Luna Park

Krustyland continues to delight and intimidate Universal guests at Universal Studios Florida and Hollywood, but what of creator Matt Groening’s other animated amusement park (that is not Itchy & Scratchy Land)?

Luna Park is something of a historical landmark in the Futurama universe, appearing in the show’s second-ever episode and serving as the first delivery of the full Planet Express crew. It’s a great location to break-in Fry for his brand new future. The name, at least, should be familiar comfort.

In the grand tradition of the golden age Luna Parks before it, this Luna Park is all about old-fashioned fun and rigged claw machines. The real advantage to this one, though, is that it’s actually on the moon.

Despite the morbid appeal of an entire amusement park hermetically sealed under a glass dome - see: Circus Circus’s Adventuredome - very little of Futurama’s Luna Park actually makes use of its location. The antique car equivalent lets drivers take a moon buggy down a very short and very constricted stretch of the lunar surface. Rule-breakers are ejected directly into the vacuum of space. But all-in-all, it’s mostly old-fashioned fun and rigged claw machines.

Mostly.

There are some welcome swings at certain cartoon mice. The design of Luna Park is credited to a crack team of “Fungineers.” The standout dark ride is an ode to old men of exotic seas, in this case Whalers on the Moon - “We’re whalers on the moon, we carry a harpoon, but there ain’t no whales so we tell tall tales and sing our whaling tune!” The park’s top-heavy mascot, Craterface, walks around wearing the celestial body from A Trip to the Moon for a head and confiscating beer, a jab at the infamously dry Disneyland.

In a parallel universe, there could’ve been a Luna Park at Universal instead of Krustyland or even beside it. Park surveys from the late 2000s collected opinions on the Futurama brand. For whatever reason, possibly due to muted feedback, nothing happened with the show. Now that Disney owns Fox and, by extension, Futurama, it’s unlikely to make any theme park appearance for the foreseeable future, even cryogenically frozen.

Wonder World

“Where happiness is king!”

The beauty of Wonder World is not the movie it’s a part of. As extensively detailed before on Theme Park Tourist, Beverly Hills Cop III is only worth watching for Wonder World. The beauty of it, instead, is in the mix.

A weaponized Sherman Brothers jingle welcomes one and all to the front gates of Cedar Fair’s Great America, then a Paramount property. The amusement half of Wonder World is a greatest hits collection of the park’s attractions. The iconic double-decker carousel. The dizzying Triple Wheel. Vortex twists through the background of every other shot. The Sky Ride. The train. Anyone fast on the pause button could waste an afternoon trying to tally it all. The movie really does make the small park look Hollywood-sized.

Some of that, admittedly, is a Hollywood trick.

The two marquee attractions of Wonder World are borrowed and stolen, respectively.

Alien Attack was shot on the Earthquake set from Universal’s tram tour. The recycled aliens are Battlestar Galactica Cylons. Everything explodes and shakes on the usual cue.

Land of the Dinosaurs is already 75% of the same name as Knott’s Berry Farm’s Kingdom of the Dinosaurs. The ride itself might even be more similar than that. The bubbling volcanoes. The leathery robots with stilted roars. Even the time-traveling sleighs right out of Jules Verne. It’s uncanny to the point of frequently mistaken identity.

But that’s kind of the point.

What a park that would be, to comfortably split the difference between amusement and theme park, white-knuckle rollercoasters and world-class dark rides. Many have tried - Busch Gardens Williamsburg’s Curse of DarKastle is the closest any American park has flown toward that sun - but it remains a fantasy, however plausible.

Wonder World’s cartoon mascots deserve their own round of applause. Like Walley World, they’re recognizable enough that you might assume you’ve seen them before. Unlike Walley World, they actually get some dedicated screen time, showing the costumed players marching to and from their posts and the plush versions hanging along the ring toss.

Plenty of movies and TV shows dream up their own amusement parks, but few invent an entire currency for it.

That’s the Wonder World difference.