h a l f b a k e r yA few slices short of a loaf.
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Inspired by the practice of preserving ghost towns, such as Bodie, California, let us erect an amusement park based on a post-apocalyptic theme. It would have three or four sectors, each on a slightly different theme.
The first, nearest to the entrance, would be a small, completely artificial ruined
city, complete with hunks of scrap and rubble in the streets, overturned cars, smashed-in shop fronts (the glass is a thick, rounded plastic for safety, as are all the "random" twisted pieces of rusted rebar and concrete), and the hulks of bombed-out skyscrapers.
Patrons entering the gate would first be encouraged to don appropriate post-apocalyptic garb -- gas masks, leather, and ragged cloaks and the like -- and then find themselves confronted by the barren spectacle of a post-nuclear/plague/global warming/zombie/etc. city ruin, utterly abandoned by its original inhabitants except for a hardy few.
These few survivors would be trying to resurrect civilisation, tending to small junk shops and primitive inns, growing food in urban gardens. These would be the various restaurants and souvenir shops and other things expected at a theme park. All the staff would make sure to stay in-character at all times to keep up the guide of a post-apocalyptic world.
Patrons venturing beyond the ruined city would find themselves in a wide wilderness beside a potholed highway, where bandits in jury-rigged vehicles battle another for territory in wasted plains where the weeds grow thick. Out here, they would find themselves wandering into a small frontier town, walled-off to prevent bandit incursion, dependent upon the continued pumping of their oil drill and the rusty whirling of their improvised windmill.
Further out, one would find a series of completely barren, flat, arid plains -- mudflats and sand dunes -- inhabited only by scarce hunter gatherer tribes. It would be a hot, flat, desert expanse where your ancient Geiger counter is all that separates you from life and death. Nuclear war has ravaged this world completely and left it devoid of life.
I think it'd be a neat experience, if rather heavy on the real estate...
Acropolis Now
http://en.wikipedia...mage:Acropolis3.JPG
[xenzag, Apr 04 2008]
West Belfast (old pic)
http://www.concept2malta.com/SARACEN.jpg
Army patrol ... the police are inside these Saracens eating chips [xenzag, Apr 04 2008]
STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl
http://en.wikipedia...Shadow_of_Chernobyl
heading towards a videogame version of what you describe. [calum, Apr 04 2008]
[link]
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Teeth and hair falling out from radiation poisoning... |
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{Niven had his Moties keep zoos like this in anticipation of an inevitible collapse.} |
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This sounds exactly like the movie *Escape From New York*... |
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From the title, I thought this idea would be something to do with a special pot of jam you'd open for your final meal when you knew the end of the world was approaching. |
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I love it, and wish it were baked. |
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Mad Max Gocarts, Junkyard Maze, the haunted whitehouse, the collapsing building rollercoaster, and the running of the Zombie Hordes. |
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Mutated Critter clay shoots, the "toxic" water slide, the Wise Old Man of the Desert (reads stories to the kiddies, puppet shows too) and the Sand Dune Bandit chase rollercoaster. |
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Bobbing for "trash", the alien artifacts gift shop, the Science museum of the Apocopolypse, and the Remains of Civilization treasure hunt in the desert. |
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Trash can bands, bat-thing trapezemen, the mutant freak show, and the DogCatBear trainer. |
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I figured this would be Jurassic park VIII. |
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Alternatively, you could spend a day in Mogadishu, Sarajevo, Basra, or Gary Indiana. |
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sounds like a paintball background, but yeah; visit any large city's "underdeveloped" areas for the same effect with the advantage that you don't have to pay actors to look like people on their last legs scrounging the waste products of civilisation. |
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Well, yes, you certainly could go to East L.A. or Detroit or Mogadishu, or any of the war-torn provinces of the world. But that wouldn't be a safe attraction for kids, that could produce profit from apocalyptic-minded tourists, would it? |
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There should be another area where some mad scientists are holed up in a high tech bunker, carrying out sadistic experiments on nubile young women they buy from the road bandits ... |
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Nowhere's THAT bad. Boming the place flat would be a definite improvement. |
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Gary Indiana - I thought it was nice
when I was
there. Check out West Belfast, where
people walk
around with screwdrivers stuck in their
heads and
don't even realise it. The police used to
patrol this place in ten ton Saracen
armoured cars
equipped with browning machine guns,
but now
they don't go there at all! |
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Dude, [xenzag], are you kidding me?! |
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"End of the World Fair." Oogh. |
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Waitaminnit - Indiana's already pretty flat. You can bomb it flatter? |
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//are you kidding me?// - no, I'm not. |
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//The police patrol used to patrol this place in ten ton Saracen armoured cars equipped with browning machine guns//
Strictly speaking, I think the police may have patrolled with the army, and the army were armed with the .30 cals, Saracens and Pigs, not the police. |
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Two men enter, one man leaves. |
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Very nice. This would be best if it was a Westworld-style total immersion themepark, where you couldn't see the join. Obviously, this would pose architectural problems - how do you make a structurally sound heap of rubble? - but it would afford maximally creepy urban exploration possibilities. |
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Futher, there's no need, really, for this to be post-apocalypse: a case could be made for recreating, say, Stalingrad or Dresden, but this time without any evidence of large-scale efforts towards reconstruction. Once the park "matures", there'd be new vegetation - kudzu in bomb craters, bracken in parkland otherwise studded with rusting hulks, birds nests in pillboxes etc. |
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This whole experience would be marketed not as an in-and-out Disney style sensory assault type of park, but as a two week vacation/holiday destination, pitched at survivalists. And for those restless types who have always to be doing something, actors could populate the city, each with a secret or a clue, the holidaymaker being tasked at the gate with, I dunno, locating the red-coated serial-killing midget that's been terrorising the neighbourhoods. |
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In the early '80s, I got to bicycle around Kochi, Japan. The old industrial area across the river south of Harimayabashi was interesting - all flat, lots of vegetation, an occasional metal beam sticking up out of the ground. It was a bit of a shock when I realized the last thing that had happened there was it being "bombed flat" - firebombed, most likely - 35 years earlier. (Google Earth shows it all built up now.) |
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Even Hiroshima didn't have anything like that left - the main train station is not a stone's throw from ground zero, and you couldn't even tell 25 years ago. |
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// //are you kidding me?// - no, I'm not. // |
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// armed with the .30 cals // |
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They were rebarreled to 7.62 x 57mm. Sometimes it was police and army together, sometimes each on their own - depended on the nature of the op. It was handy to have an RUC guy abord for navigation and local knowledge and spotting the bogtrotters. |
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[qt75rx1], Saracens with Brownings, Land Rovers with GPMGs and LMGs and a bloke with a sniper rifle for knocking over errant Paddys. |
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Also, Ford Sierras and Granadas with everything the crew could carry, including WP........ |
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Gosh, [8th]. That's all I can say... |
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Perhaps painballing would be another source of income? |
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I have an idea that is sort of an expanded version of this, but much bigger... |
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