On Thursday I took the kids (and fortysomething guest kid Trey) to Sea World in San Diego, also known as the Land of Shamu. Almost nine months earlier we had bought five tickets through a Chamber of Commerce promotion and had only a few days left to use them. I was willing to just let them go, but when my wife told me they had cost almost $200, we agreed I should use them with the kids even if she couldn’t go — and that meant going two days after Christmas.

Given that it was a few days after Christmas, my wife had asked, “Is Sea World even going to be open?”

Trey wondered the same thing.

A check of the website showed it was going to be open. I figured that since it was the holidays, we would have free run of the place.

Not quite.

I’ve been navigating the two-hour-plus course to San Diego for years, to attend the San Diego Comic Con (naturally!), to drop in on friends, conduct business, and put in at Tijuana for cigars and reminders of how fortunate I am. Comparatively speaking, it’s a drive I enjoy. On Thursday, though, it was a crawl all the way down, and once we arrived at our destination we learned why:

Evidently, everyone that day was going to Sea World.

After the three-hour trip down, we spent probably half an hour looking for a place to moor in the parking lot before I thought my head would explode and finally decided to dock in the middle of the pelagic puddle everyone else had been avoiding. I figured I’d grab out each kid, throw him or her clear of the water, jump clear myself, and leave Trey to swim for it. Even though we parked in Lake Erie and left the van about as far from the entrance as Lake Erie, this turned out to be a good decision, because during the 20-minute hike to the gate we never saw another parking space.

Once inside, the kids needed to eat. Immediately. We surfed past the Anheuser Busch pavilion, home to all the major park eateries, because I was sure we could find a hot dog stand or food cart inside and be done with it and then get on to rides and exhibits and shows and such. Here’s what I found out about Sea World: There are no hot dog stands or food carts, unless you classify snacks or candy as food. The restaurant we found with the shortest wait was an Italian fast-food chain. Forty minutes of waiting in line later, we had lunch for four, which meant pretty much a slice of pizza and a Coke for each, for $54. And then we spent 20 minutes eating it and watching the wealth of humanity shuffle by in short steps so as not to knock into each other. It was much like the classic Star Trek episode where the overpopulated planet is signified by 50 people jammed into a small viewing room.

It wasn’t too long before late afternoon arrived and the crowd thinned dramatically. Then we discovered that Sea World actually has many wonderful rides, shows, and attractions. The Shark Encounter is eerily beautiful — you walk down a tunnel encapsulated by a glass shark environment, and the sharks head right for you, mouths open, teeth bared. The Wild Arctic Base Station features polar bears, beluga whales and walruses in a mock frozen shipwreck environment both above and below ground. The penguin exhibit is entirely open air, with the penguins only inches away from us; that was very cool. And whoever put together the dolphin show knows how to do theatre: it was cleverly staged, highlighted the tricks and talents of the dolphins, and was performed with great panache and comic timing by both the humans and the animals. Really a great show.

Then there was Shamu.

Shamu is Sea World’s star. Trey and I wondered about Shamu on the way down. For one thing, given that there are three Sea Worlds and all claim to have Shamu, at least two of these three parks have to be Shamu-less. Either that, or this is one very travel-weary whale. Shamu’s show, when it is not Christmas, is called “Believe.” Shamu’s stadium features stadium seating, of course, around a watery playing pit backdropped by enormous rotating video screens. Hundreds of stage lights throw light from all sides. For the Christmas show, a large center screen showed either a solo guitarist playing Christmas ballads or, later, a female singer accompanying him not very skilfully. Between these two and then two different choral groups, gauzy lighting, and weepy music with a very 80’s lounge keyboard sound on the bottom, I thought, “This show is very over-produced.” Here’s the contrast:

Dolphin show: Minimal effects. Great show, displaying spot-on sense of timing and real talent.

Shamu show: Innumerable lights, giant rotating video screens, warbling overly sentimental music, candlelit chorales, and an almost utter lack of animal ability.

That’s right: The three whales did almost nothing. Each beached himself briefly to be rewarded with a fish, and they swam around a few times before going back into their holding tank. The rest of the time Shamu’s Christmas show was an old Lawrence Welk Show on an especially bad night.

Worse, none of the whales was introduced as “Shamu.” My kids wanted to know which one was Shamu. After all, he’s the star, isn’t he? (And a quick check on wikipedia upon return home confirmed that Shamu is indeed dead — died in 1971 — and no, Virginia, there is no Shamu in Shamu’s Christmas show.)

While we were watching this spectacle I started cracking wise to eldest son Lex. You could just feel everyone in the stadium falling for the beautiful gentle-seeming pony-tailed guitar player, everyone but us. I said to Lex, “Girls just love a guy who plays guitar like that. They get confused and think he’s sensitive, when really he’s just a jerk who plays guitar.” Lex laughed and said he’d have to learn guitar.

But Lex had the best line of the entire show, if not the entire day. Surveying the Shamu show and having noted Shamu’s evident absence, I said, “What do you think is on Shamu’s Christmas list?” Lex said, “Revenge.”

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 30th, 2006 at 10:34 pm and is filed under On seeing, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.