Zoos In Reviews, by Hermant Munchler
Zormoloch Armageddon’s Zoo of DOOM
This is a shameful column for me to write, for it is an admission that I, dear readers, have become a victim of mine own success: after ten years and over five hundred artful critiques of local animal entertainment facilities, I have finally run so short of grist for my pen that I am forced to stoop to visiting locations for their novelty value. So alas and alack, I hereby present you – my loving and diligent readership – with this, my review of a zoological garden brought to my attention by an anonymous and unposted letter slipped under my front door in the dead of a moonless night that promised me ‘the experience of my lifetime.’ I expected little, and my friends, I was not disappointed in my judgement this day.
HISTORY
Finding myself in the odd position of possessing no personal prior knowledge of Zormoloch Armageddon’s Zoo of DOOM (hitherto referred to as ZAZD for the duration of this missive, so as to avoid sensationalism, save wear and tear on my keyboard, and valiantly defend the shrinking boundaries of the edge of good taste), I turned to my personal library, then the community archives, and finally to that great devilry, the internet. None turned up anything, and so I find myself only able to offer what little information was to be scraped from my letter and the complimentary zoo map and brochure given with my ticket at the gate.
ZAZD was founded ‘in a time before man’s slimy steps befouled the sweet soil of this elder earth,’ by ‘the great singular, the cease’d one, the heedless annihilator, Zormoloch,’ as ‘prison and mansion,’ so as to ‘keep the world secluded from them and all that they represent.’ Invitation is ‘for only those who must.’
I decline to comment on the accuracy of any of these claims. If ZAZD’s marketing is its source, I would scarce be surprised – it certainly fits the intellectual profile of the same individual who advertised their establishment by anonymous midnight post.
SIGNAGE
ZAZD is, it must be admitted, thoroughly riddled with signposting; one cannot so much as walk down a trail without coming across placards saying this-way-this or that-way-that. However this meticulousness is most thoroughly counterbalanced by the tawdry carnival atmosphere of it all – there is no such thing as a ‘restroom’ when it can be instead announced as an “ETERNAL RESTROOM” and rather than surveying a simple ‘no exit’ posting on a given path you will find yourself perusing ‘DEAD END’ or “NO ESCAPE BEYOND THIS POINT” or “ABANDON HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE.” It may be October but such tawdry trappings are over the top even for this benightedly commercial month, and it speaks ill of the financial sensibilities of the management who permitted such reckless abuse of the facility’s paint budget (not to mention manpower) on something so useless in the other eleven-twelfths of the year. Finally, I personally noted several glaring typos present on exhibits both throughout the grounds and on the brochure map – the most egregious being the persistent misnaming of the giant panda exhibition as ‘Giant Painda.’ Most unprofessional.
FACILITY CONVENIENCES
As wretched as the naming of the zoo café, restrooms, and rest stops may be, their presentation is even worse. A gnarled and rotted hollow tree with a single antique stool placed inside may appeal to the goth set a la Addams, but it is dreadfully tedious to the rest of us, to say nothing of our weary hams and shanks (and to say LESS than nothing of the splinters). Similarly, the notion that being served your ‘eye scream soda’ from an iron cauldron over a blue flame by a cackling hag is appealing can only be tolerated by one who has never seen the amount of warts, loose drool, and leaking pus coming from what was clearly a laughably made-up high schooler with far too much wart budget in her makeup kit (and may I add, the eyes were far too realistic for my appetite’s sake – there’s kitsch and then there’s shlock and then there’s outright gore).
Also, nobody wants to buy an overpriced, foul-tasting, too-small hot dog in a building named ‘The Bottomless Gullet of Humanity.’ It is not cute, it is not philosophical, it does not make me think or smile, it makes me bored. I am sick of this nudge-and-wink anticapitalism guerilla-marketing hypocritical nonsense, as I was not shy of telling the man in the toad costume when I refused to leave a tip.
THE EXHIBITS
Of course, many minor transgressions in presentation can be forgiven if a zoological garden possesses good exhibits. But what defines a ‘good’ exhibit? An expensive enclosure, or an exciting resident? Both are necessary, but there is a certain I don’t know what (as the tiresome French say, a certain je ne sais quoi) that is unmistakable in its presence or absence. Happily, ZAZD fails at all of the above in numerous ways.
Firstly, the animals are dull and disappointing. The ‘Komodo Drake’ is clearly a komodo dragon that some idiotic prankster had glued a pair of wings to. The ‘megarilla’ is nothing but a perfectly ordinary gorilla that has been heavily overfed (and probably given steroids). The ‘medusa’ is nothing more than seventy-six (or seventy-seven; I lost count) slightly larger than average king cobras that have been painted different colours and just happen to enjoy spending much of their time compacted close together in a large ball. And the so-called ‘werewolf’ exhibit was clearly the work of a delinquent but devious keeper who has trained a perfectly ordinary wolf to do things like ‘answer’ questions and math problems with barks, urinate through the fence on guests who speak critically of him, and smoke cigarettes (offensive not only in odour and the potential for harm to the guests through secondhand smoke, but also in the cheapness of the brands provided). All these beasts acted healthy and happy but the sheer scale of flim-flammery and Barnumism on display makes it impossible for a serious onlooker to feel anything towards them other than a disdainful and deserved superiority.
Secondly, the enclosures were as overdone and overacted as the rest of ZAZD’s affect – whether it was the ‘vampire cavern’ (laughable – we’re on granite bedrock out here, and we’re expected to believe this ‘limestone karst’ topography is plausible? paper-mache no doubt!) with its conveniently-shadow-obscured beast (a fruitbat with some perspective tricks, faux blood on its chest, and a strobelight attached to its head); the ‘pool of bottomless depths’ (a pond filled with mirrors and floodlights to create the illusion of being over a foot deep, inhabited by a simple everyday alligator someone had fitted with fins, a crest, a fluked tail, and glowing contact lenses); or the ‘behemoth’ of ‘the burning plains’ (a meadow someone set on ‘fire’ with red lighting and fluttering red streamers and dry ice smoke, inhabited by what I’m absolutely certain was just a regular elephant or an animatronic dinosaur or CGI or something else like that), you are sure to be surprised and appalled at the absolute lack of shame with which these hucksters will take even the simplest piece of showmanship and utterly bungle it to the point of unbelievability through their own delusional inability to grasp the brute unreality of what they’ve created. It really looks real to them I expect, the poor humbugs.
Thirdly, the staff were insolent when I threw peanuts at the animals to see if they did anything interesting. This remains my bellweather test of an institution’s quality, and as expected ZAZD failed it. If you MUST have your minimum-wage upstart-carnies speak to those who have paid you money, they should do so quietly and respectfully with downturned eyes and grateful words, and not use phrases like ‘stop that’ or ‘not permitted,’ no matter how sweetly they precede them with please-and-thank-yous.
VERDICT: Zero out of five peanuts.
Well readers, this is sure to be of no shock to you, but I cannot recommend you visit ZAZD. You should stay at home. I surely wish I could, for when I made to depart the premises I found that not only was there no exit depicted on the brochure, there were no paths leading to any exit at all. I went to the ticket booth to complain only to find that it had vanished; looked for a staff member to complain to and realized that they’d all gone home; and was only alerted by the faintest scraping sound of metal-on-metal to the realization that all the exhibit doors and gates had been opened for the night. Having been forced to barricade myself inside the nearest ‘ETERNAL RESTROOM’ for the rest of the evening, I have spent my time composing this – my final Zoo In Review – on the (low-quality single-ply) toilet paper and preparing to hide it in one of the toilet tanks, in the hopes it shall be discovered by a kindly janitor and taken to my employers for publication, thereby sparing others from my fate. I believe it is safe to say that this is my last will and testament, as the megarilla has at last removed the outer door and now all that stands between me and being cast into ‘the palace-pit of Zormoloch’ that the werewolf has been howling of for the past hour is a single shoddy toilet stall doo