Post #376335 by Tangaroa on Fri, Apr 25, 2008 8:23 PM

On 2008-04-25 07:13, Cammo wrote:

This is all even more amazing, because George has half of his face burned off. Up close he looks kind of like Vincent Price in The Abominable Dr. Phibes.

When I interviewed George, he wore his eyepatch too! An awesome character he was...

To ease Sven's troubled mind, I would say this... Millay went to a lot of trouble to have Gruen & Associates design the original park in a Polynesian-Modern style, when it first opened in 1964. My opinion is that he likely wouldn't have been happy about the demolition of that A-frame. Pure supposition on my part however. But when he did Sea World Florida in '73, it also had a Poly-pop influence, even with it's own version of the Hawaiian Punch Village.

If you compare the '64 aerial shot:

with this current one on Google maps:

http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=32.765694,-117.226267&spn=0.005322,0.005482&t=k&hl=en

you can see that the original A-frame entrance sat about where the current Shamu stadium is today. I recall that turtle pond was there still in the 80s - so perhaps that is where the confusion stems from..?

It likely went out in 1971 - Shamu got the first version of that stadium (previously, he was on display in a small tank) in June of that year. The original Moffat and Nichol designed stadium held 200,000 gallons and had a 3,000 seat grandstand. Of course, it has been redesigned several times since then.

There is also evidence that the parent company was finding Polynesian design "old hat" by at least the mid-70s.

Here's an excerpt from Susan G. Davis' excellent treatise - 'Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture and the Sea World Experience' :

"As the park negotiated more acreage from the city, designers tried to blend new ideas into the older park. Trading the need to expand and intensify attractions against the homogeneity of its original landscape, Sea World began to break up the Pan-Pacific architectural consistency of Gruen's design and gradually adopted a more scientific approach to themed nature. The mass cultural South Pacific resolved into architectural diversity and sometimes dissonance, held loosely together by tropical plantings.
The process was piecemeal. Sea World saw bursts of construction in the mid-1960s after the introduction of Shamu, and as early as 1966 it had tripled its original acreage. Another wave of construction in the middle-seventies added more structures and spaces for mass viewing, including two large stadiums for animal performances."

Of course, it was that Polynesian "homogeneity" that Victor Gruen had created that was so appealing. By the early 1980s, Sea World had lost most of that appeal. And with the shuttering of the Hawaiian Punch Village, and the eventual demolition of the Theater of the Sea (replaced by the Shipwreck Rapids ride in 1999), most evidence of Poly-pop or 60s modernism, was gone. About all that was left was some attractive landscaping.

Not so-fun fact: Millay was forced out by his board of directors after his difficulties getting Florida Sea World up and running. The "Scientific" designs followed soon after.

[ Edited by: Tangaroa 2008-04-25 20:26 ]