Never been to Action Park, but that's definitely the best Wikipedia entry I've read this week.
That nearby hospitals dubbed it "traction park" is especially awesome.
That place sounds so fun. Primarily for the employees, but still.
It is also a truly epic Wikipedia entry.
Huh, apparently this Action Park has nothing to do with the Shellac album.
A fantastic entry. Never went. I do own Shellac's At Action Park, but according to Wikipedia:
Contrary to popular belief, the title has nothing to do with the infamous New Jersey theme park, Action Park, which closed in 1996 due to numerous fatalities. Drummer, Todd Trainer, came up with the title of the fictional park because it sounded cool.
At Action Park is one of my all time favorite albums and definitely the best project Albini has ever been involved in.
This slide led to the first fatality at the park, a head injury suffered in 1980 by an employee whose sled ran off the track; he then fell down a large embankment and hit his head on a rock, which killed him. Hay bales at the curves were meant to cushion the impact of those whose sleds jumped the track (a frequent occurrence), but did not always do so effectively. According to state records, in the years 1984 and 1985 the alpine slide produced 14 fractures and 26 head injuries.[6] While park officials regularly asserted its safety, saying that 90-year-old grandmothers could and did ride it, in the early years of the park the slide was responsible for the bulk of the accidents, injuries, lawsuits and state citations for safety violations.[6]
When Intrawest took over the park and renamed it Mountain Creek in spring 1998, they announced the slide would remain open for one final season. Riders were required to wear helmets and kneepads. The last day of the slide's operation was September 6 of that year, the day before the park closed for the season, as that year's Labor Day was rainy and the slide had to be closed.
It's health and safety gone mad, I tell you.
Can this be a thread of our favorite Wikipedia entries? Can I submit C.E.M. Joad?
And Thorgil Sprakling? Just because every bit of content except one is augmented with a "[who?]" or a "[citation needed]". If Wikipedia had the courage of its convictions that entry would consist entirely of "Thorgil Sprakling was the son of a bear". After all, Saxo Grammaticus is better than no source at all.
I think Action Park may have been the inspiration for Thrill World.
Speaking of summer fun, this is about as significant an incursion of "Canadian" air into the mid-Atlantic region (and way out over the Atlantic itself) I have seen this late in June. Enjoy it while it is here, briefly.
Speaking of summer fun, this is about as significant an incursion of "Canadian" air into the mid-Atlantic region (and way out over the Atlantic itself) I have seen this late in June. Pretty breezy, but enjoy it while it is here, briefly.
That nearby hospitals dubbed it "traction park" is especially awesome.
The fact that the owners responded to the high accident rate by buying the township extra ambulances is also great.
I love how some people have found revived fame on Wikipedia, probably because there's free access somewhere to their work. I'm kind of sick of learning about what Bosley Crowther thought about every damn old movie, though.
Remember if you wait until the last minute to do something it will only take a minute.
Oops, wrong thread. That was meant as useless business advice.
Sullivan reinstated as president. No taring and feathering of Dragas (who voted to reinstate, along with the rest of the board) yet.
A better result than I hoped for since I'm so used to the bad guys winning all the time.
"Q: Dr. Sullivan, what are going to do now that you've been reinstated as president of UVS?
A: I'm going to Action Park!"
Can this be a thread of our favorite Wikipedia entries? Can I submit C.E.M. Joad?
I submit Barry Manilow. It starts off slowly, but is really funny. There's just something about the tone that gets to me:
During this time he began to work as a commercial jingle writer,[8] an activity that continued well into the 1970s. Many of those he wrote and/or composed he would also perform, including State Farm Insurance ("Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there..."), and Band-Aid ("I am stuck on Band-Aid, 'cause Band-Aid's stuck on me!"), for which he adopted a surprisingly convincing child-like voice. His singing-only credits include Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pepsi, Dr Pepper, and the famed McDonald's "You Deserve a Break Today" campaign.[9] Manilow won two Clio Awards in 1976 for his work for Tab and Band-Aid.[10] These jingles were a mainstay of his concerts for years as his "V.S.M.," or "Very Strange Medley."
It's pages and pages of paragraphs like that. Once I start giggling I can't stop. The tone is precise and just on the edge of parody.
I thought I was done boggling at that article, and then I got to the part about how they sold alcohol at the water park. Great idea!
Actually, now that I think of it, I realize that I haven't been to a water park in at least 25 years, and have no idea whether it's normal to sell alcohol there. It can't be, right?
@18: UVS = UVA
@20
The whole entry is just mind boggling.
Did you get to the part about how they had spanish language radio ads but no spanish language signage or spanish speaking staff?
This seems like a good time to make sure everyone knows about Schlitterbahn, just because it's really fun to say "Schlitterbahn." (And one hears it a lot around here in the summer ten months of the year when it might as well be summer.)
And, yes, they sell alcohol at Schlitterbahn.
Or where people going down the nearly-vertical waterslides often suffered wedgies or enemas?
God I'm so mad I didn't go to that park as a kid.
I just finished reading the article. Good freaking god.
I just can't get over the fact that someone conceived and built a looping water slide.
Screw dead people, I want to know more about that unauthorized insurance operation. The citation (even when tracked down on archive.org) is unhelpful.
The criminal convictions arose out of a scheme under which Mulvihill with others over a period of some four years, in order to avoid the cost of insurance premiums in connection with insurance required by various recreational and construction operations in which he was involved, formed and purported to operate a phony offshore corporation, London & World Assurance, Ltd., as an exempt corporation under the Cayman Islands, British West Indies, and utilized it to issue and distribute fictitious insurance policies and performance bonds.
31: it sounds like they just went and had and ran the place without insurance for several years? So great.
The waterpark that adjoins Cedar Point has a special 21-and-over pool and hot tub set-up with a floating bar. It looked sort of like the various grottoes we talk about here.
It opens at noon for people who like to get started early.
And Mulvihill is now the owner of the park (such as it is).
Favorite image is the ungoverned go-karts mixed with the beer-fueled drivers. Whoo boy!
The karts were meant to be driven around a small loop track at a speed of about 20 mph (32 km/h) set by the governor devices on them. But park employees knew how to circumvent the governors by wedging tennis balls into them, and were known to do so for parkgoers. As a result, an otherwise standard small-engine car ride became a chance to play bumper cars at 50 mph (80 km/h), and many injuries resulted from head-on collisions.
Wow.
Favorite image is the ungoverned go-karts mixed with the beer-fueled drivers on the highway.
people going down the nearly-vertical waterslides often suffered wedgies or enemas
I guess the slide probably wasn't that tall, but you can die from the latter, can't you? I seem to remember reading in one of those 'survive any catastrophe' books that if you're falling a long distance into water, it is really, reallyreallyreally important to clench your asshole as tightly as you can.
I seem to remember reading in one of those 'survive any catastrophe' books that if you're falling a long distance into water, it is really, reallyreallyreally important to clench your asshole as tightly as you can.
This is something people need to be told to do? I find it's generally automatic in situations like that.
OK, in all fairness, and with the least exaggeration possible, this is the greatest Wikipedia article of all time.
Can this be a thread of our favorite Wikipedia entries?
I found the page on impalement pretty interesting.
I think it might be. I kept reading bits out to C. And laughing every time someone else died. (Probably not something I should admit to.)
Some excellent first-person stories, including from people who did the full-loop waterslide.
It is also a truly epic Wikipedia entry.
Indeed. So, so quotable.
I just sent it to a bunch of people. That is a fantastic article.
OF COURSE I have been to Action Park like 1,000,000 times. Usually high. I have ridden, swung from, leaped across, and slid down every "amusement" there,* but definitely not that insane looping waterslide. The worst I ever did was skin my knees. It was really fucking fun. But kind of insane.
*Just don't, you pervs.**
** I have even mentioned the pervs of Action Park here on this very blog. They used to hang at the bottom of the super steep waterslide hoping to see teen asscrack or if they were lucky and the girl in the bathing suit wasn't, teen boobage.
Heh. I actually found something on google.groups that I recalled posting on Usenet nearly 20 years ago.
Data from "Deaths and Injuries Associated with Amusement Rides" (U S Consumer Product Safety Commission, 1991):
1973-1990 US roller coaster fatalities: 25 (deaths from all amusement rides: 93)
For amusement parks (excluding parking lot fairs etc.) the total fatality rate was about 1 per 90 million visits. Don't know the visitors numbers for Action Park to compare its death rate... but it most certainly was higher.
It seems unlikely that JRoth hasn't been.
31: it sounds like they just went and had and ran the place without insurance for several years? So great.
I know, right? What sort of moral and business geniuses say to themselves: "We're killing and maiming so many people that nobody will insure us any more. Well then, fuck insurance, we'll just wing it."
1973-1990 US roller coaster fatalities: 25 (deaths from all amusement rides: 93)
So in other words, Action Park was responsible for 7% of all amusement park fatalities in America and 9% of all non-rollercoaster fatalities. Not bad for a frigging waterpark.
I loved comment 8, Ginger Yellow. Stewart Lee is wonderful.
I went to Action Park all the time as a kid/teenager. It was fantastic. With the exception of the alpine slide--which was clearly an insane recipe for broken bones if not death, but so much fun--it never gave off a strong whiff of unsafe to me. I was clearly an idiot. Though I do remember hearing about a kid dying in the wave pool (I see now that happened more than once; I'm probably remembering the 1982 incident), and that did freak me out a little, but I didn't understand why anyone would waste their time in the wave pool anyway when there were perfectly good beaches to go to. I don't remember the looping water slide, looks like that would have been after or at the tail end of my acquaintance with the park. I'll have to see if my younger brothers ever did that one.
Or where people going down the nearly-vertical waterslides often suffered wedgies or enemas?
This reminds me of the look on a friend's face after she came off the near-vertical slide, having forgotten she had a tampon in. Shudder.
I really loved the alpine slide. It was a luge! On cement!
It was a luge! On cement!
With the occasional bale of hay positioned downhill from the sharp turns in the highly unlikely event that someone might go flying off the track!
I like 'Roy Keane incident,' mostly for this: "Mick, you're a liar ... you're a fucking wanker. I didn't rate you as a player, I don't rate you as a manager, and I don't rate you as a person. You're a fucking wanker and you can stick your World Cup up your arse. The only reason I have any dealings with you is that somehow you are the manager of my country! You can stick it up your bollocks."
Alpine slides did exist other places. I rode one as a kid, but was I think sandwiched between my parents, who enforced a lot of use of the brake. Nooooo!
I remembered that amusement park safety report in part due to one fatal accident description that has semi-haunted me through the ensuing years: An operator shunted a roller coaster car to a "low clearance" area under the mistaken impression it was empty. And so I pay it forward.
57: Yes, I rode one at Seven Springs here in western Pa around that time; and apparently it still exists per this rider-perspective video which has a woman and her young child on the parallel run. I do recall being much less bold on it than my girlfriend at the time.
57: Apparently there are quite a few of them in the U.S. Several years ago I stumbled upon this one and was very excited--it's actually called "Kentucky Action Park"!--but it was extremely lame (not steep or twisty enough).
I feel like it is the traveling carnival rides, not hte amusement parks, that truly scrape the bottom of the safety barrel. I once went to a local carnival and went on a version of this ride that failed to spin fast enough to get enough centrifugal force to push people against the side, meaning that you had to use your arm strength to hold on to the ride as it tilted. That was pretty dang scary.
It's like something out of the Simpsons...
Best line: "the bottom of the pool was eventually painted white to make it easier to spot any bodies on the bottom".
That or the repeated phrase "infested with snakes"
OT/
What is it about Tahrir Square and assaulting female journalists?
I never went there but growing up in the tri-state area I remember commercials for it. "The action never stops... at Action Park!" (Not sung by Barry Manilow as far as I know.)
OF COURSE I have been to Action Park like 1,000,000 times. Usually high.
Jammies asked me, while we were at the kids' swim lesson, "So has anyone from Unfogged been there?" I said "No, not yet. But we haven't heard from Oudemia yet, so I've got my fingers crossed."
And potchkeh! Who I didn't know grew up around those parts, though.
Another bizarre thing about that article is links to other Wiki articles for random words- gasoline, engine, skin, lifeguard, capsize.
That's a giveaway for an article trying to emphasize its do-not-delete-me relevance.
/A person whose boss keeps suggesting she write vanity Wikipedia articles.
Mike Birbiglia has a great riff that I first heard in one of his Moth stories and that is reproduced in his book about an amusement park ride called "The Scrambler":
As I understand it, it was originally designed as a medical device for constipated patients, and it was called the Shitzyourpantserator. And then the Carnival Workers of America, CWOA, co-opted the Shitzyourpantserator. And they said, "We feel like the name is something of a turnoff."
And then somebody suggested, "What about the I-think-I'm-gonna-die-erator?" And the responded, "That's good because it gets at the essence of how you feel when you're on the machine. Plus it has the added word play with diarrhea, which is a nice homage to the original intention of the machine."
And then someone said, "What if we call it the Scrambler?"
And the boss jumped up and said, "Nailed it! But who will be in charge of this dangerous piece of equipment?"
And this one guy said, "Well, I have a nephew who's sixteen years old and smokes pot twenty-four hours a day. I feel like he might be available."
And the boss said, "He sounds amazing. We don't even need to interview him. He sounds completely qualified."
I have not laughed so hard since...this morning when I (fortunately long after he had left) became incapacitated with laughter relating something tragic a client said to me to my cow-orker.
And now this thread is renewing the uncontrollable laughter. "Infested with snakes!" Also, I like that people came up with the name "THE GRAVE POOL" but kept attending the park.
And the bumper cars doing head-on collisions at 50 mph, or, as that is also known, AUTOMOBILE ACCIDENTS.
There's a town in laos that lives off of renting tourists inner tubes, which they use to float down a fairly fast flowing river. Every 100 meters or so there's a bar selling beer and buckets of whiskey, most of which have erected shoddy swings/ziplines/water slides (1 drink minimum) terminating in the submerged rock-strewn river. It's a spectacularly bad idea, and killed like 20 people last year.
My wife was born a little too early to have gone but spent a lot of time on skis at Vernon Valley in the winter. She does recall the alpine slide being there.
The link in 44 almost made me pee my pants, I was laughing so hard.
Symbolic of my life: I saw ads for this all the time but I never got to go.
"Infested with snakes!"
God, I know. I've been laughing at that all night.
Labs! Also, 27 gets it exactly right.
I think I still have visible scars on my knees and elbows from when I became separated from my cart and was forced to frantically brake in desperation using my elbows and knees and hands so I could leave the track as quickly as possible lest I be struck and most likely crippled by the maniac coming barreling down behind me (Me waiting in line: I'm not going to use the brake at all this time. My friend waiting in line behind me: Me too!)
DubiousQuality has at least two more first person accounts from Action Park survivors.
I second the unauthorized insurance company as being made of win. Sounds like something out of the charge sheet in "Alice's Restaurant".
Also, 50mph dodgems? Where do I sign, dammit?
I want to see Action Park: the movie; or better still, a 13 part TV series with a different near death experience in each episode.
79 was referring to the Alpine Slide of course.
I checked Buck (a Jersey boy). He never got to go himself, but did have at least one friend badly injured on the Alpine Slide.
(He was also very dismissive about the snake infestation. "All the lakes in Jersey are infested with snakes." I had not known that.)
62- Exactly like the Simpsons, where characters often steal and ride bumper cars down the road:
"after the park management briefly set up a microbrewery nearby, employees looking for after-hours fun would break into it, steal the beer, and then ride the cars on Route 94."
85: I don't think Wikipedia was suggesting they deliberately infested the ponds with snakes. Just that they might have considered removing them before turning them into amusements.
I got the impression that the locals would have felt disoriented and possibly cheated if deprived of the snakes they expected as a normal accompaniment to freshwater swimming or boating. But I may have been overinterpreting Buck.
"All the lakes in Jersey are infested with snakes."
I was at a recording studio in rural Virginia this past weekend, and we asked the proprietor if there were any swimming holes nearby. He indicated several ponds we could visit but issued a stern warning that they were all infested with snapping turtles. I couldn't tell if this guy had had some disproportionately bad experience with snapping turtles, or if I greatly underestimate the threat they pose to swimming humans.
In any event, we ran out of time, so there was no swimming, no turtles, and no $5.
You checked that there were no turtles before not swimming?
I want to see Action Park: the movie; or better still, a 13 part TV series with a different near death experience in each episode.
Near death for main characters, actual death for at least one extra per episode.
Or a Kenny character who dies on a different ride each episode.
Near death for main characters, actual death for at least one extra per episode.
Absolutely; you can't beat the Roddenberry formula.
I couldn't tell if this guy had had some disproportionately bad experience with snapping turtles, or if I greatly underestimate the threat they pose to swimming humans.
Maybe that pond has particularly spry cooters.
A friend of mine left this tantalizing comment on my FB link:
Sometime I'll have to tell you about my post-prom trip to Action Park, when 12 of us rented two condos at the former Playboy club across the street from the park.
I have a scarred right knee from a waterslide debacle, but if memory serves it's from the waterslide at Long Branch Pier (home of the Haunted Mansion of Long Branch.)
Did the ghost of James Garfield participate?
97. Done right, this series will combine the best of Roddenberry and Bay Watch, with perhaps a soupçon of M*A*S*H for the hell of it.
98: Sort of? This happened on a summer camp trip and the camp bus used to pick up a girl who lived right next to his death house! (So no, not at all, I guess.)
The Action Park article was fine. My favorite Wikipedia article was the one about Le Pétomane, but some spoilsport edited out some of the good parts. There's still this good paragraph though:
It is a common misconception that Joseph Pujol actually passed intestinal gas as part of his stage performance. Rather, Pujol was able to "inhale" or move air into his rectum and then control the release of that air with his anal sphincter muscles. Evidence of his ability to control those muscles was seen in the early accounts of demonstrations of his abilities to fellow soldiers.
I wonder what the Chevy Camaro percentage was in the Action Park parking lot? I'll bet on some days it topped 40%.
*this thought brought to you while driving behind a 91 Camaro.
LIFEGUARD: "In 1996, no one died. In 1997, no one died. In 1998... someone died. In 1999, no one died."
I am probably about the only Day Today fan here. Oh, the hell with it. I am Btock style.
I'm not in the UK, but far to the east.
103: A dude I went to hs with drove a Camaro (I think it was a Camaro? Maybe Trans Am???) with the license plate JRNY.
(I found this completely hilarious even in 1987.)
LIFEGUARD: "In 1996, no one died. In 1997, no one died. In 1998... someone died. In 1999, no one died."
Ha. That was the first thing that sprang to mind when I read about the wave pool.