Review - Class Action Park

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”¹?

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.

Most of the information in Class Action Park can be found on the Internet, including many of the same testimonials, urban legends, and other assorted stories. The film does have the advantage of getting interviews with former park guests and staff, which adds a sense of realness to said stories that you can’t get from a flippant list article. There is also some new (to me) information about the business side of the company, which is as sleazy as you might think (more on that later).

But what really makes Class Action so good is the fact that it offers a much needed sense of context and seriousness to the story. For most of its runtime, the film has the same wild, “can you believe this happened?” attitude you’ll find in most retrospectives about Action Park, but it eventually takes a turn for the serious. Rather than merely mention the fact that there were multiple preventable fatalities at Action Park, the filmmakers interview the family of the park’s first victim. Through them, we learn how their son died due to poorly maintained park grounds, and how the Park tried to (and succeeded at) convincing the media that the victim was an employee rather than a guest². And we learn that the family was dissuaded from filing a lawsuit, on account of the fact that the park was insured by a fake company created by the park owner himself (and that this act of fraud was simply ignored by every authority at every level thanks to a combination of bribes, cronyism, and more).

It is at this point that the documentary really paints a picture about Action Park. It makes the argument that it was very much a product of Ronald Reagan’s America, a place where actual legal regulations were replaced by paeans to “personal responsibility”, where the “Greed is Good” ethos immortalized in Wall Street was encouraged (in part thanks to a naive belief Trickle Down Economics), and where Latchkey kids were commonplace. This is the reality that spawned a park in which literal teenagers were in charge of daily operations, where alcohol ran rampant, and where major scrapes and burns were treated with a mix of iodine and isopropyl in a dirty spray bottle.

One of Class Action Park’s interview subjects is comedian Chris Gethard (a man who is talented, honest, and emotionally intelligent enough to make a one-man show - with jokes! - about his struggles with depression and suicide). The documentary is filled with Tri-State Area Trash who do nothing but brag about their Action Park war stories, while lamenting the fact that kids today are “too soft”. And then there’s Gethard, who also shares his war stories, but he is the only one honest enough to talk about how scared he was most of the time. He is the only interview subject willing and able to describe just how nightmarish an Action Park ride could be. And in the film’s denouement, it is Gethard who says what needs to be said.

Namely, that Action Park was not a good place. It was a dangerous, unmonitored, and disgusting place, funded by (literal) Wall Street fraudsters (and quite possibly organized crime), and which succeeded in part thanks to a whole society coming together and deciding that they didn’t need to pay attention to Gen-X/older Millenials. The fact that so many interview subjects are able to laugh off their experiences does not mean that the park was okay, but rather that they were lucky that things didn’t go worse. Or as Gethard states in the end (I’m paraphrasing): “You’ve got all these people showing off their scars and talking about how ‘it was so messed up but so cool’. Then when they go to their therapist, they only want to talk about how it was messed up.’

Action Park exists in the past. And that is where it deserves to remain. Due to my age, I’ve obviously interacted with a lot of people in their late thirties and early forties. I’ve seen all too many examples of genuine emotional trauma being hidden (often poorly) behind a mask of false bravado. As much as the world today worries about the impact of helicopter parents, Class Action Park wants to remind us that the opposite extreme is at least as bad, but more likely worse.