Anyone Else Remember This Giant Maze Thing?
I have this vague memory that floats up into my mind every couple of years. There was this amusement park that was just a giant, human-scale maze. I remember the walls being basically plywood fencing? I think it was in the Bay Area, or at least “in that direction” from the central valley. This would have been 1990-ish?
I never went, but I think we drove by it a few times? There were a bunch of TV commercials, which I was sort of fascinated by. What I mostly remember is that they had a mascot that I thought looked exactly like The Noid from Domino’s Pizza, and in the low-information environment of the world before the web, I was confused about if this place was now both a bad pizza place and a maze?
Anyone else remember any of this?
…
Anyway, this bubbled back up again this week, and I decided to finally figure out what the heck I was remembering. I’m gonna put some space so you can see if you can remember any of this before you scroll down.
.
..
…
….
It was a real thing!
It was called The Wooz.
Opened in 1988, closed in ’92, it was in Vacaville, basically across the freeway from where the Nut Tree used to be, adjacent to that whole outlet store cluster that was going to be the future of retail back before the Roseville Gallaria opened up. Apparently mazes were a fad in Japan in the late 80s, sort of the Escape Rooms of theirtime, and so someone tried to expand that out to North America.
The idea isn’t great on it’s own, but why Vacaville? I guess they picked it because of that outlet mall thing, but let’s talk about your competition. Ignoring that you’re only a couple hours away from Disneyland, at the time you’re less than an hour away from the pre-Six Flags Marine World, Great America, and even the old Waterworld USA at Cal Expo. Hell, there’s even two Scandias in range. A big maze with no shade made out of redwood fencing is a hard sell, even without that many rides nearby?
Some links for you!
The history of the hottest, most ill-advised theme park ever made: The Wooz
The Wooz - Vacaville - LocalWiki
Do not sleep on the embedded video in that first link, an episode of the That’s Incredible Show on the park which includes a race through the maze, one of the participants of which was Steve Wozniak, who is introduced only as “a computer whiz”. I love, love, love that there was about a 5-year window where “co-founder of Apple Computer” was not something to be proud of, of which 1989 was the absolute peak. He’s basically here because he was a minor local celebrity. Presumably he got the call after Cal Worthington (and his dog spot) turned them down?
And the mascot did look an awful lot like the Noid.