Under The Sea
- Paulie
- Mar 17
- 8 min read
Hey hotties. Years back, I discovered the Youtube channel Defunctland, a creator dedicated to unearthing the cultural histories of various Disneyland rides and park features, as well as other themed parks like Universal, Six Flags and so on. To be clear, this guy fucking rocks. His videos are easy to follow, well-researched and as someone who wrote a masters dissertation on Disneyland parks, an absolute joy to watch. Next time you’re stoned, order a takeaway and throw this on.
Often in the videos, you’ll see archival photographs and video clips of now ruined theme park rides: rusted rails, bubbly characters made of rubber rotting away, facades covered in mildew and neglect. It’s the other side of the nostalgic coin - that everything you cherished as a child is old and fucked and the people who created it for you threw it away when it stopped being valuable. Anyway, this got me thinking about submechanophobia: the fear of submerged man made objects, such as ships, oil rigs, and other machines we’ve thrown in the big drink. I fucking hate that shit! For example, check out the disgusting rotting horror machine that is the Universal Studios Jaws animatronic.
We’re all pretty au fait with scary things that should be in the ocean, the type of stuff that scares us because it has mastered its environment in a way we haven’t, see Jaws (1975), Moby Dick (1851), the Unagi of Super Mario 64 (1996) and so on. But it’s just as scary to see something unnatural in the vast deep blue, a complicated structure that has rotted in the elements, completely forgotten to time. A corpse that holds corpses. A monument from the past, a long way from home, reminding us that we are not welcome in this alien landscape. This dearest rat babes, is submechanophobia. Let’s dive in. Pun intended.
