Marineland Is Unethical, And Worse, A Bad Theme Park
If you grew up around this part of the country, you know Marineland for exactly two things: severe animal abuse, and that inescapable jingle.
For everyone else, Marineland is a marine-life themed amusement park in Niagara Falls, Canada that’s been open since 1961. It’s most notorious for their exceptionally poor treatment of the sea animals in their care, as well as for management’s stubborn refusal to bend to activist pressure and change the park in any way. Many have expressed surprise that the park is still solvent, owing to its unpopularity with basically everyone.
I don’t want to undersell the animal abuse inherent to the foundations of the park. There’s some truly heinous shit that Marineland has pulled- but, in a way, I think that focusing on just that aspect of the park almost lets it off too easily. It acts as a lightning rod for criticism, when there’s so much else wrong about Marineland that goes unaddressed. Even if it fixed its treatment of animals overnight, it would still be deeply baffling as a theme park.
The most confusing thing, to me, is size and location. Marineland is huge. It’s bigger than all 4 of the Disney World parks combined. The first thing people notice when they go is just how empty it seems, not just because it’s a dying park that nobody likes, but because the handful of people that do go are spread out over an area that is roughly the size of Poland.
The pathways between areas are wide enough to drive several lanes of traffic through. There’s no ambient music being played, so all you hear is the humm of ride machinery and the distant noises of upset animals. The park has an inexplicable half-assed medieval theme, so you’ll occasionally run across run down, shitty looking 1500s cabins that were food stands a decade ago but have been closed since god-knows-when. There’s a real train track that runs through the park- not a ride train, an industrial train- because Marineland is somehow situated exactly between two factories that run raw materials between each other through the park.
It would be one thing if they needed all this space, but Marineland barely has any rides, and most of the ones they do have are lightly themed, off-the-shelf flat rides (think carnival rides but marginally safer). Many of these are closed often. One of their rides, a Topple Tower that they creatively named “Topple Tower”, was installed improperly in 2007 and was down regularly for maintenance until it closed permanently in 2011. They left it standing, abandoned, for 11 years. The ride they replaced it with, Star Voyager, is closed as of the day I’m writing this article.
Even the good stuff at Marineland is tinted with these incomprehensible design decisions. Take Sky Screamer. It’s absolutely their most iconic ride, a gigantic S&S drop tower you can see from any point in the Niagara Falls skyline. It literally towers over Marineland in every sense.
Riders can reach a maximum height of 450 feet off the ground… but the tower itself is only 300 feet tall. This is because there is a 150 foot hill you have to climb up in order to even get to the ride. Like everything in Marineland, this is not a small hike, and there’s no tram or escalator to make it easier. To get to the Sky Screamer, you’ll need to climb a mountain.
But the weirdest ride in the park has to be Dragon Mountain, Marineland’s sole roller coaster targeted to adults. I could dedicate another thousand words to it, but the gist of it is that Dragon Mountain is the only part of Marineland to feature any level of care or ambition… and it still fails in fascinating ways.
Built in the 80s as a counter to the competitive force of the recently opened Canada’s Wonderland, the original plans called for one of the largest roller coasters by track length in the world, with the riders traversing Marineland’s vast backlot, around a quarter-scale replica of Niagara Falls, and to end the ride by circling the inside of a model volcano.
And then they ran out of money.
What they ended up finishing was the track of the ride, the wireframe of the volcano, and an absurdly elaborate queue where you go through the mouth of a carved stone dragon. Eventually they got the money to finish the outer half of the volcano sometime in the late 2000s, 20 years after the ride was built.
Once you know this, you can really tell. There are some genuinely good elements, including a unique bowtie element, and it covers a staggering 30 acres of land. But there’s also long stretches of nothing happening because that’s where they were going to put the fake waterfall. And it was built in the 80s, so it’s really rough. It all averages out to an okay ride with a very strange history.
The key thing to understand is that Marineland is not a normal business. Their operational goal is not to entertain. It’s not conservation or education. They don’t even operate on the principle of attempting to make as much money as possible- if so, they’d cash out and sell their extremely valuable land. No. They operate out of spite.
They exist solely because people say they shouldn’t. They will keep existing as long as people say they can’t. It doesn’t matter how hated they are, how run-down the park is, how much it deteriorates, how much the animals suffer. Marineland, the weirdest, worst park in the world, is going to outlive all of us.