Where does Canada's Wonderland fit, 37 years later, in a world with no shortage of amusement?

Is it mere nostalgia that still attracts crowds by the millions--the wistful novelty of a throwback; the return to an era of more tangible wonder?

Nationalpost.com
July 24, 2018
Calum Marsh

See the teeming people. See the corkscrews of knotted steel. See the lines miles-long and selfie-taking tourists. See the funnel cakes and the overpriced cups of beer, the bags of miniature sugared donuts and the lukewarm slabs of buffalo chicken. See the plush yellow Minions and the impossible games of skill and chance one must play to win them, and see the tour groups of school kids and the busloads of tourists milling around in a daze from all the candy and the sun. See Windseeker and Skyhawk and the antique carousel. See White Water Canyon and Action Zone and something called Boo Blasters on Boo Hill. See the entrance, a riot of metal detectors and impatient faces. See the exit, not a moment too soon.

This is Canada’s Wonderland: the 14-million-square-foot theme park north of Toronto that has long endured as this country’s answer to Disneyland, as vast and as spectacular today as when it opened 37 years ago. There are more rides and roller-coasters here than almost anywhere else on the planet, and over the course of its five-month summer season, it draws close to four-million visitors eager to suffer its formidable thrills.

Ask anyone in Ontario about Canada’s Wonderland, and they will share memories of Wild Beast and The Bat and the Mighty Canadian Minebuster--memories either fond or mortified depending on the disposition of the Ontarian. This is the reward for the park’s longevity. It’s an indelible part of our modern cultural history. But four decades is a long time to remain exciting, and with every year that passes it is surely harder, one presumes, for the once cutting-edge technology that roused and awed Canadians to continue rousing and wowing them.

It’s in the nature of the spectacular to seem less so over time. Is it mere nostalgia that still attracts crowds by the millions--the wistful novelty of a throwback; the return to an era of more tangible wonder? The daunting metal superstructures that loom over Vaughn can hardly help but seem quaint compared to the marvel of our digital recreations, no matter how extravagant or extraordinary. We are inundated every minute now by virtual distractions vying for our attention from the face of our personal screens. How can a loop-the-loop possibly compete? Where does the amusement park fit into a world that doesn’t want for amusement?

One of the first things anyone familiar with Canada’s Wonderland from their childhood will notice, stepping foot onto the park grounds in 2018, is, indeed, how familiar Canada’s Wonderland is from childhood. The crowded entrance still heralds the mouth of the Disney-like International Street and the foot of the waterfall-draped Wonder Mountain. The same costly snack foods still surround the same food stalls and refreshment stands, and the same arduous midway challenges still line the same boulevards and thoroughfares tempting you to compete for the same cheap prizes for the same exorbitant rates. The same rapacious photographers roam the same territory urging you to buy the same family snapshots. Even the same sales clerks are on hand to shell the same old-timey photos and henna tattoos.

The park’s 69 extant rides--among them not only roller-coasters but bumper cars, river-rapids log rides, swinging pendulums, carousels, mini-putt courses, go-karts and free-fall swings--represent the history of Wonderland and the evolution of amusement park technology and design. New rides are terrifically expensive and time-consuming to build; they are, therefore, rarely retired, and most of the original attractions present when the park was constructed in 1981 remain active today. This accounts for the somewhat uncanny sensation which seems to preside. Practically every roller-coaster one remembers still stands as if it has gone utterly unchanged in decades. In many cases, it actually has.

The only thing different about some of Wonderland’s most famous rides are the names: the park’s movie-inspired attractions were re-christened when Cedar Fair acquired it from Paramount in 2006. Top Gun is now known as Flight Deck; Tomb Raider is now called Time Warp. Even the short-lived Italian Job ride from 2003 gave up its title to become The Backlot Stunt Coaster.

It is satisfying to be reunited with the top-of-the-line coasters whose arrival in their day seemed to this wide-eyed child a miracle on the order of a godsend. How pleased I was to shuttle up the mountainside ascent of Vortex, with its hanging little metal boats and dazzlingly precarious tilt, and how sentimental it felt to endure the interminable backwards climb of The Bat, despite being once again traumatized by that steady tick-tick-tick. Vortex and The Bat were erected in the 1990s. They do not, needless to say, feel like relics of the past: It’s difficult for anything so exhilarating to seem particularly old. Nor do I think the enjoyment was strictly a matter of me pining for my youth, either. Plenty of little kids were whooping through these rides with glee that day, too--there making happy memories they will no doubt be nostalgic for some day.

It is an irony entirely typical of such things that the most dated aspects of Canada’s Wonderland are its most craven and transparent efforts to keep up with the times. “Download Your Fun,” read colourful billboards plastered about the park. These are advertising Wonderland’s fancy new mobile app, which allows guests to share photos and consult digital maps and which is, of course, completely unnecessary. A number of rides, meanwhile, capitalize on such state-of-the-art innovations as virtual reality and 4D animation--to uniformly disastrous effect. By far the worst attraction at Wonderland is an interactive roller-coaster called Wonder Mountain’s Guardian. Ambitious, unconventional and obviously very expensive, it combines computer animation, 3D glasses, plastic arcade guns, and pyrotechnics. It’s unbelievably embarrassing and a total waste of time.

I waited more than an hour to board the Guardian and left so demoralized and resentful that I wanted to go home then and there. But I couldn’t give up on Wonderland without trying out its newest traditional roller-coaster: Leviathan, a monster of a ride from 2012 that I’d been assured was worth the price of admission alone. Leviathan is a teal-coloured steel roller-coaster so tall and so fast it can only be described as idiotic. That is what impresses you, standing beneath its medieval-themed entrance, craning your neck way up toward its stratospheric summit: such a ludicrous feat of mechanical engineering, in defiance of gravity and all natural laws of physics, is the product of monumental idiocy. It is an Icarian folly--a crime against order and humility. Mankind was not meant to reach such heights or such speeds. And certainly not in a car the size of a barber’s chair, unprotected from the elements.

You queue for hours in a state of bone-deep dread among hundreds likewise fated, inured too fast to the screams of humbled terror emanating from above. You reassure yourself ineffectually with safety statistics and speculation about the manufacturer’s liability in the case of a wrongful death lawsuit. You pray. A teenage attendant barely old enough to drive and here entrusted with your life ushers you into an undersized seat at the front of the fibreglass train with an indifference that, ironically, is the most confidence-inspiring sight around. You settle into the ride certain that if you die your last thought will be I am an idiot.

Leviathan is both the tallest and fastest roller-coaster in Canada, and among the 10 tallest and fastest roller-coasters in the world. It whisks you more than 300 feet in the air, then catapults you to the ground at a nearly 90° angle at almost 150 kilometres per hour--three figures incapable of doing justice to the bodily experience they represent. The ride lasts three-and-a-half minutes and bears the visceral intensity of a thousand-foot bungee jump and a multi-car highway pileup combined. I spent the duration looking like Keir Dullea at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and I walked away more limber than after a full day of hot yoga.

Why would Canada’s Wonderland ever think it needs to keep up with passing fads or fancies when it has a classical ride as triumphant and mesmerizing as Leviathan on its grounds?

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This experience so handily trumps the Guardian and its tawdry arcade-game mechanics--makes that whole gimmicky experience feel so unmistakably ridiculous--that you can’t imagine why the park would ever feel self-conscious about its relevance in the digital age. A full-body tactile thrill like Leviathan, that mammoth corporeal joy of fibreglass and steel, cuts swiftly through the distractions of the smartphone and the internet, of social media check-ins and push alerts. It can’t be replicated or contended with by anything digital because its pure physicality is too potent, too powerful, too profound.

It dawns on you when you exit one of these mega-coasters: how can anything this bodily seem dated, anyway? We are all bodies, after all, and no matter how much of our lives we live in the virtual world these days, there’s nothing like what we can feel. To invoke a cliché, the amusement park is as relevant today as it has ever been--maybe, in its capacity to penetrate the haze of a digital existence, more relevant still. It just isn’t relevant in its most desperate efforts to be.

So, forget the virtual-reality embellishments and the 4D gimmicks, the mobile apps and the grounds-wide WiFi. See the physical stuff--the stuff of old. See the corkscrews of knotted steel. See the park, and not a moment too soon.