Sign, Space, and Story: Roller Coasters and the Evolution of a Thrill Dana Anderson zyx How high can we go, how fast can we go, what are we going to do to the people, well zyxwvu ... I think the only limit we’re going to see is what the people will get on. Ron Toomer, President of Arrow Dynamics, zy America’s Greatest Roller Coaster Thrills in 3-0 Amusement parks have enjoyed a respectable and deserved share of cultural critique over the past 15 years. James Cameron and Ronald Bordessa, among numerous others, have illustrated how these seemingly unremarkable, even banal public gathering spaces comprise “a shorthand epitome of the culture, a prime cultural manifestation of the America of today” (102). Margaret J. King has in turn elevated these parks beyond epitome to aesthetic and mythic greatness, proclaiming them “an espe- cially American zyxwv art form, a new American muse” (56-57). If, following King, we are indeed to regard these cultural constructions as more art than artifact, more muse than mere amusement, then only one park struc- ture is worthy in its physical stature and symbolic inspiration to be called Olympus: the roller coaster. In both its history and its contemporary incarnations, no artifact more completely represents the culture of American amusement than the roller coaster. Although, as J. Meredith Neil posits, it may be the “least recognized of all the symbols most widely recognized by Americans,” its serpentine trail is nonetheless the master metonym of the multi-billion dollar industrialization of leisure thrill, “the most popular amusement park ride in existence” (108). As the recognized sign of amusement, the roller coaster enjoys both American and worldwide cultural coinage as well. Impressive exemplars of the new generation of tubular steel “mega-coasters” operate or are currently under construction in France, Spain, Egypt, Kuwait, China, Japan, Australia, Brazil, and Chile (“International” 14). And in a recent display of solidarity, amusement organizations everywhere (except for Disney) banded together in cele- bration of 1996 as the International Year of the Roller Coaster. At elabo- z Z