Another thing Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk has is a train ride. The novelty here is the train ride is on the lower level, the one with Wipeout! and a bunch of kid-oriented rides. It's not a full-size train, but it's still a pretty good size. And, most interesting, it goes mostly 'underground', on a platform beneath the main level of the boardwalk. This had a very long line but the thing about a train ride is it can take a lot of people. I think we got on the second train after we joined the queue, which isn't bad at all.
The spiel to start the ride explained that what we were about to see was discovered by an archeological dig, finding a prehistoric society of people living beneath the boardwalk. And now, by virtue of the Cave Train Ride, we could see their strange society ...
So what this was, pretty much, was a scenic dark ride, not far off the point of a Tunnel of Love ride. The train moved slowly through a series of rooms, each with some scene, usually with some animated elements. They were of cavemen, living the early-60s life in a way reminiscent of but legally distinct from The Flintstones. And there was some stray side business too, like a pair of cute little old-style dinosaurs romping together and making some mischief. Some of these were kind of in character, dinosaurs hatching from eggs or people trying to move through a threatening jungle. Some were more fanciful, like the dinosaur kids(?) riding a stone-and-wood-car 'roller coaster' on an endless loop. And the big centerpiece, the thing people get very angry about if rumors get out they're going to change it, is The Stone Room, a big lounge complete with band playing the 1930s song Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen (you know the song, you just like me never knew that was its name) while people take drinks or circle one another in dance or stuff like that.
So what you may have put together about this is that all the characters are cave people. Ones that are the same model as the figure I saw on the sky chair ride. It turns out there are two cave-person cars on the sky chair, one male and one female, twenty passenger-carrying cars apart. They were installed when the ride opened in the early 60s, as promotion for the new attraction, and were loved exactly as they were so have stayed on, riding back and forth the length of the boardwalk, ever since. Also you may have realized ... early 60s cave people in a stone-and-log simulacrum of a particular white-middle-class contemporary society? This is because they didn't want to buy The Flintstones license, isn't it? Yes. But it hit that sweet spot of corny, and left intact so long, that by the time the Boardwalk planned to modernize the attractions the community basically told them No. And, mercifully, the Boardwalk listened, accepting that the corny datedness is a big part of why everyone wants to get on the ride.
So it was with us; we didn't know just what to expect but we were delighted, and ended up in love with this ride too. When we got around to souvenirs I got a t-shirt showcasing this ride, even above the Giant Dipper and the carousel rides you'd think would take my attention.
Also, apparently, some of the cave characters and scens were designed by Teddy Ruxpin creator Ken Forsse. Neat.
Ride operator walking around the Berserker, which doesn't seem to have anyone on it at the moment. Not sure why not.
And there's the Rail Blazer or Rad Blazer, train going down the initial drop.
Back to the front. Saw this park worker doing a bit of vacuuming up(?) in front of the carousel.
And we're at the front of the park again, giving us finally the chance to take a photo of the entrance without being crowded out by other people.
``It's under a big W!'' But it does feel like something's missing in this picture, doesn't it? What could it be? ...
There we go! ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger is what we needed! Note she's wearing a shirt for Viper, from the Six Flags Great America, which is her continuing her sly joke of wearing the 'wrong' park shirt to places. (She's done things like wear the Kings Island Vortex to Canada's Wonderland, riding their unrelated Vortex ride, or the Kennywood Jackrabbit T-shirt to Seabreeze's Jack Rabbit coaster.)
Trivia: The spacesuits used by the Command Module Pilots on Apollo 15, 16, and 17 for the trans-Earth coasting spacewalk, when they retrieved film from the science bays on the Service Module, did not have the liquid cooling garment, as the spacewalks were designed to be short and low-stress enough that the astronaut was not expected to expend too much energy or get too hot. Source: Lunar Outfitters: Making the Apollo Space Suit, Bill Ayrey.
Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 27: The Island of Laughing Waters, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle. Which on starting to read makes me realize I missed one of these because the Paradise Peak story wasn't ended even by Thimble Theatre standards.
