ned's mouth or like swap his head out for one of the other heads and keep on going.

Yeah. So pretty much his name is coming in. You can't reach out to people like hey can you hang for an hour it's like you gotta be ready for some puppet repairs yeah exactly like it might not happen and then you have a short day but what kind of sandwiches do you want well we'll have treats for you um but everybody all of our guests were Really great because everybody's just excited to Hang out with some puppets Yeah you know

Talk to them and engage with them Yeah geez yeah yeah Well yeah everybody check that Out on Disney plus and other people Have been on the show Nick Weigert Jordan Morris Great great staff you had there So yeah congrats on On Earth to Ned

And as for us we're at podcast the ride on social media we got merch on t public and for three bonus episodes every month subscribe to podcast the ride the second gate at patreon.com slash podcast the ride um anything to go out on i'll just say that uh i have a lot more questions about Jason and Shuffleboard, but I will save them for a later time. That's fine. I'm sure it'll come up again. Um, all right. Uh, more Shuffleboard to come.

Les, thanks for being here. Thank you all for listening. Forever Dog. This has been a Forever Dog production. Executive produced by Mike Carlson, Jason Sheridan, Scott Gairdner, Brett Boehm, Joe Cilio, and Alex Ramsey. For more original podcasts, please visit foreverdogpodcasts.com and subscribe to our shows on Apple Podcasts, Spotify,

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