Podcast: The Ride - Opryland USA with Jesse Farrar

Episode Date: December 4, 2020

Jesse Farrar (Your Kickstarter Sucks, The Go Off Kings) joins us to discuss Opryland USA. The now closed Nashville park that became a big mall.  PTR Gazette: Rhode Retires, Super Nintendo World Opening Details episode up at The Second Gate: Patreon.com/PodcastTheRide Listen to Podcast: The Ride Ad-Free on Forever Dog Plus: http://foreverdogpodcasts.com/plus FOLLOW PODCAST: THE RIDE: https://twitter.com/PodcastTheRide https://www.instagram.com/podcasttheride BUY PODCAST: THE RIDE MERCH: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/podcast-the-ride PODCAST THE RIDE IS A FOREVER DOG PODCAST https://foreverdogpodcasts.com/podcasts/podcast-the-ride Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Forever. Dog. Warning, the following podcast contains rhinestone studded clothing, strip mall wax figures, an extremely safe Santa photo op, and a rock and roll city? Jesse Farrar joins us to talk Opryland, so get ready to hoot and holler. It's podcast, The Ride. Welcome to Podcast The Ride, the podcast about theme parks that's more fun than playing a game of family feud against the Statler brothers. I'm Scott Gairdner, and hey, Jason Sheridan, come on down.

I'm here. Yes, it's a historic family feud game. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I figure we get it out of the way right at the top because everybody's going to be demanding you can't you can't talk opryland without the famous statler mandrell family feud uh uh mike i'm sure you got a myriad of thoughts about that mike carlson i certainly do everyone i ran into while i was walking the dog today i've been saying you gotta talk about this okay you gotta do the family feud story and i said i'll get it i'll get there but i don't want to reveal all yet i think and what a story it is it's definitely not just uh that it happened it's way beyond that uh i'm really excited for today's episode and i think i texted you guys some version of this thought which is that i i think that we've done it very uh seldom but i think that when i think the good things happen when Podcast the Ride goes south.

Not when we fail, but when we go to the south of the country. I think about Hard Rock Park in South Carolina. I think about Dogpatch USA in Arkansas. And I'm so excited to head south now to Nashville, Tennessee, to talk about Opryland usa and joining us uh from tennessee uh from the go off kings from your kickstarter sucks and from the new podcast on stitcher premium good morning good morning jesse farrar hey guys thanks for having me on absolutely thank you for joining us uh so excited to talk about a thing native to your neck of the woods uh you had

mentioned dolly dollywood as well but we have a thing i said about dolly i'm like i think we have to go i think we like we do we deserve that dollywood deserves our physical presence for us to do we need to do a live show at dollywood before like we need to like in one of the theaters that houses like civil war shows or something to do a show there yeah i had actually when we were talking about what to do yeah i i i said well i don't you know i'm not i'm not a theme parks guy so get the get the knives out now and slash my belly open um i and and actually listening to your show has helped me work out some of my feelings on theme parks uh and this kind of thing because you guys i think you have a really good attitude about it i'm not here just to blow smoke up your asses okay better not be

but i think it's true that theme parks like everywhere else are nightmares for a lot of reasons especially right now obviously um but there's there's a lot of shit to hate about it there's so much shit to hate about going to one of these places um i don't have to enumerate all of it but i mean it's it's it's just unbridled capitalism it's not fun to see that it's become an experience for if not purely the rich then the people with enough disposable income to say you know like a few hundred dollars a pop just to get in the door is no big deal for me um and it's also just i mean so much of the stuff is junk i mean so much of it's the ip that you have to wander through in all these places

is garbage i don't care about any of this shit however what do you mean minions and uh getting to watch vin diesel fly a helicopter uh i mean how many things are there how many parks or rides are there dedicated to properties with one movie that's not you have to have more than one movie to get a ride, don't you? Am I out of my mind? That's an interesting point. Yeah, I mean, sometimes a movie gets lucky. There's an amount of money a company, a corporation has to put into a ride, and this movie just happened to have just come out,

and they go, oh, that thing just came out. Maybe we'll use that. So if it gets lucky yes it can be that's the water world situation like it was ready at the time i don't know that years down the line you'd sink a lot of money into water world right yeah yeah but that being said there is something that when i've been i i find to appreciate there um you know i've taken my kids to uh to disney world uh out here on my side of the country and we went um my wife and i went to the what what's the avatars in the animal kingdom right that's where in the animal kingdom yeah right so we went there and i got sick um and had some big

nasty drinks and uh made a fool of myself by taking a picture that now all my friends mock me with um and i guess probably will for the rest of my life and that's fine uh yeah oh yeah i also have it ready to go yeah jason pulled it up jesse there jesse two drinks yeah yeah that's me yeah um and and that you know and i and that's not that's nothing i enjoyed but i appreciate that somebody took this much time look hey somebody put some effort into this shit you know that you guys really you've made an attempt at doing something here and it's pretty uh cool and my kids like it so there's stuff that i like about parks without i can't roll with the punches you

know what i mean i can't get on the coaster and whip my neck around and all that other kind of stuff but i can kind of bask in it and go okay somebody did a really good job on this rock texture for this ride and also they had there's like a good hot dog or something that's that's where i'm at with with this kind of stuff you know what i'm saying not too far from where we're at yeah you're speaking our language here we we did a whole episode about fake rocks right we love fake rocks fans of fact it's amazing fake tree that you were in front of in this photograph the tree of life it's no mere tree there's many animals carved into the the bark of the fake tree the fake bark of the fake tree right there yeah there are a lot of very talented artists and creative people that uh have given their lives to these corporations as a tribute. Their whole creativity is now given to a corporation. And it's nice to see some of their work. My point was when you asked me what do you have feelings on in this world,

and I threw out Dollywood because I have been there one time, and to me that is the equivalent of caring about something enough to talk about it. What I didn't realize is it's still open, and you guys like it, so you can just go and have a real experience there and have stuff to talk about. That didn't occur to me that that would be a possibility but of course and you should go you know when this is all over oh yeah believe believe me um jesse can i ask how do we um how do you get to pigeon forge tennessee can you tell me i've always wondered hard is it fly into nashville and then drive is that the easiest course well uh so the the knoxville airport uh which would be fairly close is a regional airport okay um so if you are going

you're not going to be flying from la to knoxville unless something drastic has changed or if you're going to be on a plane that That will provide such a horrible experience. You'd never want to do it again. So yeah you would probably fly into Nashville. And then drive the three and a half. Or four hours up there. Or honestly. North Carolina would probably be the way to go.

And then drive. Backwards. So you go over it. And then come back the other direction. So it's not. It's not super easy i don't think okay yeah that's what's been stopping me and other people i know is like seemingly the difficulty of going and then also the rumor that it is a uh at least past a certain hour that it

is a dry uh town i don't know if you can confirm or deny that. Oh, you know, I don't know. Pigeon Forge itself being dry. I'm not sure. There are some quixotic laws in this area about that type of stuff. I mean, I think most people probably know that the home of the Jack Daniels distillery is it's a dry county, which is a little bit strange. I didn't know that, actually. Yeah, that's very bizarre. Yeah, it's very strange i think you can get i'm not sure can you get samples there of the the whiskey you may be able to get a sample

there but not you're not like not able to buy like a big commemorative bottle or something or they may have carved out an exception in those in those laws for for that area yeah but um but that still does happen out here blue laws are a real thing out here for sure. And East Tennessee is a very old and very religious part of the country. So that wouldn't surprise me at all, yeah. Yeah. And yet we want to go.

After all this, we still are wanting to go. You crave the thrills. Yeah, I want to hit Branson too. I know it's not super close but just like do a whole yes a whole dry loop dry a whole dry trip um you might adopt that uh method you you might stay dry after you go you'll realize there's something to it yeah um so yeah we'll we'll do that i mean branson i feel like is a whole saga is that a daily that's a 19 part at least we gotta live there though for maybe a month it opry land and branson

feels similar in that when i've read about them it feels like i am i am consumed i'm learning about like not alien culture but aliens trying to impersonate human culture like opry opry the grand ole opry is just a corner of country music that i am like i just don't understand mini pearl and hee haw like i just i it's it's just a little alien to me you know i just didn't grow up with it in the northeast that's i think that is like a really good way of putting how i feel about opryland specifically theme parks as a whole but opryland even more specifically because um like i was alluding to earlier this is clearly something that and then you can see this in all the videos i'm sure you guys looked at the the rides and stuff

that they had there and all of the kitsch and everything that was so crucial to what opryland was all about and the takeaway for me even as someone who has lived here my whole life is well you guys really put a lot of effort into this but it was stupid and i don't it's not i don't i didn't like it um so that's not for me. You did a good job, but I don't care. And that's what Opryland is. That's what Branson is. It's like a lot of people caring a lot about something that I might as well not even have encountered ever.

And that's why I feel so alien. The corny level is just cranked up all the way. Like big white leather boots. And I don't want any part of this shit you know yeah all these places make me think of like lots of people kicking up their heels and skirts which are red white and blue and tasseled many times over like all these like with between branson and opryland there's like like 5,000 shows all told happening at any time. And the shows are like essentially public domain songs for the most part.

Yeah. And also that's supposed to be funny too. That's the other thing that's so alien about it is it's not just, that's not just like an entertainment, like you would go to the ballet and watch someone like with technical proficiency perform something you can't possibly imagine doing it's also like i mean that's what a hootenanny is is someone like dancing a jig and you clap but you're also laughing at the same time so i don't really know that isn't that's like a weird emotion i don't have you know it's like hooting and hollering i don't know how to do that one why are you laughing because people are

like looking like fools yeah because they're just kind of like you know they're getting they're really i don't know like i don't do it i don't know how to i'm just trying to i'm not sure i'm trying to put myself in their shoes but clearly when you see the pans to the audience of one of these shows and like you said the skirt goes up way high it's like like what a relief to see the skirt go up so high that's so much fun i just have to like exhort you know it's like church well or if like like a will rogers type came out in a starched white cowboy outfit and he he's like i saw a senator standing next to a donkey which was the politician and which was the ass and then just everyone laughs at that single joke for one hour straight i think i think yeah growing up that was not a part of any entertainment really but i will say

the older i get the more i like maybe my kitsch my tolerance for love of and love of kitsch has just gone skyrocket i've been excuse me i can't speak uh skyrocketed but i get more and more interested in like old hee haw clips uh let me ask you this jesse do you know have you seen the country bear jamboree i'm familiar with the country bear jamboree yes i do i know about that it is uh i mean that's what a hoot is right there isn't it yeah i think so like that's about and this is of course probably sacrilegious to anyone who knows a lot about all these shows that oh your favorite one is the one where there's robot bears but it's a very good version of it i find there's jokes in it that i think are funny i like the songs so like i get how like this kind of a format could be fun so i and then look we've

built in i think uh we've built in a fail safe on this podcast where we like stuff if it's really good or if it's really bad right like there's almost the same enjoyment we can uh take from a show like that so that's why i feel like going to branson like maybe we'll see a show that like wow that those songs are really good those were great performers and then the other 90 of the shows were dog shit and we loved them just as much i'll say i learned about i do remember in college learning about like the grand ole opry in the context of like an introduction to mass media and popular culture in america of like uh i had a very old very white professor who really wanted to tell us about jazz like he had a lot to tell us about jazz and uh very very la la land but he would also like enlightened us into like uh you know muddy waters or robert johnson or like the grand

old opry in terms of like they were pretty small and then they just got insanely popular and they had this massive radio wattage where like there was a certain point where you could hear it anywhere in america with a radio so like i i remember learning about it like on an intellectual level and like how it how it was important to the history of american media some of the first like mass entertainment yes essentially yeah and like with a way wider reach than anything uh now whatever yeah for some context grand old opry and i didn't realize this grand it's kind of like the ground links where you're like you had to be a member of it you would have to kind of get like audition to get in and then you would because you could sort of be a member for as long as they

would either keep you or if you left and it's still like fairly exclusive um but yeah then it was like a radio show and yes yeah other media yeah other media. Yeah, it's a phrase that means lots of different things, right? It's a place. It's like this echelon of country music society. It's like a proto Hall of Fame, I think, in a certain way. Because the Hall of Fame is like downtown and Taylor Swift owns it or whatever the hell. So in a way, the grand olavry is a little bit different um it also does now sit in the parking lot of a mall which you know if we

have time to talk about that uh that would be it might be mostly that i was gonna say a parking lot in a mall this is podcast the ride yes that's well here let me let me jump in with some dry expositional stuff, because I think what we haven't said maybe is Opryland USA was outside of Nashville from 1972 to 1997, and it was a theme park that was supposed to flesh out the surrounding area of the Grand Ole Opry Theater. Jason was talking a little bit about Grand Ole Opry, and Jesse's saying it's many things. I think I always thought until right now that it was a venue only. And what I didn't realize is that it was a radio show and a review that moved from place to place, eventually landed at the Ryman Auditorium historic venue, but that started falling into disrepair, and during the summer it would get to be 120 degrees sitting in that thing,

so they needed something more updated. And they were talking about how to do this and where to do it, and whoever was putting all this together went and visited Astroworld, which we discussed several years ago. And Astroworld is a theme park that is sort of fleshing out the adjoining area of the Astrodome. The Astrodome's at the center. How do we make this

more of an experience as a bunch of shops and hotels and a theme park? So what if we could do something like that? And for more information about Astroworld, check out our episode about that. But obviously, beware bad man Nick Mundy. bad man the bad man waits around every corner um but uh besides all that yes it was like uh yeah how do we like make this more than just a theater uh this this has this would be a bigger experience and like a creating a whole little community and city around it yeah when i

uh was looking back into some of this stuff uh because i was so i was i guess i was 10 when opryland closed um so it wasn't like this was a huge part of my childhood really i wasn't going there when i was like a pre-teen i didn't work there as a teenager any of that kind of stuff it was already gone by that point for me um but when i was looking back preteen. I didn't work there as a teenager or any of that kind of stuff. It was already gone by that point for me. But when I was looking back into this, I thought it was funny to hear that same pitch of once we build this, then we'll build all this stuff around it

and then it will be this hub of economy for the city and for these jobs and all this stuff, which now I would only associate basically only, I think, associated with sports arenas and stadiums and stuff like that. This is the same pitch that they make now chiefly as a way to get money from the city or county or state or whatever to help them build these massive places and defer their tax payments way into the future when they've already blown the place up and left town but i thought it was really funny to hear that pitched

around what is essentially like like a roller coaster in the middle of the city i just that was so weird there's such a weird throwback to hear that this was this is what the rich guys i guess have always done this right this is like yeah this is like la live by the Staples Center. Right. What's that nightmare one by the Banneheim? Do you even remember the name anymore? It's the worst name. It's really good, but I can't think of it.

With so many ones instead of I's and exclamation points instead of everything. Awful name. These places are ones instead of eyes and exclamation points instead of everything awful name these places are yeah always insane I guess what you're describing Jesse is sort of like alright one super rich guy leads

the army like we're gonna build a big arena or something and oh wait while I got the opportunity my 20 other rich friends want to come in the door real fast and get in on this scam with me yeah they these guys want to run the parking for the six blocks around this whole area you know this guy owns the construction company that's digging the footers for the arena and all this stuff and it's just a massive i mean it's it's grift it's what else

could it possibly be just on this massive scale um but instead of covered in the cloak of this is this will be a fun thing to have on sundays and then in the aforementioned taylor swift can come by twice a year and justify the box seats here it's like uh oh this will be cute because it's like country music or whatever and i i apparently the guys apparently the guy really cared about it that was that's at least what's been written in the history books that he really cared about country music or whatever and maybe you did but it's hard to see the the complex itself as anything other than what it was which was a moneymaker even until it closed yeah the ceo of gaylord uh is that the that what we're describing yeah that they took it

over at a certain point just like it's now been taken over by Marriott. So it's changed hands, I think, a number of times over the years, the property up there. Yeah, there was a couple of times where it's like I had to keep reading like histories of this because, you know, I feel like I was skeptical or I was suspicious. And it's like, oh, like you're saying, I think he did care about this place, but there, there was a moment when I found the old logos where the tagline was the home of American music. And to their credit, they did try to have like a country and jazz and rock and roll.

And they even seem to admit that like rock and roll was changed. Like they areas would try to change with the times a little bit but now i feel like if something has a tagline home of american music i'm just like oh jeez what's this oh no like i'm just immediately terrified of what about what is about to happen yeah and i think that that's that's something i think about when i when i hear people complain about what it has become now which you know in one sense is is it true now that it has become essentially you know a a generic you know monstrosity uh a pay into capitalism uh just a big nasty mall that you go and fart around in and eat bacon wrapped whatever.

I mean, yeah, it has. And that sucks. And then it flooded and then they built it back up again, which is even grosser for some reason. Not that it was their fault they flooded. But that's true. But when people say they took this away from us, this was real Nashville. This is what Nashville was all about. This is before nashville sold out i fucking start getting really like grossed out by that because to me it's a very clear implication

of what people really think about a city getting bigger and more diverse and more inclusive and wanting this this history to be constrained to one very particular thing, which is like, I mean, it's like white people shit. I mean, that's what it is. It's just, and country music is great, and it has a place and all this other stuff, but when people are like, they took this away from us, and they get like really upset about it, now I'm out, you know? I'm out on the whole, you can be upset a little bit,

but don't be, this can't be your whole life. Crusading for Opryland? What the fuck? Now, hang on. Hey, they did have a, now they had a roller coaster that looked like a big dragon's face and they carved all the teeth. Isn't that something worth fighting for? Going to the match for?

Yeah, you're right. It is. Do I diddy city? Oh, yeah. Oh oh come on yeah that's a that's a paradise from the sound of it my america is do what diddy city nest tea plunge nest tea plunge is that real well okay so the dulcimer splash formerly the flume zoom and for a brief period of time the nesty splunge that was the log ride uh in the park i have to give this part credit because the ride names are all fun that said uh i was a little shocked to discover that the roller coaster called the hangman

was rolled out in 1995 that That seems far too late. Yeah, that is kind of, I guess that's kind of gruesome, but you look at it and it kind of is like, it is, they named it right. It is, you're a man,

you're hanging there. So. I didn't see a picture of the hangman. I don't know what the hangman's about. Why did they build a ride so close to it being closed? Like it was closed two years later well that's the other thing that is i think very interesting about this park is like all of the

like look backs and after actions no one is taking credit no one has an answer for why it closed it's like besides you know like jesse's talking about like corporates corporations consolidating and stuff there's no like oh we wanted to do this instead. Or like, oh, there was safety incident. Or like, everyone honestly seems a little confused about why it closed. Yeah. Do we know, just to go back to Jesse's point, do we know like, was there a big uproar when this closed?

Was this like a Confederate monument being taken down when Opioidland closed and people were very upset about it? Or was it just like, oh, that's a shame. Like, what do we know? I don't remember contemporaneously with it happening that it was a big thing. Yeah, because of course

you look at all the videos or you do any kind of reading and there is that sort of I don't know if you'd call it rose colored glasses but definitely the uh prioritization the the wistfulness about the past that is like really common i mean with essentially everything we love fandoms and we love uh we love our innocent childhoods and we love all the other shit that makes us go out of our fucking minds but with theme parks in particular right that are aimed at pushing that button in your brain that that's the stuff that you like i think there is a lot more of

that with old rides or or old movies or whatever that go by the wayside i think people feel that way more more often about this than other stuff but i don't remember at the time i mean there wasn't like a protest or anything i mean i think it just i think it just quietly went away but it seemed very popular um i i think if they brought it back in fact they there was talk of it being brought back uh in some capacity with dolly parton and that was like a huge deal around here that was just a few years ago that people were really excited about that do we so we don't know if maybe an early version of antifa was behind taking opry land down we don't know that for sure we don't know for sure but i mean i'm reporting it obviously i just i just don't know it yeah people are saying more and more yeah those floods there

were several floods in this area and we don't you know uh i don't know if this antifa uh put some holes in some dams or uh like put the extra water in a river or something well i mean we know how much they love soup is it possible that the soup was being opened up and poured into the soup very chunky displaces more water than just water alone so something to think about a thickening agent yeah if you're looking to create a flood add a lot of soup to a river right yeah um i guess jesse you were the like on the ground source of this and you and it's uh foggy memories it's before you were 10 but uh uh what do you remember about it was were there were there things worth uh saving uh do you

have positive memories here yeah i i think i do you know the um i also know that i've always been lame uh my whole life so i never would have gone on the hangman ride i might have seen it and been terrified and that would that would have been the end of it i it would not surprise me at all if the extent of my being in opryland was uh my mom taking me there and us uh getting on the uh they're called the tin lizzie's i think the extremely loud go-kart motored um i mean those are the worst things in any park to me i don't know if you guys agree with that have you ever sat on one of these things i don't know in this in this what like yeah what i don't think so i have yeah it's pretty much like an autopia engine

but like on a model t like frame like a model t style frame and a lot of older parks uh keep these going like sometimes it's their vintage like this has been here since the 20s and we've just kind of like kept it up where we've swapped out some parts they're the type of thing you would see at a zoo not necessarily like a like an actual proper park this is like the thing that you pay 50 cents and get on at the zoo and you and you feel like shit when you get because your ass is what's that thing where your ass gets like really vibrated and it like itches you know what i'm talking about oh yeah i know that i know that okay you know that one okay yeah clever relating i don't know if there's a name for it it hurts yeah it's a it's got to be maybe a spine is maybe it's partly a spine like a lower part of your spine

gets like jacked up a little bit i don't know i need it i need it but i need a better ass um but it wouldn't surprise me if i went and got on the tin lizzie's um and got on some kind of like tram and then maybe got on the log ride which that's to me is what was emblematic of the park is the the flume which jason you said it was called the nest tea plunge is that real that was real that was real for like i think one summer uh okay it was i think originally called the flume zoom and then at some point the dulcimer splash log ride that is not the last utterance of dulcimer coming to this episode oh that's right that um oh nesty plunge was a uh that that was like a slogan that was that was a campaign for it was a campaign for nesty so to turn that into a famous phrase we all love

that's crazy uh it was also look i hate i have to say it uh it was also a bump that mick foley would regularly regularly take he would fall onto the concrete like on his back from the ring apron in wrestling so i just had to say that because it's a thing i know it was called the nest tea plunge a nest tea plunge is a really ugly looking bump he would take in wrestling. And that wasn't an endorsement? No, that was not an official nest he endorsed. He wouldn't get like 50 bucks every time he landed

on his back on the concrete. He deserves it. The McMahon family are dignified people. They wouldn't do something like that. He was doing it before. He was doing it in WCW. So Ted Turner owed him the money there. They wouldn't do something like that. He was doing it before. He was doing it in WCW. Oh, okay. So Ted Turner owed him the money there. Who shockingly does not come up in the history of this.

Very good. Yeah. So we need to, there's not been a lot of Ted Turner on this podcast, but we should correct that. You know where he came up? The Sid and Marty Croft Park. The short-lived indoors, yeah, Sid and Marty Croft Park in Atlanta is now the CNN building. Yeah. I'm also a fan of Ted's Montana Grill.

It's a mediocre burger restaurant, but that's oddly satisfying to me. People would be so mad that several times when I've been to New York City for only a few few days i'm like you know i really want to go ted's montana grill you've been there multiple times yes i was like last time i was in new york i was only there for like three days and like with that short amount of time you know what i need to do ted's montana grill really this is new information to us such a tourist this is a patreon episode i think sure sure gladly it's one of my favorite restaurants when you're in new york you gotta go well hey uh folks an exciting thing i learned about the the now opry mills uh grand ole opry the existing complex as of 2020 one of the old Opryland buildings that had flooded during the 2010 floods, has been repaired. And again, this is, as of 2020, is now a Paula Deen's family kitchen.

So, Jesse, do people get canceled in Nashville? Do they know about that concept yet? Wait, is that true? It's on the Opryland. This is news to me. It's on the Opryland.'t this is news to me it's it's on the opryland paul dean is there that is what i was reading about yeah supposedly i will pull it up yeah that's crazy there's one at pigeon forge and uh and maybe a few more and uh yeah one at opry mills you're right i i had not uh i had not seen that that's interesting to me that's i mean it's not surprising

um she's i mean she's gonna make money still obviously i actually i have i have like three knives in my drawer that i laugh at every time i pull out that's a paula dean on there um in a very racist script no it looks it's normal it's a normal font it's a normal font it's a normal um but yeah you but you get that yeah i think i gave my mom like the guy fieri pan what year for christmas they like just sell these pans at the stores now like any celebrity chef yeah how are the knives um i do use the i'll tell you what i use the knives for most most often is they are sort of my designated um styrofoam pack opening knife where it's like it's it's the it's the big it's the chicken breasts that are too they're too big they're too big and there's three of them in the package and this is the knife i take out and i slice that

open and then immediately throw it in the dishwasher because i don't care i don't need to do anything else with it i'm not taking any risk it's just it has one job and it goes right in the dishwasher and i kind of like it for that so's just it has one job and it goes right in the dishwasher. And I kind of like it for that. So I give it an A plus. And I think she should have more restaurants, actually. I think she's a great lady. Jesse, thanks for being here.

Okay, new topic. Let's talk about some other stuff in the park before the last hour and a half of Mills conversation I'll just throw out names, see if you remember any of these I think we brought it up before, there's all these country areas but of course we're rock and roll guys, we go, our eyes look at that map and go straight to the rock place, which for a while was called Music of Today and in Music of Today that's where you could go on the ride little deuce coop circa 1984 yeah that's very cool yeah yeah um also uh also a ride there apparently called rock and roller coaster before before Disney did it.

Yes. And they had a little Rock and Roller Coaster. Oh, wow. There was a smaller version. Yeah. So they, I guess they didn't copyright that name. Could have saved the entire thing. Yeah.

I think it's generic enough. I think that. What could you, what's copyrightable? Yeah. It rocks. Well, I mean, you have to do more than that, I think, to get in front of a judge or whatever. enough i think that what could you what's copyrightable yeah it rocks well i mean you have to do more than that i think to get in front of a judge or whatever that's like paris sultan trying to copyright it's hot yeah oh yeah similar thing uh yeah i guess that's a good point i guess i guess maybe disney probably though has copy written the words rock and roll or coaster. Yes. Yes, certainly they've done it.

Yeah, they're smarter. And unlike Opryland, they're still around. Yeah. Yeah. There's a question. I think you were correct in what you said before. I don't think that this is their fault. But the site has flooded

twice. It flooded when it was a theme park and it flooded when it was a mall. Are we sure this is not their fault? Was this a poorly picked location if it is going to flood many, many years apart in completely unrelated events?

Yeah, I'm not a geologist um and i also don't know what the right word is to say about someone who does know any of that stuff but i think it's probably geologist there's rocks underground so that kind of makes a lot of sense uh what i said aqualogist like a if you study water? Yeah. My understanding is that those were what's called 100 year floods. So analyzing the science

it's supposed to happen once every 100 years or so. So the fact that it happened twice in that whatever 25 year period is several times more frequent than you would expect um now why is that happening maybe you don't uh lift up that rock and start thinking about uh why we're having a lot more floods and uh other natural disasters um but i don't i don't

i don't know that the people behind opryland are necessarily completely responsible for uh for that. But honestly, around here, it's surprising to me it hasn't been demolished by a tornado. I mean, that's honestly the thing that happens here more than anything else. And Nashville has had several big ones in that time period. So, I mean, stuff's going to get fucked up for sure. It's not

LA. We will get fucked up pretty much all the time living out here and florida on the other hand is just going to take about 100 years and then we'll be completely fucked but in the meantime i guess it's okay um but yeah this this type of shit does happen so i don't i don't know where they would put it that would keep it uh from from getting fucked up i think that's just the way of life out here you know yeah yeah so it's well they don't have like a disney weather machine or anything they don't have the money.

No. No, they don't. You think so? Wait, do you think Disney will ever get up to that? Will they be the ones to spearhead a carbon conversion machine that's specifically over Orlando? That's a good question. So yeah, Disney, just purely out of a profit motive, will solve some aspect of global warming.

A big blimp that looks like Mickey and it looks like it's like ingesting some substance and spitting out another. He's like hot boxing or something. Carbon. It's not like a vaporizer and then it tilts backwards and spits it up out of the uh our atmosphere into space for us give me a hit of that carbon well oh yeah but i mean they could certainly afford to fund at least the research they have all those crazy research relationships with like carnegie mellon or so but like what peaks we've had behind the scenes we i have we have learned that it's like yeah this one the company pays for it's a little expensive this you can get on the app store

and it's like uh-oh that's how you plan stuff it's available on ios just on the app store i see i will say though I think if you look at most of the corporations during COVID, we're going to have to have a much worse crisis before any of them step up and do a lot. We'll have to be melting from the sun.

Humans will be half-melted before a corporation goes, huh, maybe we could use our money to do something. I could see them starting the Mickey atmospheric balloon program and then laying everybody off right in the middle of it. I think that would maybe be the compromise they aimed for. Yeah, I think that's very possible. They just have one person who operates it like a drone,

and that is otherwise they can fire 20,000 people. Or it's just Bob J. Peckg operating it it's just the guy yeah yeah just one guy fly mickey um i okay what what else is uh what else is in this place uh um the we didn't say what grizzly river coop oh i was gonna say little deuce coop is a teacup style ride housed in a geodesic dome that's pretty good i'm not sure why that's a named after a car song but um why not a hip modern car song really yeah no uh no hipper song um a song that i once performed performed in a lip sync fashion with a Boy Scout troop. Really?

Yeah, yeah. And there was a part that I, if you can imagine, spearheaded. You know what we should do? You know what would be fun, fellow kids of 1995? Do you have video of that? You know, I should look into it because i can't deprive the audience of that i do remember that there's a part about the pink slip daddy and then we all pulled out a little pink piece of paper and i'm going to be red as i describe this i um well my dad helps

choreograph it oh man there's Some great revelations on this episode. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Great is one word. Mortifying is another. I can't not say it, though. Did we... Can I just confirm that the music of today area,

they eventually threw in the towel and renamed it Doo-Wah Diddy City? That's correct. Okay. That's right, yes. Where they're just like... Doo-wah-diddy-diddy-dum-diddy-doo, a very much more modern name.

Yeah. Named after a more modern song. I was just looking, the year-end songs, 1984, number one, When Doves Cry, Prince. What's Love Got to Do With It, number two. Say, Say, Say, number three. Footloose, number four.

Those were the songs of the day, just for context. So that's actually like, that makes me feel better about the theming of this place. Because that's, I guess with the exception of the Prince song, those are extremely corny tunes. I think, because I thought like, I don't know, when you think of songs of 1984, is that what you go to? Do you immediately think, does that make sense to you when you read that or were you thinking of something else? Well, I was thinking of like new wave stuff. But if I think about 1984, I'm probably thinking of stuff that wasn't as big of a hit. I'm thinking of like what Elvis Costello was doing, but he never really had a, like he was never like number one on the charts or anything.

Yeah. And I was thinking of like metal, you know? Yeah. Right. Jump, jump was on the charts by Van Halen. Cool.

You forget that pop music. I'm going to sound like a real piece of shit. You forget that pop music has always sucked. And when you think back of stuff that was like, oh, that's what this era was. It wasn't. That's what either the cool shit was or maybe like the really uncool shit that has since become cool. But the very tip-toppy of the crop there was always kind of bad. So it makes sense that this was also bad and like poorly themed to me anyway it was just a

little older yeah i mean i think a little bit behind i think the grammys if you watch a grammys broadcast until about 1989 it was still extremely like uh you know up with people is that the name of the group is it like very like corny starland vocal band like shows at opry land honestly it like took a long time before things weren't lame as hell and it's almost like logic defying now that the grammys would start with a big kendrick lamar performance or something because like but it was like it like everything was 40 white people harmonizing like i think almost into the 90s and perhaps through still a lot of it but even though like the way we look at i mean i remember in high school uh like freshman or sophomore year in high school uh i this just sticks out in my mind so clearly comedy

central would show this commercial for like hits of the 80s like new wave hits of the 80s with clips from the music videos and we me and my dork friends just thought it was like the funniest thing we had ever seen like can you believe this shit like you know and then a few years later grand theft auto vice city comes out and then everyone's like man these songs these songs are awesome. What happened to these? The framing device, the branding totally worked on us, where it's like, man, the radio stations in this game rock. Yeah. Cooler. I'm looking.

I mean, if you look, I would say you would say a lot of that. I'm looking at the whole chart now. I think you would think a lot of the songs are cheesy. There's nothing like break my stride by matthew wilder 27 that's the coolest song that is a corny corny song also what i keep thinking in my head is the the solo on what's love got to do with it which is so like what is that plate is that a child's keyboard is that played on a on a baby's toy i don't know what any of this shit i don't know what any of the sounds were my my wife loves

movies of this i guess it's probably this era now if i mention a movie that's not in this era i'm gonna get my ass torn to shreds but she loves the stuff from when we grew up that to me is very very corny and unwatchable um uh i'll i'll stream at night here on the computer i'll go upstairs and she'll have for instance a polyshore movie on i have no interest in watching that not even for ironic sensibility like i don't i just want to be out of the room when that stuff is on um and last night i walked up and she was watching uh she's watching sister act with the kids and the kids couldn't follow it at all um but she was really enjoying herself and i was like god damn this movie is so corny at the end of the movie i don't know if you guys ever seen this at the end of the movie whoopi goldberg is

leading her her choir of nuns in oh my god and i'm not going to be able to remember the song but it's um i will follow him or is that used earlier i maybe that is it yeah i think yes i think that's it because the the joke of the movie was often taking songs about men and making them about god right that was one of the running gags of the movie so they were doing that and then at the end the pope stands up and gives them a standing ovation and whoopi's like hey check this guy out what the fuck this wasn't a movie theater i can't believe this shit you know that's crazy to me and that's what all this is it's just i can't believe people were doing it like kids you know there were eight year old kids going little deuce coop and then like scott me yes i'm the one proudly

something truly for all ages like the the term all ages meant something in this time period little kids and old people and everyone in between had the fucking exact same interest what a nightmare well this i think is a good uh point to transition into a video that i have uh which might move us into uh a next general area to discuss uh i have here i will screen share uh this is a clip uh from a special from 1988 called opryland 200 years of american music um right now you're looking at uh frankie avalon um i was gonna jump i was gonna show a really specific thing here but since with what we've been talking about i feel like i should jump around uh you'll just see random frames here like a lot of people all doing the same dance on a big staircase which i think is in the opryland hotel uh i mean you're this is this is all ages

entertainment big time uh just you know uh giant hair and giant earrings on barbara mandrell in a giant in a giant uh giant shouldered gold drape um i mean it's just hours and hours of the corniest uh uh you know he hush stuff ever kind of hopping all around the campus because i feel like there were like 20 different places to do shows at opry land as well as the boat we haven't talked about the boat oh wow it's still around the boat's called the general jackson and it's parked in the opry mills parking lot uh you ever done it you ever been on the boat i've never been on the boat never been tempted to go on the boat um i've it is it i i think one time i accidentally got stuck in the little rounded driveway that the boat like maintains that i was i was like trying to get away i was trying to go in the right lane i accidentally got in there i was like oh it looks like i'm gonna get on the fucking boat i don't

want to do this and you know like kind of like peel out of there but i've never been tempted by the general jackson car got trapped on the boat get the dude there's the three hour loop filled with ragtime i have to have all ages fun not if you blast metal from the car and just like keep laying on the horn until they stop has there been any talk of renaming this boat um i'm gonna guess no i'm gonna guess no and in here let me see if i get lucky if we do i'm gonna play a second of the song and if it's part of the song that i'm thinking of then it'll make its point for me if not i will i will stop it here's a little sample from this opryland musical special

nope it did it it said it this is a lot of people in shiny there's those those huge skirts like i was talking about big circle skirts up, and they are waiting on the Robert E. Lee. Guys, I actually did see there was talk last year of renaming it to the HMS Paula Deen. So that's something we could do. That's cool. Can I confirm it's Stonewall Jackson, not Andrew Jackson? I would have to. I would guess, right? I mean, six of one, half of the other.

You know, it's not much better but if we could get trump to tweet about this before he's not president anymore that would be we'll make that a priority yeah it'll be his main thing i think yeah um so that's a little taste of the special boy this goes on you get off the boat and marching bands are led and then we go into the opry i think that was a little that a lyle love it we're no not lyle love it that's a chris yeah that's um uh anyways um but what i was gonna show was of course the rock and roll section they jump all around the park uh there's a there's a beach boys performance most of these performances are by a very old man. Let me just get a taste of this. What? Is he singing like this to mock the B-20s?

He's also engaging in like Tim Conway-esque antics. He's on a rapid ride. The guy's singing in this bad falsetto and it's sped up and he's with some you know some gorgeous scrunchie wearing babes and uh they're getting splashed on the rapid ride your seersucker suit is gonna get soaked my man you're crazy also are you okay like your voice i'm concerned um then we like what is that voice um every time that i am uh listening to some beach boys adjacent thing uh aaron my wife who does not like the beach boys makes always makes a point of saying this is what i hear when i when you play the beach boys

there's no difference to me yeah and i say hey um let me play you haven't really listened a little deuce coop here put on some headphones um anyways uh then we get you mentioned sister this is a performance of the supremes on the big vlog ride to make you stay away so long. That's fun. But the main thing that I wanted to show, and I'll try to not spoil it here, despite it not being American music, of course the Beatles are part of the fabric of American music now,

and this is how they pay tribute to it and i'm gonna have to jump in and narrate real fast because the characters who show up um are so delightful i'll let you guys be surprised but here we go in 1964 england made a huge contribution to america's music they sent us the beatles so um let me stop real fast uh this is the same this is the old man in the seersucker suit who badly sang the beach boys but now he's in a bad mop top wig and he's performing sergeant pepper with a cadre of characters and the characters are all your favorite cereal characters the lucky charms leprechaun buzz the honey nut cheerios bee and the tricks rabbit um not present for whatever reason is uh boo berry or whatever the character's name is from that cereal um oh i'm sorry count chocula count chocula is off on this i didn't mean to leave

him out um this is the strangest little piece of tape i could imagine he slides into a ball pit muggy so hard throughout this whole thing yeah we did it you're in a ball pit. He is mugging so hard throughout this whole thing. Yeah, we did it. You're in a ball pit. Oh, my God. Who is this guy? I don't know. I didn't watch his introduction carefully enough to know.

Is he the mayor? It's a little treat for his 20th year in office. Anyway, this takes us into, I had another way into this because there's several generations of great characters at Opryland, but this is the strangest thing to me that you'd think,

so Opryland, the home of country music, huh? And yeah, that's right. And it's where you can take a picture with the Trix rabbit and Count Chocula. This is interesting because this is IP that has not been exploited thoroughly at a theme park. At least with what we've come across thus far. And this is the first time I'm seeing a theme park exploit them. Yeah, and they're great characters.

I'm so excited they were at a theme park. Well-rounded characters that we all love. Some of our favorite characters in fiction, I would say. Jesse, agree? Jesse agrees. I know he does. What's your fondness for? I'm just thinking of their backstories.

Is there a canonical reason they're all there together? Or is this, I mean, I meant to understand this is a larger universe. What's happening with these guys? There's a lot of questions I have because I'm just seeing this is a larger universe. What's happening with these guys? There's a lot of questions I have because I'm just seeing this footage for the first time. I think they all are big music lovers for sure. Sure. Yeah. They all love music.

They love the sounds of today. I mean, I'm sure there'll be some movie that connects all of them together into a larger universe, just as Scoob recently tied in. Who else is in Scoob? Now I can't remember. Scoob is a universe builder of a movie. The Birdman character? I forget.

The Birdman? I haven't seen Scoob. Alcatraz? I didn't know. Scoob introduces the Birdman of Alcatraz. But anyway, yeah, I don't know why they're together did they all is this like um in toontown that the disney and the warner brothers characters all hang out like do all of the uh is there a mascot town where mascots all come from and only mascots are allowed. And regardless of what brand you work for, you all hang out at a cafe or something. Yeah, like a bar, but safe for the whole.

And they're just dancing around. And so, I mean, obviously, they work hard. They play hard, too. That's what I love about Count Chocula, you know? Yeah, Count Chocula is always grinding, is what I like. Yeah. He wakes up in the morning. He's grinding. And that's what he loves.

On that grind. Here's a, let me share the screen again to show you how they were introduced to the general public as being there. This is from the Tennessean newspaper. Opryland introduces Big G Breakfast Buddies. Big G, and it's the general mills g which you know for some reason on this show we talk about we like to say the phrase king features syndicates oh this boring corporate name that a lot of the comic strips are owned under and this is similar to me like wow mommy it's the general mills big g breakfast buddies nobody it's a really mealy mouthed corporate phrase

the Big G breakfast buddies I've never heard of that phrase I wonder if that's still something they refer to them as internally I don't know that's a good question I mean it does now that we're seeing this it does feel like there's no why hasn't there been 10 movies about the Big G

breakfast buddies just looking at this picture count chocula is straight up wearing high heels he is in some louboutins yeah is flexing right now on our asses and he looks great um yeah what sorry for a bootberry as well as wearing i feel like a flat a woman's conservative flat uh knows he's going to be on his feet all day. Possibly Buzz the Bee as well, maybe. I mean, those are more like slippers or something. Yeah, he's comfortable.

And the Trix rabbit, that's the Trix rabbit, right? Yeah. Yeah, and he's au natural. Yeah, I think Boo-Berry is in the Marge Simpson ones. They look pretty good um what so you don't like big g breakfast buddies you feel like that's too stiff too corporate okay that's fine what's your pitch on what to call all of the cereal mascots when they get together is there is you have a better idea of what to call them when they team up god i don't

i just want that corporate i just want that brand out of their general mills but um i mean i don't i guess i don't mind breakfast buddies i guess breakfast buddies is okay yeah um do we do we have a better one though i don't know if i do off the i would i honestly i think it's too i want... I want more of a King Feature syndicate. I want it a little less specific. So I want it to be like Triangle Entertainment presents. Like the General Mills breakfast consumption ambassadors. That suggests something to me. I want it to be so

neutral you can almost understand what you mean by that yeah maybe try to obfuscate it even more um what gm consumption concern that's better that's closer okay that's good i was thinking sugar mills gang is that too clever by half too cute i think too cute sugar like that that suggests to me they're having fun and i can see how that might be interesting i think it's yeah general general uh maybe like general concerns properties the general general uh general mills uh yeah concerns maybe it's lc yeah that's good and they each one is a concern they're not we don't consider them a mascot they're a concern they're concerns yeah maybe a consortium oh yeah yeah that's good but concerns is a little more vague you don't know what that

extremely that's fair well there's some adorable concerns, and yeah, they are rocking some wonderful footwear. Our favorite concern in fiction is what we'll say from now on. Scott, did you come across the original characters? Oh, you know it. I'm sad they had to go. I mean, you need characters as high and mighty as Count Chagula to top these,

because these are no slouches themselves. Sure. If everyone could see right here, all your favorite cartoon pals. We've got Delilah Dulcimer, Frankie Fiddle. We should say these are anthropomorphic musical instruments. Yes. Faces jammed often between the strings. It's eyeballs and mouths poking out from behind strings

and with frets on their sides where ears would be. Nightmarish characters that would come to life in a horror movie, if there was a horror movie about instruments that were murderers. It's some yellow submarine shit for sure. Yes. Barney Bags, Yancey Banjo,

and then they wanted to go home early, so then they just went with Johnny Guitar. Did you call him Johnny Bar bags isn't it say barney bag or barney bass barney barney it's pretty yeah it's pretty blurry all the pictures um yeah i was wondering that's true i agree that the text could be clearer, although the name is right next to an upright bass. That's not a garbage bag full of musical instruments. Discarded, broken instruments. Spirit of broken instruments. Barney Bags.

I don't think Barney Bags is that bad. I don't know what nicknames they give their instruments, their tools down at the Opry. Yeah, I play a bass guitar, also known as a bag. Yeah, what's your bag, man? Maybe they were talking about a bass guitar that whole time, okay? Austin Powers was talking about a bass guitar. His bag, baby.

I want to say there's one who's not represented in your picture. If I could consult my list. I think there's one more. I just want to make sure they all get their due. Finding my list. Oh, Jose Mandolin. I don't know why he's not in the picture. I don't know why he's not in the picture i don't know why they you know they

don't like cut out diversity but um yeah he's not allowed to be photographed but if you hear a mandolin it's jose got it yeah uh i do we like these characters yeah i like to you okay i like i like uh i like johnny guitar a lot i will say that yeah johnny guitar has a certain charm uh yeah he's sort of where these jason do we know were these walk around they weren't right there's no they were just pictures i mean yeah i think i think that would be kind of horrific in 3d yeah no no no there no. There were walk-arounds. I don't have a picture, but I... Yeah, well, I'll see if I can find it. But yeah, no, you could get your picture with Johnny Guitar.

All right. Well, that's going to really determine my feelings on them, is how they held up in 3D. Okay. Wait here. I got it. Sharing the screen. Let's see.

What do we think of the gang opryland's musical characters i'm a thumbs up now they look better than i thought they just look they just exceed your expectations yeah i think they look much better in this picture than they do in the cartoons yeah they look a little more i'm not gonna say realistic right because that's not the right way of putting this but they're they're not quite as like fantastical the the the drawing of them does make it seem like there's no way they could possibly make this real and by god they did it yeah and this is early this is early mascot tech the earlier mascot technology as well so um it's very we should say for the listener it's extremely Sid and Marty Croft it's very uh

it's very Lidsville I would say but I'm usually horrified by those things and I really don't mind the the gang here it's pretty cool when you have these things and you don't immediately go oh their face is in the mouth. Like, that's a pretty good bar to clear, is knowing that I'm not sure where these people's heads are, right? I don't know. They're not at all. It's not obvious to me where these people exist inside the body of the instruments. There could be, like, three people in each suit for all I know.

Yep. Or they're autonomously operated. They were, yeah, robots. They were alien technology robots that opryland had access to uh jesse can i ask in general do you have any is there like a do you have a guilty pleasure ip mascot that you like even where you go like well i do have affection for this character from childhood. That's interesting. An IP mascot. Okay, so we're thinking specifically one that has been brought into the real world here. Yeah, probably.

I mean, it could be, it's pretty open-ended. I mean, it could be like from a, yeah, a food, like a spokes character from a food or from a commercial or even a walk-around character, something like that. You know, I don't think many of the product related ones speak to me. Although, of course, I mean, like anyone else, if I saw Count Chocula in person, I'd shit a brick. I mean, I'm only human, but I can distinctly remember something from my childhood, which I think is like maybe in my box of things I go to immediately when I start to get a big head sometimes about myself.

And I got to remember, no, actually, you're really stupid. And one of the things I go to to remind myself how stupid I am is that I remember one Christmas. I feel like this was and I don't know if this is right or not. But I remember thinking one Christmas I woke up and there was a framed photo of me meeting donatello the smart turtle from the ninja turtles and at that time for some reason i did not remember going to this it would have been disney or universe i guess universal right no disney they were in the parks for a little while they were okay i i didn't remember meeting him and having my photo taken. So I thought, because I was so dumb, that Santa had somehow whisked me away to have my photo taken while awake with the turtle, then framed it and gave it to me as a Christmas gift.

So I would say, to answer your question, I really liked the turtles so much so that it almost drove me insane. Wow, really? I had like a break in reality trying to figure out how the picture of myself showed up for Christmas. So I really liked the turtles. That's interesting. You talk about the turtles breaking someone's brain. As you look behind me, there are just all ninja turtle toys pointing guns at my back

so yeah they've they've broken a lot of brains yeah well one of them seems to be sort of a sexual predator as well but the rest of them seem just like straight up violent threads but oh trench coat yeah yeah yeah they're all by the way they're all violent they all have the power to kill they do they do they've established that in the films yeah could i pick apart that notion more and i know you don't defend it but just to to get into it even more thoroughly that uh it was the night i guess christmas Christmas Eve that Santa absconded with you and then took a daytime photo that you weren't cognizant of?

Yeah, in retrospect, there's a lot of pieces of it that don't really fit together. To me, it was Occam's razor, right? I don't remember having this photo taken. It's Christmas. How else could this possibly have occurred? And I think to that extent, you say, well, Santa did it, and you just put it in the Santa box this photo taken it's christmas how else could this possibly have occurred you know and i think to that extent you say well santa did it and that's you just put it in the santa box and go

on about your life and not examine you know maybe what's wrong with your brain at such an early age well and also if you are not necessarily a magic believer uh 365 days of the year maybe you're like as you get to be an older kid you're like I know there's no magic except for the one day where there is magic. Right, right. Although, you know, Santa has to do stuff during the other days, too. I mean, it's not inconceivable that he stopped by, you know, one August afternoon and said, you know, sprinkled some elf dust over my face and said, you know. I guess you'd also have to imagine that to Santa Claus it seemed like it would be a better gift not to meet Donatello but to simply have a photo of meeting him

so I'm not sure that that really tracks as far as what a child would like to have so I don't know not a lot of it works there wasn't like a big conversation you didn't kind of get into it he didn't teach you anything or if he did you know

it's yet to be uncovered um maybe one of those things he sort of planted and i'll rediscover in my 50s uh just maybe right when i need it i mean knowing donatello i mean he's the smartest one after all of course i gotta assume he's got my best interest in mind you'd have to hope at least yeah absolutely of course he wasn't wearing a trench coat so i assume everything was on the up and up it's trustworthy unlike some turtles um here's a another piece of ip using a different uh coat just a really quick flash here of a character they had in the early 90s called professor you be smart i'm not really sure what his deal was in general, but he's got thick round glasses.

He's driving some kind of cart around. And to me, he looks exactly like David Cross. He is so David Cross-esque. I was going to say he's got a very Mr. McFeely vibe as well. Oh, sure. From Mr. Rogers. Certainly. I don't know. We'll post this photo. was gonna say he's got a very mcfeely mr mcfeely vibe as well sure from mr rogers certainly um i don't know we'll post this photo if you're the kid in the photo or if you know what professor you be smart did um let us know um let's see uh i mean that's the ip look the ip that's really

where i fell in love with this place you can can, I think, judge a park especially based on their IP and, I mean, two fantastic generations. I just have to applaud them for it. Yeah. I really like that all the rides seem like something Cotton Hill would yell in anger. The Wabash

Cannonball. Grizzly River Rampage, Bobby. Close to Grizzly river rampage bobby uh close close to grizzly river run yes a different another disney ride oh but the grizzly river rampage has the unique uh fact that it was for one year used as a course in the nation nations bank whitewater championships which in 1995 alone served as a qualifier for the 96 summer olympics in atlanta what wow wait so they did they ran uh they went and rafted down this rapids course uh this rapids layout and you could qualify for the olympics potentially and they relocated that thing

to kentucky kingdom i believe so yeah yeah a lot of rides these rides we relocate it to other parks eventually uh or soldiers that doesn't count though a rapids ride that's like doesn't it doesn't have to be regulation somehow well you just you just turn on the rapids and you put in your own raft and you do it. I guess so. In the Olympics, you're not going to face a big fake bear. Scott is in his whitewater rafting bag once again. Here we go. It's time for the big rant.

Let's hear it, Scott. We need standards in our whitewater rafting Olympics events. You can't just pick these courses willy-nilly. Said it a thousand times. There should be, look, there should be a bear involved in every different trial at the Olympics. And just at the Olympics, I'd say, too. Yeah. Yeah.

There's a threat of bear in every event. Yeah. Jason, do you have more rides you were going to list? No, I think we talked about most of the other ones. And I mean, these were all made by like Arrow or Intamin. Like these were big, made by big ride manufacturers. So like, it's not like they just like homemade these out of nothing. Some of them

look good but but just do you think that they weren't good like i think in in weird dming i think you referred to some of the rides as as quote hick shit yeah the i mean for me the entertainment is pure hick um because it's it's fiddles and all those other i mean walking by and seeing someone playing a fiddle and then sitting down and then continuing to watch them play the fiddle is like unimaginable to me i don't i don't know what state of mind you could possibly be in that you would want to do that although i know many people do um i think the rides were perfectly adequate for for that era um again the appeal to me is essentially nil of getting in a big log and going down a thing and then my feet get all wet that's not i don't want that to happen because

i'm not at a water park i don't want to be wet so i don't really understand water parks over here you stay wet normal park over here you stay dry that makes sense to me um but there was a lot of getting wet at this uh at opry land for sure um roller coasters i mean the rock and roller coaster i think was like i think that was like a legit roller coaster for a while um and maybe now it's been employed as sort of a throwback like wasn't this cute what we used to think was fun or whatever but i think at the time i think it probably held its own it's and it's still around it's uh let me look i have it here it's opera it's the cannon blaster at great escape in queensbury new york oh yes so people get on that now and it's like they're not dead and they're not you know like bored i guess you know so that's that's legitimate you don't

granted you don't go up and like you don't like what's the one i remember the ride i went on as an adult was the one where you go extremely fast and then you sit here for a minute and then some people like hold a penny and they're like, wow, look at the penny floating and then they go back down. Is that the Hulk or Superman or something like that? There's a, the Superman in Magic Mountain is like that. Okay. Because as you're saying, it's just sort of a ramp up and then you go back.

Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah. It's not that. That to me is the modern ride. Although now I guess the modern ride is like there's a screen i really don't i don't know what the tech of modern rides is i

guess i'm showing my ass i don't know what's supposed to be good now well i think that i look the classics are still good but you know there's different like there's a there's a roller coaster themed around the ninja turtles in a mall in new jersey that tips you up and then makes you go... How do you describe it? It goes like... 270 degrees. It's not a straight down drop. It drops you like...

It curves a little. It curves inside to make you feel like you're really going to die. Oh my God. That's like more modern. That big mall built in a county with blue laws.

So they build a massive, largely empty mall that cannot open on Sundays. The mall can't be open on Sundays? I think shops in East Rutherford, New Jersey is where it is. This is the American Dream Mall. And it opened. This took decades to build. We did a whole episode about it. It took decades to build we did a whole episode about it it took decades to build then opened like two weeks before covet hit and now is like pseudo open

sometimes maybe but uh yeah they can't be open one of the days of the week that ain't good i and also i was just gonna disney's innovation for Rock and Roller Coaster was adding the greatest American rock and roll band, Aerosmith. Oh, it's the Aerosmith ride now? That's what that is now. It's just the same name. Disney's Rock and Roller Coaster is Aerosmith, has Aerosmith music. It's been that way since it opened.

Yeah. Yeah. Agreement, disagreement on that phrase, greatest American rock and roll bands yes well it's the music of today that can't be denied well absolutely yes that's true um should we talk since you bring up a mall it's hard to go backwards when you bring up a mall can we talk about what is there today? Yeah. Which is Opry Mills. I guess the solution, it seems like just a purely cold calculated business decision that

maybe the park is limited at a certain point and we do have to employ all of these people. This may be due to tons of ride operators and tons of performers and stuff. What if we cut all that out and we just open up a big mall? And they did, and it is a Mills Mall. I have complained about Mills Malls before because they have no aesthetic. I was trying to think how to describe the Mills Malls. I think it's like,

there's like the tunnels underneath Disney World that connect everything that the public never sees. And it's like, what if that was the mall? What if a bunker was a place where people go yeah to me opry mills the the original aesthetic was i think significantly worse um pre-flood because it leaned i mean it was also just older and that's just the way things go i mean it's updated it looks a little bit better for my modern eyes, I guess. But it did seem at the time to be a little more emphatic on the idea, not just being an outlet mall, but having these weird, kitschy places inside of it.

In fact, I was looking at some of the early ads for Opry Mills,s and they emphasize things that of course haven't been in there in forever but we're like one-offs and i'm struggling to think of one now but i mean if you've been to any of these big outlet malls you know it's not just like here's the old navy that we have at the outlet mall here's the i mean not even gucci but like what's two tiers below gucci like here's the swarovski we have have here at the mall and it's a little bit different or whatever. But they were also trying to be like, here's 3000 square feet of,

of fucking, I don't know, pretzels or whatever the fuck, whatever weird shit you would put in a mall like that, that seemed to be the focus. And whereas now it's more like a legit, it's more like a normal mall, just eight times as big as it ever should be.

Yeah. Yeah. They're so mammoth every mills like like it is such a workout to do the entire loop it is yeah it's legitimately very difficult to see everything in there not that you would want to because it's like some of it literally repeats from side to side um and the the aesthetic i think the aesthetic of it now is like hotel room or or hotel lobby or whatever where a lot of times you go into a hotel and you go i can tell this was expensive it just doesn't it doesn't it's not cohesive in any way it's just like that's an expensive light fixture that

carpet was more expensive than it should have been maybe that's like a piece of marble that looks really shiny but you then you put it all in the same room and you just go I don't know it's just like I don't know what who's this for yeah and that mall is now built next to a massive hotel with a giant atrium covering much of it that's

right yeah yeah yeah land is the land of contrast it's it's yeah the I've stayed in opera land hotel a couple of times. I've stayed in Opera Land Hotel a couple of times. That looks good to me. I watched a long, boring video about all the amenities of the hotel, and it

looks great. My official review is that it has seen better days. I don't know if it is coincidental that it happens to seem that way once it's been taken over by marriott um and has had this massive you know corporate overhaul or maybe i just got a old room when i stayed i don't know but also got flooded don't forget that hard to bounce back from

sure sure um the atrium is legitimately very very cool. If you've never seen it before, this is a it's I guess it's probably fair to say it is a convention center, first and foremost, which explains the huge footprint of the place. And the hotel does have in the middle where you can access this from the slightly more expensive rooms. The balcony rooms overlook this atrium. And it's just like I mean, it's like an indoor rainforest. Basically, there's like a manmade little stream through there. There's waterfalls in there and just a massive number of plants that have no business really being in Nashville, it seems like. And so along with that, you get, I mean, you get the humidity of obviously what that's like having all those plants in there. But honestly, it's pretty cool. It's pretty novel. And it's kind of interesting.

But it is, it's also like, it's a microcosm of what I find, like, what I think about theme parks or Disney world in particular, which is, wow, look at this like beautifully curated flora that we're enjoying right now. Uh, what, what better to compliment this than a $21 slice of the worst pizza I've ever had in my life brought to my room, you know, by somebody who looks like they hate my guts.

So that is, that to me is like the experience of Opryland, which is, I mean that's a huge fucking bummer um well don't count out uh all the cool things that could potentially that at least at one point were available in that atrium which is that there was a like night show like a world of color like a disney fountain show where they they lit fountains up uh and they danced to music which looked really cool and then also in that hotel atrium you could see a performance by lloyd lindroth who the one and only my favorite mr show character uh the king of the harp i think this guy he's like he's harp liberace is what he is wow look

at lloyd lindroth he's in a like a pink uh like sparkly cut like a nudie suit would you say would that be an accurate uh term nudie suit adjacent i think a little bit nudie suit-esque people are thrilled right now to be meeting the lloyroth. This woman's losing her mind. He's dressed like Flabber from Big Bad Beetleborgs. Yes, indeed. It's as exciting as meeting Flabber. So, you know, that's cool. Don't count out Lloyd Lindroth.

It brings a lot to the table, Opryland Hotel does. Man, and that is huge as well. I mean, the mall is very, very big, but walking around the hotel itself is also like a real chore walking around that fucking place. I mean, it's not interesting at all. A long walk with nothing interesting to do? It was at one point one of the 30 largest hotels in the

world so yeah pretty uh pretty massive well and i think also if you compare it to other hotels of its size it's it's really big for not having a casino attached to it um which is those are the places that i'm used to getting into those hallways it's like oh this wasn't meant to be anything um like if you ever if you ever walk around um uh like caesar's or uh the bellagio like some of the really massive hotels in vegas like i i want to go somewhere it's three miles from where i am right now so i'll get to walking and in the meantime you'll see see like these entire corners of the building that are very minimally themed, where it's just like it's just carpet and just lights and that's it. It's like this is for the roof line or something. It just exists here and there's nothing to do except for like sit down and plug your phone in.

It seems to exist purely to be vacuumed. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. That's what a lot of corners of the Opryland Hotel are like. There's no one in here. There's no one eating here there's nothing going on you're just walking through and i i hope i hope there's a camera here in case i get attacked like there's no other reason for this to exist does it still connect to like the downtown like the entertainment district by water taxi because that was something that like they did at some point right like they were trying

to redo the entertainment district simultaneously as they're redoing like the opera land property i those words don't make any sense to me the way that you put them together i don't know anything no i believe you i believe that at one time that something someone said i just don't even know i wouldn't know first of all because i don't go downtown so it would never exist to me it's like but you love Kid Rock's big ass honky tonkin steakhouse I mean you're wearing oh brother yeah well this is what I'm saying why would I ever want to take a taxi I'm never leaving the fucking joint okay

you also love getting COVID over and over again yeah yeah it's kind of good to do yeah it's like it's a daredevil like let me see how many times i can get it and survive that is uh that is actually a huge deal with the guy specifically who owns that place like he's uh he's like a big asshole i mean obviously he's a big that's

obvious right but uh yeah kid rock or like his like regional brand manager his business partner yeah kid rock and his business partner have made a lot of people mad or happy i guess depending on you know which type of guy you are but that's uh yeah for the the whole downtown shutdowns which of course never really happened in earnest here at all which i know is very different from out there at least um yeah that guy is a big piece of shit and uh really wants people to come down there and get sick and i think one of the cool things is a lot of people are obliging and are doing it so that's interesting anything you say kid rocks business partner yeah this guy sounds

like a guy up our alley we love our nefarious uh corporate uh greed mongers so i want to know more about this guy yeah he owns a lot of that shit can i seg into like you know there's talk about just real quick covet and like you know santa photo ops uh how you know how is that going to work in this time or whatever and i think they've actually cracked it at one of the restaurants do you know what i'm talking about no scott no okay so there's a restaurant at the mall at the opry mills uh called the let me look it's called uh aquarium restaurant yes okay loved the name i looked this up too and i was like there's got to be more right no it's aquarium restaurant aquarium restaurant it's owned by landry's

obviously yeah and our buddy tillman for tita one of our our favorite nefarious corporate weirdos um and it's it kind of looks like cool here let me see if i can i'll bring this up you know it kind of looks rainforest cafe ish yep uh let me i'll share the screen here yeah um just so you can get a definitely like a cousin you know there's a lot of rainforest cafes, or sort of, a couple dozen. There's like four aquarium restaurants. Yeah, so like you go, oh, this is kind of cool. The ceiling looks cool. There's big tanks with fish.

Coral reef world. So let me show you a picture of how they figured out how to crack the issue with having kids meet Santa. And here's what they landed on. Yes! Oh, boy. Santa is in the tank with the fish in a full Santa suit, and the kids just go up to the tank and wave at him.

He does have oxygen. He does have oxygen. He's not holding his breath and gloves and santa's white gloves and suit he's just in the regular suit it's not a a santified scuba suit it's just the the cloth and the wool yeah it looks like an accident it looks like he's saying help kids please if you want another christmas if you ever want to meet donatello so on on the official on the website it says mail your letter to santa and keep a

close eye on the aquarium tank you may see him swimming with our fish ruining your letter letter whoops i guess this one i didn't didn't read it uh let's get you some socks how about that uh now i will say they have figured out santa to keep santa safe um but the restaurant is just open and it's also a buffet so santa will be safe wow i've so i've eaten at that aquarium restaurant a couple of times oh boy um and it ain't good boys it ain't that it ain't it ain't too too good um no never no but uh the the rainforest it's it's as good as rainforest cafe right which many more people have had um it's it's it's quite bad food. It's on the level of, I regret bringing up zoos twice because it sounds like that's the only place I've ever been.

This guy fucking loves the zoo. It's like zoo food, which it's like 40 to 50 percent more expensive than it should be and like 40 to 50 percent less good than it should be. So like even french fries kind of suck and they cost $9. That's basically the realm of aquarium except with it with a bonus which is that it's mostly

seafood which is already way more expensive than it should be at most chain restaurants so i mean you you can really legitimately sit down at the aquarium and with four people which is what i would have been doing with myself my wife my two children you legitimately could sit down at that restaurant and eat i mean uh like 40 worth of food for 130 dollars i mean it's it's not at all difficult to do that type of shit there and it fucking stinks but the fish are very cool um yeah and okay and that's the hillman for tito promise the the the aquarium is like really well done as far as i know i'm not an aquarium guy i'm a geologist as we established earlier but it's um the one of the things there is we went somewhat

recently like after the big flood that caused them to refurbish the whole mall and the waiter there told us somewhat credibly i feel that because the place was so flooded they were not able to get in and rescue any of the animals so by the time they got back there was one remaining and it was the one that had eaten all of the other fish in the aquarium. I mean, it sounds somewhat apocryphal, but also I know it was flooded for a really long fucking time. So that makes sense. Sure, yeah, that's what happens.

It's that one. It's not like he killed himself. Like he was, you know, he didn't, I mean, he was in there for a long time. Right. It's that one, the 12-foot tall fish. He ate Santa. right yeah that one the 12 foot tall fish he ate santa oh my god that's incredible um the yeah we well there's also there were mermaids i think they do that right did you see mermaids at the aquarium restaurant i don't think i've seen the mermaids in there i've seen the people who clean so they go in to clean it's big enough that you do go in to clean it right um so that is kind

of fun that's to me the entertainment equivalent of a mermaid because you're sort of like there's not very much you can i mean you can kind of like i mean we're people right we're not fish we can kind of move our arms a little bit but that's pretty much it i mean otherwise she might as well be cleaning a rock while she's in there i don't know two words with one stone why not and they have to hold their breath or there's like hidden oxygen like uh tanks where they can take a quick breathe and oh that oh because i was concerned you watch a video and you're like this is too much time are they trained and are they trained trained in anti-torture methods? How else are they under here so long? Yeah, I think they have to train a lot.

It says on the website, people are always asking us about our mermaids. Click here for fun facts about what it takes. Oh, and then it's like they tell you if you want to work this job. And then not a link, but it says go to the restaurant, fill out an application if you want. Yeah, you have 50-yard butterfly stroke time, swim 200 yards, timed underwater endurance evaluation.

There's also a performance evaluation in the exhibit. Yeah, wow. And it says what kind of... Oh, sorry, Jason, go ahead. Oh, I was going to say say it does make a point to say the mermaids are not all scuba dive certified that's a little alarming and then it tells you what you would have to swim with and there's a big list of fish like uh butterfly, assorted tangs, look down jacks, and tessellated eels. Okay, somebody was having a little bit of fun in the website copy room.

Come on, those aren't real. That's not real. Such thing as a tessellated. Eels can't be tessellated. Come on. That's outrageous. For Tillman Fertitta creation. You know, Tillman Fertitta came up know Tillman Fertitta came up

last year in our downtown Disney ordeal the owner of the Rainforest Cafe and many other restaurants I think Bubba Gump's too and I didn't have I didn't want to go down a big rabbit hole here but I was just like I know it's been kind of a year for Tillman Fertitta and things have been rough for him with the

Houston Rockets I forget what exactly but I just have here three random recent headlines about this man and this great restaurateur. Tillman Fertitta supporting Trump leading to revolt among Rockets players. Rockets owner, this is from March, right at the beginning of the pandemic. Rockets owner Tillman Fertida is the worst type of boss and then over the summer rockets tilman fertida's family has deep mob ties just get better and better with this dude huh yeah that's uh i didn't know that he owned landry's although i of course have heard as well i mean the player dissatisfaction with him i think is i mean maybe a little convenient given what the other 29 billionaire owners must be like i mean yeah yeah they're just like slightly

they're one percent quieter but all pieces of shit yeah i think maybe you go in there blind a little bit on those guys but i do know that i mean his fortune has decreased substantially as a result of the pandemic and all that and that's that's very understandable i didn't know that he owned landry's um which like you said owns the aquarium and what else there's there's a bunch of it he also owns claim jumper which is in opry mills as well yeah um which i actually liked but now i've i haven't been in a couple years but now i feel like i've soured on based on his uh on his associate not like there's a good restaurant tour

i guess i should support but i thought the restaurant was pretty good i did one like a year ago i thought it was like the worst restaurant i've been to in the recent past yeah might have just been mike's might have just been the uh ajoo sandwiches but uh that's any indication i have affection for it but i wouldn't recommend it yeah i like it there's one right over here by the warner brothers lot in an office building that's the one yeah and the tbs headquarters we should say also that the tnn headquarters used to be on this campus remember the nashville network sure they used to broadcast that's why family feud broadcasted from the with the special guests the stadler brothers bringing us back to the beginning uh tnn the national network became i remember it

mainly for showing dallas reruns um then it became spike tv where it mainly showed Mansour's reruns. Then it became the Paramount Network, where it mainly collapsed and died, I think. It had Bar Rescue as well. It's got Bar Rescue reruns, yeah. Because I keep wanting to watch Bar Rescue, and then I'm like, where is it? What's it streaming on? Oh, right, the one that you can't get to, the one with the content moat. Never mind, I will never watch bar rescue. Well,

the great thing about bar rescue here is that, uh, if you want to pirate bar rescue, which I would never recommend doing, um, if you wanted to do that, for some reason, bar rescue has completely fucked up on TV database.

This is one of the things that gets up my ass all the time. TV database on bar rescue is fucked because they kept doing this shit where they would say, this is part three of season two when it was actually part one of season four. And all of the episodes overlap and you can't get the fucking episodes because nobody knows what fucking season it is. It's a nightmare. Some seasons were 10 episodes long and other seasons were like 80. It makes no sense. Yeah, that's annoying annoying that's my bar rescue

rant of the day i appreciate hearing such a niche that would absolutely bother me and and you're not alone and i guess there's multiple ways that trying to watch bar rescue is trouble yes i think he wouldn't john would be furious about all of this. This season is only 80 minutes long. The one's 10 episodes, one is 80. You're confusing people. You can't stream it anywhere. He'll talk with Trump about it, of course, because he's another Trump guy.

He loves Trump. He never loves Trump. He interviewed him on his podcast. What? Oh, my God. Like recently? I didn't know that. Three weeks ago. god three weeks ago he sat down with him does that he literally posted they would have any questions for the president no i can't think of any thank you though thanks john excited for taffers tavern

what cocktails will you have on tap um uh the okay that was gonna say the the santa thing in the aquarium uh was interesting when you uh when you were talking about the how they had figured out how to meet santa i was like oh he's about to talk about uh bass pro because that's where i had seen the Santa innovation with the big plexiglass shield was at Bass Pro, which around here is a massively big deal. It is now an anchor store in Opry Mills. It wasn't always, but now it is. I think it's the only store. No, it's one of two, if I remember correctly, that you can't get to from inside the mall. It has like a, or it did have a separate entrance. Maybe now you can get in through the mall. Um, but it's this huge play. I mean, it's, um, if you like, look at the satellite of Opry

Mills, you can see there are millions of boats out front. Like someone's going to the mall to buy a boat, which is very strange, but I guess probably happens. Um, but that's where the big, I think that's where the, I saw the thing about the plexiglass. happens um but that's where the big uh i think that's where i saw the thing about the plexiglass um and there's also the big bass pro shops which we actually would be going to i think this holiday season uh in memphis which is in the site of the old pyramid um where the grizzlies played for a time but has it also has this weird kitschy appeal where people thought it was haunted um or run by the mob and all this stuff. But it's a very cool, I mean, literally just a big great glass pyramid on the Mississippi River and is now a Bass Pro Shops with, I think, the largest freestanding elevator in North America.

And we would go down there. We've been there for the holidays once before, and they always have a big uh santa thing and of course now we're not going to uh do it but that's sure our idea of a good time is going to a big bass pro not that we don't do anything outdoors but it's a cool place another thing that's like this which is like a cool place to look at because somebody tried really hard to make it look like something and it mostly worked you know yes i have you stayed at the hotel in the pyramid yeah we have stayed at the hotel a couple of times and it's like i mean you talk about theming it is it is impeccably themed as a wilderness lodge like really really nicely done on the inside and it's only the hotel

itself is only three levels um and the i mean because obviously the right it's a pyramid so you can only go up so high in the fucking thing. So, Wilderness Lodge in a pyramid? This is great. It's incredible. It's absolutely incredible. They have, like, little crocodiles in there. And, of course, I mean, all of the camo shit you could ever want to barf on. But, you know, Memphis itself is a really great place to visit.

And so we would go down there um and actually uh my wife um did get roped into uh buying a uh buying a room that came with a um i'm trying to think of the way to phrase it where we we got a discount on a room for this year last year um if we sat through a timeshare presentation and this is something that I would never have done. And she did because she was like, we're going to come here anyways. It's so much fun. The girls love coming here for the holidays.

They do Christmas so big here. We'll see Santa. We'll do all this fun stuff. We get these gift cards and we get a discount on the room. It's perfect. Of course, we're not going to buy anything. It doesn't matter.

And I'm like, okay, that's not what I wanted to do. But okay, we've got a year to do it um and then this year half and then i guess it's just like money down the toilet now because they're not gonna let me cancel you know oh yeah yeah never if they have some of your money yeah yeah um oh geez um yeah we've the this came up recently i've been curious about this pyramid but never done the deep dive uh we were asking for examples of like crazy epicottish architecture recently somebody brought this up and i was like oh this is an episode for sure and you you're confirming this more oh yeah oh yeah do that on your branson loop go there yeah uh get some ribs um and hang out at the the big the big pyramid it's a fucking hoot man

it's really cool well either do we do wait until covet is over to do the loop or do we just go do it right now because everything's right you could probably do a lot of this couldn't we be cheap everything would be cheap yeah it would essentially be no different everyone else is doing it um out here so there would be no disruption in service i definitely i think my game plan is to low bar the farrar family and i will use their credits so they're like well we don't lose all the he's it's a bad offer but at least we don't lose everything yes that would be great and and you know and then maybe you actually do want to buy the timeshare i mean we don't know i mean it could be a great deal like it could be anything the timeshare you know i mean we know for a fact it's an investment pass that down to your kids yeah yeah

um i we we've been going a while we'll wrap it up but i have i have one more thing that like a truly unique experience that can only be found in the opry mills mall and i'm excited to share with you guys um so that you know many is as we've established many of the great uh restaurants slash entertainment brands are in opry mills you got your Dave and Buster's there too. A Chili's and a Chewy's. Everything you could want. But there's also a Madame Tussauds. These are fairly common. They're around. Here you have the added specificity of country music. You've got your Kid Rock wax figure. Not his crooked business partner yet,

but hopefully someday um but you know so it's more more country influenced a group of wax figures you can go see um and that includes a recent uh rising country star darius rucker of hootie and the blowfish and now recently a big country star. So there is a Darius Rucker wax figure. What's the big deal, you ask? You just take a picture with him. There's a myriad of those who cares. Not so fast. This is the first ever wax figure

that includes screen mapping technology. This is a thing that's in theme park world a lot you put a projection show on the castle uh or you know i think i guess there's disney characters where you project onto their face but not deployed by madam tussauds until darius rucker and uh so darius rucker comes to life talks to you and tells you about the process that goes into making a wax figure. And we'll put these on Twitter. This will have more impacts, I think, to look at than to hear about. But you guys just need to see the progression here. So, you know, here's regular stuff.

That's just Darius and Wax Darius. Yeah, that'll make sense to my yes so far yes very accurate uh here he is being sculpted and it's a little you know creepy of course but not you know nothing out of the ordinary talent by the sculptor i mean that's incredible yeah yeah i mean this is a very good looking i mean i feel like madame tussauds recently are are pretty impeccable i don't knock their work but then we start getting into the screen oh no here is jerry is watching with uh some skepticism uh uh oddly brightly lit version of himself he seems like scared of his own visage i would say he looks like when jimmy kimmel did carl malone that's not good like blackface jimmy kimmel yes oh no

um it's that is very unnerving it's uh yes or the or the cranky anchors puppet version yes he looks like he looks like a cranky anchor puppet so what does this look like without the screen whoa hold on do it uh okay here's oh no it's like cats wow yes very good description uh here he is being made here's like all

of there's like a bunch of storyboards like different expressions that Darius Rooker can make. And they all look so alarmed. It looks like these are all like figures that have come to life inside the computer and they want out. They're begging to be killed. And all of this made, by the way, not for nothing, on a Mac with a full size toolbar that does a dock that does not disappear when you mouse away from it that's a huge oversight to your productivity I mean you're taking up a full 10% of the screen yeah you're right that's that's massive no one's adjusted that size it's only basic apps on there

that's crazy yeah and you got updates to do in the app store and they're only using like pdfs and quicktime player this is being achieved with the most basic mac technology yeah it makes sense actually now that you point that yeah no it makes yeah all it all yeah adds up look at his crooked mouth on this one picture it's like his mouth is trying to escape his face oh man uh then we keep going this one's very disturbing i think this is part of a progression where his skin tone is being painted on. So he's blank,

and then his texture's being filled in like an hourglass, and it's very upsetting. And then now we get into some very creepy, this is just the most ghastly thing. Here he's poking behind some from somebody's back and now the full thing no

anyone feel free to describe it in your eyes this to me it just looks like Darius Rucker got crushed by a cartoon steamroller so his head is just perfectly pancaked like splayed all the way out his head is three feet wide um it looks a lot like recently second gate addressed big dick

tracy character little face yeah it's like a cronenberg body horror to me yeah it's this is the thing yeah yeah the thing yes exactly like the thing. It kind of looks like that CGI image of like, well, here's how the human body could be sculpted if the human body evolved to survive car crashes. And it's just the most hideous looking thing you've ever seen. Oh, those monster creatures. Yeah, the monster creatures. I mean, it gives us a preview, I guess,

of if you took our head skin and unraveled it completely but left the face attached uh i guess there would be some disturbing results um and then and then just one more where he looks like like a ghoul like from the haunted mansion he looks like a singing bust whoa but it's just hold on. That's the magic mirror from Shrek. That's the magic mirror that talks to Lord Farquaad. We'll get these all up on the Twitter so you know what we're screaming about. Wait a minute. I think what happened, they're on Windows now.

I think this person maybe opened a link that said, can you tell the difference between this picture and this other picture? You have to wait 50 seconds or else you can't. And then they got scared. I think this is the scary face. They opened a link in their email. They shouldn't have opened up. That's what this is.

This is not real. This is a virus being distributed as we speak. Yeah, a virus email. I will tell you what is real uh millions of people across the world dream this face every night this is what you see when you die of covid you get a quick flash of this and that's all she wrote um i yeah yikes truly truly disturbing stuff there only at opry mills um they also that they did this this gag they did this technique like the first wax figure that talks to you and the excitement of this has resulted in a sum total of you know 147 views on youtube like the making of like no

one's looking into this this is not a story i had to go digging to find it's like it's like they don't want people to know about uh cgi little face darius rucker well it also costs like an exorbitant amount of money to go into that place am i am i wrong for thinking that i mean is it i believe that's a lot of money yeah um i don't yeah i'm not sure it used to be a bookstore in that slot there which i mean you know at a tourist mall i guess it makes sense that that's wouldn't be the most highly trafficked place but the truth is is it's also a mall mall for the nashville area i mean the other malls um that we have around here there's uh cool springs and green hills which are really really like the high-end malls um and they're also pretty far out of the way for most

nashvillians um and then there are some older malls as well that are like borderline dilapidated um and so opry mills is like the default mall in addition to being this tourist trap it is also sort of the default mall for a lot of people here as well so having a massive madame tussauds uh operation in there that costs i'm gonna say a hundred dollars i don't know it's something crazy to go in maybe um it's yeah it's weird it's it's it's very strange to look at yeah yeah pretty big use of space i also just something just occurred to me while as i continue to stare at this little face darius rucker it's a little face with a perfectly puffed out round you know like rest of it around is this showing us what hootie would look like as an actual blowfish. Oh, wow.

I mean, I think you hit the nail on the head there. I don't think there's any better description than that. It's the only explanation. I've looked up the price. I'm sorry, it's $25 if you walk up, which, quite frankly, might as well be $100 for how quickly I would not buy the ticket to go in and look at Weird Hootie. To go see Hootie, the actual blowfish?

Do you, I guess as a closing thought, like, do you miss this place? I don't know if you've been or if any aspect of it is available to go see, or if you've done the, did you say you did the Bass Pro Distance Santa or are considering it? Oh, I will not, and I will not be going to a mall anytime soon. I can't imagine uh going there i mean that you know the mall and you know i mentioned this earlier people are nostalgic um for opryland and that's fine i i kind of believe that nostalgia is poison um but i also know that

we are all sort of poisoned by it to one extent or another um and you just kind of have to deal with it i and you know i didn't have any memories with it so the fact that it's a mall now um as a man in my 30s with children um who gets motion sick the mall honestly serves me better than the theme park would now it doesn't have to be not everything's for me that's fine um but as far as i'm concerned i would go to the mall more and my wife and i did you know we would go see movies there it had a huge it still does and i'm sure people are in there watching fucking transformers 4 being brought out to theaters again or tenet or whatever i don't know what's going on in theaters right now whatever the hell it is yeah whatever the hell it is you know people

are still going in there right now, I'm sure. But we would love to go in there and see a movie and go to Dave & Buster's and blow $20 on a phone game that's on a 50-inch LCD screen now for some reason. We would love to go down and look at the Build-A-Bear thing and say, well, we're not getting our kids that, but it's cute. Or all of the little kiosks in the mall. The last time

I was there, the kiosks were the following. You had the thing you throw at the wall and splats. They have this new thing. It's called like Dragon's Breath, which is these little snacks that you put in your mouth and then it looks like you're vaping and they sell them to kids.

That's a great thing. They're like these little puff snacks that you put in your mouth and then it looks like you're vaping and they sell them to kids um that's a great what it's they're like these little puff balls that i think it's obviously not dry ice it wouldn't be that it's like whatever the safe version is of something you can eat that gives that it's like cold but you it like exhales water vapor or whatever so you walk around you see high schoolers or i guess middle schoolers would be the ones Obviously high schoolers vape all the time But like middle schoolers or children Going like isn't this cool And they're like eating a snow cone or something So you know I miss seeing that stupid shit

I miss the food court Which I want to talk about the food court Before we go What is I mean this is what I remember from being in the food court And I think yeah yeah please by all means uh what is i mean this is what i remember from being in the food court and i think it actually has changed since i went last but i'll tell you guys what it is and you and you tell me if you have any favorites or things that you hate um there's the uh the sarku or sakio japan which is like the flat top teriyaki style

place you pay a dollar for double meat okay that's one that's pretty good uh there's like a smoothie place in a salad place but come on there's a burger king there is a sabaro uh there is a i think it's a tgi fridays and a chili's two if i'm not mistaken they're like across from each other competing for the exact same demographic of guy. It just depends on which of them is a 15 minute wait and which is a 45 minute wait. There was the always mysterious Chinese, typical Chinese place. But then the one that they inexplicably say is a Louisiana style, like the Cajun place that serves the same food as the Chinese place. It just has a different name on

it i don't know if that's something that's common out west fond memories of of those in malls i grew up going to yes very i don't understand the bourbon chicken yeah which which one is the good the bourbon chicken you know oh i just saw that as one of the only things left in a dead mall video i was watching it's like the only slot out of 12 in a in a food court and some decaying like ohio mall wow yeah that's i that's all i can remember being there in the food court there was then claim jumper there was a moe's burritos place in there uh the aquarium right like does anyone has anyone done moe moe's isn't good is it i think i've done it once and i don't have any memory of what it was.

Yeah. Good or bad. Their main thing is it's a big burrito called the Home Wrecker, which I think is just too cute. We're not, you know, I'm not that interested in that.

There's a Mexican place. There's a fascist barbecue joint called Mission Barbecue. Oh, there's a macaroni grill that's pretty good. Yeah, the barbecue place is one of the places that you will go and it's like it's got the american flag that's been palette swapped to look like terminator future or whatever that shit is um but the the best place there is the bavarian beer house oh which is huge massive it's massive yeah it's it's

it's totally huge they have the live german music in there it's like a beer hall with these long communal tables um now that's now that's good eats there i like that a lot that's gotta there's a place yeah there's a place like that in vegas where jason got way too high and ran out of there i was afraid either the waitress with the test tube shots or the band with the hat that moved uh was coming for me there was a woman there was a woman who would paddle you for a dollar whoa he was really jason was really worried she was coming for him that she had a there was a coming for his ass oh my tillman fortita quote tillman fortita that was a tillman fortita quote i did it honestly all comes together yeah uh that all sounds i mean that sounds good i'm a

big chilies fan of all the garbage oh really yeah so that would probably be my choice of those i would like the beer all sounds like the most fun though sure so you're thinking chicken crispers i guess yeah chicken crispers for sure uh i like the big platter with the ribs and you can get like a big you can get like six different horrible things yeah like from around the menu yep yep that would be good i uh it'd be um it's it i'm imagining now like what if i did go do a like a curbside pickup awesome blossom but i i'm confident that my wife would not join me in that and my baby is a baby so he would not um so me just sadly peeling off bit after bit of a would that be it depends on my attitude if i

make it sad it's sad But if I make it the coolest thing I've done For the entire quarantine Maybe it is Yeah that doesn't sound that sad to me That doesn't sound sad? I don't know What is this? Chili's is inherently sad so

Once you're there It doesn't matter it's all good I mean it's going to be ice cold by the time you get at home yeah because the closest one is in the casino scott the closest one is in the casino i believe yes i know but i can get back and forth pretty fast uh i mean it's pretty deep in ceno it's pretty west in ceno but there's no traffic anywhere so um now that is not that far from where my baby goes to the doctor so i could the next time he's got to go to the doctor, drop them off, sit in the car, and eat an awesome blossom by myself. And then go pick them up.

That's great. See how far I get. Or could you bring the awesome blossom in the waiting room? I'm sure they'd appreciate that. And then take off my mask in this pediatric care lobby. I'm eating here. A lot of pediatricians have different sections they have the well section and the sick section and the awesome blossom to go section that you have to

kind of sit in there it's next to the aquarium oh but if i still got a view if i can watch the fish this is the this is the opry mills experience uh condensed i feel you're absolutely right man oh beautiful this is great. Any closing thoughts or words of wisdom about this area, this theme park, but also, I mean, it became the mall, as we knew it would. Well, but we neglected to mention

when they opened the Grand Ole Opry house, the big venue they built for the Grand Ole Opry, who was in attendance and sat down and played a couple's ditties on the piano president richard nixon himself that's right uh of course uh on on the disney dish on jim and len's show they had a historian from the smithsonian on recently who talked about uh nixon's love of these theme parks and he did want to go to the opening of disney world but could not

because of the optics because he was about to withdraw a ton of troops from vietnam and they thought it would just look too bad while he was on like while he's while he's on the ride but in his place he sent hr haldeman with a flag that flew over the White House. The first one Nixon ever gave out. Wow. To present to Roy O. Disney. Haldeman, of course, ended up doing time for the water gate break. I've never heard that one.

That's bonkers. Ladies and gentlemen, H.R. Haldeman. He was not on that opening day special. No. I was aware that we missed that fact, and I will continue to do. I think maybe Mr. Nixon will play us out of this episode. That became my plan as I started thinking here. But Nixon notwithstanding,

any last things we want to say to this wonderful campus, the many things to do over the years? I would have liked to have visited Duodidi City. That's all I'd like to say. Sure. Yeah, I guess i you know what nothing lasts forever is the way i feel about opryland you know um it had its moment in the sun would it still be there today if a couple of incompetent ceos hadn't decided that there was more money in this weird land grab or whatever they were doing at the time. I don't know. I mean, if it were around now, it would be hitting pretty hard times, right? I mean, like everything else is. So I don't know. I guess

that's in the interim, another 25 years or whatever. It could have had some good times, but so be it. We got a Dave and Buster's now. You know, you can go in there and do the Fruit Ninja on a big iPad. What the hell else do you want? You think the fucking Rock and Roller Coaster is better than Fruit Ninja on a big iPad? You know what? I don't know what to tell you. Get with the times. Get down to Opry Mills. Turn in your tickets for a stuffed

bear. Get some COVID. Jump on the trampoline for $20. Go to Madame Tussauds for $100. You know, have a good time. See a jolly old elf in a fish tank. Drowning Santa. They've got it all at the Opry Mills. Beautiful closing words with that, Jesse Farrar.

You survived Podcast The Ride. What a blast. Thanks so much for joining us here. And hey, let's exit through the gift shop. Is there anything you would like to plug? Yeah, you mentioned at the top, I do a show with my friend Mike Hale called Your Kickstarter Sucks.

We talk about all the shitty stuff on Kickstarter, actually pretty similar to stuff that would be in any gift shop, except for most of the time, it never makes it out of the idea phase. So if you like goofing on silly products that's a good place to go we've also teamed up with my friend Chris James a great comedian to do the new show on Stitcher Premium it's called Good Morning Good Morning it's a

little bit different than YKS it's that we're playing radio hosts and we've got some very funny comedian friends on to do some great bits. We're really excited about doing that. It comes out pretty much as soon as this episode comes out. Perfect. Yeah, so that's a good timing on that. We're really excited. And then I do a stream pretty much every night of the week

with my friends Stefan Heck and Rob Wiseman. It's called the Go Off Kings and we go on there and we play games pretty badly most of the time but we have a good time and goof off you know kind of like this if you like goofs and good boys i think that's a good place to find yourself over there on twitch at the go off king stream so uh thanks for having me guys a lot i really uh appreciate it and i love the show so it's nice to be on oh geez thank you so much fun yeah yeah great great area yeah go off kings hitting uh fruit ninja at um

david busters anytime soon we're we're actually we have to do a lot of practice before we're able to get up to the fruit ninja level we're sort of like we're on the like uh starting the stream on time making sure the system turns on everything's plugged in the controller is charged and then and then we'll get to the big boy stuff like fruit ninja on the ipad you know uh awesome well thanks so much for being here jesse uh as for us we've got uh you can check us out on all your favorite social medias at podcast the ride and for three bonus episodes every month visit podcast the ride the second gate at patreon.com slash podcast the ride uh and now as promised here to play us out uh the at the time about to be uh only five months away from resigning the presidency um uh but in happier times uh opening uh the new Grand Ole Opry at the future site of Frightening Hootie and the Blowfish Wax Figure.

Here now, the piano you will hear is Richard Nixon to say goodbye to Opryland USA and goodbye to this episode. Thanks, everybody, so much for listening. Dick? How weird is it to look at, by the way? The guy knew he played. Oh, he's mainly blocked by a head in the audience.

Video says low resolution preview. He had the angriest face I've ever seen he was like you will God bless America A bunch of glaring people in thick glasses. Tucker Carlson's dad. Great job, Dick. forever dog this has been a forever dog production executive produced by mike carlson jason sheridan scott gerdner brett boehm, Joe Cilio, and Alex Ramsey. For more original podcasts, please visit foreverdogpodcasts.com and subscribe to our shows on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Keep up with the latest Forever Dog news by following us on Twitter and Instagram at Forever Dog Team and liking our page on Facebook.