Volume 2, No. 20. October 25, 2002
Monkey
business
Amusement attractions
always jump on bandwagons, especially the successes of their local professional
sports teams. However, few sporting events have created as many tie-ins with
the amusement industry—and with so much variety, involving everything from
capuchins to sea lions, plush dolls to wax— as the Major League Baseball
World Series between the Anaheim, California, Angels and the San Francisco,
California, Giants.
The amusement industry presence make sense for this particular series considering
that the Angels are owned by the Walt Disney Company. Disneyland Resort appropriately
staged a pep rally on the eve of the Series last Friday, with 11,000 people
showing up at Downtown Disney, including Jackie Autry who brought the honorary
Angels jersey of her late husband and team founder Gene Autry.
Knott’s Berry
Farm in neighboring Buena Park also got into the hometown spirit by offering
half-price discounts on admission for anybody wearing anything with an Angels
team logo. The discount did not apply to the evening Halloween Haunt at the
park, which public relations director Susan Tierney said had not been impacted
in attendance by the postseason presence of the Angels.
Disney also capitalized on the fact that this Series is being contested between
two California teams, another natural fit for the company’s Disney’s
California Adventure. Both teams’ banners are hanging from the faux Golden
Gate Bridge at the theme park’s entrance. Also hanging from one of the
bridge’s towers is a 25-foot-tall (8 meters) monkey.
Ah, the monkey, a most surreal aspect of this World Series. The Angels started
a tradition two years ago of the Rally Monkey, a series of videos on the Edison
Field scoreboard starring the capuchin from the television series Friends.
The Rally Monkey appears late in games in which the Angels are trailing and
whips the crowd into a cheering frenzy. It has been credited with the team’s
penchant for come-from-behind victories, and during the post-season playoffs
Angels fans have been dressing as gorillas and orangutans, wearing various species
of primates on their hats, and, most notably, carrying plush doll monkeys.
Many of the plush dolls are Aurora Wildbeasts sold at the Edison Field gift
shops and at more than 15,000 retail locations across the country, including
a number of zoos. A portion of the proceeds of their sale goes toward the Zoological
Society of San Diego, which runs both the World-Famous San Diego Zoo and the
San Diego Wild Animal Park, plus the Center for Reproduction of Endangered Species.
Even the Los Angeles Zoo has seen a run on the plush toys at its retail shops,
which are reporting a 30 percent increase in sales, said Lora LaMarca, the zoo’s
marketing and public relations director. “We’ve sold out of everything
that is black and white,” she said, referring to the capuchin’s colors.
“Even if it is a colobus, people think it’s the Rally Monkey.”
Though her zoo does not have capuchins, LaMarca has fielded several media calls
regarding the monkey, and Fox Sports Network did an interview with the zoo’s
monkey curator.
Upstate, Six Flags Marine World in Vallejo, does have a couple of capuchins,
which the park took to San Francisco Bay Area television stations for some good-natured
turncoating. On one show, the capuchin was given a Giants terry cloth wristband
which the little monkey naturally cuddled up with while on the air. Marine World
also has sea lions, and that afforded an opportunity for the park to capitalize
on the Giants’ mascot Lou Seal—which, despite its name, is a sea lion.
“It was a good chance to distinguish between a sea lion and seal,”
said Public Relations Manager Jeff Jouett, always putting an education spin
on his park’s zoological endeavors.
Yeah, right. One television crew filmed Marine World’s Louie “really
abusing a rally monkey,” Jouett said—the plush kind. Louie dragged
the doll around, slapped it with its flipper, drowned it in the water, then
barked “loud and long in the rally monkey’s face,” Jouett said.
Whatever education message he was hoping to get across in the display didn’t
work with his own boss, park General Manager Joe Meck, a former Disney and Knott’s
employee. “He’s an unrepentant Angels fan. He’s only been here
a year, not long enough to fully appreciate the Giants and (Oakland) A’s,
and he has called me on the carpet for using the Rally Monkey in such a public
fashion,” Jouett joked.
Most of the amusement parks in the Bay Area are closed for the season, but they
still have found ways to reap publicity from the Giants’ success. Giants
star Barry Bonds “openly tells everyone that Paramount’s Great America
is his favorite amusement park,” said the Santa Clara park’s public
relations operations manager, Nicole Koebrich. When Bonds hit his 600th career
home run this year, the team called Great America to participate in a celebration
that would give Bonds 600 of his favorite things. The park sent a 5-foot (2-meter)
plush Scooby-Doo bearing 600 tickets for Bonds to give his favorite charity.
Meanwhile, the Series has thrown a monkey wrench, as it were, into the plans
of the Wax Museum at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. “We’re
doing a Barry Bonds, and he agreed to come in for a measuring session after
the season,” said Rodney Fong, vice president of the museum. “It keeps
getting postponed because the Giants keep winning in the playoffs.”
So do zoos and amusement parks.
©2002, Minton Enterprises
LLC
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