HBO Max
Amusement parks have become a go-to destination for families during the summer months, and year-round with the addition of parks in California and Florida that don’t see much change in the seasons. But for the regional amusement parks across the country, summertime is the time when people flock to the parks to experience the thrill rides, food, fun and other attractions, including water park areas that have sprung up as additions. People have been visiting amusement parks in the US since the 1890s when Steeplechase Park pretty much put Coney Island on the map. Since those early beginnings, amusement parks have grown and with their popularity, the thrill rides offered have grown as well, designed to offer speed and the illusion of danger when, in fact, the ride experience is generally very safe (not that there haven’t been accidents and injuries due to faulty equipment, but those cases are rare).
But those parks offered family-friendly thrills for all ages, and as the times began to change in the late 1970s and teenagers were becoming more free and mobile, they were seeking more thrills than their local amusement parks could offer. Enter Eugene Mulvihill, venture capitalist and financier, who set his sights on a sleepy little town in New Jersey, Vernon, and its seasonally operated ski resort. Seeking a way to generate revenue from the resort in the summer, he opened an Alpine Slide in 1976, and expanded on that idea by adding water slides and a go-kart track in 1978. Mulvihill, though, wanted more thrills and began designing new rides with other ‘designers’ whose ideas had been deemed too radical by other reputable amusement parks, and by Mulvihill himself who had no training whatsoever in mechanical engineering. He’d often sketch out an idea for a ride and hand it to his construction team, telling them to make it work. Thus, Action Park was born, with the motto that the visitor controlled the action.
The new HBO Max documentary Class Action Park details Mulvihill’s ascension from Wall Street money man to Action Park overlord, providing a wealth of vintage video from the park, as well as interviews with some of the park’s former employees and visitors, including comedian and actor Chris Gethard who offers his own first-hand experience of visiting Action Park. The film delves into great detail, amusing and horrifying, laying out Mulvihill’s often reckless plans for Action Park, which consisted of three distinct areas: Alpine Center, Waterworld and Motorworld, which was actually separated from the other two areas by a highway visitors had to access via a pedestrian bridge over the road.
Andy Mulvihill
Each area of the park was carelessly designed to offer the maximum thrill and danger with park employees rarely attending to their duties because the teens coming to the park were there to do what they wanted … and the people in charge of them were often their peers, some legally too young to even operate the rides. And naturally, accidents did happen, some minor, some major, some leading to death. One of the film’s participants even commented that park-goers seemed to think the possibility of dying was actually part of the experience. Some of the most notorious rides were the Cannonball Loop, The Tidal Wave Pool, the Super Go Carts, Battle Tanks, Alpine Slide and The Tarzan Swing. The details of the Cannonball Loop are initially funny, and it seems like an amazing thing to experience, but then you have to wonder how anyone thought a human body could just woosh down a hill in a totally dark tube, take a loop with ease and come out the other end unscathed. It became clear as employees were given $100 cash to test the ride that they needed more padding inside the loop, but after that was added they couldn’t figure out why the riders were coming out with lacerations. The reason: teeth that had become embedded in the padding. There was also the problem of people getting stuck at the top of the loop which required a trap door to be installed so they could be extricated. It’s surprising that when the ride was tested with dummies and they all came out dismembered that anyone thought this water slide was a good idea, especially with the consideration that the rider also had to be exactly the right height and weight to ride it.
The film tells how Mulvihill sought to bring more carefree danger and excitement to the park while disregarding the number of injuries and covering up the deaths. People were drowning in the Tidal Wave pool because it was too packed with people and the waves were much too strong for the size of the pool and the crowd, and the water was so murky that lifeguards couldn’t see if someone slipped under the water, earning it the nickname the Grave Pool. One of the most notorious incidents involved 19-year-old George Larssson, who died after an accident on the Alpine Slide. Featuring heartwrenching interviews with Larsson’s mother and brother, they detail how George was thrown from his cart on the slide, bashing his head on a rock that had previously been ordered removed. The death, however, was not reported to the state because, as he Larssons allege, Mulvihill concocted a story that George was a park employee and thus the death did not have to be reported. He also claimed the accident happened at night, in the rain, while the film details the accident happened on a dry, sunny day. It’s this section later in the film that casts a pall over the proceedings, painting Mulvihill as a careless man looking to protect his bank account, even going so far as to threaten a local newspaper unless they fired a reporter investigating him (they did and she has her own story to tell in the film).
Class Action Park is a fun-filled ride through the unimaginable for its first two-thirds, marveling at how Mulvihill got away with what he did. It does take that darker turn for the last third as Mulvihill is unmasked as cold and calculating, using his power and influence to not only suppress the reported injuries and deaths, but in how he dealt with the town of Vernon, at one point refusing to pay his lease on the property so they’d finally give up and let him buy the property outright. It does start to bring things down quite a bit, but then by the end, everyone except the Larssons try to bring it back around to what a great place Action Park was … so forget about those deaths … which is a bit jarring. I did enjoy the film but the last two moments are quite jarring as Gethard, who had detailed the thrill and dangers of the park, flips the viewer the bird while the final image features Larsson’s brother and mother visiting his grave. Those two moments juxtaposed against one another left a bad taste in my mouth. Overall, though, Class Action Park is an entertaining and informative document of a time and place of a bygone era that likely will never be seen again.
What did you think of the film? Did you visit Action Park? Sound off in the comments below!
HBO Max
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