Over the last several years, an Indianapolis drug company has been quietly purchasing a wide swath of swamp land and marginally profitable farms near the town of Martinsville. Recently this bucolic setting has been transformed by a prodigious collection of construction equipment–earth movers and cranes, dump trucks and bulldozers–as the pharmaceutical giant breaks ground for an unprecedented new project opening in the spring of the year 2000:
ELI LILLY LAND A theme park whose theme celebrates the wonderful transformational and restorative powers of modern medicinal chemistry as well as the visionary genius of Eli Lilly–Hellenophile, philanthropist, historian, archaeologist, art connoisseur, botanist, and inventor of the gelatin capsule–is designed for the whole family’s entertainment and is promoted as being, at once, both thrilling
and educational. Plans for the park, on the drawing board since the early 1950’s, call for a magnificent six square miles of meticulously maintained and manicured grounds and staffed by several thousand white-coated men and women accurately referred to as “Lab Techs” who will supervise the vast array of rides, prepare sumptuous repasts at the Land’s gourmet restaurants and drug store soda fountains, and assist the visitors with the purchasing of their souvenir pharmaceuticals and personalized pill boxes. And what would a theme park be without a cadre of costumed characters to conduct the visitors through the seemingly endless maze of entertainments and pose with delighted children for pictures? Graduated Cylinder, Mortar and Pestle, Dram Man, Eliot Narc, The Corpuscle Family, The Ether, and Doctor Sientist, MD, all of the favorite characters from Eli Lilly Comics, which have been distributed free of charge to physicians’ waiting rooms since the Great Depression, will come to life daily on the 189 miles of roads, bike paths, and garden walks of the park. From the Michael Graves designed visitors center, where you complete your induction physical and fill out various liability release forms, to the fifteen story Hypo-Dermic Space Needle; from the Hormonal Tilt-A-Wheel, to the formal floral gardens landscaped to suggest a gigantic monthly dispenser of the Birth Control Pill; from the monument to Aspirin to the nightly Parade of Wonder Drugs which features the famous chorus line of high-stepping white rats, a day at Eli Lilly Land promises all a kaleidoscope of psychedelic high times.
The Blue Guide to Indiana is fortunate in having been provided by the visionaries of Eli Lilly Land with the following intriguing glimpse into the future. Here are some of the attractions that will come to life come the turn of the century.
The Placebotron On this ride the very willing volunteers (as all the park’s guests are referred to) are provided with readily chewable and sweet-tasting tablets and told by the Lab tech strapping them into the coaster car that they have been given a safe sugar pill to ingest before being whisked away on a leisurely five mile roller coaster trip. In reality everyone has been given a specially selected fast-acting psycho-stimulant to enjoy the scenery.
The Organic Chemistry Bumper Cars Unlike other bumper car amusements, the electric motors that propel these cars also generate a powerful magnetic field. The cars, painted as carbon, hydrogen, or oxygen proceed to crash into each other, somtimes energetically rebounding as the fluctuating charge causes a repelling reaction, but more often after the collisions forming elaborate and elegant chains of organic compounds and, more rarely, even polyesters and esters when the occasional inorganic vehicle, a bright yellow sulfur say, is released into the comical collision.
The Gelatin Capsule House of Horrors The Gelatin Capsule you ride in proceeds to dissolve asyou travel along a highly detailed and thoroughly accurate recreation of the alimentary canal. Thrills await as you cascade through the mucus covered rooms, sluiced from the pharynx to the esophagus to the stomach and on to the intestines, both large and small. You race against time and the prospect of untimely elimination, hoping that you will be, through the marvels of virtual reality and computer generated animation, absorbed into
The Body’s Bloodstream, an entirely separate ride, and on your way to where you can do the most organic good.
The Inoculatron Roll up your sleeves and say ahhh! While relaxing on your own overstuffed and hypo-allergenic chaise, you will be inoculated, both by needle and orally, with the newest live and dead vaccines derived from the most fashionable designer viruses. With any luck you will develop a mild infection on the spot and experience the simulated effects of an actual fatal disease spiking fevers while stimulating your body’s own natural defenses. Children must be taller than the 150 cc mark on the cartoon Graduated Cylinder guarding the amusement’s entrance.
It’s a Prozac World The engineering wizards of Eli Lilly Land have created this charming attraction to suggest that we are all the same under the skin. Scores of life-like automatons dressed in the native costumes of children from around the world serenade the enchanted visitor ensconced upon a sliently gliding cloud car. The songs penned especially for
It’s a Prozac World by Dr. Joyce Brothers and Philip Glass are performed by the Boys Choir of Caramel and seamlessly lip-synched by the happy, highly animated animatronic minions.
The Possible Side Effects Funhouse You can just imagine what’s in store!
Trade Mark City Visitors to
Trade Mark City experiment with proprietary rights while attempting to patent ordinary or generic compounds, extracts, plants, animals, and even elements by giving them imaginary and unpronounceable catchy names. The letters “z,” “x,” “Q,” and “v” are rationed as are the umlaut and the asterisk.
The JumboMax Theatre Playing perpetually on the big screen is the captivating narrative of
Accidental Discoveries which documents through dramatic recreations the amazing discoveries which occurred accidentally. Spills and chils. Petru dishes left out over night. Mislabeled bottles. High jinx with the fire extinguishers. Notes tampered with to doctor the bell curve in a lab section. Lots and lots of stray electric charges including a famous one dealing with static electricity.And last but not least, who could forget
The Amnesiac-a-tron -
Michael Martone
