The biggest game safari park of anywhere around you can go

[austin_dern]

And then some news from the old homestead, which will need some context first. Six Flags Great Adventure has, since the days when it was just owned by a rogue M-G-M scion, had a drive-through safari. Weird? Yes, it's a little weird. But it also made for memorable and odd experiences before a day's visit to the park began, as Mom and Dad told us how important it was we keep the windows rolled up tight lest the monkeys get in, and yes, that would be a bad thing. You just drove through, on this roadway in the midst of open enclosures (shut up and pretend that makes sense), and sometimes get blocked by some elk-class ruminants who were in the road and had no desire to leave. There'd be legends too of families caught by a lion that's sprawled across their car hood and unwilling to move, but nobody ever saw that happen themselves, you know.

No more, alas. Great Adventure's declared that the days of the drive-through safari are over. They say, for now at least, that they're going to continue to offer the park-operated bus tours and let people experience this odd simulacrum of the savannah from taller vehicles. Allegedly this (and allowing access only from inside the main park) also will justify merging the areas of the Safari Park --- which was always a separate ticket, but woe to the parent who bought only the ticket to drive through the safari and skip the amusement park --- with that of the main park and proclaim themselves the largest theme park in the world (or whatever), thereby annoying Cedar Point fans. Maybe also Disney fans.

I am, sadly, confident that this is just going to be a temporary thing, for a year or two, until they find new homes for the animals. The Safari has been a weirdly anachronistic thing ever since the mid-80s at best, a last gasp of the Victorian holdover attitude that something must not just be fun but also educational. Amusement parks aren't interested in providing education and haven't tried for decades now; when they do --- I'm thinking of the historic buildings and glass-blowing exhibit in a little corner of Cedar Point, for example --- it's the fossil of the we-must-educate past, preserved until someone finds a way to take it out without drawing nostalgic protests.

I have no idea when I last went through the Safari. Probably it was the late 80s, maybe on a school field trip.

Here's a mid-70s advertisement for the park, by the way, with a bunch of Safari footage after the first minute. It's not grossly color-faded; that's just how the mid-70s really looked.

Trivia: A French law of 1791 imposed a fine on owners of speeding carriages which ran over animals. Source: The Discovery Of France: A Historical Geography, Graham Robb.

Currently Reading: Group Theory In The Bedroom, And Other Mathematical Diversions, Brian Hayes.

Comments

[xolo.livejournal.com]

It's not grossly color-faded; that's just how the mid-70s really looked.


It's not just the 70s, really. During the 20th century as a whole, you had odd effects as the world changed over from black and white to colour.



Here, fur instance, at the 1908 Olympics, the stadium and some of the surrounding area have reasonably well-saturated colour, but London itself remains largely black and white as it had been in the previous century. It was a visually interesting time.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

No, no, there was something wrong with the sun in the 70s. I think they replaced it with a cheap fluorescent so everybody's sense of colors was completely wrong. One of the first shuttle missions was to replace it with the old-model sun again so we could look at everything around us and shudder and start to recover.