One of the nation's oldest marine parks may tank soon, thanks to the inexorable drain of central Florida's tourism megamonster. Marineland, located on the Atlantic coast north of Daytona Beach and south of St. Augustine, has been a required "just off" I-95 stop for vacationing families since 1937. Sixty years later, with drooping attendance and the pressure to compete with the likes of Disney and Sea World, Marineland has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Marineland started as an underwater movie studio, and even incorporated as the town of Marineland in 1940. Postcards and films from the 1950s and '60s show a happy-go-lucky attraction -- giant underwater tank shows with leaping porpoises snatching reward fish from the mouths of their trainers.

Performances in recent decades were still imbued with classic, canny Sunshine State showmanship: a poodle would ride a surfboard pulled by a porpoise; a poolside campfire, out of control and part of a plywood Smoky the Bear tableau, effortlessly extinguished by dolphins; three more hurtling simultaneously through tiny rings twenty feet in the air.

Marineland features the only electric eel theater show we've seen. "Static," the star performer, sits sullenly in his display tank until show time, when a rubber-gloved Marineland employee starts poking him with a metal rod. Static responds with a burst of high-voltage electricity, illuminating a voltage meter. "Wahhhhhhhhhhh!!" sounds the buzzer. "600 volts -- how about that, folks?" cheers the prodder. "That's enough current to paralyze a full-grown horse!"

Visitors also have a special fondness for the Moby Dick Cocktail Lounge, or the Aquarius Theater, where the "world exclusive" showing of Sea Dream "in superdimensional 3-D space vision" was held every hour, on the hour for many years.

But these kind of thrills are lost in the Orlando area feeding frenzy. Marineland needs enough visitors to keep up payments on $9.7 million dollars in municipal bonds. And while some attractions, like the Gulf Coast's Weeki Wachee, still cling to market niches, theme parks roll over Marineland with their moody super-cetaceans and 6-million volt extravaganzas.

[04/12/1998]