So tonight I found out about the proposed right wing Disneyland in Oklahoma. Sorta.
Oh my GOD I'm putting this thing in my fucking video game. Are you fucking KIDDING me I already have a fucking Route 66 motif going on in-between all of my games Oh My Fucking God oh my fucking god. Holy shit thank you so much for bringing this stupid piece of shit nightmare theme park to my attention. This is like. SO FUCKING PERFECT. It's like, SO FUCKING CLOSE to Afton, Oklahoma, too, which is where the finale of my last game was set. 17 minute drive. I mean what the fuck.
It's so funny cause, as my dad puts it, car culture and the freedom to go anywhere is what defined his era(late Boomer/Early Gen X). With Suburbia taking away third spaces, it's not a surprise that the car became the center of our cultural touchstones in the 60s-90s. However, that same machine and culture destroyed Americana and then ate itself. We wouldn't have a lot of chain stores without the parking minimums creating sprawling parking lots that only national corpos could afford. Downtowns died because nobody could afford to pave over these "America Heartland" people's "paradise" and put up a parking lot. Climate Town recently made a great video on this topic, I wholly recommend it.
We can't even build our cultures around our cars anymore, cause the pursuit to make cars economical has taken all the vibrancy out of design. I don't think it's coincidence that Top Gear took off like it did right when the economy went to shit in 2008 (not to mention the cash for clunkers shitshow). Nobody could afford the cool cars and needed to live vicariously through these presenters. In reality, it became SUVs all the way down and they all look the god damn same. Instead of making them more efficient to meet environmental standards, the corpos would rather discontinue iconic brands(Dodge Challenger) or paradoxically making trucks bigger and less efficient to jump through environmental regulation loopholes. Car companies killed car culture, just like they killed third spaces, downtowns, trains, public transportation, the environment, and our old communities.
