Park People
www.parkworld-online.com
Three Americans have been
memorialised with statues in their parks. Walt Disney is depicted with Mickey Mouse at Disneyland, Magic Kingdom, Tokyo Disneyland, and Disneyland Paris. Milton
Hershey’s likeness greets visitors at Hersheypark, and Mark Cline stands heroically in Civil War dress inside Dinosaur Kingdom II, tongue firmly in cheek.
a bucket of paint in front of a fan and splatter up on the wall and that’s artwork? And you take someone like Norman Rockwell who never considered himself an artist. He was an illustrator, so I guess you might say that I consider myself more of an entertainer that knows how to do art.”
That art includes making sculptures that are a play on words, such as a donkey jumping through the number nine, Cline dubbed it “Asinine.”
Standing in front of monster sculpture he says, “That’s actually my face (pointing to left side of the monster), that’s my dad’s face (pointing to right side of it). We made moulds of our faces. I’ve been doing this a long time. It’s kind of follow the dream, and I still do comics. “There’s a lot of ways that I approach a job. I have somebody to come to me and they say, ‘We’ve got a mini-golf; we want something
here...design something.’ I have some people that want something specific and so the people that want, say, a dinosaur for instance, I’ll say, ‘What’s your landscape like? Where’s he, first of all, where’s he going to be standing? What kind of dinosaur do you want? When people are walking out of the woods, which way do you want him looking?’ So it’s not just a matter ‘I just want a dinosaur’. Let’s make this so it actually works your area.”
“This is the concept drawing for the trees and it started out like this and then we decided to turn that more into an entrance and here is the actual drawing of the sizes so people know exactly what they’re going to get when
they get it and how big it’s going to be. It’s good to put in personality. I’m trying to put personality into every one of my characters. It plays a big part in it, I mean, Disney knew this.”
A statue in your yard
A lot of what Cline does these days is fixing pieces that are considered totally destroyed. Not so for him. “Lots of stuff gets damaged over the years for whatever reason,” he explains. “Trees fall on them. They get hit by trucks, heavy equipment, or just wear down over the years. I’ve done lots of repair work. A few years ago, I repaired the giant gorilla down at the Ocean Breeze Waterpark in Virginia Beach. There are very very few people out there that repair the stuff properly. The Lady of the Lake in Alabama was just destroyed by the recent hurricane. I built her several years ago and will be repairing her in the near future. I have a whale here that had been damaged. It was at the Enchanted Forest in Maryland for over 50 years. I totally overhauled her.”
“I want to focus more on my attraction down here and my ghost tour but the big thing I’m planning on doing at some point is turning this into a school where I can teach this. When I’m gone, there’s going to be other prop makers but nobody doing it the way that I do it and I feel it’s important to pass that on. It’s not how famous I can be or how much money I can make, it’s never really been about all that. You know, you got to keep in mind, I was a just a kid from Waynesboro that just had a big dream and I just wanted to entertain people. Bringing laughter to people, heals people. I believe that this world would be a much happier place if everyone had a fibreglass statue in their front yard. I mean if you opened up your window and looked out and saw a big giant out there smiling and holding a big ice cream cone, I mean how could you not start off your day happy?”
62
DECEMBER 2020
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