World’s Weirdest Theme Parks | The Strange Truth

Some people think that Walt Disney invented the theme park, but that's not really right. Is it? Um, there's a tendency of Americans to think that we have kind of a patent on theme parks. The export of things like Disneyland or Universal Studios that are gobbled up internationally mean that the Americans have somehow invented this. That's not true at all.

There's a theme park in Singapore called Haw Par Villa, built in the 1930s, that was meant to extend the virtues of Chinese and Confucian morality to people there. There's Diggerland, which is this amusement park that allows people to get on heavy construction equipment in South Korea. There's Toilet Land, but one of the most bizarre and horrifying amusement parks is in Lithuania. It's a place called Grutas Park, which is colloquially known as Stalin's Land.

Would you say you've enjoyed the experience here? I don't know if enjoying is the right word, but it's fascinating. The people who probably enjoy it most are the people who lived under Soviet oppression, who are still alive during the days of the Soviet system. Are you enjoying it? No, Stalin World is fascinating for showing the extent and the iconography of the Soviet system during the Cold War.

But there's a much more personal, intense, and violent recreation of those times called the Soviet Bunker. The bunker is the sunken world; it's a hell which is center grounded. It's very important for us that it is underground because we preserve the Soviet Union as it was in 1984. It just some tear down this wall.

It's totally improvised; there's no written script. Everything is done by actors; every time is different. I know what attracts young people, of course. It's very strong, and young people are schoolchildren. They have a very high threshold for stress, and they don't have enough experience. And upstairs, everything they live through the screen, like mobile screen, computer screen, and they don't feel alive. When they come here, you feel really alive.