Disneyland rides: The secret YouTuber changing everything we know about theme parks.

Mar 12, 2024

Kevin Perjurer, the pseudonymous creator of the wildly popular YouTube channel Defunctland, made it to Disney World just twice in his youth. On the final day of the first vacation, he purchased a souvenir book detailing the many attractions that had been paved over as the park grew. These were staples like Motor Boat Cruise and the Swiss Family Treehouse, once-legendary rides that would forever be confined to the 1970s and ’80s as they slowly atrophied in public memory.

But it wasn’t the rides themselves that Perjurer found fascinating—it was their transience. “Theme park attractions are such a temporary thing,” he told me on a recent phone call. “They’re this huge undertaking of art, architecture, and storytelling, and yet, they’re probably the most fickle and disposable medium. Once they’re gone, there’s no way to experience them again. Movies don’t go defunct, music doesn’t go defunct, but you’ll never be able to get on a shuttered ride again.” The only way to get a taste, he realized, was to pick up the pieces of the stories they left behind.

Years later, Perjurer has become YouTube-famous for doing exactly that. In rapturous, detailed histories of theme park minutiae, he dissects failed Disney ventures, the technological background of beloved attractions, and the chaos of bad ride engineering. But while much of his content gazes into the polished, billion-dollar enterprises in Orlando and Anaheim, his most illuminating work occurs when he explores the schlocky underbelly of lower-rent parks, and the glorious, anachronistic attractions that often barely function.

Perjurer’s deep dive into Garfield’s Nightmare, an infamous, discontinued dark ride at the Pittsburgh amusement park Kennywood, is a compelling example. Originally called the Old Mill, it opened in 2004 and was modeled after Disneyland’s It’s a Small World, albeit with the utopian Summer of Love multiculturalism replaced by copious lasagna gags. Patrons boarded plastic boats fastened to a steel rail under the sickly, chlorine-blue waterway, and for five minutes, they explored a panorama of Garfield’s greatest fears: evil veterinarians, demonic pepperoni pizzas, and a maleficent pod of sewer rats brewing up a pot of Cat Stew. There’s no shortage of ramshackle roadside theme parks in America moldering away on the fringes of spatial consciousness, but over the course of his investigation, Perjurer made a hilarious discovery about this one: Simply put, the young lovers of Pittsburgh were using the darkened halls of the Garfield’s Nightmare cruise to fuck in public. One source even claimed, with reasonable confidence, that he has a family member who was conceived in the corridors of Kennywood—hopefully under the prismatic glow of cartoon lasagna.

Securing such a salacious scoop was no small task. To peel back the layers of Garfield’s Nightmare, Perjurer spent hours picking through old Pittsburgh newspapers—some as old as 1934—and interviewing yinzer locals to corroborate the amorous allegations. The result is a remarkable bit of journalism on a subject that rarely gets put under the microscope, which might as well be Defunctland’s entire raison d’être: Perhaps if we better understand amusement parks, he argues, we can better understand America itself.

Delve deeper into his catalog, and you’ll see exactly what he means. Recent highlights include a deep dive on SeaWorld’s misguided thrill-park pivot, and an examination of a hilariously ill-conceived cone-shaped sandwich—known as the “Handwich”—that was introduced, and swiftly aborted, at the Magic Kingdom in the 1990s. Both are a profound reminder that America is less than 300 years old, and that our monuments and ruins tend to be engraved with the visage of Mickey Mouse. But my personal favorite Defunctland entry might be a mammoth 103-minute feature on the sociological impact of the FastPass—a system that allows attendees of Disney parks to skip the queues of certain rides, which effectively institutes a caste partition on family vacations. Yes, the Happiest Place on Earth is forever beholden to the almighty dollar.

In this way, Defunctland shows us just how much of a lens into culture amusement parks can be. “It’s untapped territory, and untapped analysis,” Perjurer explained. “People don’t analyze theme parks the way we analyze other forms of art. But I don’t think it’s possible to do enough analysis on how theme parks have affected American culture. From Disneyland to Disney World to Universal, all of these parks have changed the way we view ourselves, how we vacation, and how we engage with the media.”

This might sound like niche material, but Defunctland has become one of the most popular and acclaimed channels on YouTube. Perjurer’s FastPass documentary has reaped an astonishing 17 million views, to go along with 1.7 million total subscribers. The first Defunctland video was uploaded in 2018 and dug into a short-lived Tomorrowland attraction called ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter. Just five years later, he was making enough of a profit from his theme park coverage to call his hobby a job.

Perjurer keeps practically all of his biographical information close to the chest. He refuses to go on the record about his age, or his real name, or anything concrete about the amount of money he generates from the advertisements that dot his oeuvre, but he does concede that he lives in Florida and grew up in Kansas City. There, the young Perjurer had exactly one avenue for theme park kicks: a modest establishment called Worlds of Fun. The midsize park featured a respectable collection of roller coasters and water rides—all loosely based on Jules Verne’s vagabond classic, Around the World in 80 Days—but although it kept him entertained, he was well aware of its inadequacy relative to the Disney greats.

Craving the more monumental thrills of larger, more thoughtful parks, Perjurer spent his youth trawling through ancestral amusement park forums—those sanctums of insiders-only metadata that separate the casuals from the die-hards—which nurtured a desire to think critically about the pocket dimensions of towering brand capital that dot the American heartland. (If you’ve ever met someone who can speak eloquently about Club 33, or knows how to secure reservations at the Pirates of the Carribbean restaurant, then you know this population well.) There, he absorbed a wealth of sources and insider knowledge, which would later become his secret sauce: With his ascetic devotion to the grind of research, he’s become something like the Robert Caro of roller coasters, poring through yellowed magazine articles, resuscitated URLs, and the ambient chatter of amusement park superfans until a narrative comes into view. Sometimes there’s a wealth of information to harvest, and other times, he has to pull gold out of one or two videos that showcase what it’s like inside, say, a long-gone Berenstain Bears attraction. He loves the hunt, and he has an uncanny knack for finding what he wants.

Witnessing the scale of Perjurer’s reporting is worth the price of admission alone, especially when he finds a highly specific detail nobody’s talking about, or goes to great lengths to re-create a pivotal scene. In the FastPass documentary, he hires an industrial engineer to simulate a Disney World facsimile in order to estimate the median number of attractions that guests who don’t use the system could expect to experience on a single visit. (The results are borderline criminal in their inequity, the data showing that some guests who didn’t use FastPass managed to experience only two attractions per day.) In the Handwich video, Perjurer pieces together the old recipe for those misbegotten bread cones, and re-creates three of those foodstuffs that haven’t been purchasable at a Disney park since roughly 1995. One of the best discoveries comes from an investigation of an atrocious ride based on the Wiggles—the imperially famous Australian children’s band. Perjurer eloquently boils down the many logistical gymnastics that harried this poor attraction. Six Flags couldn’t cast actors to portray the band because it’d be clear to kids that they weren’t the true Wiggles. So, instead, the amusement park put its staff in freakish costumes—with huge, borderline postmodern plastic masks molded to look like the band members’ faces—to get around the challenge. For my money, the best Defunctland videos illuminate the inherent inanity of the industry. You mean to tell me there’s a Matterhorn in Southern California?

It’s details like these that strum the heartstrings of die-hard amusement park fans, but they also have a magnetic effect on viewers who may have overlooked the cultural gravity of rides and attractions. “My whole life, I sort of assumed that Disneyland, Universal, and other theme parks were for either children or adult children,” Slate editor and fellow Defunctland fan Isabelle Kohn told me. “But seeing the full backstory behind these rides and parks really illuminates how much of a creative feat they are. Every one is such a microcosmic example of the era it was created in—they’re like this adrenalized way to visit the past. You don’t realize it, driving by a theme park or standing in a sweltering line for a ride, but it really is kind of shocking how interesting the stories behind them are.” Kohn was particularly riled by a Defunctland exploration of Disney’s bizarre teen nightclub Videopolis, an extremely ’80s establishment that served 12-inch churros and wrung its hands about so-called “homosexual fast dancing.”

And for those who can’t experience the parks themselves, the Defunctland catalog provides a close second best. “[It’s] a way to talk and learn about theme parks when I’m not able to visit them,” said Corvyn Hartwick, a 25-year-old Defunctland superfan. Hartwick believes that the channel functions as something like an audio guide in an art gallery—yes, it’s possible to pore through the Louvre and enjoy its aesthetic pleasures, to feel some sort of inarticulable psychic tug while staring deep into Pastoral Concert. But when you’re assisted by someone who has completed their studies and can identify all the whirring pieces—the risks and gambits that add up to something like Radiator Springs—it’s suddenly a much larger, fuller sound. “It definitely changes your perspective on theme parks,” he told me. “Deeply researched videos like Defunctland’s allow everyone to find a great appreciation of something in the theme park industry that they may not have noticed or appreciated as much beforehand.”

I think Perjurer would likely agree with me that defunct attractions like the Great Movie Ride and the Tower of Terror aren’t high art in the same way Renaissance paintings are, but he still believes that there’s virtuosity to be found here, and that even the chintziest of attractions are worth our critical thinking through the proper locus. If nothing else, the bygone rides that are pulverized to make room for newer, flashier, potentially more grotesque contraptions—the Old Mill transforming into Garfield’s Nightmare in barren steel-mill Pennsylvania—say something poignant and melancholy about the passage of time and the inevitable decay of all things. Toward the end of the Kennywood video, Perjurer notes that the Garfield ride itself steadily fell into disrepair, thus repeating the cycle anew. We are but transient and fragile customers, catapulted across Space Mountain like dust in the wind.