Abandoned Amusement Park

If you look at the pictures of the abandoned Nara Dreamland amusement park in Japan you can almost see the zombies hiding in every corner waiting to jump out at you like they did in Zombieland.

Nara Dreamland was a Disneyland clone, and I mean clone, which opened in 1961.  Everything from the style of the souvenir map, to the monorail to the Matterhorn like mountain ride, is essentially lifted from Disneyland. Somehow this place avoided the global corporate wrath of the Disney Corporation and remained open until 2006. Dreamland looks like an alternate universe Disneyland, maybe one where the island sunk and Walt Disney was never part of the Dharma Initiative.

That was a joke for you lost fans, but if you go to this website you will see a trip report that kind of explains what I mean. Dreamland was equal parts dream and dump. It was a rip-off whose biggest attraction was a roller coaster called Screw.

The park remains standing though and while looking for information on something else I found a hearty urban explorer's pictures of his self-guided tour of the remains of the Dreamland Amusement Park. It is kind of creepy, but to be honest a lot of the stuff looks like it is in decent shape and it could be reopened without too much trouble. 

Anyway, I have always dreamed of opening an amusement park, a dream that will no doubt die with me. Once I did a sketch of an SLG amusement park and I was thinking of trying to turn it into a virtual world, but I have neither the skill or patience to pull that off. Plus I think a lot of the people I publish would not okay my using their property that way, even if it was a flight of fancy. But I digress.

The point is that every time I started to draw something, Disneyland always seemed to be the model, and it was hard to move beyond it. I guess someone else had a similar dream and decided the best thing to do was to copy it.