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The Dark Ride Western Kentucky University TopSCHOLAR® Masters Theses & Specialist Projects Graduate School 8-1-1995 The aD rk Ride Brandon Kwaitek Western Kentucky University Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses Part of the Folklore Commons Recommended Citation Kwaitek, Brandon, "The aD rk Ride" (1995). Masters Theses & Specialist Projects. Paper 914. http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/914 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by TopSCHOLAR®. It has been accepted for inclusion in Masters Theses & Specialist Projects by an authorized administrator of TopSCHOLAR®. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE DARK RIDE A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Department of Modern Languages and Intercultural Studies Western Kentucky University Bowling Green, Kentucky In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts by Brandon Kwiatek August 1995 THE DARK RIDE Date Recommended Director of Thesis J Director of Graduate Stujflies Date Acknowledgments My grateful appreciation goes to the following individuals, organizations and institutions who enabled me to complete this study: For their valuable time, assistance and enthusiasm... Robert F. Ott and Scott Bluebond of Dorney Park and Wildwater Kingdom Mary Lou Rosemeyer and Jason Belavic of Kennywood David Wynn and Matt Risnak of Knoebels Amusement Resort Glenn Bergethon and Sergi Danilov of Lake Winnepesaukah Fun Town Also... James Futrell of the National Amusement Park Historical Association Carol M. Herrity of the Lehigh County Historical Society Suzette Raney of the Chattanooga-Hamilton County Bicentennial Library, Local History and Genealogy Department The Interlibrary Loan Office of Western Kentucky University The International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions The Northampton County Historical and Genealogical Society. And for generous financial support, the Graduate Student Research Grant Committee of the Graduate Council of Western Kentucky University. Table of Contents Abstract v Introduction 1 Laughing Inside the Mouth: The Grotesque and Mysterious Iconography of the Dark Ride 11 Engineering Thrills and Events Against Nature: The Mechanical Ingenuities of the Dark Ride 43 Changing to Sustain: Renovation and Destruction in the Dark Ride 72 Rights of Passage: Subversions and Reinterpretations 124 Illustrations 137 Works Cited 143 IV THE DARK RIDE Brandon Kwiatek August 1995 150 Pages Directed by: Michael Ann Williams, Erika Brady and Larry Danielson Department of Modern Languages and Intercultural Studies, Programs in Folk Studies Western Kentucky University An intersection of vernacular architecture studies and American studies, "The Dark Ride" defines the standard amusement park attraction both generally within the contexts of horrific iconography and the history of amusement devices and structures, and also specifically within the contexts of five amusement park environments. As a "ride-thru Halloween," the dark ride maintains a popular tradition of deriding and mocking the symbols of hell and death. As a variety of theater, the dark ride shares its technological and structural origins with primitive cinema (whose own century-long development intertwines with that of the dark ride) and the scenic attractions of late 19th and early 20th century expositions and amusement parks. As a commercial shapeshifter, the dark ride responds to the greater changes in its environment with structural alterations made over time; to illustrate this tendency, "The Dark Ride" presents structural histories of eight rides in five traditional amusement parks. Finally, from a constructivist point of view, I examine the attraction as a liminoid space which dark riders variously interpret as an opportune location for romance, storytelling, mischief and vandalism. Introduction "The Dark Ride," a study of a standard amusement park installation ride, represents the intersection of two amenable disciplines that purport to investigate heretofore unacknowledged objects on the popular cultural landscape: American studies and vernacular architecture studies. American studies was born of and the most recent vernacular architecture studies reflects the academic trend of the new social history, an academic attempt to democratize the scope of research by including all varieties of social phenomenon at all cultural levels (Carter and Herman 1991:4). In much the way American studies complements American history, vernacular architecture studies complements architectural history, both fields sharing an added interest in popular culture—its various media and commercial structures. Popular culture should be of great interest to the folklorist as well, not only because popular culture is traditional culture but also because people interact with traditional popular structures and manipulate traditional popular symbols in the constant effort to build personal meaning. Although the various media, as the interconnected extensions of our eyes, ears and voices, have generalized or standardized the structures and symbols, the interactions with and manipulations of them occur on a specific, private and individual level. Describing these personal responses to general environments or experiences—often subversions or reinterpretations—is a task rightfully belonging to the folklorist, who has turned his/her attention away from the products of tradition and concentrated on discovering the process of making meaning by making tradition. "The Dark Ride" attempts to fulfill this complex assignment by describing how the dark ride is at once an artifact of commercial traditions of supernatural 1 imagery and architectural change and an enactment of individual responses to those traditions. It is not my immediate business to justify the serious study of American amusement parks—the deciphering of the intricate cryptography of an American culture largely defined by its devotion to leisure and recreation. The scholar's justification already has been written by Margaret J. King. Her rallying cry for the study of "theme parks" (their antecedents, present forms and future incarnations) introduces a special issue of the Journal of Popular Culture devoted to the subject of this "New American Muse." King writes persuasively, The serious implications of amusement parks are not immediately obvious. It does seem that this is the ideal sort of topic—obvious yet unseen, omnipresent yet unexamined—that is the special call of the popular culture scholar, and those students of American culture in its widest sense, to question and observe, answer and analyze. No single field can by itself be expected to encompass or to explain such a complex production in its rich and mobile mix of artifacts, people and behavior; human, animal and automated forms, graphics and sculpture, machines of every style and description; artifice and fantasy at every possible level and on every theme imaginable (1981 b:57). But for the essays contained in that special issue, and several published elsewhere and at later dates, few scholars have answered King's multi-disciplinarian call. Those who have responded have been forced to simplify a complexity that defies simplification. Unfortunately, the overwhelming phenomenon that is the amusement park generally has resulted in abstracted digestions of it by scholars of traditional popular culture. The first typical over-simplification reduces the number of parks in America to one or two oppositional archetypes which can then be compared (Francaviglia 1981; Johnson 1981; King 1981a; Mechling and Mechling 1981; Weinstein 1992). Fitting a fluid phenomenon into a prefabricated analytical framework of assumptions and presuppositions depletes the amusement complex—whether it be Coney Island, Disneyland, or Marriott's Great America—of the chaos and symbolic contradictions which sustain its vitality. The end result of such forcing often is a treatment of a profound subject smacking of superficiality. More significant is the distortion of perception caused by narrowing the wide- ranging field of the outdoor amusement industry into one or two representative parks. Without building on an understanding of the long history and vast scope of the industry in one's work, the resulting conclusions reflect as accurately as a fun house mirror. One very easily overlooks the lines of development and the reflexive influences the parks have on one another. Consequently, the most egregious flaw of recent scholarship is its concentration on the theme park to the utter neglect of the traditional amusement park, as if the latter had been displaced completely by the former. The result of ironically ignoring the "obvious yet unseen, omnipresent yet unexamined" is an unfortunate misunderstanding of the substantial cultural and architectural contributions of each. The so-called "theme park" is differentiated from the traditional amusement park by its architectural pre-planning and scientific approaches to crowd control. Whereas the traditional amusement park is an organic evolution of sorts with one ride leading to another over time as money and space permit, the "theme park" is a development of the drawing board, executed entirely in blueprint before the first building is raised. Consequently, the difference between them is one of feeling—the traditional park is a disorienting clutter of rides and attractions, the theme park a deliberate coherence of ideas1. Additionally, the term "theme park," "* Of course, the traditional theme park, as the older incarnation of
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