One of my favorite books is
The New Roadside America: The Modern Traveler’s Guide to the Wild and Wonderful World of America’s Tourist Attractions (1986) by Mike Wilkins, Ken Smith and Doug Kirby. The book profiles a variety of roadside attractions circa the mid-1980s – including Prehistoric Forest in Marblehead.
The side-splitting description makes it clear that the goal of Prehistoric Forest was to entertain. The authors noted, "At the Prehistoric Forest in Marblehead all pretense of
history and education are abandoned. Tram riders are issued miniature M-16
rifles and are instructed to "kill the monsters." A prerecorded tour
guide panics repeatedly and screams, "To the left! To the right! Shoot!
Shoot!!!" whenever one of the feebly nodding dinosaurs comes into view.
The forest echoes with the chatter of toy M-16 fire spraying in all directions.
The tram driver remains unaffected by the mayhem, smoking cigarettes and
sipping coffee as the tram slowly chugs along.”
That’s why it was so strange for me to discover a nice series of postcards issued by the owners of Prehistoric Forest in Marblehead that seemed, well, downright educational.
Here they are. The mail panel side of each postcard included a nice description of each “monster” and what it ate.
2 comments:
Have you come across any mention of what happened to all the critters when the park closed? I wonder if North Olmsted would let me put one in my front yard.
Hi Dennis! This article tells what happened to them:
http://www.dispatch.com/news/20170414/dinosaurs-retire-from-ohio-amusement-park-to-madison-county-business
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