I’ve had a long fascination with the now-defunct Action Park. Not “long” as in “ever since people started writing about it on the Internet”, but “long” as in “ever since I started seeing commercials for the place as a child”. I was born in Rockland County in 1985, and while that meant I was too young to experience Action Park at its peak, it still existed, still advertised heavily on TV, and so still appeared intoxicatingly cool to me.
Think about it - what child wouldn’t be enticed by a place literally named Action Park, that billed itself as the “World’s Largest Water Park”, and which claimed to be only “minutes away in nearby Vernon, NJ”?
In the end, I never did get to go, and in retrospect that was very much a good thing. I recently watched the documentary Class Action Park, and it served as a powerful (though still entertaining) reminder that, despite all the words written about Action Park for the sake of Internet Humor Points, it was not a good place to be, at pretty much any time.