Monday, September 8, 2008

Let's play a game of Boring

Mose Mou
Moose Mountain Adventure Golf, which has been open since early 2008, is the latest in a string of lame-o amusement enterprises occupying the space across from the North food court. I predict its imminent demise.

This is actually the mall's second mini golf course. When MOA opened in 1992 the space was originally Golf Mountain, which sucked. After it closed down, it was replaced by General Mills Cereal Adventure, a cereal themed amusement park where you could see giant statues of Sonny the cuckoo bird (I'm KOO-KOO for COCOA PUFFS!), and the Trix Rabbit, and other cereal themed "role models." You could even make your very own cereal by combining 2 cereals in the same bowl, a concept never attempted anywhere before.

But kids didn't give a crap, so it was replaced by Dinosaur Walk Museum. Kids love dinosaurs, right? Well, not when they're in a museum that sucks ass. Kids want giant dino-robots that roar and move around, not just a bunch of bones strung together to resemble something "educational."

Dinosaur Walk's demise came earlier this year, and rumors surfaced it would be replaced by a skater park with a giant ramp. But all the slacker skaters apparently were content with their halfpipes in Burnsville, so the space gave way to its second incredibly shitty mini golf course, Moose Mountain.

The only thing that differentiates Moose Mountain from the original Golf Mountain is the addition of a mountain shaped vaguely like a moose and some lame looking trains. Ok the trains aren't all that bad...but let's get real. When I play mini golf, I want COOL stuff. I want WINDMILLS and CRAZY UPSIDE-DOWN RAMPS...in other words, things that are FUN. To me, that's what separates a good mini golf course from being just a bunch of putting greens.

But there's nothing cool on this course. Every hole looks roughly the same...no spinning obstacles, no crazy loop-de-loops, just boring green after boring green amid endless faux-rock. And guess what? People have figured it out. I rarely see more than 1 or 2 people on the course, as I frequently observe from the nearby food court. When it first opened, they would blare the same Swing-era trumpet song over and over in an annoying attempt to attract customers. The opposite effect was achieved.

I'm convinced the space occupied by Moose Mountain will never succeed, no matter what it is. It will always be some misguided, insipid entity designed to bore the general public. By this time next year I'm sure it will be something new yet again, but I wish they'd just fess up and rename it the Forest of Fail.

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