The Most Insane Amusement Park Ever

you'd see like a kid in the summer covered in friction burns and you'd just be like oh how was action park accident park part of the fun was actually surviving the day traction park the slides were higher the rides were faster class action park we got a reputation as being the wildest amusement park in the world it's been shut for almost 20 years and i think no amusement park has caught up to its death toll yet if you told somebody about this it sounds like you're making stuff up [Music] so action park opened in 1978 it was one of the country's first modern water parks a really experimental place in many ways ahead of its time but by the time the park closed in 1996 it developed a reputation for being an extreme place a dangerous place i probably went to action park like once every summer it was sort of the highlight of the summer [Music] there's nothing like going on a really hot day and just being able to jump around in the water and it was only later that i realized you know a lot of stuff was kind of dangerous the average family you'd see would be like a woman screaming at four kids who seemed like they'd just been eating sugar and drinking soda all day and like a drunk dad with no shirt on i'd like to think of action park sort of as like my drunk uncle andy's backyard when you're on the way to action park you're bragging to your brothers and sisters and to your family about how brave you're going to be and it's almost like a rite of passage i think of growing up in north jersey action park just had more extreme rides and i think they kind of thrived a bit more on that sense that there's a little bit more adventure there than a lot of other parks what attracted me to to working for gene was this combination of walt disney and pt barnum uh sort of let's let's do something for everybody for the family right make it really big my father uh probably should have been born in the 1850s he was a he was a really a very uh interesting iconic guy who just loved to have fun the amusement park he wanted to have was one where people controlled the action not where you just sat in a ride and it kind of took you around he wanted one where you could control how fast you went how high you went and that's what he did action park doesn't strip you down action park lets you soar because you control the action participation rides were enormously appealing to teenagers especially nobody was going to tell them what to do at action park and they loved it the rides at action park were lawless like you could feel that you could tell that no one particularly cared what you did one is the tarzan swing you'd stand in line for a long time and you'd be on this like raised wooden dock and they'd hand you a rope and then you swung on the rope out over this pool of water the thing with the tarzan swing was that when you got on it it would then swing in front of the rest of the line some people would go up and like do a backflip off it and get a big cheer and or some people you know would like slip and wipe out and everybody would just like point and laugh and mock them occasionally and inevitably you would always get somebody who would either shout something at the line to get the line riled up i'm sure body parts were shown and i remember being a kid standing on this line watching this ride and at least three or four different men would just swing out get in full view of the line and just go like and pull their bathing suits down so you could just see their dicks and that's a ride the alpine slide was a terrifying thing it was essentially a giant track to rip people's skin off that was disguised as a children's ride i always got a skin burn on the alpine slide if you don't know what the alpine slide was it's this long cement track that you'd be on and this this little device with wheels on it every sled seemed to either be broken in a way where you couldn't use the brakes at all or where it was just locked in the brake position you're either going to careen down this thing at full speed with no ability to control it or you're going to be going dreadfully slow and someone at full speed is going to crash into you from behind it was by far one of the most dangerous situations i've ever been in my entire life you go down a cart and you could determine how fast and if you went too fast you could come out i was always just as a kid kind of in awe of people like kind of flying off of the alpine slide you have to take the ski lift to get up there so while you're on the alpine slide you also have other people on the ski lift just spitting at you the whole time people trying to hit you with spit and you know that's true because you tried to hit them with your spit on the way up when you got at the top of the alpine slide you actually saw photographs of other children who had been maimed with a sign that said keep your arms in kids because if there's anything children should be it's responsible for their own safety one of my favorite legends about action park is the giant loop-de-loop slide the cannonball loop was literally just a water slide that at the very end looped which is almost physically impossible and there is no safety whatsoever you would climb essentially to the top of a building jump off it slide down a fast water slide and then just from the force of your own bones hitting the earth flip over and come down you hit the bottom and your stomach falls out and then you get all disoriented and you come out you don't know where you are like if you go back and look at the picture of the cannonball loop slide it looks photoshopped like it looks unreal the urban legend was that they sent like a dummy down to test it and it came not it came out with like no head i used to hear that employees got paid a hundred dollars to test it out there was an award at some point for anyone that would you know go on it as an employee early on if i wasn't around my father would offer a hundred dollars to test out a new ride it was a i guess it was a hundred dollars it was an award people i think after a week of it being opened were just walking away with bloody noses because you'd get to the top part of the loop and just clank your head pretty wild ride never quite perfected that one i think we were open a couple weeks but it was a little too rough on folks it looked like somebody just went like you know we should just make this thing that just goes like this and then they just like traced his finger and used that as like the blueprint my father if he could find a guy with a crazy idea for a ride he'd hire the guy even if the guy had never built it before and not actually like think about angles or gravity or momentum in any way we'll just build that thing just about every ride at action park it kind of made you think what the hell are they thinking when you go to disney world you assume that if you're on space mountain and it breaks down somebody's going to turn the lights on and climb a ladder and get you out of there but action park within seconds of entering you knew there was no one who was going to do that there was no one who cared it was sort of like just do your own thing and you know the staff would show up if someone got hurt maybe but there weren't a lot of restrictions that i remember there were six kids in my family and we all worked up here during the summers and frankly we ran the place young guys young girls running the place and we had more fun than you can imagine you could just run around a park and know that nobody was going to care what you were doing you know like a 15 year old from long island walking around with a budweiser can was not frowned upon at all and very common everyone involved in running the place seemed to be a combination of teenaged and drunk or completely apathetic the employees at the park were just young local vernon kids and like they smoke a bowl and then they come to work and then they're like yeah go ahead next the carnival ride safety act was passed in 1975. it basically sets forth a series of requirements that all amusement parks including water parks need to follow legally you had to be 16 years old to operate a ride that seems really young but according to reports kids as young as 14 and 15 were actually operating these rides rides which which could and did kill people the choice to have 14 or 15 year old operators is a pretty reckless one even at that age i knew it was not quite right that these people were working these adult rides over the course of action park's existence there were six deaths the first death came in 1980 when an employee was going down the alpine slide and his cart flew off the track and he hit his head on a rock but by far the deadliest attraction was the wave pool there were wave pools at tons of water parks but the one at action park was utterly insane the crowd was chaotic the waves were much bigger than they should have been and they went on for much longer than they should have gone on the staff the lifeguards they didn't stand a chance we were one of the first guys in the country to put in a wave pool and the day that we opened the wave pool we must have pulled a hundred people out of the wave pool with our lifeguards it was crazy in 1982 just a week after somebody drowned into wave pool a 27 year old got out of a ride called a kayak experience and was electrocuted by a loose wire every amusement park every water park has incidents and injuries and sometimes tragically so it's just part of the industry as an operator you know you hope that doesn't happen you do everything to plan to try to prevent that part of this story is a story about inspection and oversight and you would hope that inspections would happen frequently enough that they could see that there'd be problems with the equipment or problems with operation that doesn't seem to have been happening with all that much frequency in this case especially in light of the number of reported incidents whenever somebody got hurt or there was a fatality it was terribly tragic you know the drownings were difficult we had a few by the mid-1980s action park had become notorious for its injuries deaths its lawsuits and so both the government and the media they began to take notice i've heard the same things that there was like no insurance the owner was able to have an insurance company that was i guess not typical of your current amusement park insurance companies i think he just wanted to be able to have more control over you know whether someone would get a settlement for you know a minor injury my father was ahead of the head of his time he went and he set up a self-insurance vehicle which the state didn't really like they went after him for that there was something that they didn't like about it whether it was an out of state insurance company or whatnot gene actually got in a lot of trouble for creating his own insurance company that was based in the cayman islands in order to cover action park in my experience as a lawyer whenever things go through the cayman islands it's always a red flag for sketchiness there's a lot about this that strikes me as being on the fringes of legality so after nearly two decades of incidents injuries negative media reports lawsuits action park was sold in 1996 and what was known as action park ceased to exist we went to action park the year after closed thinking it was still open and that's when we found out i could shut down it was kind of a national lampoon moment for us and then my dad started looking through all the you know press about it and thought oh my god that never happened to us but wow what if it had these amusement parks used to be a lot more kind of uh dangerous than they are today action park couldn't exist today there are way too many lawsuits there are way too many overprotective parents there's no time out zone at action park there's too many rules and regulations in today's world that would prevent us from opening up action park and it's true in its purest form that it was you know i think most other theme parks you go to these days it's you just wait in line and then you ride and then you wait and lying again it kind of makes me sad i wonder if kids today have that feeling of like man let's go prove our backbone if the park were around today i would definitely go i would love to go these are the most amazing rides in the world i love it here just go to action park there's no other park like it i would absolutely go to action park if it were open today when it's hot out this is a great place to spend the day with your family there's generations of kids that grew up that worked here that had a blast and they came to the place and had a great time and i'm really proud of what my father did someone doesn't come to me and say oh you know my brother got hurt you guys are irresponsible they never say that they say it was the best most fun place in the world to come to they have good memories action park was this thing that you could go through and maybe you got hurt but oh my god did you have a good time doing it it's actually kind of hard to exaggerate how nuts it was so i think a lot of people hear the stories of it who never got to go there and they're like oh it couldn't have been that bad i actually think that every story that you hear you know any legend that you hear about it's all true this is a place that it actually happened did it make a man out of a generation of people i don't know it probably gave a couple of them a few alpine slide scrapes and scars that's about all but they had fun and they they cherish those memories we're back we're in control and we are going to make this place real fun again we're going to make sure it's safe but we are going to make it so much fun but that's important

Channel: Derek Balling

Views: 277,200

Keywords: action park

Id: KKDx_piZvsg

Length: 13min 54sec (834 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 28 2017