Behind the Bastards - The Libertarian Theme Park of your Dreams/Nightmares
Aired: 2021-09-02
Duration: 01:44:12


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[00:00:24]  People think that creative ideas are like these light bulb moments that happen when you're in the shower.
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[00:01:18]  This is Amy Roebach alongside TJ Holmes from the Amy and TJ podcast.
[00:01:22]  And there is so much news, information, commentary coming at you all day and from all over the place.
[00:01:28]  What's fact, what's fake, and sometimes what the F.

=== Learning from Six Flags Corpses (02:52) ===

[00:01:32]  So let's cut the crap, okay?
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[00:02:21]  Ayo.
[00:02:23]  AAO.
[00:02:25]  Daylight come and we start the pod.
[00:02:29]  Ayo.
[00:02:30]  The podcasts.
[00:02:31]  Potty Potty Cast Cast.
[00:02:34]  It's a podcast and it's started.
[00:02:37]  Ah, Jesus.
[00:02:38]  I don't know why I committed to that so much.
[00:02:40]  That was at no point was that good.
[00:02:42]  This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast that's incompetently introduced by a hack and a fraud, i.e. me.
[00:02:50]  And you know what?
[00:02:51]  I had a great script.
[00:02:52]  We were finally going to do the Will Wheaton episode.
[00:02:54]  I wrote 40,000 words on it.
[00:02:56]  Really, really jarring, horrifying stuff.
[00:02:58]  But I'm so ashamed of that introduction.
[00:03:01]  So ashamed that at the last minute, I'm canceling our normal guest.
[00:03:04]  We're bringing on Garrison.
[00:03:06]  He's reading an episode instead.
[00:03:07]  Nobody gets the podcast episodes now.
[00:03:09]  I'm ashamed.
[00:03:10]  Garrison, Garrison.
[00:03:11]  I was really looking forward to the four-hour Will Wheaton podcast, but six hours episode.
[00:03:17]  Yeah, you know, honestly, I think it was too dark.
[00:03:20]  I don't think Spotify would have put it up.
[00:03:22]  There was just too high a body count.
[00:03:24]  You know, we can talk about Mao or the British Empire or Hitler, but when you get to Will Wheaton, you know, that's a lot.
[00:03:30]  That's a lot of corpses.
[00:03:32]  That's a lot of corpses.
[00:03:33]  Well, it's like several robbed zombies worth of corpses.
[00:03:38]  Garrison's here.
[00:03:39]  Hello.
[00:03:39]  That was a house of a thousand corpses.
[00:03:42]  So I saw somebody that said that when Garrison and Chris come on, that they have to turn their podcast speed to half six.
[00:03:50]  You guys talk so much.
[00:03:51]  Yeah, we're working on that.
[00:03:52]  I mean, both of you and Chris are.
[00:03:56]  I think that they need to get used to it because that's how the youth is.
[00:04:00]  I think both Garrison and Chris need to slow down a bit.
[00:04:03]  This is a process of learning.
[00:04:05]  Everybody has a learning process with podcasting.
[00:04:07]  That's what we're doing.
[00:04:08]  I think it's great.
[00:04:10]  We're all finding our voice.
[00:04:11]  You listen to the earlier episodes of this show.
[00:04:13]  It took me some time.
[00:04:14]  It takes everybody some time, and they're doing great.
[00:04:17]  But yes, it is important to go slow when you're reading.
[00:04:20]  Because the only thing is that I've only had two shots of espresso this morning.

=== The Danger of Amusement Parks (10:34) ===

[00:04:25]  That's good.
[00:04:26]  Oh, so you're not even awake.
[00:04:27]  No.
[00:04:27]  And it is morning for Garrison.
[00:04:29]  We had to get him up.
[00:04:30]  I had to get up with him at 11 a.m. yesterday, which was just a nightmare for both of us.
[00:04:34]  That's an internal night for you.
[00:04:36]  And it was worse because we were both interviewing someone whose work we admire, and that was just the worst.
[00:04:41]  Just an absolute worst.
[00:04:43]  Interviewing a competent person as you're struggling to keep your eyes open is not super fun.
[00:04:48]  Oh, and the moment he came on the screen, it was David Wallace Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth.
[00:04:53]  The instant he came on the screen, I was like, oh, that's a fucking morning person.
[00:04:56]  That's a guy he gets up.
[00:04:57]  Absolutely.
[00:05:00]  No, earlier than well we're dressed too quick.
[00:05:03]  It was just, oh, I felt like such a piece of shit.
[00:05:07]  That is very true.
[00:05:08]  Oh, that's funny.
[00:05:09]  Yeah, that's that's very good.
[00:05:11]  Well, yeah.
[00:05:15]  What are we talking about?
[00:05:16]  We're talking about amusement parks, as a matter of fact.
[00:05:20]  Now, I actually really like amusement parks.
[00:05:24]  Not so much as in I enjoy being in them, but more like I find their whole design, their structures, their engineering, and like surrounding culture extremely fascinating.
[00:05:33]  Yeah, I can see that.
[00:05:35]  I can't.
[00:05:36]  I've been to the beach with you on a number of occasions, Garrison.
[00:05:38]  I can't fathom you at an amusement park.
[00:05:40]  It's real funny.
[00:05:41]  Maybe the Star Wars disaster.
[00:05:43]  I'm excited.
[00:05:44]  I've never been to Disneyland, but I like learning about it and its whole process.
[00:05:51]  I can't imagine you in board shorts at a Six Flags going down a water slide.
[00:05:57]  I've never worn board shorts, but I have gone to Six Flex.
[00:06:00]  When I would take trips from Canada down to Texas to visit a family, one of the highlights was visiting Six Flags Over Texas in Dallas.
[00:06:10]  So I happened to be a really big Looney Tunes and Batman fan because those were some of the few TV shows we were allowed to watch as kids.
[00:06:19]  Dallas is a Looney Tunes town for sure.
[00:06:22]  And the Six Flags there was the first Six Flags.
[00:06:25]  And it's all like Warner properties and stuff.
[00:06:30]  But yeah, but the best part for me was going to the Gotham City area with all of its set dressing and Batman rides.
[00:06:36]  Now, before you go poo-pooing how Batman's a fascist or whatever, which he's not, sometimes.
[00:06:42]  He's sometimes not a fascist.
[00:06:44]  There's a good video essay.
[00:06:45]  Strong arguments there, Garrison.
[00:06:48]  There's a good video essay by a guy named Thought Slime about how Batman isn't always fashy, but he is sometimes.
[00:06:53]  But anyway, the Batman at Six Flags is like the Tim Burton or animated series one, so it's fine.
[00:07:00]  But it also means all of the sets and architecture look really cool.
[00:07:03]  It's like this gothic neo art deco kind of stuff.
[00:07:09]  It's very fun.
[00:07:10]  All this to say, the main ride they had there was called Batman the Ride, and it was kind of like flying in the Batwing, but on a roller coaster.
[00:07:17]  It was the first ever inverted roller coaster.
[00:07:19]  So you're strapped into a hard harness and belt while sitting on a small seat and your legs are like dangling in the air.
[00:07:25]  It's a fun ride.
[00:07:27]  But one of the things we talked about was that Batman the Ride had killed two people in its short history.
[00:07:34]  Oh, yeah.
[00:07:34]  In its short history.
[00:07:35]  That was always the best thing about Six Flags because as a kid, when you go with a group of like your cousins, you all want to go to all of the rides that have killed people.
[00:07:42]  So you look that shit up ahead of time to ride the rides that killed kids.
[00:07:45]  Yes, you could be better than that kid.
[00:07:47]  Like, ah, you fucking died on this ride, you loser.
[00:07:50]  Like, what are you doing?
[00:07:52]  So dying on a ride.
[00:07:54]  No, but both the Batman that ride deaths happened the same way.
[00:07:58]  People actually ventured past the fence into the off-limits area under the ride, and riders' dangling legs hit people in the off-limits area, and they died of blunt force trauma.
[00:08:10]  And one, I think like a 17-year-old on a youth group church trip was decapitated, actually, by the force.
[00:08:18]  I mean, having been on a couple of youth group church trips, that's the best case scenario for one of those, really, is you get decapitated and you don't have to get back on the bus with everybody.
[00:08:28]  So like these deaths are not like 100% Six Flags' fault because it was a fenced off area off limits, but the tracks could have easily been higher to not have like this risk at all.
[00:08:39]  Like you don't need people's legs close enough to the ground for this.
[00:08:44]  I think we've got enough people as it is.
[00:08:46]  So it seems like Six Flags did us all a anyway.
[00:08:49]  Sorry.
[00:08:50]  You're doing just a casual manslaughter pill, okay?
[00:08:55]  So like amusement parks are kind of inherently dangerous.
[00:08:59]  Yes, they should be.
[00:09:00]  But you don't want to go to an amusement park that hasn't killed somebody.
[00:09:04]  Because then there's no thrill.
[00:09:07]  At the same Six Flags that I went to as a kid, someone else died after falling off a roller coaster called the Texas Giant.
[00:09:14]  Oh, yeah, the Texas Giant.
[00:09:16]  Yeah, which is the biggest wooden roller coaster in the world.
[00:09:20]  And someone fell into that and died.
[00:09:24]  Only Texas, because normal people are like, well, if I want to go on the biggest roller coaster, I want to go on the biggest roller coaster.
[00:09:29]  And Texas is like, yeah, well, what about the biggest wooden roller coaster?
[00:09:32]  What if it's made out of trees?
[00:09:34]  The entire rest of the world goes.
[00:09:36]  I don't really give a shit.
[00:09:38]  That doesn't appeal to me at all.
[00:09:40]  But Texas, it's like 80% of Texan identity is that we have the biggest wooden roller coaster.
[00:09:46]  My God, are we proud of that giant, stupid wooden piece of shit?
[00:09:52]  Oh, the Texas giant.
[00:09:54]  Oh, man.
[00:09:57]  At another Six Flags Park, eight teenagers got trapped in a walkthrough haunted castle attraction.
[00:10:03]  And this gets real dark real quick, Robert.
[00:10:09]  And all of the lights went out.
[00:10:12]  The light bulbs went out, making the area pitch black.
[00:10:14]  And one of the kids used a small lighter to see, which then caught some foam padding on fire.
[00:10:20]  And there was no indoor sprinklers.
[00:10:23]  And the whole thing burned down with those eight kids inside.
[00:10:25]  Oh, my God.
[00:10:26]  That's a nightmare.
[00:10:27]  So I think that is the highest death toll from a single incident at any amusement park is that incident.
[00:10:38]  Which, again, it's not like it's not just Six Flags' fault, but like they should have had sprinklers inside or something, right?
[00:10:44]  If it's like an indoor sprinkler.
[00:10:45]  They absolutely should have had sprinklers.
[00:10:47]  Like, yeah, it's...
[00:10:49]  Part of your job, if you run a facility like that, is to assume, to try and figure out ways in which dumb kids, because your entire clientele is dumb kids, will attempt to do things that could hurt themselves and then mitigate that.
[00:11:01]  And you can't expect everything.
[00:11:03]  In the case of kids crawling under the thing and getting hit by feet, like, yeah, you know, you can, after the fact, try to deal with it, but like, it's just a horrible thing that happened.
[00:11:11]  But in the case of like, well, yeah, you should have fucking sprinklers in buildings filled with flammable materials.
[00:11:17]  Like, you should just always have that for the workers, too.
[00:11:20]  Yeah.
[00:11:21]  That's absolutely not on the fucking.
[00:11:23]  There's been very few deaths at Disneyland.
[00:11:26]  Like, besides, there's actually been a number of suicides.
[00:11:28]  But there's a lot of people.
[00:11:29]  Well, that we know of.
[00:11:31]  But it's a swamp.
[00:11:31]  You can hide corpses in a swamp.
[00:11:33]  Yeah, but in terms of like park guests, there hasn't been there many deaths.
[00:11:36]  What there has been, there has been a lot of worker deaths and like deaths related to construction and stuff because they don't really care about their workers and who's building all of the things.
[00:11:48]  But in terms of the actual amusement park, when it's operating, Deaths and injuries are often like a combination of negligence on behalf of the park, user error, and sometimes pre-existing medical conditions that maybe you shouldn't be doing super like extreme high-intensity stuff.
[00:12:03]  Yeah.
[00:12:04]  However, there was one to a certain point.
[00:12:08]  There was one amusement park whose inherent danger wasn't simply negligence or user error.
[00:12:15]  It was designed into every single aspect of the park itself.
[00:12:20]  And that's TV today's bastard.
[00:12:22]  Come on, baby.
[00:12:23]  It's a little place about 45 miles outside New York City in the small town of Vernon, New Jersey, called Action Park.
[00:12:31]  Oh, yeah.
[00:12:33]  Hell yes.
[00:12:35]  Oh, man.
[00:12:36]  I first learned about Action Park a few years ago and was immediately, immediately fell in love with this concept.
[00:12:46]  It goes by a few other names.
[00:12:48]  Most popularly, Class Action Park, Traction Park, Friction Park, Accident Park.
[00:12:56]  I know we've actually talked about Action Park a few times previously, just because it's just one of the funniest things ever.
[00:13:05]  You know what it is, Garrison?
[00:13:07]  It's the kind of libertarianism that I receive.
[00:13:09]  Yes, exactly.
[00:13:10]  So that's kind of what I'm going to be talking about today.
[00:13:13]  Because I'm going to be honest here, I think Action Park rules.
[00:13:16]  I think it's the perfect place for a teenager with my predispositions.
[00:13:22]  It was absolutely like it has done innumerable harm to the world and to a number of families and altered and ended people's lives.
[00:13:31]  But it's pretty funny.
[00:13:33]  Yeah.
[00:13:33]  So I am going to try to recognize how the very aspects of the park that make it charming to me also led to thousands of serious injuries and a number of preventable deaths.
[00:13:43]  But, you know, there could have been more deaths, actually.
[00:13:46]  Like, it is actually surprising how once we finish this episode, it'll be surprising how few deaths there are based on how ridiculous things get.
[00:13:54]  We're going to start by discussing the park's founder, Gene Mulvihill, because Action Park really is just the direct spawn of this man.
[00:14:04]  Similar to how Disneyland and Disney World is like an extension of Walt Disney, and it's like a test ground for how Walt would like society to operate.
[00:14:12]  Action Park is both an extension of Gene and like a playground for his ideal weird Ayn Randian circus world.
[00:14:20]  He is, there's a, there was a fight.
[00:14:24]  I think all of these kind of parks that are built by like a dude have that to them.
[00:14:29]  Like there's another one in Texas called Schlitterbon, which was also just like a dude who had no business and no experience designing water slides, just making a bunch of giant water slides.
[00:14:39]  And yeah, people died.
[00:14:41]  But it was also a pretty rad place to get drunk and roll down a lazy river.
[00:14:45]  Sure.
[00:14:45]  Fucking hammered at Schlitterbon.
[00:14:48]  And it was clearly this man's dream to just design different water attractions, having never studied or gotten any sort of relevant training in how to do that, and then give people cheap liquor in order to ride them.

=== From Wall Street to Water Parks (04:44) ===

[00:15:00]  Well, that's exactly what happens here, too.
[00:15:03]  Yeah, I love that thing.
[00:15:05]  I love that kind of thing.
[00:15:06]  It's always fun when that specific thing happens.
[00:15:10]  There's a financial journalist named Mary Pilton who described Gene as a mix of P.T. Barnum and Donald Trump, which is like 80s Donald Trump, which I think is like a really good explanation of the bizarre man that this is.
[00:15:24]  So Eugene, aka Gene Mulville, was born in 1934.
[00:15:30]  He grew up in a working-class neighborhood in West Orange, New Jersey.
[00:15:34]  He graduated from Leahy University with a Bachelor's of Science in 1956, which he then basically never used again.
[00:15:45]  But he also got a focus in business administration when he was in university.
[00:15:49]  After this, he served in the Marine Corps in two different battalions or divisions, and he earned the rank of captain.
[00:15:59]  According to his obituary, so spoilers, he's dead.
[00:16:03]  Quote, Mr. Volville was a pioneer in the mutual fund industry and a venture capitalist and financier with a distinguished career spanning many industries, including cellular broadcast, cancer drugs, robotics, magnetic imaging technology, amusement park rides, ranching, and real estate development.
[00:16:22]  By all accounts, Gene started out with not much money to his name when he began on Wall Street, and he was evidently good at picking stocks.
[00:16:29]  And a decent portion of his fortune was made through Wall Street investments in the 60s and 70s.
[00:16:35]  And soon he actually founded.
[00:16:36]  Yeah, and when you have that skill, when you're able to make money that way, one of the things that says about you is that you are capable of completely cutting human beings out of the equation.
[00:16:49]  Absolutely.
[00:16:51]  It's a necessary thing to make a fortune as a stock trader.
[00:16:54]  And also leads to really fun water parks.
[00:16:58]  It does lead to very fun water parks.
[00:17:01]  I'm on board so eventually he founded his own Wall Street firm called Mayflower Securities.
[00:17:07]  And then he went to co-found and develop a few medical research companies which specialized in developing cancer vaccines.
[00:17:13]  Now, spoilers, that did not work out because we do not have vaccines for cancer.
[00:17:19]  Oh, that's a shame.
[00:17:20]  I got excited there for a second.
[00:17:22]  Instead, we got water parks.
[00:17:24]  This is what's.
[00:17:25]  You know.
[00:17:28]  So in the early to mid-70s, Gene Gutt started getting into the penny stock schemes, also called the pump-a-dump frauds, within Bitcoin.
[00:17:38]  Yeah, it's Bitcoin, but with a worse name.
[00:17:40]  Bitcoin with a worse name and on Wall Street.
[00:17:42]  It's Crypto with a worse name.
[00:17:44]  Yeah, and on all Wall Streets.
[00:17:45]  So it's a little...
[00:17:46]  They're both very insufferable in their own way.
[00:17:50]  At least one you can buy drugs with.
[00:17:51]  I guess actually he probably, you could also buy drugs at Wall Street.
[00:17:54]  Never mind.
[00:17:54]  Yeah.
[00:17:55]  Yeah, you can have both of those.
[00:17:57]  Both of those you get drugs from.
[00:18:00]  So it's basically when a salesman would sell a worthless shares to an unknowing client for a lot of money.
[00:18:06]  Now, Mulville was a very outstanding and charismatic character on Wall Street, and he applied this whole plan with a pal named Robert Brennan, who helped him start Mayflower Securities.
[00:18:22]  Robert Brennan was another noted kind of Wall Street fraudster at the time, and an all-around pretty sketchy dude.
[00:18:30]  He's going to come back a few times in this story.
[00:18:32]  But in 1973, Mayflower Securities was suspended by the Securities and Trades Commission on the grounds of selling its customers worthless securities in a bankrupt electronics company, according to a 1974 issue of the New York Times.
[00:18:47]  So Brennan continued to make other penny stock firms on Wall Street, but for Eugene Mulville, he was basically kicked off of Wall Street, and he was not able to operate there anymore.
[00:18:57]  No one wanted to do anything with him because he was frauding people for a long time.
[00:19:04]  Yeah, I mean, that's just when you retire, right?
[00:19:07]  Like, that's how every good Wall Street guy's career ends, is they get caught committing what for anyone else would be the rest of their life in prison crimes.
[00:19:15]  And instead, it's just like, well, you have to at least temporarily stop working for Wall Street.
[00:19:21]  And then they go on to become, I don't know, a senator.
[00:19:24]  Well, he doesn't become a senator, but he has another idea.
[00:19:28]  Yeah, he has federized it.
[00:19:29]  So he still has a decent amount of financial assets.
[00:19:33]  And what he decides to do is buy two ski resorts in Vernon, New Jersey.
[00:19:38]  So back in 1972, one of his Wall Street investments, Vernon Valley and Great Gorge Ski Resort, went bankrupt.

=== Action Park's Legendary Risks (09:51) ===

[00:19:44]  So Gene and Bob Brennan formed a company called Great American Recreation and purchased both of those ski resorts and combined them into one.
[00:19:54]  So the vacation resorts were popular in the winter times.
[00:19:58]  You would have people from New York come down and do skiing and stuff.
[00:20:01]  But they wanted a way to crank out income during the summer.
[00:20:05]  And it was in 1976 when they arrived on the winning idea to build an outdoor summer adventure park, which would soon grow into Action Park in 1978.
[00:20:16]  So this is kind of how we get from Wall Street investor guy to this guy who buys two ski resorts on a mountain and wants to transform it into basically the first water park in the country.
[00:20:28]  Because Action Park was like one of the original US-based, like what we call water parks now.
[00:20:35]  No one had thought of the brilliant idea of mixing the fun of a playground slide with the sheer erotic joy of being surrounded by other people's bodily fluids mixed in with poorly chlorinated water.
[00:20:48]  There wasn't much chlorinated water at Action Park.
[00:20:53]  Thank God.
[00:20:57]  So you love to see it.
[00:21:00]  Gene wanted Action Park to be different from other thrill-based amusement parks where you just hop on a roller coaster.
[00:21:08]  He wanted, as the Action Park TV ads used to say, for you to control the action.
[00:21:13]  That was the line they used.
[00:21:15]  Gene's son, Andy Mulville, explained his dad's thought process like this: quote, Gene didn't want to do the same old shit where you get strapped in or something and it twirls around.
[00:21:25]  He wanted to take the idea of skiing, which is exhilarating because you control the action, and transfer it into an amusement park.
[00:21:31]  There's an inherent risk to that, but that's what makes it fun.
[00:21:34]  So it's like, here, we want to have fun of skiing.
[00:21:37]  There are similar ads for like very high-powered vibrators, and they have a similar death toll to Action Park.
[00:21:43]  Cool.
[00:21:44]  There's a danger in controlling the action.
[00:21:51]  The ones you have to put into a 20-volt plug, like the ones that you run in Arkwell.
[00:21:55]  Rice.
[00:21:55]  Like those kind of vibrators.
[00:22:03]  The first addition he made to the ski resort to make it, you know, this summer adventure park was in 1976 and was called the Alpine Slide.
[00:22:12]  It was almost a 3,000-foot-long track going down just a mountain.
[00:22:18]  It's just like a big track going down a mountain.
[00:22:21]  It was, you know, it was a part of the mountains, part of the Appalachians.
[00:22:27]  You rode on this small cart controlled by a steering rod, and you had a brake that sometimes worked.
[00:22:33]  More on the Alpine slide later.
[00:22:35]  But pretty soon, two water slides, a car racing track, and a skate park were added.
[00:22:40]  And over the next few years, we had more water slides, a swimming pool, good like tennis courts, a softball field.
[00:22:46]  And at the beginning of the 1980s, the softball field was replaced with a gigantic wave pool.
[00:22:52]  This was one of the first wave pools in the country as well.
[00:22:56]  And we'll talk about this wave a little bit later.
[00:22:58]  I'll bet it was very secure.
[00:23:00]  It was very safe and well designed.
[00:23:04]  Eventually they got a whole other racetrack, more ridiculous slides, a kayaking ride, a few bungee jumping sets, which are oddly enough, like one of the safest rides at Action Park was the bungee jumping ones.
[00:23:14]  And various other action-based attractions.
[00:23:18]  In 1979, the summer section of the resort was renamed Action Park.
[00:23:23]  And altogether, the park ultimately had about 75 rides, 40 of them being water slides.
[00:23:29]  And Action Park is still considered one of the first modern water parks in the States.
[00:23:33]  So the thing is, is that like, Gene didn't know anything about amusement parks.
[00:23:38]  Gene didn't, like, the amusement park entry was still Pretty new, but there was already like experts in it who like specialized in stuff.
[00:23:46]  Gene did not.
[00:23:48]  He was not an engineer.
[00:23:49]  He didn't really know engineers.
[00:23:52]  And random people just approached Gene for ideas for rides.
[00:23:56]  No one had engineering.
[00:23:58]  No one had engineering degrees.
[00:24:00]  See, that's perfect because it's a pure meritocracy.
[00:24:03]  You don't have any kind of false divisions like having a degree, knowing how to make things safe, understanding the basics of physics.
[00:24:13]  None of that gets in the way of making a truly great ride.
[00:24:16]  Pure meritocracy.
[00:24:18]  I love it, Garrison.
[00:24:19]  I love it.
[00:24:19]  Gene would go to like amusement park conventions, and there'd be like ride designers who are blacklisted from Disney and Six Flags who would like talk to Gene because Gene's like the weird dude that you could get to build your crazy ride.
[00:24:32]  But like, no one, no one was qualified.
[00:24:35]  However, and Gene basically greenlit every single ride that came to him.
[00:24:40]  Hell yeah.
[00:24:42]  But he also do a lot of tinkering with the designs to make them like more extreme, to push them a little bit further.
[00:24:47]  So like again, pure meritocracy.
[00:24:50]  It's like the ride was already not great to begin with, but then Gene would change it all of the time and just like make things just a little bit worse or just like turn it up a little bit.
[00:24:59]  And he actually designed, or like designed, quote unquote, he drew a lot of these on napkins.
[00:25:05]  Most of the rides at Action Park was he was the one that came up with the idea for, and he like made, you know, rough diagrams.
[00:25:13]  Then he, you know, just hired contractors and welders to build them.
[00:25:16]  They were, you know, they were made out of like concrete, cement, fiberglass, and PVC piping.
[00:25:22]  That's what most of the rides were made out of.
[00:25:25]  It just gluing gluing PVC pipes together and calling it good enough.
[00:25:29]  That's basically how he set up his park.
[00:25:33]  And Gene.
[00:25:34]  Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things.
[00:25:35]  Like, you can spend a lot of time making sure it can hold the weight of a human body or that people can travel down it without lacerating themselves or cracking bones.
[00:25:47]  But you're probably good at just eyeballing it, you know?
[00:25:50]  Like, why go further?
[00:25:52]  Why go further?
[00:25:53]  To be fair, the rides did always have a testing phase.
[00:25:55]  He would pay his teenage, he would pay his teenage employees money to test the rides.
[00:26:00]  And many of them did not get past the testing phase.
[00:26:05]  I'm guessing testing for Gene was not wildly different from how the SS tested vaccines on children and with a high body cap.
[00:26:12]  Yeah, that's basically what happened.
[00:26:14]  So like the final product was truly a mix of Ayn Rand and Lord of the Flies, which sounds amazing.
[00:26:21]  Like this is like the perfect place to be as a teenager.
[00:26:24]  Like this is this, the best best combination of everything.
[00:26:29]  There's no rules in the park, no regulations from the government.
[00:26:34]  We'll get into those legal issues later.
[00:26:36]  Action Park was really only possible in a specific time in like Regan's America.
[00:26:42]  Like it's very, very obvious that this was like a Zeitgeist moment.
[00:26:48]  And Gene was actually friends, because because of Wall Street, Gene was friends with future President Donald Trump.
[00:26:53]  And according to parking employees, Trump was very close to investing in Action Park and actually dropped by one time to take a look.
[00:27:01]  Upon seeing the park, he decided it was too unhinged to invest in.
[00:27:11]  Yeah.
[00:27:11]  Captain Covid took one look at Gene Spark and was like, this is going to get people killed.
[00:27:16]  Yeah.
[00:27:17]  So the park was too wild for Donald Trump to invest in.
[00:27:21]  And that's kind of, that gives you a really good idea of what the whole, what the whole vibe is here.
[00:27:29]  There are two other aspects that made Action Park the legend that it is today.
[00:27:33]  Alcohol and the exclusively local teenage staff.
[00:27:38]  These are the these two things combined with the rides are what made Action Park the kind of the legend that it exists as now.
[00:27:47]  Journalist Seth Porges, who's done most of the work digging into the history of the park, describes the park's atmosphere like this, quote, a lawless land that was ruled by drunk teenage employees, frequented by even drunker teenage guests, filled with rides that seemed to defy even the most basic notions of physics and common sense.
[00:28:06]  And that is like the, that's the, that's the whole idea is that you're in this place that just ignores the laws of physics, ignores the laws of the country, full with drunk teenagers who are both running the park and attending the park.
[00:28:19]  And that's it.
[00:28:20]  And that's like, that's how you just get the result that we got.
[00:28:26]  Also, they were totally ignoring all labor laws.
[00:28:31]  Jersey law requires write-off writers to be 16 years old.
[00:28:34]  14-year-olds would frequently be operating these rides.
[00:28:38]  Yeah, I mean, their little hands can get in and fix things better, I would guess.
[00:28:43]  And all of the supervisors were kids, like starting at 16 years old.
[00:28:48]  Because if you were 16 years old, that means you were already working at the park for two years because you started working there when you were 14.
[00:28:54]  So you get bumped up real quickly.
[00:28:58]  You've seen a lot of death at that point and you can handle it.
[00:29:02]  One 17-year-old was a security guard for three months and then he got bumped up to supervisor.
[00:29:07]  So that kind of shows how fast that progression goes in some cases.
[00:29:12]  A previous manager has talked about how the teenage staff would like haze new employees by quote-unquote drowning them in the pool, by strapping them to a board and then floating them upside down and leaving them in the pool.
[00:29:23]  And he ends the story by seeing things happen at Action Park that we don't talk about.
[00:29:29]  So that's fun.
[00:29:31]  I don't think anyone died by getting hazed, but you know, it's kind of unclear.

=== Sponsorships and Fast Progression (05:38) ===

[00:29:36]  Do you know who won't kill you by hazing, Robert?
[00:29:40]  I mean, basically, any of our podcast sponsors will happily kill you for a variety of reasons.
[00:29:49]  They're not going to duct tape you to a piece of wood and float you upside down in the swimming pool as a bit.
[00:29:54]  HelloFresh might.
[00:29:57]  Look, they might, okay?
[00:29:59]  I'm not going to say that they won't because we've all lost a lot of friends to HelloFresh.
[00:30:05]  Look, that's all I'm going to say about it.
[00:30:08]  Anyway, I hope their ads aren't on this.
[00:30:14]  I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
[00:30:18]  Hi, Dad.
[00:30:19]  And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
[00:30:26]  This is badass convict.
[00:30:29]  Right.
[00:30:29]  Just finished five years.
[00:30:31]  I'm going to have cookies and milk.
[00:30:33]  Come on.
[00:30:35]  On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversations about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
[00:30:43]  On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
[00:30:52]  The entire season two is now available to binge, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
[00:31:00]  I'm an alcoholic.
[00:31:02]  Without this program, I'm a guy.
[00:31:06]  Open your free iHeart radio app.
[00:31:08]  Search the Ceno Show and listen now.
[00:31:14]  I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable until I really start making money.
[00:31:20]  It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating Wall Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
[00:31:28]  This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
[00:31:37]  If I'm outside with my parents and they're seeing all these people come up to me for pictures, it's like, what?
[00:31:42]  Today now, obviously, it's like 100%.
[00:31:45]  They believe everything, but at first, it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
[00:31:49]  There's an economic component to communities thriving.
[00:31:53]  If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
[00:31:57]  And what I mean by fail is they don't have money to pay for food.
[00:31:59]  They cannot feed their kids.
[00:32:00]  They do not have homes.
[00:32:01]  Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
[00:32:05]  Listen to Eating Wild Brook from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:32:14]  When you listen to podcasts about AI and tech and the future of humanity, the hosts always act like they know what they're talking about and they are experts at everything.
[00:32:22]  Here at the Nick Dick and Paul Show, we're not afraid to make mistakes.
[00:32:27]  What Koogler did that I think was so unique?
[00:32:30]  He's the writer director.
[00:32:31]  Who do you think he is?
[00:32:32]  I don't know.
[00:32:34]  You meet the like the president?
[00:32:36]  You think everyone has the president?
[00:32:37]  You think Canada has a president?
[00:32:38]  You think China has a president?
[00:32:40]  The law proves that.
[00:32:43]  God, I love that thing.
[00:32:44]  I use it all the time.
[00:32:46]  I wrap it in a blanket and sing to it.
[00:32:50]  It's like the old Polish saying, not my monkeys, not my circus.
[00:32:53]  Yep.
[00:32:54]  It was a good one.
[00:32:55]  I like that saying.
[00:32:55]  It is an actual Polish saying.
[00:32:58]  It is an actual Polish saying.
[00:32:59]  Better version of play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
[00:33:02]  Yes.
[00:33:02]  Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
[00:33:05]  I actually, I thought it was.
[00:33:06]  I got that wrong.
[00:33:07]  Listen to the Nick Dick and Paul Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:33:14]  Hi, I'm Bob Pippman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic: Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
[00:33:23]  Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.
[00:33:29]  I'm talking to leaders from the entertainment industry to finance and everywhere in between.
[00:33:34]  This season on Math and Magic, I'm talking to CEO of Liquid Death, Mike Cesario, financier and public health advocate, Mike Milken, take-to interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick.
[00:33:44]  If you're unable to take meaningful creative risk and therefore run the risk of making horrible creative mistakes, then you can't play in this business.
[00:33:53]  Sesame Street CEO Sherry Weston and our own chief business officer, Lisa Coffey.
[00:33:58]  Making consumers see the value of the human voice and to have that guaranteed human promise behind it really makes it rise to the top.
[00:34:08]  Listen to Math and Magic, stories from the frontiers of marketing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:34:18]  Oh, we are back.
[00:34:20]  And my God, I, for one, enjoyed it when HelloFresh threatened to hold our heads down under a wave pool unless we ordered their Fettuccine Alfredo dinner for two.
[00:34:35]  HelloFresh, they'll fucking kill you.
[00:34:39]  I honestly don't think we've ever even had HelloFresh as a sponsor.
[00:34:42]  We had one of those food box companies sponsor us briefly.
[00:34:45]  I think it was, I think it was Blue Apron.
[00:34:47]  It might have been Blue Apron.
[00:34:48]  I don't think our fans are really food box people.
[00:34:51]  This is hurting me and making it harder for ad ops to sell us food box.
[00:34:55]  What?
[00:34:56]  Can we not like pigeonhole ourselves?
[00:34:59]  I don't know.
[00:35:00]  Dick pills and sheets are all I want to sell.
[00:35:03]  Hey, hey, guess what?
[00:35:04]  You're not leading this episode.
[00:35:05]  Garrison, continue.
[00:35:06]  All right, Garrison.
[00:35:08]  This is going to be, I think we're already going to my favorite quote that I have, that I've pulled for this show.

=== Bumper Boats and Tennis Balls (15:37) ===

[00:35:15]  This is from Weird New Jersey magazine, which is a great resource just in general.
[00:35:20]  Is there a normal New Jersey magazine?
[00:35:22]  I don't know.
[00:35:23]  But this magazine was staffed by a whole bunch of people who grew up to be like famous comedians.
[00:35:28]  So it's actually a pretty cool site in Meg.
[00:35:31]  Anyway, but here's a quote about Action Park that really sums up the beauty of this place and why I want to live there.
[00:35:40]  Quote, it was truly a teen-run show, and it manifested itself in many ways.
[00:35:45]  From ride attendants willfully ripping the entrance wristbands from park attendees who misbehaved, to staff knowing all the places that one could get stoned and/or drunk to hide from supervisors.
[00:35:54]  And Action Park got into legal trouble for letting underage employees run rides too.
[00:35:58]  So chances are your personal safety may have once been in the hands of a 14-year-old tripping on acid, which is the best, the best scenario.
[00:36:06]  That there were 14-year-old operators of these rides just tripping on acid as they're leading you through this water slide.
[00:36:17]  I have a relative that's as detailed as I should get who very nearly died because he went to Six Flags with his friends and they all took a tremendous amount of acid and it was like a degree and there was a stroke problem.
[00:36:30]  So I can only imagine that if they had, instead of just being at Six Flags, been running Six Flags, it would have been a much safer situation.
[00:36:41]  To make the whole weird teenage atmosphere even better, at the top of the Alpine slide on the mountain, there was an employees-only shed that's referred to as the Sex Shack or the Weed Shack.
[00:36:55]  Basically, it's just tons of drunk, high, and horny teens all dating each other while running an amusement park.
[00:37:03]  There was massive Action Park employee parties at the end of summer, basically a big all-night bash where everyone stayed over at the park.
[00:37:11]  People would get like blackout drunk and then wake up, go find your whistle, and then go do quote-unquote lifeguarding in the morning.
[00:37:20]  And that's just how the park was run.
[00:37:22]  And Gene was like okay with it because he's like this weird like libertarian dude.
[00:37:26]  He's like, yeah, do whatever.
[00:37:28]  You can go have sex in the middle.
[00:37:30]  Go have sex in the shed.
[00:37:31]  Go have sex in the shed and then run the park.
[00:37:35]  Yeah.
[00:37:36]  That's that's.
[00:37:37]  I mean, how else?
[00:37:39]  How else are you going to like run an amusement park like this?
[00:37:43]  You can't hire adults.
[00:37:45]  You can't hire real people.
[00:37:46]  No adults wanted to work with it.
[00:37:47]  People are going to complain about how it's a death trap.
[00:37:50]  The children only care that they're getting beer money and are allowed to take acid.
[00:37:54]  Roberts.
[00:37:55]  You think they're paying for beer?
[00:37:57]  There was so much free alcohol at Action Park.
[00:38:01]  Again, this is how all of society should work.
[00:38:07]  Oh, so like the freeform atmosphere was very inspired by Gene's libertarian ideals.
[00:38:14]  He like a few times like fake killed himself in front of employees as a joke.
[00:38:20]  What a fucking dude.
[00:38:22]  Just pretending to commit suicide in front of his tripping employees.
[00:38:27]  They still have blood on their hands from the last time somebody went down the slide the wrong way.
[00:38:33]  Fucking A.
[00:38:36]  The employees often refer to him as Uncle Gene.
[00:38:41]  That sounds like an uncle.
[00:38:42]  That sounds like a specific kind of uncle.
[00:38:45]  He kept a MAC-10 machine gun in his office drawer.
[00:38:48]  Good.
[00:38:49]  Yep.
[00:38:49]  Classic choice.
[00:38:50]  Yeah, Ingram is really, I mean, if you might need to host down a bunch of like plainclothes feds trying to close down your water park.
[00:39:01]  Oh, that happened in the 80s.
[00:39:02]  That happened, Robert.
[00:39:06]  That happens a few times in the story.
[00:39:09]  What, that he hosed feds down with the park?
[00:39:10]  No, plain clothes feds show up at his park to like to like collect money.
[00:39:16]  Anyway, what a hero.
[00:39:19]  He got this fake cattle prod and hatched an idea to stop people from riding the ski lift to the top of the slide without a ticket.
[00:39:27]  You were supposed to have a ticket to ride on the ski lift.
[00:39:31]  But like people just didn't care.
[00:39:32]  They were just riding it.
[00:39:33]  So he's like, oh, they should be buying my tickets.
[00:39:36]  So he got this plan.
[00:39:39]  An employee would pretend to be a park guest and he would get on the lift, quote unquote, without having a ticket.
[00:39:47]  The operator would then ask for a ticket.
[00:39:48]  And then when the incognito employee didn't have one, the park operator would pull up the fake cattle prod and tase him.
[00:39:54]  So that would scare kids into not riding the thing without a ticket.
[00:39:59]  And he did this.
[00:40:01]  This is a little skit that he did.
[00:40:03]  And it resulted in hundreds of parents calling in to complain that their kids saw someone off running the ski lift, kill someone for not having a ticket.
[00:40:11]  See, and I think the fact honestly, my only opinion of this is that the fact that he wasn't really tasing people for riding the ski lift without a ticket is incredible restraint on Gene's part, given the man that he is.
[00:40:24]  Yes.
[00:40:25]  Yes.
[00:40:27]  So once enough rides were built, Gene went into marketing mode and started airing some amazing TV ads made by his daughter Julie, starring the park's teenage employees.
[00:40:39]  When a local TV reporter filming a live segment on the 70-foot bungee jump called the Snapple Snap Up Whipper Snapper.
[00:40:48]  Cool name.
[00:40:49]  So when this reporter refused to jump off because he was scared, Gene's youngest son, Christopher, pushed the reporter off the ledge.
[00:40:57]  Excellent.
[00:40:59]  He was so ready for the 21st century.
[00:41:01]  It's a shame that he was born in the 30s and not like the 60s.
[00:41:04]  He really could have gotten up to some shit these days.
[00:41:09]  So yeah.
[00:41:11]  On to like how the park operated itself.
[00:41:14]  There were three sections of the park.
[00:41:16]  On the mountain, we had Waterworld and Alpine Center.
[00:41:19]  These had all the slides, water slides, and outdoor adventure-based attractions.
[00:41:23]  And close to the bottom of the mountain, there was a section called Motor World, which is like kart racing and like attractions that required motors to run, essentially.
[00:41:34]  Dividing Water World and Alpine Center and Motor World was the Route 94 highway.
[00:41:39]  So a highway went right through the middle of the park, actually, dividing the different sections up.
[00:41:45]  We will start the deep dive into the rides by discussing.
[00:41:49]  Wait, wait, wait.
[00:41:50]  So it's like if there was a giant freeway in between California and Adventures?
[00:41:55]  Yes, exactly.
[00:41:56]  And this gets used creatively.
[00:42:03]  When you said that, I'm like, there has to be a reason why Garrison is matching this.
[00:42:07]  Yeah, there's not a great idea.
[00:42:12]  It's convenient for like, if you're running an amusement park, be like, yeah, you can just pull off off the highway in two directions.
[00:42:19]  You're both in a newspaper.
[00:42:20]  Part of the best places I've gone go-kart riding have been right off of the highway.
[00:42:24]  And the danger of that is, because when I go to play, when I go go-kart riding, I go to hurt people, right?
[00:42:31]  Like, my goal is to make sure that if there are kids on the track, they don't graduate high school.
[00:42:35]  You would have loved action.
[00:42:36]  You parked Robert.
[00:42:37]  Oh, boy.
[00:42:37]  That's the reason to do go-kart riding.
[00:42:39]  Robert!
[00:42:40]  You don't say this on the park!
[00:42:42]  The problem is when you get done go-kart riding and you get right back on the highway, you have to really be careful to like de-escalate yourself.
[00:42:51]  The thing is, Robert.
[00:42:52]  Because if you've just been permanently injuring 14 years old, the thing is, Robert threatened to end high school.
[00:43:00]  Not end their lives in their ability to graduate high school.
[00:43:04]  Here's the thing.
[00:43:05]  God damn it.
[00:43:05]  Here's the thing.
[00:43:07]  You could get drunk at a authentic German pub right next to the go-karts and then take the go-karts onto the highway.
[00:43:16]  What's the paradise?
[00:43:16]  What a Shingri-La.
[00:43:18]  Xanadu was riding.
[00:43:19]  What a Shingri-La!
[00:43:21]  Ending high schoolers.
[00:43:23]  So, high school.
[00:43:23]  So Here's a list of the Motor World rides courtesy of themeparktourist.com, the prime source of info for amusement park rides.
[00:43:35]  We had the bumper boats, which is like bumper cars but boats.
[00:43:39]  The engines and the engines of these frequently leaked gasoline.
[00:43:43]  There was at least one instance where a guest needed medical attention because too much of it got onto his skin.
[00:43:48]  Also, the pond that they were in was filled with giant snakes.
[00:43:54]  Of course it was.
[00:43:56]  Why not?
[00:43:58]  Why wouldn't he want snakes in the bumper pool?
[00:44:05]  I bet old Gene went and got the snakes and put them in himself.
[00:44:10]  People aren't going to think it's authentic if there aren't snakes.
[00:44:14]  That's incredible.
[00:44:15]  What a hero.
[00:44:17]  Next to the bumper boats, we had the Lola cars.
[00:44:20]  These were miniature race cars with an open cockpit on a long track.
[00:44:25]  It costs extra money to drive the cars, but people were willing to pay, especially the people who knew that you could raise the speed to dangerous levels without the right adjustment.
[00:44:32]  You could stick your hand in the engine and move a piece of metal that would make the speed governor operate wrong.
[00:44:41]  And you could get up to like 70 miles an hour on these.
[00:44:46]  So the park had actually.
[00:44:48]  Jesus Christ.
[00:44:50]  Well, and the best thing is, the only way people found that out, you don't figure that out just if you're writing it a lot.
[00:44:56]  You figure that out.
[00:44:57]  Exactly.
[00:44:57]  Yes.
[00:44:58]  And then you tell your friends to go to the park and spread it to everyone else.
[00:45:02]  Yeah.
[00:45:03]  This started with park employees and it slowly spread to like, you know, the teenage underground gossip thing.
[00:45:11]  Something else Gene did, which one of his smarter decisions is that...
[00:45:14]  So there is tons of alcohol everywhere at Action Park.
[00:45:17]  There's like alcohol stands so many places.
[00:45:19]  They don't care what age you are.
[00:45:21]  They don't care anything.
[00:45:22]  But one thing he did as well is he dismantled a micro brewery pub in Germany and moved it to Action Park.
[00:45:32]  So from Germany, he moved the entire pub and he set it up right next to the race cars.
[00:45:38]  What a perfect human.
[00:45:41]  So after the park was closed, employees were known to break into the micro brewery, steal beer, and then take the race cars onto the highway.
[00:45:52]  Yeah, of course.
[00:45:53]  So next to the.
[00:45:55]  In all of this, Gene knew all of this would happen.
[00:45:57]  He knew what's happening.
[00:45:58]  He wanted to happen.
[00:45:59]  Yeah, he's like, yeah, it's fun.
[00:46:01]  Why not?
[00:46:01]  No, he wanted to pill those kids on libertarianism.
[00:46:06]  You don't need fucking driver's licenses.
[00:46:09]  I don't care what age you are.
[00:46:12]  And if you can grab the alcohol, you can drink it.
[00:46:20]  There was like a slingshot, bungee jumping ride where two people were shot up in the air and wheeled upside down.
[00:46:26]  These are pretty common in amusement parks nowadays.
[00:46:29]  Usually they cost more money because of insurance issues.
[00:46:32]  But Action Park had its own insurance setup, which we'll talk about later, so he didn't need to do that.
[00:46:38]  Then we have super super go-karts, which is different from the race cars.
[00:46:43]  Basically, people, because the race cars went so much faster, I mean, like, I say this, but like, the super go-karts could also go 50 miles an hour by messing with the speed governor.
[00:46:54]  They would like shove it, they would shove a tennis ball in the engine, so you would like move the governor stick.
[00:46:59]  So like these, these go-karts still go 50 miles an hour, and they were often used as bumper cars.
[00:47:06]  So gasoline fuel leaks were another problem for the go-kart track.
[00:47:16]  There is a quote from an Action Park guest.
[00:47:18]  The quote, still remember being able to be served Action park beer at age 17 and then go riding the go-karts.
[00:47:25]  If you knew how, with and without burning yourself in the muffler, you reach behind it and pull the throttle past where the governor was set and just take off past the other kids.
[00:47:34]  Amazing wow oh, um they.
[00:47:40]  There was another boating attraction called the super speedboats uh, which was a small pond uh, which also had snakes um, no people, people would often fall out of the speedboats, so this was more of a problem with the snakes um, and also riders would uh would, would would also use the speedboats as bumper boats, which is a problem because these are going like super fast.
[00:48:00]  Um, oh my god, there was uh, the one really drunk individual needed to be rescued by a lifeguard after uh, because the boat fully capsized um, but people fell out.
[00:48:09]  You know often um, I would.
[00:48:11]  I'm not surprised.
[00:48:12]  I would be almost disappointed if they didn't.
[00:48:14]  There was a guy that uh, so there uh, there was a speedboat uh, parked like in the dock and another guy who was racing uh, was going super fast, and he jumped his boat on top of the other docked boat while someone was still inside and they very nearly got decapitated.
[00:48:32]  Um the the, the guy that they got jumped a boat, then ran off and people never found him, or he.
[00:48:36]  He never faced any punishment because he was able to run fast enough, which is yeah, that's kind of how you do it.
[00:48:40]  Um, if you do something wrong, if you run quickly, then it's fine.
[00:48:44]  So that was, that was the speedboats, and one of one of the best uh rides in the motor world.
[00:48:50]  Maybe maybe, maybe my favorite is the tank ride.
[00:48:54]  Um, this ride featured heavily in the tv ads back in the day.
[00:48:57]  Uh basically can, can we have Robert, guess what that means?
[00:49:00]  The, the tank ride yeah, i'm guessing.
[00:49:03]  Like the weapon system right, like some child version of a tank, pretty much.
[00:49:08]  Um so like, Gene built these motorized tanks and they had this whole like arena and for excellent, oh man, i'm on board.
[00:49:16]  So far, a small feat.
[00:49:18]  He would let guests drive um in these tanks for five minutes at a time, shooting tennis balls from from cannons at the other tanks.
[00:49:26]  Uh don't, don't worry, don't worry Robert, it gets, it gets better.
[00:49:29]  Um okay, when hit a tank would automatically stop for like 15 seconds.
[00:49:32]  Uh, giving the other tankers and visitors with.
[00:49:34]  And also uh, on the on the edges of the arena also had cannons that people could just walk up to and shoot.
[00:49:40]  Um and uh.
[00:49:42]  So yeah, you can, you could just shoot tons and tons of tennis balls.
[00:49:45]  Um now, often these tanks would break down and workers would have to go inside of the arena to to, to fix the tank, but they didn't shut down the rocks.
[00:49:53]  So so it was like the guy at a golf course whose job is to clean the driving ray just name for the fucking.
[00:50:00]  So um, everyone would try to hit the employees with the tennis balls, just of course he would.
[00:50:06]  This made the tank ride an unpopular work shift.
[00:50:09]  Um yeah no, really.
[00:50:13]  Um, and there was one time where a park attendee um Aqua uh, acquired gasoline from inside the park and soaked his tennis balls inside them, brought them into the tank and then lit them on fire and started shooting flaming fireballs out of his tank.
[00:50:29]  Um, they were.
[00:50:30]  They were kicked out of the park.
[00:50:31]  Unfortunately, incredible.
[00:50:32]  Unfortunately they were.
[00:50:34]  That should make you manager of the park.
[00:50:36]  This is where see, libertarians are never as consistent as they should not, exactly.
[00:50:41]  No, you should reward that kind of innovation, shooting flaming tennis balls at employees.
[00:50:47]  Come on that's, that's amazing.

=== Flaming Fireballs in the Tank (04:20) ===

[00:50:52]  Come on.
[00:50:53]  If you get hit by one, just dive into the gasoline pool, you'll be all right.
[00:50:58]  Hey, worst case scenario, you burn the snake set, solve two problems, oh man.
[00:51:06]  So the last time I played bumper guards it was this place in Lay.
[00:51:09]  That was again right next to a highway, and I was just.
[00:51:13]  I was going out of my way to hit kids, as I usually do when i'm playing bumper guards.
[00:51:19]  I managed to turn around, so I was going the opposite direction and just driving head on at people.
[00:51:26]  And it was like, it was like me, a group of adults who were horrified and these little kids.
[00:51:32]  And I would just keep riding around and slamming the walls and just screaming, DAF, like the Rohirim the whole time.
[00:51:40]  It was such a good day.
[00:51:43]  God, I love bumper cars.
[00:51:44]  It does sound real fun.
[00:51:45]  We should go to Oaks Park sometime.
[00:51:48]  No, I can't go back to do more bumper cars.
[00:51:50]  It makes me a bad person.
[00:51:51]  He can't go back.
[00:51:52]  He cannot be a really bad person.
[00:51:54]  I can't not.
[00:51:55]  I just can't not.
[00:51:57]  The only place I can do bumper cars safely is Mexico because everyone there, everyone at Mexican bumper cars is on as much acid and as violent as I am.
[00:52:04]  Or at least that's how.
[00:52:06]  I thought you were going to say on the 405 in Los Angeles because that's basically what it is.
[00:52:10]  No, 405, it's very polite driving.
[00:52:15]  Very, very.
[00:52:16]  That's why you need the bumper cars.
[00:52:17]  You need to go hurt people on the bumper cars.
[00:52:19]  You need to do damage to your friends.
[00:52:22]  Oh, I miss bumper cars.
[00:52:23]  All right, so.
[00:52:24]  You can't do it.
[00:52:25]  We have gotten most of the notable Moto World rides, so we're going to move up to Alpine Center.
[00:52:31]  This housed all like the sports-related attractions and all like the sports ball fields.
[00:52:36]  And then, you know, tons of like other slides.
[00:52:39]  It did have another bungee jumping attraction that was 70 feet tall, which is one of the safer rides in the entire park.
[00:52:45]  And Action Park was also briefly home to a skate park, now not designed by an engineer or people who knew anything about skateboarding.
[00:52:53]  So the bowls that Ryder skated in were separated by black pavement and there was no smooth edges, so a lot of tumbles.
[00:53:01]  An action park employee talked about the skate park and he said, quote, so then they built a skate park, a masterpiece of design where the smooth bulls were isolated by the black pavement between them.
[00:53:12]  Who thought this was a good idea?
[00:53:13]  The black top did not even meet the cement at a smooth edge.
[00:53:16]  The skate park was responsible for so many injuries that we covered it up with dirt and pretended it never existed.
[00:53:23]  Amazing.
[00:53:24]  That's libertarian.
[00:53:25]  Gene's back in my good books.
[00:53:27]  That's how you do it.
[00:53:28]  So we covered up with dirt, pretended it never existed, and thought of grander ways to hurt people, like the Honda Odysseys.
[00:53:33]  Now, before...
[00:53:40]  You don't even need to finish that.
[00:53:41]  I'm just hoping he invented the Honda Odyssey and that was his final method of revenge on the Honda Odyssey's, but before the mini-man of the same name, Honda made a four-wheeled, a knobby-tired go-kart, which predated ATVs.
[00:53:57]  And that was wicked fun, mostly for the employees who would ride them through the park, terrorizing everyone in our path.
[00:54:03]  It's quoting former park employee Tom Fergus.
[00:54:06]  So just chasing around park guests on ATVs and all the sidewalks after you bury the skate park because it hurt too many kids.
[00:54:15]  Dude, do you know, Robert, are you familiar with the people who don't drive ATVs at children at skate parks?
[00:54:23]  Why would you not aim an ATV?
[00:54:26]  So an ATV garrison, I come from the South.
[00:54:29]  Oh, I. There's two purposes.
[00:54:30]  I grew up in the prairies.
[00:54:31]  I grew up in the prairies of Canada.
[00:54:33]  Yeah, I know.
[00:54:34]  Yeah, you and I have had this conversation with friends who are not ATV pill.
[00:54:38]  There's two purposes for an ATV.
[00:54:40]  One is to kill large chunks of fans.
[00:54:43]  Of your own family.
[00:54:44]  Of your own family in terrible ATV accidents.
[00:54:48]  And the other is to use as a weapon against people who irritate you.
[00:54:51]  Yeah.
[00:54:52]  And those are the jobs of an ATV.
[00:54:54]  So yes, I can't imagine anyone not driving it at someone.
[00:54:59]  I hope we do get a sponsorship from Big A TV soon.
[00:55:03]  Because if they could send us free ATVs, we could have so much fun.
[00:55:06]  They could, and they could.
[00:55:09]  We could wipe out whole generations in a single weekend away from home.

=== ATVs as Weapons and Toys (03:40) ===

[00:55:13]  So here are some ads from hopefully Big A T V. Sophie, get on that.
[00:55:17]  Can we get an ATV sponsorship?
[00:55:19]  Please, please.
[00:55:21]  I'll put that request in for you.
[00:55:23]  Here's the ads.
[00:55:27]  I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
[00:55:31]  I was hi, dad.
[00:55:32]  And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
[00:55:40]  This is badass convict.
[00:55:42]  Right.
[00:55:42]  Just finished five years.
[00:55:44]  I'm going to have cookies and milk come on.
[00:55:48]  On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversation about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
[00:55:56]  On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
[00:56:05]  The entire season two is now available to binge, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
[00:56:13]  I'm an alcoholic.
[00:56:15]  And without this pro, I'm a guy.
[00:56:19]  Open your free iHeartRadio app, search the Ceno Show, and listen now.
[00:56:28]  I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable until I really started making money.
[00:56:33]  It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating While Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
[00:56:41]  This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
[00:56:50]  If I'm outside with my parents and they see all these people come up to me for pictures, it's like, what?
[00:56:55]  Today, now, obviously, it's like 100% they believe everything, but at first it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
[00:57:03]  There's an economic component to communities thriving.
[00:57:06]  If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
[00:57:10]  And what I mean by fail is they don't have money to pay for food.
[00:57:12]  They cannot feed their kids.
[00:57:13]  They do not have homes.
[00:57:14]  Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
[00:57:18]  Listen to Eating While Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:57:27]  Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic: Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
[00:57:35]  Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.
[00:57:42]  I'm talking to leaders from the entertainment industry to finance and everywhere in between.
[00:57:46]  This season of Math and Magic, I'm talking to CEO of Liquid Death, Mike Cesario, financier and public health advocate Mike Milken, take-to interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick.
[00:57:57]  If you're unable to take meaningful creative risk and therefore run the risk of making horrible creative mistakes, then you can't play in this business.
[00:58:06]  Sesame Street CEO Sherry Weston and our own chief business officer, Lisa Coffey.
[00:58:11]  Making consumers see the value of a human voice and to have that guaranteed human promise behind it really makes it rise to the top.
[00:58:20]  Listen to Math and Magic: stories from the frontiers of marketing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:58:28]  When you listen to podcasts about AI and tech and the future of humanity, the hosts always act like they know what they're talking about and they are experts at everything.
[00:58:36]  Here at the Nick Dick and Pole Show, we're not afraid to make mistakes.
[00:58:41]  What Koogler did that I think was so unique, he's the writer director.
[00:58:46]  Who do you think he is?
[00:58:47]  I don't know.
[00:58:48]  You meet the like the president?
[00:58:50]  You think he goes to president?
[00:58:51]  You think Canada has a president?
[00:58:53]  You think China has a president?

=== Human Testing on Lazy Rivers (16:08) ===

[00:58:54]  Lesla Cruzette.
[00:58:57]  God, I love that thing.
[00:58:59]  I use it all the time.
[00:59:00]  I wrap it in a blanket and sing to it.
[00:59:04]  It's like the old Polish saying, Not my monkeys, not my circus.
[00:59:08]  Yep.
[00:59:08]  It was a good one.
[00:59:09]  I like that saying.
[00:59:10]  It's an actual Polish saying.
[00:59:12]  It is an actual Polish saying.
[00:59:13]  Better version of Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes.
[00:59:16]  Yes.
[00:59:17]  Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
[00:59:19]  I actually, I thought it was.
[00:59:20]  I got that wrong.
[00:59:21]  Listen to the Nick, Dick, and Paul Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:59:31]  We're back.
[00:59:34]  Sophie, do you think all this talk about injuring people, specifically children, is going to go badly with our audience?
[00:59:40]  With our audience?
[00:59:41]  No.
[00:59:41]  Oh, good.
[00:59:42]  Okay.
[00:59:43]  With our employment?
[00:59:45]  Probably.
[00:59:46]  Well.
[00:59:46]  Look, you can't win them all, Sophie.
[00:59:50]  I know.
[00:59:50]  I don't know.
[00:59:51]  There's certain...
[00:59:52]  So there's some people who grow up and fun is doing things that are enjoyable for everyone involved.
[00:59:58]  And there's some people who grow up and fun is damaging each other.
[01:00:05]  And I grew up in the country a decent chunk of my childhood.
[01:00:10]  And so fun often involved someone getting horribly injured.
[01:00:14]  And, you know, that's just life.
[01:00:17]  That's just life.
[01:00:17]  And eventually you seek to replicate that fun by having, I don't know, fireworks fights and trying to go bicycle jousting and beating your friends with raw fish in public parks.
[01:00:32]  You know, just good times.
[01:00:34]  Great times.
[01:00:34]  Great times.
[01:00:36]  We could have had some fun times at Action Park.
[01:00:38]  We could have had some fun times.
[01:00:40]  I would have traveled to the state of New Jersey.
[01:00:43]  Just to go to Action Park.
[01:00:46]  I would have rented a house for a month.
[01:00:48]  Oh, man.
[01:00:50]  So the Alpine Center has a lot of rides that never got through testing.
[01:00:55]  Possibly maybe my favorite attraction in the entire park, which did not last super long, was called The Man in the Ball and the Ball.
[01:01:04]  It was a giant metal ball floating inside an even bigger metal ball with tiny wheels all around it.
[01:01:12]  And you'd have someone in the very middle.
[01:01:15]  The idea was to roll down a mountain in a ball on a set track.
[01:01:20]  Now, the track was made out of PVC piping because no one knew what they were doing.
[01:01:27]  And on human testing day, it was very hot.
[01:01:30]  And PVC piping is plastic, so it expands.
[01:01:35]  So as they were rolling the ball with a person inside down the mountain, the track completely fell apart.
[01:01:41]  And the bull rolled down the mountain, over the highway, and into the swamp with the snakes, with someone all inside.
[01:01:50]  Excellent.
[01:01:50]  It did not pass human testing, unfortunately.
[01:01:54]  That's a shame.
[01:01:55]  Yeah, I know.
[01:01:55]  Well, you can't get everything.
[01:01:57]  I know.
[01:01:58]  Another ride that did not last long was the so-called zero gravity slide, which was allegedly inspired by airplanes.
[01:02:06]  Now, love that allegedly.
[01:02:12]  Doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
[01:02:14]  So no one knows what gravity or airplanes are who's involved with this ride.
[01:02:21]  The goal was you would have a slide that you gain enough speed and then hit a ramp that makes you glide through the air.
[01:02:28]  Now, that's not how humans work.
[01:02:30]  No, that's not how physics.
[01:02:32]  But this guy doesn't know any of that.
[01:02:33]  This man's never studied anything in his life.
[01:02:36]  So the idea was like glide through the air and then land perfectly parallel back on the slide to go on another ramp.
[01:02:42]  Like this guy's whole plan for building a ride is to drive to a Home Depot parking lot, say Trabaho, and hold out a napkin.
[01:02:51]  Yeah, yes.
[01:02:52]  That's exactly what happened.
[01:02:56]  And it's a testament to the workers he hired, to the day laborers he hired, that fewer people died than you.
[01:03:02]  That's a surprise.
[01:03:04]  Once we're done, the episode, you're like, how did only X amount of people die?
[01:03:07]  Like, it should have been more.
[01:03:09]  I mean, there maybe is someone that we just don't know about, but like, it's weird how few there are.
[01:03:15]  Yeah, it is very absurd.
[01:03:18]  I don't know, as I've learned race and go-karts, it's harder to kill people than you might think.
[01:03:23]  So, testing on employees went surprisingly well with the zero gravity slide, but then shortly after it opened, a small kid went on and got going super fast.
[01:03:31]  And he launched so high that he missed the entire slide and the landing pad and was sent to the hospital, and the ride got shut down.
[01:03:38]  So, it just did not last super long.
[01:03:40]  And probably one of the more infamous rides at Action Park is the Alpine slide.
[01:03:46]  It was the longest running Action Park attraction, and it was the first one built.
[01:03:52]  It was a long shoot on the side of a mountain that caused many, many major perils and injuries.
[01:03:58]  It was ironically referred to as the safest ride there.
[01:04:02]  Because park officials would talk to the media and say, no, it's safe.
[01:04:10]  We saw a 90-year-old grandma carrying a baby right down the slide.
[01:04:14]  So that was the lie they kept using.
[01:04:17]  Yeah, which is also very, very frightening to hear because these tracks are made out of concrete, fiberglass, and asbestos.
[01:04:25]  Well, and also, I am absolutely certain, being the man that he was, if you called something the safest ride at his park, Gene would take it as an insult.
[01:04:35]  Yeah, sure.
[01:04:36]  Like, how dare you?
[01:04:38]  How dare you say that about my child?
[01:04:40]  So, like, the windy, bumpy track was made out of concrete, cement, fiberglass, and asbestos.
[01:04:46]  So, anyone who took a anyone who took like even a minor hit tended to get like very bad friction burns on their skin because you're rubbing on all of these rough materials.
[01:04:57]  And also, like, they were usually just wearing bathing suits.
[01:04:59]  Like, they didn't have much clothes on.
[01:05:03]  The sled had two speeds, very slow because you're breaking the whole time, or bullet fast, like, insanely quick.
[01:05:14]  And also, the alpines, in order to get to the top of the alpine slide, you need to get on the ski lift, which we already talked about with, like, the fake tasing, you know, the ski lift.
[01:05:22]  Same thing.
[01:05:24]  But on the ski lift up, people would like play games, games such as spitting on the people on the slide and trying to hit them.
[01:05:33]  Or when you're riding up the ski lift, you would like strap your sled onto the side.
[01:05:39]  And what you would also do is try to drop your hard sled on people riding down the slide.
[01:05:46]  See, it's a whole theme park where everybody thinks the way I do at theme parks.
[01:05:51]  I had a home at one point, Garrison.
[01:05:53]  I had a home, and I never got to see it.
[01:05:56]  This was a daily occurrence.
[01:05:58]  People dropping their like 20-pound slide.
[01:06:01]  Literally, what else are you going to do?
[01:06:03]  20-pound sleds onto people riding down.
[01:06:07]  So at the top of the slide, there was a gallery of bloody pictures of people who rode the ride previously.
[01:06:19]  Oh, my God.
[01:06:22]  And on your little slide, you had like a stick break, which almost never worked.
[01:06:27]  Yeah, no, why would that's the least important thing in the entire park is the brakes on anything.
[01:06:33]  You really need the brake to turn on the slides, or else you're just going to fly off.
[01:06:36]  You need the brake if you're a coward, Garrison.
[01:06:39]  Your brakes are the other people on the ride.
[01:06:42]  That's how you feel anybody.
[01:06:43]  That also happens.
[01:06:44]  That's how you make it work.
[01:06:46]  You use their bodies as a brake.
[01:06:48]  That did happen frequently.
[01:06:50]  I'll bet.
[01:06:51]  Even if you did break properly, the bumps could still send you flying off into like a rocky.
[01:06:56]  Around the slide was like a mountain.
[01:06:58]  It wasn't like soft, grassy.
[01:07:01]  It wasn't soft, grassy hills.
[01:07:02]  It was a rocky mountain.
[01:07:04]  Yeah.
[01:07:06]  Just a pile of rocks.
[01:07:08]  I bet they were soft rocks.
[01:07:10]  It's the Appalachians, right?
[01:07:11]  That's not the hard mountains.
[01:07:12]  You know, everything.
[01:07:14]  Broken collarbones, broken arms, many concussions.
[01:07:17]  On an average day, there was 50 to 100 people injured on the slide.
[01:07:21]  Double on the weekends.
[01:07:26]  What an incredible place.
[01:07:29]  But it's okay.
[01:07:29]  You've got that brewery right there.
[01:07:31]  You break your collarbone, you go get it.
[01:07:34]  And you get right back on the horse that bitch.
[01:07:36]  You could probably find acid from a 14-year-old who's riding who's operating the water slide.
[01:07:42]  Yeah.
[01:07:42]  I feel like you would have to work to not buy acid from a 14-year-old at Action Park.
[01:07:48]  That would be an achievement.
[01:07:50]  You'd go back home and was like, yeah, I went to Action Park and I did not buy drugs from a child.
[01:07:54]  It's like going to Guatemala.
[01:07:57]  Near the bottom of the Alpine slide was a so-called infirmary shack, specifically for slide-related injuries.
[01:08:05]  Inside the shack, there was a small white circle on the ground.
[01:08:09]  And to help prevent infection after bad friction burns, they had a special spray, which was just alcohol and iodine, that employees would spray onto the open wounds caused by the slide.
[01:08:20]  Now, if you can stay inside the circle as the employees sprayed you, you would win a prize.
[01:08:25]  And if you ever had a big traction burn or anything, if you ever had one try to get cleaned, especially by any alcohol-based spray, you can imagine how extremely painful this would be.
[01:08:36]  Like some of the worst pain you can imagine.
[01:08:39]  Oh, yeah.
[01:08:40]  So one employee recounts, over the three years they worked there, only two people ever stayed in the circle.
[01:08:45]  And remember, there's like 50 to 100 people getting injured on weekdays, double on weekends.
[01:08:50]  So only two people stayed in a circle over this employee's time working.
[01:08:54]  And the prize was an Action Park pen.
[01:08:57]  So that's fun.
[01:09:01]  That's worth it.
[01:09:03]  Yeah, and here's where things get to start to get a little actually get darker.
[01:09:06]  The Alpine Slide was the first was the site of the first death at the park.
[01:09:11]  19-year-old George Larson Jr. was at Action Park with his family on July 8th, 1980.
[01:09:17]  He was riding the Alpine Slide and got thrown off the track and his head struck a nearby rock.
[01:09:22]  After several days in a coma, he died.
[01:09:24]  Gene Mulville tried to cover up the death by saying Larson was an Action Park employee and he snuck in at nighttime and it was raining when the accident happened.
[01:09:32]  None of that is true.
[01:09:34]  But this meant that since Gene claimed he was an employee who died, he did not need to report the death to state regulators.
[01:09:41]  So he just lied so he didn't have to report it.
[01:09:44]  That's you still see this lie reported in a lot of media about Action Park.
[01:09:50]  You still see this lie repeated.
[01:09:51]  Yeah, that an employee died.
[01:09:52]  That the first death was an employee who snuck in at night, which just did not happen.
[01:09:56]  So the Alpine slide only caused one death that we know of, but it was responsible for most of the lawsuits and around 40% of the citations against Action Park.
[01:10:08]  Yeah, it was also one of the last rides to get shut down when the park closed.
[01:10:13]  So now that wraps up the Alpine Center.
[01:10:18]  Now we're going to go on to Water World, the final area of the park.
[01:10:22]  Now, oddly enough, the first Water World attraction we're going to talk about has nothing to do with water.
[01:10:26]  It's actually a skydiving simulator.
[01:10:28]  There was a skydiving simulator, like wind tunnel, outdoors, that was invented in Germany in 1984.
[01:10:36]  The first one was moved to the States in 1987 at Action Park.
[01:10:40]  Riders wore special diving suits, helmets, and earplugs, and they had an instructor there who would help you get over this giant trampoline with a fan, essentially.
[01:10:49]  Most injuries at the skydiving simulator came because riders will instinctively try to break their falls by extending their arms.
[01:10:56]  I used to be a parkour instructor.
[01:10:57]  That's pretty common when people fall and they don't know how to.
[01:11:01]  They try to use their arms and you get a lot of dislocated shoulders, wrists.
[01:11:06]  Yeah, you're supposed to tuck and roll, right?
[01:11:07]  Yeah, or just like throwing yourself out of a beach.
[01:11:10]  Like landing flat on your back is better than landing on your arm.
[01:11:14]  So yeah, it caused a lot of shoulder.
[01:11:18]  The ride caused a lot of shoulder dislocation, severed nerves, and it almost caused some permanent arm paralysis in a few guests.
[01:11:27]  But now on to the most famous, albeit short-lived Action Park attraction, the Cannonball Loop.
[01:11:33]  This one was designed on a napkin.
[01:11:36]  Good.
[01:11:37]  So we're off to a great- You know how there's roller coasters that do a little like loop-de-loop thing?
[01:11:43]  You know, like the basic thing.
[01:11:44]  It's fun, you know, a little loop-de-loop.
[01:11:46]  Now, what is that but water slide?
[01:11:49]  Now, if you're saying, but that's not how water works, because you can't like shoot water up the thing unless you have like a hose running through it, which you didn't have, that does it not matter.
[01:11:58]  Because Gene drew a little loop-de-loop on a napkin and then built this water slide.
[01:12:04]  In the initial testing, he put down like crash test dummies, and the dummies came out with missing limbs and heads.
[01:12:13]  And then when they moved on to human testing, Gene offered employees $100 to ride the cannonball loop.
[01:12:19]  Which was like...
[01:12:20]  Will you be my flesh mannequin?
[01:12:22]  It's like $300 in today's money.
[01:12:25]  So if you're a teenager, it's not nothing.
[01:12:28]  You can buy like, I don't know, 20 tabs with that or something.
[01:12:31]  It's great.
[01:12:31]  It's a great deal.
[01:12:32]  I mean, and just speaking from a libertarian point of view, there's no greater joy than handing children money to endanger their own lives.
[01:12:40]  That's really, that's the peak of that ideology.
[01:12:43]  So the cannonball loop never caused super bad injuries, actually.
[01:12:47]  It's surprising how much it functioned because it was just drawn on a napkin.
[01:12:53]  Because it looks like, look at a picture of it.
[01:12:56]  It's like a Looney Tunes ride.
[01:12:58]  It's out of its mind.
[01:13:00]  So there were concussions and stuff, but it's a concussion.
[01:13:05]  It's bad.
[01:13:06]  But it's not the worst.
[01:13:09]  And there were some very unhappy testicles from having to loop up and then your body hits the side of the thing.
[01:13:15]  Yeah.
[01:13:15]  Don't feel great afterwards.
[01:13:16]  But the ride was deemed safe enough by Gene.
[01:13:19]  And the sheer just impossible nature of the construction was too enticing to pass up.
[01:13:24]  Yeah, no, you have to try it.
[01:13:25]  Yeah.
[01:13:26]  So right before you, when the ride opened, right before you got on, they would have like a garden hose to spray you down to help make you more slippery.
[01:13:34]  They should have looped people up.
[01:13:36]  They should have looped people up.
[01:13:37]  Gotten those big fits.
[01:13:38]  Horse loop.
[01:13:39]  Horse loop.
[01:13:40]  Yeah.
[01:13:42]  Initially, there was no padding at the top of the slide.
[01:13:44]  This caused a lot of injuries, like smashing your head to the top of the loop.
[01:13:48]  But then some foam padding was added.
[01:13:50]  The next issue is that riders kept exiting the slide with bizarre cuts and scratches on their body.
[01:13:56]  When the slide was inspected, they realized that human teeth were found stuck in the foam padding from people smashing their heads and it's off.
[01:14:06]  It's an incredible detail.
[01:14:08]  Just other people's teeth are embedded so deeply in it that the teeth are biting.
[01:14:15]  Passengers after them.
[01:14:17]  Oh my God.
[01:14:19]  The cannonball loop was...
[01:14:20]  Again, the only thing I would change if I were running Action Park was for everyone to be covered in lube at all times.
[01:14:27]  It would have made the park a bit safe.
[01:14:28]  That would have gotten rid of those deaths.
[01:14:30]  Yeah.
[01:14:30]  Yeah.
[01:14:31]  So the loop was only open for a little over a month in the summer of 1985 before the state's advisory board on carnival amusement safety ordered its closure.
[01:14:41]  Too many teeth!
[01:14:42]  You can't have this many teeth in a blank park ride.
[01:14:46]  Gotta get this number of teeth down by half.
[01:14:49]  So moving on to other kind of bizarre water slides, there was one called the Aquascoot where riders would have hard plastic sleds at the top of the attraction and go down a curved open slide.

=== Vertical Drops and Underwater Fans (15:34) ===

[01:15:03]  But on the track, they had little metal rollers, you have like a factory assembly line.
[01:15:09]  So you would roll across these on the sled and then try to skip yourself like a stone over a puddle at the bottom.
[01:15:15]  So it's like you're stone skipping, but you're the stone.
[01:15:20]  If you weren't positioned just right, you would immediately face plant and the pool was not very deep.
[01:15:24]  It was only like a foot deep.
[01:15:26]  So you would like slam into the bottom of this of this of this little puddle.
[01:15:29]  Also, there was a bee's nest inside the slide.
[01:15:32]  He just couldn't help himself.
[01:15:34]  I have to believe that every interaction of wildlife with injury is purposeful.
[01:15:40]  Was Gene being like, what else can I stick in here?
[01:15:43]  Fucking bees nest.
[01:15:45]  One of the rides that looks actually super cool was called the Colorado River Ride.
[01:15:50]  It was a group inner tube ride that was a whitewater rafting simulator.
[01:15:55]  Now, it began life as a lazy river ride.
[01:15:58]  And Gene was like, you know what's more fun than a lazy river ride?
[01:16:02]  It's action in the lazy river.
[01:16:04]  It's whitewater is class four rapids.
[01:16:07]  So early human test pilots came out of this ride unconscious.
[01:16:12]  So the intensity was slightly turned down, but it was still very, it was still a very intense ride.
[01:16:17]  And Gene purposely removed all of the lifeguards there because, quote, there are no lifeguards at the Colorado River.
[01:16:24]  Well, there you go.
[01:16:25]  There you go.
[01:16:27]  I mean, fair enough, my man.
[01:16:29]  Fair enough.
[01:16:33]  Incredible life.
[01:16:36]  There aren't, Gene.
[01:16:37]  You are correct.
[01:16:39]  Nearby were the diving cliffs, like 25 and 15 feet tall cliffs over a freshwater pool.
[01:16:48]  The pool is about 16 feet deep.
[01:16:50]  Because the whole inspiration for Action Park was like, Gene says it was the nature that he grew up in.
[01:16:55]  And he figured if kids couldn't go into real nature, his park could be the next best thing.
[01:16:59]  So this just meant, you know, a Colorado River ride and jumping off cliffs.
[01:17:04]  On the cliff jumping one, you would often land on top of people because, you know, the danger of the ride was that the section of the pool where people landed wasn't blocked off at all, and people would just jump off without caring about what's under them.
[01:17:15]  So there's a lot of collisions, and you're colliding on people over top of a 16-foot pool, and people did not know how to swim.
[01:17:24]  No, of course.
[01:17:24]  Shoulders would get constantly dislocated.
[01:17:28]  And the water was much deeper than expected.
[01:17:30]  Eventually, they had to paint the bottom of the pool white, so it was easier to see bodies.
[01:17:36]  Sure.
[01:17:37]  Because it's just hard to tell with, you know.
[01:17:39]  You know, you're running a good theme park when the sentence, so it was easier to see bodies, is added to an explanation of like one of your engineering changes.
[01:17:51]  Now, diving cliffs were not the only cliff place attraction.
[01:17:53]  There was another one where you're riding on the cliffs called Surf Hill.
[01:17:58]  It was basically a giant slip and slide on a mountain.
[01:18:01]  The original concept was to jump off a cliff and land on the slide to continue the ride.
[01:18:07]  This idea was abandoned due to space limitations.
[01:18:09]  But Surf Hill got its airborne wish via other means.
[01:18:14]  So you had little plastic mats to ride on.
[01:18:17]  And employees would slide extra mats onto the slide to make the jumps and ramps bigger and more extreme.
[01:18:23]  Eventually a guest got too much air and broke their neck upon landing.
[01:18:29]  And guests would slide down the slip and slope and land in this little puddle area.
[01:18:36]  There was like 10 lanes, but there wasn't many barriers to speak of between the lanes.
[01:18:40]  So there often be like crisscrossing and collisions on the slide itself.
[01:18:44]  The seventh lane was particularly dangerous because that's the one that employees would stick the mats under.
[01:18:51]  When Gene discovered that the force of hitting the water at the bottom of Surf Hill could tear off bathing suits, he immediately took action by building a grandstand spectator section so people can watch every time I start to think he's not a great guy.
[01:19:08]  He just does the best thing he could possibly do.
[01:19:10]  Some people can watch teenagers get their top strips off.
[01:19:15]  What a perfect libertarian.
[01:19:18]  He is checking all of the boxes.
[01:19:21]  He is the platonic ideal of a libertarian.
[01:19:25]  You've got borderline child molestation.
[01:19:28]  You've got child labor.
[01:19:31]  You've got paying people to endanger their own bodies.
[01:19:36]  You've got a complete... contempt for any sort of safety regulations.
[01:19:40]  You've got everything libertarians love.
[01:19:45]  He's like their Zeus.
[01:19:48]  Park employees often would sit by a nearby snack shack that offered a good view of Surf Hill, just excited to see all the injuries and lost bikini tops.
[01:19:57]  God damn it, G. Another water slide called Cannonball Falls, which is like a completely covered water slide leading into a massive 10-foot drop into a pool.
[01:20:12]  According to a former Action Park guest, there's a cluster of four or five shortwater slides that ended by shooting you into a lake.
[01:20:18]  Various kids would fly out at various times, landing on top of each other mid-air, or sometimes landing on a sharp rock nearby because you wouldn't line up the jump correctly.
[01:20:30]  Sure, right.
[01:20:32]  And often lots of these tunnels had very abrupt 90-degree turns, not a 45-degree turn.
[01:20:38]  So you would slam into a wall and keep going because of the force of the water and just toss you in a different direction.
[01:20:47]  It would shoot your young, gnarled body into a gooey pool full of crying kids and water snakes.
[01:20:53]  It was awesome.
[01:20:54]  Amazing.
[01:20:55]  That's the end of the quote.
[01:21:00]  They had another whitewater rafting ride called the Roaring Rapids.
[01:21:03]  This one had rafts that they were trying to replicate a mountain swimming hole.
[01:21:07]  Gene turned up the intensity to make it another class 4 rapids simulator.
[01:21:14]  There was responsible for report after report noting fractured bones and dislocated body parts.
[01:21:19]  There were also exposed bolts on the underside of the tunnel and lots of traffic in the forks of the path that would cause people to get stuck.
[01:21:28]  Yeah, there was fractured femurs, collarbones, broken nose, and dislocated shoulders and knees all were inside of reports filed by Action Park just in the year by 1984.
[01:21:40]  They had a very steep water slide called the Super Speed Water Slide, which would be almost like a completely vertical drop where you would have to like park employees would say like they actually gave instructions for this one because if you fell off you would like fall to your death like very quickly.
[01:21:54]  Sure.
[01:21:55]  So you got to have a teenager kind of brush over what you're supposed to do to avoid that.
[01:22:00]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:22:02]  And you would go super fast on this because it's like a vertical drop.
[01:22:06]  And most notably, it would shoot water up your ass and mess up your junk.
[01:22:10]  It was referred to by staff as the freshwater enema ride.
[01:22:15]  So that's fun.
[01:22:18]  Another popular attraction was the Tarzan Swing.
[01:22:21]  This was memorable for some good and bad reasons.
[01:22:24]  It's exactly what it sounds like, a giant rope swing into a pool of water.
[01:22:29]  If people held onto the rope too long, they would mess up their swing and go back into the jumping off point.
[01:22:34]  That's just a problem with rope swings in general.
[01:22:36]  The biggest cause of alarm, however, was the pool of water.
[01:22:40]  It wasn't like a pool of water.
[01:22:42]  This was a section of the mountain that river runoff would go into.
[01:22:46]  It was freezing cold.
[01:22:49]  Lifeguards were forced to jump in and rescue people who forgot how to swim because they were so unprepared for the shock of the cold water.
[01:22:57]  Now, due to line placement, there was always a large crowd of spectators that would often heckle people currently on the ride.
[01:23:03]  Park attendees recount the crowd chanting, pussy, at bleeding injured riders after they climb out of this freezing pool.
[01:23:10]  Also, the spectating area gave a great opportunity for people who are swinging to flash the nearby crowd with boobs or dicks.
[01:23:20]  So yeah, that's Tarzan Swing.
[01:23:25]  Then, oh, they had a kayaking simulator.
[01:23:31]  It used giant submerged electronic fans underwater to help make turbulent conditions.
[01:23:39]  The kayaks will often get stuck or just tip over.
[01:23:42]  And in 1982, someone fell out of a kayak, got too close to an exposed electrical wire in the underwater fan, and got electrocuted and died.
[01:23:50]  This was the second visitor death in the history of the park.
[01:23:53]  The kayak ride closed shortly after.
[01:23:56]  So someone got electrocuted because of underwater fans in 1982.
[01:24:01]  And then around this time, they built one of the first wave pools in the country.
[01:24:09]  So the wave pool was nicknamed the Grave Pool for reasons that will become clear very shortly.
[01:24:15]  It was a 100 feet wide by 125 feet long pool that held between 500 and 1,000 people, often like shoulder to shoulder.
[01:24:26]  It's a nightmare.
[01:24:28]  This was a wave pool designed by a NATA engineer.
[01:24:32]  The water was way too murky to see through.
[01:24:34]  There was a mix of like runner, a mix of like river runoff, body lotion, human waste, and other bodily fluids from like open wounds.
[01:24:42]  They got the waters really, really murky.
[01:24:46]  The artificial waves would be like a few meters tall and they would go on for 20 straight minutes, which is way too long for a wave pool.
[01:24:54]  That's not how we do wave pools.
[01:24:55]  Usually it's like five minutes on, ten minutes off or something.
[01:24:58]  But 20 straight minutes of waves.
[01:25:00]  That's plenty of time for a good or for even like a good swimmer to get in some serious trouble because you just keep getting hit by waves and the pool gets pretty deep.
[01:25:10]  Visitors who could not swim well would quickly have water going over their heads.
[01:25:14]  And experienced swimmers who are used to ocean water didn't realize that the freshwater, like the pool was freshwater, so it wasn't nearly as buoyant, which would make it a lot more exhausting to try to swim through.
[01:25:26]  Yeah.
[01:25:28]  Every few minutes, like after the waves were done, they would clear out a particular section of the wave pool to scan for any bodies at the bottom.
[01:25:34]  Like at the special deep spot, they would clear everyone out to look for it.
[01:25:39]  Former employees claimed that lifeguards at the wave pool would often claim 30 saves a day for each lifeguard.
[01:25:46]  Jesus Christ.
[01:25:48]  Where your average lifeguard at a pool may only rescue one or two people an entire summer.
[01:25:52]  And I think there was like 12 lifeguards on duty at the wave pool because it's massive.
[01:25:58]  Easily one of the scariest attractions at the park.
[01:26:01]  The first death happened in 1982, the same year of the kayaking death.
[01:26:06]  And another guest drowned in 1987.
[01:26:08]  Now, two deaths may not sound a lot, but that's the low tally, because lifeguards were saving so many people non-stop.
[01:26:15]  12 lifeguards on duty, saving about 30 people a day for each one of them.
[01:26:20]  It's a nightmare.
[01:26:20]  Jeez.
[01:26:21]  Because it was just so big, so deep, so many people.
[01:26:25]  Lifeguards and staff would then give out wristbands that say CFS, or can't fucking swim.
[01:26:32]  So if you have one of these wristbands on, you've probably already gotten saved that day.
[01:26:38]  Also, in 1984, a man had a heart attack shortly after in the Tarzan Swing Pool.
[01:26:45]  The cold water believed to send him into shock, and then he died in the pool because of just how cold it was.
[01:26:50]  Like, triggered a heart attack.
[01:26:53]  And then a few years later, in slightly related news, this isn't Action Park's fault, but I think it's worth mentioning.
[01:27:01]  There was a bus crashed on the way to the park, killing five people on the highway.
[01:27:09]  So that happened.
[01:27:09]  Were they headed to the park?
[01:27:10]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:27:11]  They were going to the park and it crashed.
[01:27:14]  This adding on to this kind of press about the park.
[01:27:18]  But to a certain point, the more kind of danger and death reported in media, the more the local kids and teens just wanted to go.
[01:27:24]  Because the magic and horror of Action Park is that you could leave with all of your dreams of fun and adventure and freedom come true, or you could leave in a body bag.
[01:27:33]  It's like, it's this like, it's this like allure.
[01:27:36]  That's what everyone really wants is a chance to risk your life and also not travel more than a couple hours from home.
[01:27:45]  Yeah.
[01:27:45]  So it's hard to say how many people actually got hurt here.
[01:27:48]  The state only requires the park to report serious injuries, quote unquote.
[01:27:51]  So unless you left in the ambulance.
[01:27:53]  Yeah, and we already know that he did.
[01:27:57]  Unless you left in the ambulance.
[01:27:58]  Decapitation wasn't a serious injury to this guy.
[01:28:01]  So yeah.
[01:28:02]  Unless you left in the ambulance, it was almost certainly not going to be reported.
[01:28:05]  But stories like three months in the hospital and a six more months in a body cast, and the same day we got there, a guy got stuck on the cannonball loop, another person broke their neck cliffdiving were not uncommon.
[01:28:16]  Those are common sentiments people would say.
[01:28:19]  Not to mention hundreds or thousands of dislocated joints, broken boats, and concussions.
[01:28:26]  According to Newsweek, quote, from an emergency room doctor at a nearby hospital, they claimed they admitted nearly five to ten people a day from Action Park.
[01:28:36]  Sometimes interesting reported.
[01:28:38]  Yeah, so injuries included like ankle sprains, broken bones, cuts, concussions, dislocations, and head wounds.
[01:28:47]  So five to ten people in the emergency room per day.
[01:28:52]  And actually, the Vernon, New Jersey ambulances had to stop serving Action Park because they would keep busy at the park all day.
[01:28:58]  The city forced Gene to buy two of its own ambulances to have its own Action Park ambulance fleet.
[01:29:04]  Oh my God.
[01:29:05]  And I bet there's nothing that Gene was more responsible with than owning his own emergency services.
[01:29:11]  The majority of police calls for Vernon in the day were for Action Park.
[01:29:16]  There were many fights, many brawls, because, you know, partially due to the sheer abundance of alcohol.
[01:29:23]  Now, you may be thinking, wow, this park seems pretty dangerous.
[01:29:26]  I bet their insurance bills are pretty expensive.
[01:29:28]  Well, no, not really.
[01:29:31]  Here's a quote from Seth from Seth Porges, the journalist who's done most of the work on Action Park.
[01:29:36]  Quote, Gene didn't believe in the concept of insurance.
[01:29:45]  Yeah, this guy is like the archon of libertarianism.
[01:29:50]  He's their captain planet.
[01:29:52]  Ayn Rand and her five best friends all got special rings and so in she.
[01:29:58]  And then being a libertarian, he abandoned them to make Action Park immediately.
[01:30:03]  Gene thought if you got hurt, you should deal with that problem yourself.
[01:30:05]  It wasn't his problem to deal with.
[01:30:08]  But technically, he needed insurance to run the park.
[01:30:10]  So he did what any true libertarian would do.
[01:30:13]  He made his own fake insurance company in the Cayman Islands.
[01:30:22]  He also used his fake insurance company in the Cayman Islands as a money laundering scheme.
[01:30:26]  Sure.
[01:30:27]  Yeah, of course.
[01:30:28]  Look, he already said he was a libertarian.
[01:30:32]  When a park manager told Gene, like, the state says we can't do that.

=== Sketchy Friends and Insurance Issues (11:21) ===

[01:30:37]  Gene replied, well, who the hell are they?
[01:30:40]  They can't shut us down.
[01:30:41]  Oh, Gene.
[01:30:42]  Oh, you beautiful, beautiful animal.
[01:30:45]  Surprisingly, this led to a creepy monster.
[01:30:47]  Surprisingly, this led to a large-scale federal investigation.
[01:30:51]  Yeah, that's usually how large-scale federal investigations start.
[01:30:55]  That's generally the way things kick off.
[01:30:57]  wake of the two deaths in 1984, they investigated Action Park and found all of these financial fraud elements.
[01:31:04]  This resulted in a three-day hearing and a 110-count indictment.
[01:31:09]  Gene refused to testify or appear in court, but through his lawyer, he eventually pled guilty to counts of fraud, theft, and conspiracy.
[01:31:16]  And he was instructed to give up control of Action Park since some of it was operated on state land.
[01:31:22]  So he hatched a new scheme.
[01:31:24]  He decided to be the worst tenant he possibly could.
[01:31:27]  He stopped paying bills and filing paperwork for all of his rent to the state because the state owned some of the land.
[01:31:35]  He just stopped paying.
[01:31:37]  He did everything he could to piss off the state landowners he was renting from.
[01:31:41]  Look, the government can't own land, Garrison.
[01:31:44]  The only people who can own land are weird libertarians.
[01:31:49]  He just didn't pay hundreds of thousands in rent.
[01:31:52]  And somehow.
[01:31:54]  And somehow this worked.
[01:31:55]  By the mid-80s, the state got so fed up with Gene that they agreed to sell him the land for $800,000 just to get him out of the way, which he did.
[01:32:03]  So then eventually he owned all of the land Action Park was on.
[01:32:06]  Because he just stopped paying rent.
[01:32:07]  The state was like, fine, you buy it.
[01:32:09]  How much was rent?
[01:32:11]  It's unclear the exact amount, but it's multiple of hundreds of thousands of dollars he just didn't pay.
[01:32:18]  It's unclear.
[01:32:19]  And they were like 800K.
[01:32:22]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:32:23]  So it was probably around.
[01:32:25]  He was that annoying that they weren't.
[01:32:27]  The squeaky wheel with a large dude who files a bunch of stuff.
[01:32:31]  That's great.
[01:32:33]  Action Park became an important part of the local economy for Vernon.
[01:32:38]  It brought a lot of people into this smaller.
[01:32:42]  So other businesses had interests in keeping the park open and having good press.
[01:32:47]  Gene would bribe public officials.
[01:32:49]  He bought politicians' houses.
[01:32:51]  Sure.
[01:32:52]  And he found a lot of ways to put people on his payroll, you know, because he was employing, because he was also employing all of their kids.
[01:32:59]  All of their kids worked for Gene.
[01:33:02]  And according to local reporters who personally knew Gene, specifically became friends with him at the end of his life, he was most certainly involved with the mob.
[01:33:10]  There was a lot of sketchy friends Gene had, and he would say a lot of weird, concerning things.
[01:33:17]  He would often make jokes with high-level employees.
[01:33:19]  Yeah, I mean, this is the guy who heard that teenagers were having their bathing suits ripped off and said, well, let's find a way for people to watch.
[01:33:27]  Creepy, creepy scared.
[01:33:28]  I'm not surprised.
[01:33:29]  He would often make jokes with high-level employees about how certain managers knew where all the bodies were buried.
[01:33:34]  So they couldn't betray him.
[01:33:36]  So he said a lot of, you know.
[01:33:38]  These weren't jokes.
[01:33:39]  Yeah, no.
[01:33:41]  So with a fake insurance company, six deaths and an unknown but very high number of injuries, you'd expect a lot of people to sue Action Park for damages.
[01:33:50]  And they tried, but barely anyone ever succeeded.
[01:33:53]  If you tried to sue Action Park, Gene would always refuse to settle.
[01:33:56]  He would take you to trial every single time, and he would make the trial as long and as painful as possible.
[01:34:02]  Action Park would win about 93% of cases.
[01:34:05]  And Kiki got he got such a reputation of being hard to sue that most lawyers just didn't even bother.
[01:34:12]  And even when he lost cases, he just wouldn't pay.
[01:34:16]  Multiple times, U.S. Marshals.
[01:34:18]  Yeah, he doesn't pay the government rent.
[01:34:19]  He's not paying you because he killed his kids.
[01:34:21]  Multiple times, armed U.S. Marshals came to the Action Park a lot to collect money.
[01:34:27]  And they got to know some of the employees.
[01:34:30]  The employees would be like, oh, Greg's here again with the Marshals.
[01:34:34]  All right.
[01:34:34]  Someone, someone go get Gene.
[01:34:37]  We got to get a check or something.
[01:34:40]  It's the U.S. Marshals.
[01:34:42]  Tommy Lee Jones is here with Robert Downey Jr.
[01:34:46]  That was a U.S. Marshall.
[01:34:48]  I've seen the U.S. Marshals.
[01:34:49]  It's a good movie.
[01:34:50]  Okay.
[01:34:51]  That was such a great visual.
[01:34:54]  There are like one or two incidents that Gene did have to settle related to like certain deaths, but it was settling out of court mostly just to shut people up.
[01:35:02]  And for not very much money.
[01:35:03]  Like I think the first death, he settled for only like $50,000.
[01:35:08]  So yeah, but the death danger and scandal of Action Park didn't immediately affect the park's ability to operate.
[01:35:16]  And unlike the actual deaths at Action Park, Action Park's own death was a very slow process.
[01:35:22]  The 90s recession hit Action Park pretty hard.
[01:35:25]  And in the 80s, Gene's parent company, Great American Recreation, actually opened two spin-off locations that they weren't quite as wild as the original.
[01:35:34]  And both of those were forced to shut down in the early 90s.
[01:35:37]  And as the 80s came to a close and people started growing up, the danger of Action Park became less appealing to the new generation of parents.
[01:35:45]  And the bad press, deaths, and lawsuits piled up, and it started impacting the park's attendance in the mid-90s.
[01:35:52]  Yeah, people they got what the problem is, Garrison.
[01:35:55]  They took the lead out of the gasoline, and parents started caring about their kids doing things as opposed to just wanting them away.
[01:36:01]  Yeah.
[01:36:02]  That's when everything went wrong in American society, if you ask me.
[01:36:06]  The real kicker was when Gene's business partner, Bob Brennan, was found guilty of fraud and money laundering and sentenced to 10 years in prison.
[01:36:15]  So Gene's magical money tree ran out.
[01:36:19]  And by 1995, Action Park declared bankruptcy.
[01:36:22]  And at the end, their last operating season was the next summer.
[01:36:27]  So then Action Park closed its gates in 1996.
[01:36:32]  So, you know, the political circle that Action Park was able to exist in had come to an end.
[01:36:38]  Two years later, the ski resort and the park grounds were bought by another amusement park company named IntroWest.
[01:36:46]  Most of the old Jerry Rigged attractions were ripped out, and it was renamed Mountain Creek.
[01:36:51]  It became a generic small town ski resort, golf course, and water park.
[01:36:55]  But the story isn't over just yet.
[01:36:57]  In 2010, IntroWest itself had to declare bankruptcy and sell Mountain Creek Water Park and the ski resort.
[01:37:07]  And Gene, who is now in his late 70s, decided he wanted his theme park back.
[01:37:12]  So he led a group of investors to gain control of the park again, and he succeeded.
[01:37:17]  But before he could fully enjoy turning Action Park back into Action Park, he died.
[01:37:25]  In 2012, he shouldn't have lasted into the 2015s.
[01:37:30]  No, he was 78 years old.
[01:37:33]  He died in his home in 2012.
[01:37:35]  Two years later, in 2014, Gene's son, Andy, partially capitalizing on nostalgia, revived the Action Park name and added a few more kind of more action-y attractions and announced plans for a new updated version of the Cannonball Loop designed by Real Engineers.
[01:37:51]  That did not happen.
[01:37:52]  And they're not actually building it because in 2017, the park filed for bankruptcy again.
[01:37:59]  And a year later, ownership changed hands once more.
[01:38:03]  A Vernon native and former Action Park employee, Joe Hessen, who worked at the park for 18 years, bought controlling, and then he went on to become like a snowboarding businessman or whatever.
[01:38:17]  He bought controlling shares in Action Park and he has exclusive year-round oversight of the park's ski resort and water park operations, and he is the new CEO.
[01:38:29]  But as of 2018, Mountain Creek was still in like $28 million in debt to the state.
[01:38:36]  Okay.
[01:38:37]  And that's kind of...
[01:38:38]  That is obviously not open.
[01:38:40]  Mountain Creek is open, but it's like a boring golf course with a few water slides.
[01:38:47]  It's not Action Park anymore.
[01:38:49]  It's a totally different thing.
[01:38:50]  It's basically a ski resort with a few other attractions.
[01:38:54]  And that's kind of the end of Action Park.
[01:38:55]  I know in the last few years, it's gotten more popular on the internet.
[01:38:58]  I know last year, there was an HBO documentary came out made by Seth Porgas, who I only found after I did tons of research for this episode.
[01:39:09]  I'm like, oh, someone already did a really good job detailing this.
[01:39:11]  That's going to be a good idea.
[01:39:12]  It's pretty good.
[01:39:13]  Pretty fun documentary.
[01:39:15]  It's a great documentary.
[01:39:16]  You can find a whole bunch of weird articles on this.
[01:39:17]  I would recommend you read the New Jersey magazine article on it.
[01:39:21]  It's just hilarious.
[01:39:24]  But yeah, that is the place that I wish I could live at.
[01:39:30]  It sounds up like a blast.
[01:39:32]  It's everything that I actually want from libertarianism, plus a bunch of things I don't want, which is what libertarian gets.
[01:39:40]  Yeah, it's always what you get with libertarian.
[01:39:42]  This is why he's described.
[01:39:43]  It's like it's a mix of Ayn Rand and Lord of the Flies.
[01:39:46]  It's like all of the things combined to make this weird, like 80s-specific, you know, place that is almost like a fever dream.
[01:39:55]  But yeah, that is the story of Action Park, probably the world's most dangerous amusement park.
[01:40:03]  Not the amusement park with the most deaths, but the most serious injuries, absolutely.
[01:40:09]  It's shocking how few people we have reported died there based on like how ridiculous a lot of these riots were.
[01:40:16]  I mean, it's gotta be because everyone was drunk enough that they hit limp, you know?
[01:40:22]  So, yeah, like the one thing I like understated is how many places you could get alcohol for mostly free over Action Park.
[01:40:30]  So many alcohol stands, they would just give it to the 14-year-old kids.
[01:40:33]  It's just an absurd amount of booze.
[01:40:36]  Well, you can't buy this, have it for free.
[01:40:40]  Look, the law says you can't purchase alcohol.
[01:40:43]  Doesn't say we can't give it to you.
[01:40:45]  It doesn't say nothing about drinking a get-on-themed go-kai.
[01:40:48]  What's the state gonna do?
[01:40:49]  Stop me?
[01:40:50]  They can't do that.
[01:40:53]  So, yeah, that's that.
[01:40:54]  That is last feds they sent died on the cannonball rock anyway.
[01:41:02]  All right, so that is that is the episode.
[01:41:04]  We ran a little bit long just because there was so much to talk about, but yeah.
[01:41:08]  I've never loved anyone more.
[01:41:10]  I've never been more horrified by the thought of meeting someone.
[01:41:14]  No, he sounds like he's real, real creepy.
[01:41:17]  Like, listening to his voice sounds exactly what you think his voice sounds like.
[01:41:22]  Like, think of what we've all said.
[01:41:25]  Now, imagine him talking.
[01:41:26]  You got it.
[01:41:27]  You got it.
[01:41:27]  That's it.
[01:41:28]  You got his voice.
[01:41:30]  Yeah.
[01:41:30]  Well, do you have any pluckables, Garrison?
[01:41:33]  You can find me posting about Catboy Made Rave Outfits on Twitter.com at Hungry Bowtie.
[01:41:40]  You do post about that stuff a lot.
[01:41:42]  I do now.
[01:41:42]  It's real fun.
[01:41:44]  Yeah, just mainly Twitter, I guess, at Hungry Bowtie and read that weird New Jersey article because it is hilarious.
[01:41:51]  Yeah.
[01:41:52]  Yeah.
[01:41:52]  And shout out to Dan O'Brien, the only person from New Jersey I've agreed to know.
[01:41:57]  All right.

=== Welcome to the End (02:14) ===

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