Anyway, there are also links between theme parks and politics — and not just because spending too long doing either can make you vomit.
Earlier this month, French President Emmanuel Macron sought Saudi investment to turn what was once the country’s biggest theme park into a manga-themed attraction. The site used to be home to Mirapolis, which celebrated French literature and culture (“c’mon kids, let’s go ride a rollercoaster based on Proust’s ‘À la recherche du temps perdu.’ The queues are short, but the ride lasts 200 hours”) but closed down in 1991 due to financial difficulties.
Then there’s the Puy du Fou theme park, which has one location in France and one in Spain, and now wants to open another in the U.K. Philippe de Villiers, its founder and president, has been linked with Russian President Vladimir Putin and previously proposed the construction of a theme park in Crimea after Russia’s annexation of the Black Sea peninsula in 2014.
Next comes Thierry Breton, the former European Commissioner for the Internal Market and Getting Into Fights With Elon Musk, who helped come up with the idea for a high-tech theme park called “Futuroscope,” just north of Poitiers in western France. Its tagline is: “Expect the unexpected,” which was very much the theme of Breton’s time in Brussels.
Theme parks aren’t just occasionally political though; they can also be weird.
There’s Wunderland Kalkar in Germany, which is on the site of a former nuclear power plant — one that was never operational, as the entire project was abandoned due to safety concerns. There’s South Korea’s Loveland, an adult-only sculpture park that features explicit artwork (maybe President Donald Trump found out about it just before cooling diplomatic ties with Seoul). And then there’s Colombia’s Parques Temáticos Hacienda Nápoles, a theme park on the grounds of former drug baron Pablo Escobar’s ranch (sounds like a wild ride).