Park People
www.parkworld-online.com
Before
After
I will repair Lady of the
Lake for billionaire George Barber. It was destroyed by one of the recent hurricanes in Alabama. I will take parts that remain of her and overhaul her completely.
started out as an April Fool’s joke. April Fool’s day, I do something, you know, that pops up, it’s just very temporary. It pops up in a locale, never the same place twice, never the same display twice. This is actually the busiest time of the year for me because everybody in the theme park business wants all this stuff now! When a lot of other people are struggling for work...I’m slammin’!” “Unlike some other prop builders, as an entertainer myself, I understand the showmanship of how the pieces should ultimately present themselves. After all, every one of the pieces is designed to entertain. It’s their job, and it’s my job to make sure they do it.”
Art of fibreglass
“Plus, I have my own parks and other attractions that I’ve built. I’m trying to take ‘roadside’ to a whole different level. My biggest fans of Dinosaur Kingdom
II...you might be surprised: millennials, Generation X-ers, the young people, they absolutely love this
place...because this is something, you’ve got to keep in mind, that they’ve never seen before. A lot of roadside attractions disappeared in the ‘70s and ‘80s but they were very powerful in the ‘50s and ‘60s. So for someone to drive down the road
and do a double-take, it’s about extracting emotion from someone. That’s what it’s all about and ultimately inspiring people
“I was about 19 years old; I’d done some papier- mâché in the past but I had this idea to open up this monster museum. I originally wanted to build this down at Virginia Beach. I didn’t know anything about business so I went down to Virginia Beach and I was sort of laughed out of town. The irony is now I build all the attractions down there, but I came to Natural Bridge. It’s a lot closer to my home which is Waynesboro, that’s where I was born and raised, and so I came to Natural Bridge and found a piece of property and opened up this insanely crazy idea of a monster museum in 1982.
“There was only a limited market building monsters but I had so many people that wanted so many other figures and I had to basically learn how to build figures that were going to be more durable, more substantial, something that’s going to last outside. People wanted things up on their signs, most of my stuff was built for indoors. I learned the art of fibreglass at a very early age and developed my own technique. What I do is I’ll coat it with fiberglass but I’ll lay cotton over it first. So I’ll build a skin out of cotton and then fibreglass over the top of that to make it stiff. Nobody else does this.”
Disney knew
“There’s a lot of folks that don’t really even consider fibreglass work artwork, stuff on the mini-golf, the stuff at the theme park. They don’t really consider that art. I myself struggle with that because art is so subjective. You take somebody, you take a monkey that can throw
60 DECEMBER 2020
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