Doctor Jones and the Template of Doom

One big ongoing thing during the late eighties and nineties was the hype around Universal Studios beginning operations in Orlando. This bled over into the theme party biz a few times when our crackerjack sales department sold "Back Lot" parties. Mostly this involved renaming and repainting old stuff. For instance, rearrange the decompression chamber from the "Undersea World," paint it dark blue and call it "The Bat Cave."

The coolest thing, though, was the Indiana Jones cave. We took our two swamp ponds and the fiberglass rocks from the "Pirate" parties and set up the two rock archways as the entrance and the dead end. At the end we rigged two pumps to create the double waterfall that that rock archway was actually designed to handle, with the path taking guests between falls. One fell into a fiberglass rock with a built-in deep pool, into which we placed bones from the human skeleton that had broken years before. Between the entrance arch and the waterfall arch we flanked the path with every rock we had in stock, which was a lot, thatched it over and dressed it up with erosion cloth, reed fencing, areca palms, ferns and whatever else there was to turn the pile of rocks into a cave.

The purchasing department provided us with bushels of large, brightly colored bugs, lizards, snakes and rodents. We placed these throughout such that anywhere you looked and anywhere you might put your hand, there was a critter of some kind. (Of course, after the first time out our supply of critters was reduced by about 75% due to theft by party goers!) Just before party time, we broke out the cobweb machines, went in and went crazy with the cobwebs.

During the party, guests could sign up to be Indiana Jones in a video taped adventure in the cave, taking a tape home as a souvenir. Very clever, really, and hokey as hell. Of course, they weren't really prepared for the reality of it: they didn't have the hat and they didn't have the brown leather jacket! Lucky for them, they had a guy (me) with a brown leather jacket for riding my motorcycle, and several fedora styles from which to choose. Saved the day again!

Needless to say, the cave required exacting placement of ponds, rocks, archways and pumps to make it work properly. So when we invented it in the shop the first time, we laid it all out on quarter inch plywood, marking the placement of each element for future reference: The Template of Doom!