In 2014, Andy Mulvihill took control of Mountain Creek Waterpark in New Jersey with a plan that surprised everyone. He wanted to change the name back to the one his father had used decades earlier: Action Park. The name came with a notorious reputation. People had gotten hurt there.
Some had died. Andy believed the new Action Park could be as fun as the old one, just without all the danger. He was wrong. The revival seemed like a bad gamble to many, but the owners had good reason to believe it could work.
A documentary called *The Most Insane Amusement Park Ever* had put the old park back in the public’s mind. It wasn’t exactly flattering, but it sparked interest. Bill Benneyan, the park president, admitted, “At first we were taken aback by the video, but we ended up being very pleased with the results. What came out of it were good stories and a lot of people wanting to go to the park.
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Test ads featuring the Action Park name showed that 74% of people who saw them had fond memories of their visits. Even New Jersey Senator Cory Booker joked on Twitter that despite the scars he still carried from previous visits, he wanted to go back. Strangely enough, the nostalgia extended to younger people who had never been to the park. They had grown up hearing stories from their parents and developed an interest through those tales.
So what were all those memories about? Action Park was one of America’s first water parks. It opened on July 4th, 1978, as a way for Andy’s father, Gene Mulvihill, to make money during the off-season at his ski resort, Vernon Valley Great Gorge. The first summer had just four attractions: a 2,700-foot Alpine Slide, two water slides, and a go-cart track.
It quickly expanded with more slides, tennis courts, and a softball field. But the rides were unlike anything at other parks. The Tarzan Swing let visitors swing out over a spring-fed pool and let go, plunging into near-freezing water. The cliff diving pool featured a 23-foot cliff where patrons jumped into water full of swimmers.
The Tidal Wave Pool held up to 1,000 people, got deeper without warning, and generated waves up to 40 inches high. Then there was the infamous Cannonball Loop, an enclosed slide with a full vertical loop. It was so terrifying that Gene Mulvihill had to bribe his employees to test it. Some smashed their front teeth in the process.
According to Andy, his father wasn’t interested in copying what everyone else did. He wanted to take the thrill of skiing, where you control your own action, and recreate it in a park that also served alcohol. He accepted the risk, believing it was what made the place fun. That philosophy led him to work with imaginative but not entirely qualified ride designers.
One of them later admitted that several rides were designed in-house by people without engineering degrees. He was one of them. The park was a massive success in the early and mid-1980s, but visitors didn’t always leave in the same condition they arrived in. Unsupervised teenagers frequently ran the attractions.
The park earned nicknames like Out of Action Park, Accident Park, Traction Park, and Friction Park. By 2014, though, the media was celebrating the return. Mashable’s headline read, “The world’s most dangerous amusement park opens its gates again. ” The New York Post declared, “The dangerous return of the world’s most insane theme park.
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The new owners swore the new park would be different. They weren’t selling danger anymore. Their new hook was nostalgia. They revived the original rainbow logo and sold humorous t-shirts, including one that proudly proclaimed, “I survived Action Park.
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It was meant to be a joke, but not everyone had actually survived Action Park. The first visitor to die was 19-year-old George Larson Jr. On July 8th, 1980, his car jumped the track on the Alpine Slide and his head hit a rock. He died 18 days later.
Gene Mulvihill told reporters Larson was an employee instead of reporting the death as required by law. Larson had briefly worked at the ski resort, but never at Action Park. Two years later, 15-year-old George Lopez drowned in the Tidal Wave Pool. Employees had long known the pool was too deep and the waves too powerful.
People who couldn’t swim routinely jumped in, and lifeguards couldn’t look away for a moment. A month later, 27-year-old Jeffrey Nathan was electrocuted on the Kayak Experience. His kayak tipped, he got out to right it, and his foot touched a grate in contact with exposed live wiring. He went into cardiac arrest and died at a nearby hospital.
On August 27th, 1984, 20-year-old Donald DePass drowned in the Cliff Diving Pool. Lifeguards tried to find him in the 15-foot-deep pool, but the dark bottom and murky water made him impossible to locate. EMTs couldn’t revive him. That same year, an unidentified visitor suffered a heart attack after hitting the icy cold spring water beneath the Tarzan Swing.
The water was typically 50 to 60 degrees Fahrenheit, far colder than the 70-degree water used elsewhere in the park. On July 19th, 1987, the Tidal Wave Pool claimed a second victim: 18-year-old Gregory Grandchamps. The staff had secretly started calling the attraction “the grave pool,” and the spot where the water reached shoulder height, “the death zone. ”
Despite all of this, Action Park avoided regulatory responsibility and stayed in business for nearly 20 years.
In 1996, Great American Recreation, the company through which Gene Mulvihill ran the park, filed for bankruptcy. The park expected to open for the 1997 summer season, but it never did. On September 2nd, 1996, the original Action Park closed. In 1998, Canadian resort developer Intrawest purchased the property and reopened it as Mountain Creek Waterpark.
The new owners closed several rides and added bilingual signs spelling out exactly what visitors should expect. Safety rules were strictly enforced. But the park lost its status as New Jersey’s largest water park, attendance fell, and by 2010, Intrawest filed for bankruptcy. The park was sold to the owners of the neighboring ski resort, now called Crystal Springs.
Those owners were a group of investors led by the Mulvihill family. They were back in charge. In 2012, they began advertising that “the action is back. ” But in October of that year, Gene Mulvihill died.
In 2013, the documentary brought the old park back into public consciousness and created a wave of nostalgia. The new owners decided to test the viability of the Action Park name with an April Fools’ Day prank. On April 1st, 2014, they replaced the Mountain Creek sign with the original Action Park sign. Finally, in 2014, they made it official and changed the name back to Action Park.
But the nostalgia didn’t translate into attendance or sales. Just two years later, on May 29th, 2016, the owners announced they were retiring the Action Park name and restoring the Mountain Creek brand. The study showed the name was fondly remembered, but mostly by older people, who don’t go to amusement parks that often. It wasn’t connecting with people under 34, the park’s actual target audience.
They found the name confusing because it didn’t suggest a water park. But the real problem went deeper. Benneyan explained it: “What we found out, and I’m a sucker for nostalgia, is to us Action Park represents not the park itself, but a time in history when life was different and a little more liberated and free. And while you can bring back a water park’s old name, you can’t bring back its moment in history.
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The decades when the original Action Park flourished coincided with the childhood and teen years of Gen X, the last unsupervised generation. Gene Mulvihill pushed the adventurous spirit of those times to its limits. But times had changed. Parental concerns and regulations have only grown stricter.
The old Action Park was a place where safety was a distant second to fun. Teens could go there and feel like grown-ups, free from being told how to behave. The new Action Park tried to let grown-ups feel like teens again. Its main attraction was the safety of nostalgia.
But as anyone who went there in its heyday could tell you, Action Park was never about safety.
