Friday A/V Club: The Legend of Action Park

Action Park was a legendarily unsafe amusement
park in New Jersey, the sort of place that Blue Teamers imagine a
libertarian society would be like. (There is a parallel universe,
I’m sure, where Action Park occupies the place held by Somalia on
our plane’s compendium of comment-thread clichés.) “Action Park was
less a water park and more a complete insult to the evolutionary
concept of self-preservation,” Matthew Callan wrote in
a fun Freezerbox piece some years back. “And yet, despite
all the danger, we kids kept going back, tempting fate like
Russian-roulette-players.”

You should read Callan’s whole essay, with its detailed
descriptions of the park’s fate-tempting rides. Here’s a
sample:

The very first ride you saw when you entered Action
Park involved a sled and a ramp of metal rollers. You slid down on
your sled across the metal rollers, reaching speeds of roughly 300
miles an hour, and skipped thirty feet across the surface of a very
shallow pool. The metal-roller ramps had no guardrails on them, so
there was always a possibility that you would veer off to the side
and fall very quickly into two feet of water. And since there were
four metal-roller ramps emptying into this pool in tandem, snarls
of sled collisions were constantly occurring, making it look like
the Cross Bronx Expressway on a Friday night.

The Colorado River Ride was a water slide involving huge inner
tubes that could fit seven people. It tried to approximate a
mountain rapid, with lots of bumps and obstacles and so forth. But
the most dangerous part of it was the fact that the borders that
kept the tubes on the course were criminally short. And just off to
the side of the Colorado River Ride was a steep
tree-and-pricker-bush-lined hill. It was the perfect demonstration
of the Action Park philosophy: Put seven people in a large inner
tube, push them down a wet slide, and let the laws of physics
handle the rest. People would gather around to watch folks scream
their way down, cheering and hoping that a tube would hop the
barrier and go careening down the side of the hill. When a large
family would come close to flying away, the whole crowd would gasp
and then sigh in disappointment, like the audience at the Indy 500
when the Tide car just narrowly misses hitting the Pepsi car and
exploding in a beautiful orange ball of flame.

And then there was this thing:

They called it the Cannonball Loop. “It was never open,” Barry
Petchesky
recalls in Deadspin. “You wondered if it had ever been
open.” Turns out it was open, though apparently not for
very long. Petchesky has located some footage of the slide in
action, part of an alternately eerie and funny compilation of
Action Park commercials and home movies:

If you want to watch people riding the slide, you can skip ahead
to 8:17. But there’s much more to see here, from the
children-as-sewage-discharge footage at 5:12 to the breakdancing
demonstration at 3:13. (The latter is recommended for hardcore ’80s
nostalgists only.) And at the very end of the video, there’s the
most frightening ad slogan I’ve ever heard: “where you and the
rides become one.”

Bonus link: “Anarchy,
State, and Amusement Park.”