The Land of the Shirt Tales

First off, if you need a refresher course in Shirt Tales 101 then click on the title of this post for an archive of all Shirt Tales related posts on WWoB. Oh, it's good reading!

Now...if you're still with us, today we're proud to present this scan from a 1984 Six Flags Great Adventure brochure for their new Shirt Tales Land attraction. In 1984, things like ball pits, net climbs and giant tubes to crawl through were considered state-of-the-art entertainment that you could only find at a big fancy amusement park. Nowadays you can walk down to the corner mini-golf place and do all that stuff for five bucks! BUT...you won't get the Shirt Tales!

Shirt Tales Land featured unimaginatively named attractions like "Tyg's Gymnasium", "Rick's Ball Crawl", and "Bogey's Adventure House". It's always kind of lame when the best a park can do is attach a character's name to a ride and that's the end of the themeing. At least "Digger's Underground Climb" makes a little sense, since he's a mole...and he digs...underground!?!

The Shirt Tales seemed like such a quick blip on the pop culture radar, yet they managed to anchor the kids section of most of the Six Flags parks back in the 80's. Today, Bugs Bunny and his gang are the mascots in the kiddie area of a Six Flags park. You'd be hard pressed to find alot of the same physical activities for kids. Motorized rides have replaces these giant playgrounds at so many theme parks because of the public's changing tastes and also for insurance reasons! Kings Dominion used to have a huge Flintstones themed play area, which is now a quarter of the size and re themed to a construction site. How much does that eat me up inside!?