I grew up when Taman festival was being built and it actually was open for a year or so. My brothers and sister and I had free roam of the place. It was effectively our own giant amusement park because almost no one else was ever there. They had a giant reptile petting zoo (with the hungry crocs below of course) and we’d always go there. They were so ambitious at time of opening, talk about building a semi underwater hotel, zero gravity roller coaster, etc. they actually did start on that roller coaster but never finished. You can prly still finds parts of it gathering dust. Pretty sure it was all a giant money laundering operation. It was a really bizarre location to build a giant theme park. I mean we had just finished building a house in the middle of nowhere (pedang galak, an area known more for black magic competitions and poisonous snakes). It bordered on a river / jungle. Hard to emphasize how not ideal of a location it was for a giant theme park. Cool for us though
I'm not sure if it's still active, but early on in the series, the intention was also to create a VR Park of all of the defunct rides that he was covering: https://defunctland.com/vr-park/
That webpage states it's still being worked on, but the page is not accessible unless you find it through a search engine.
>The adult Atlantis dolphins had been performing in captivity for almost a decade, and the captive-born juveniles had never hunted in the wild. They all needed to be shown how to hunt for fish. While some of the dolphins responded immediately, the captive-born dolphins “seemed to treat the exercise as a game and would often all chase the same fish, competing more with each other than actually showing any ability to forage” according to researcher Kelly Waples.
Not big enough to make it onto Atlas Obscura but in El Cajon California (San Diego County) https://hiddensandiego.com/things-to-do/places/marshall-scot... still intact they tried to open the Go Kart track a few years ago but the church next door put in a tremendous number of noise complaints getting the effort shut down.
The theme seems to be similar: a park was built once -> lot of people used it -> repairs/maintenance was not done or was not done enough -> park got dangerous due to neglect -> less people visit it -> park gets closed down
If something is literally a novelty, there's an inherent boom-and-bust dynamic to that. Travelling fairs are one alternative for places that don't have enough demand to sustain a permanent amusement park, but those have their own issues.
