robotnik2004 | Heeeeeeeere’s Zazzie! (Reply)

Originally published at Route 96. You can comment here or there.

Enterprise Square, USA, on the campus of the Oklahoma Christian Bible College, is a Disney-esque (that’s being charitable) theme park dedicated to the glorification of free enterprise and the excoriation of government control. Visiting this spawn of big business and the religious right, built in 1982 and apparently not remodeled since then, was like taking a time machine back to our childhoods under Reagan’s first term: that sunny, unapologetic Cold War jingoism, that pre-Japan confidence in the American Way, and all the high-tech wizardry that 1982 had to offer. Audio cassettes! Games with paddles instead of joysticks! Beta!

Resistance is futile: Derek and Pete embrace capitalism? Our little tour group was greeted in the lobby by a videotape of Bob Hope. Bob, who apparently owed some of his chums in the military-industrial complex a favor, started to read some platitudes about Enterprise Square off his cue cards, when suddenly he was interrupted by a “news flash” from that well known journalist, Ed McMahon.

Had Bob won the Publishers’ Clearing House Sweepstakes? Was he a contestant on Star Search? No! Aliens from the planet “Flabjab” had crash-landed right on the campus of the Oklahoma Christian Bible College! And before Ed could say “heeeeere’s Zazzie!” the aliens themselves–Bubbin, Zazzie, and their long-suffering robot yes-man, Quonk–came down through the ceiling.

Here the plot took a bizarre postmodern turn. It seems our aliens–in truth they looked more like low-rent Muppets–needed replacement parts for the spaceship they’d just totalled. But how to pay for them? Nobody on this planet would accept their “Flabjabbian Blaffle” as legal currency, and the aliens, who obviously come from some weird Muppet culture with high taxes, gun control, and socialized medicince, didn’t have a clue about how to make any Earth dough. “I know!” said our teenage tour guide, the poor dumb “Worth the Wait”-pledging bastard gamely playing out the same script he’s probably done a thousand times. “Why don’t you, uh, Flabjabbians join our tour group, learn the wonders of capitalism, get respectable jobs, and save up enough Blaffle to get home?” And here I was thinking they’d just enslave our race by laying eggs in our brains. But the capitalism thing works, too.

Don’t Dis The Head!

Bobby Sheem and his Singing Dollar Bills of Some Esteem By this point, of course, the three of us were losing it. Enterprise Square was, quite possibly, the cheesiest thing I have ever seen in a quarter-century of life on this Earth. The “Great American Marketplace” featured a barbershop quartet of huge dollar bills with mechanized faces that sang about the free market system. Giant cans of tuna and fruit cocktail taught us, apparently, that “basic human needs inspire a world of economic values.” In the “Freedom to Choose” gallery, we learned that, thanks to the magic of 1982 blue screen technology, Americans can briefly pretend to have any occupation they desire. The little kid in our tour group got to be President for a few brief seconds, and Pete made a fine trucker, even without a chimp. We also enjoyed “entertainment and economic adventure” in the Enterprise Arcade, which featured such VIC-20 classics as “Lemonade Stand” and “Protect Your Rights,” which I can only describe as a Libertarian version of Asteroids. (The fact that they haven’t changed the video games since Donkey Kong was a bad guy suggests to me that Enterprise Square, like American capitalism itself, has seen better days.) “Doc’s Donut Shop” was supposed to illustrate the elasticity of supply and demand, but in good Canadian fashion, we thwarted the invisible hand of the market by demanding the maximum number of donuts every time, regardless of price. The stymied donut-making robot started sparking and smoking, saying “Error! Error! Does not compute!” Captain Kirk would have been proud of us. “Tough crowd,” said the robot’s hapless human assistant.

The Not-So-Great Communicator The climax of the tour was the “Talking Face of Government,” a Giant Video Head that ranted about the evils of government. One might wonder if the Head’s Freeman Militia-esque rhetoric would be 100% kosher in Oklahoma City post-Timothy McVeigh–but mostly we wondered why the Great and Terrible Government Head had an ear where its eye should be and a mouth on its forehead.

Yesterday’s Enterprise

2006 Edit: Wow. Good times. There’s lots I could say, ten years down the road, about Enterprise Square. Funny that my write-up assumes American economic decline as a given in 1996, the early days of the big cyberboom slash bubble. Funny, too, that Enterprise Square kept on keeping on right through the 1990s, only to close its doors for good in 2002, at a time when you’d think this Reagan-era time capsule would be right back in step with the American zeitgeist. And funniest of all, I actually have friends, apparently, who visited Enterprise Square non-ironically as school children in Arkansas.

You can see more pictures of Enterprise Square–actually, they’re almost exactly the same pictures, with different people in them–at indie pinko cartoonist Tom Tomorrow’s This Modern World and also at the indispensible Roadside America. (The latter even has a very short Quicktime movie of the amazing singing greenbacks.) Roadside America writes:

One of the most darkly appealing aspects of Enterprise Square was that it was slowly falling apart. It was built in 1982 for $15 million, and little appears to have been done to upgrade it. Color schemes and display designs dated from the tail-end of the disco era; the internal power systems were less reliable; a cheerful skeleton crew kept the place running.

They close on this dark note:

[ES’s] most notable casualties near the end were the space alien puppets that provided a framework narrative for the tour during the Golden Age of Enterprise Square. (They had supposedly crash landed and had to learn how to make money so they could repair their ship.) Their puppet bodies were left, mute and immobile, in a little shrine at the end of the Hall of Statistics.

Those poor innocent homesick buggers! They never got home! I find this extremely poignant: their three little lifeless alien bodies, light-years from their Flabjabbian home. Betrayed by the free market, forsaken by Bob Hope and Ed McMahon, their plushy remains entombed in the Hall of Statistics to be exhumed, or not, by some future Elijah Snow.