7th Invades St. Augustine Part 3: Ripley's Museum!
Posted by 7th on August 25, 2004

Okay, first off, let's cover some very brief background on the history of the Ripley's phenomenon. Robert L. Ripley was born in the year 1890. He was a bright kid, but dropped out of high school in 1908 to care for his mother. Two years earlier, he was playing semi-pro baseball for the local Santa Rosa, CA team, when he began sketching his fellow players and showed a knack for it. Two years later, he published his first work, a sketch called "The Village Belles Are Wringing" for Life Magazine.

In 1909, he joined the staff of the Sanfrancisco Bulletin, and eventually got a job as a staff acrtoonist at the Chronicle. It was there that he established himself as a cartoonist with a gift for drawing realistic depictions of practically any subject. He was offered a job in New York in the winter of 1912, and headed for the Big Apple.

In 1913 he published his first cartoon for the New York Globe, and tried out for the New York Giants, but injured himself during training, an injury that not only ruined his dreams of being a big leager, but would continue to nag him for the rest of his life.

In 1914 he made his first trip out of the US, to Europe. His mother died a year later, but he'd found a new drive for his life that he took comfort in: a love for travel. In 1918 he published his first regular cartoon column, Champs and Chumps. He joined the New York Atheltics Club. Two years later, he returned to Europe to cover the Olympics in Belgium for his Champs and Chumps column.

In 1922 he embarked on his first trip around the world, using his new "Believe It Or Not" column with the Globe to chronicle his travels. The Globe went out of business in 1923, so Ripley hired on with the Post, having become a hot commodity from the success of his BION column. In 1929 he joined the King Features Syndicate. His column went worldwide overnight, making him an international celebrity.

In 1930 he started a radio show based on his column that became an instant success, heard around the world. During this time he pioneered the concept of the live "on location" radio broadcast. By 1940, he'd visited and chronicled 201 countries across the globe.

In 1933 he opened his first museum, the Ripley's Believe It Or Not Odditorium, in Chicago. The following year he'd become wealthy enough to buy a 28 room mansion on a secluded island in Mamaroneck, NY. (This is the same mansion seen in the opening credits for Dean Cain's Ripley show on TBS.)

He opened another Odditorium in San Francisco in 1935. Then another in Dallas, Texas in 1936 after being voted the Most Popular Man In America. In 1937, he hist another benchmark. He allows a young, unknown artist to publish drawings of canines and other drawings in his BION comic. The artist's name is Charles Schulz, and he will go on to become famous for drawing a dog of a totally different sort.

He opened yet another Odditorium in New York, right on Times Square, and his popularity grows. In 1949, the Ripley's Believe It Or Not television show goes on the air. He dies later that year, collapsing on the set of his weekly show (episode 13.)

But his company grew. Over the decades, museums came and gone, but there was never a time where a Ripley's wasn't open somewhere. The first Ripley's built overseas opened in Blackpool, England in 1972. Since that time, new museums have sprouted up all over the country, sharing the man's legacy with the whole world. He was the Walt Disney of oddities and exotic sights.

So that brings us to the museum in St. Augustine. Ready to go in and have a look?

Most Ripley's museums have a unique look. The one in Orlando, for example looks like a building that's fallen victim to one of Florida's famous sinkholes. The Museum in Gatlinburg looks like a building ravaged by an earthquake. This one is not as flashy. It's built to be a replica of Ripley's New York Island home. Everything is torchlit (at night) just like the one you see during the credits of Dean Cain's TV show. Outside of the museum is a mobile home made from the trunk of a redwood tree (unfortunately, I have no pictures of that.) There is also a video game arcade built onto the side of the museum, which is appropriate, since the games therein belong in a museum. Pac-Man, M.A.C.H. 3, Popeye, Poo Yan, and the like... but enough about that, let's go in and take a gander at some weird shit, shall we?

Now I didn't go in and take a picture of every single thing inside that museum. I would've been there for hours, and this article would be at least twenty pages long. There's that much stuff... walking through it is almost like walking through an old person's attic... there's stuff everywhere, and almost seems as though it was just thrown in there at random.

The first thing you'll notice when you walk in is this gigantic skull of a Tyranasaurus Rex. Now I know that most, if not all of you have seen at least one of the Jurassic Park movies. And yeah, the effects are realistic. And yeah, there were a few scares in them. But as realistic as they were, nothing can compare you for getting right up next to the skull of one of these animals and seeing just how big they really were, and how easily they could've removed your upper torso from the rest of you. it just makes me happy that there were no "save the planet" eco-nuts walking around back then. If there were, these man eaters would most likely still be roaming around in the same 2 million acres Clinton put aside for the spotted owl.

Here's another one of Ripley's favorite oddities... animals with extra limbs/and/or heads... Why he thought these poor creatures were so wonderful, who can say. All I know is that they're pretty damned freaky, even in a long since dead stuffed state like this little guy here.

I can't speak for anyone else, but were such an animal born on my property, I'd put it down without a second thought. I don't care what Robert L. Ripley would've offered me for it either. No ammount of money is worth letting a creature like this suffer needlessly... Plus goats are good eatin'...

To me, this exhibit belonged more in the Guiness museum than in a museum of "oddities." Basically, some guy with more spare time than common sense carved the entire English alphabet on a standard lead pencil... with his chainsaw... How does one up and decide to try something like that?

I mean why? What's the point? Why do with a chainsaw what you can do with a pocket knife, without the gas costs or risk of defingering yourself? It boils down to that old Southern joke.

What are a Southern man's most common last words?

"Hey boys, hold my beer and watch this!"

So the next thing that caught my eye was this enormous ferris wheel. While obviously too small for anyone to actually ride, I have seen ferris wheels that were no taller than this exhibit. Basically, someone got really bored and built this twenty-something foot tall replica of the Wonder Wheel at Coney Island using hundreds of Erector Sets.

I imagine this guy must've had a really bad marriage. Otherwise, he would've spent more time erecting things in his bedroom rather than playing all day with tinker toys...

No, it's not what it looks like, all phallic resemblances aside. Look close, and and you'll see that what old R.L. Ripley dug up for us was a mummified cat. When Egyptian aristocracy passed away, one of the first things the priests did was kill all their pets. So when the dead folk were mummified and buried, their pets were buried along with them. I suppose it would be nice to have Tabby with you in the hereafter, but it's a bit of a bum deal for the cat, don't you think?

And it's not exactly the most dignified death, is it? I mean look at the poor little thing. It looks like either a really twisted novelty vibrator or a Rotted Cat Pez Dispensor (tm). The Egyptians must not have known whether to shove it up their ass or pull candy from its mouth... Which is rather nauseating either way...

What you see here (besides a cortchety old man wondering why I'm taking his picture) is a set of teeth from a baby megalodon. "Why 7th, what's a megalodon?"

Well friends, a Megalodon is a species of shark that lived several million years ago. They have only found jaws and teeth of these beasties, but some specimens are estimated to have been almost seventy feet long, and most closely related to the Great White shark of jaws fame. So what we're talking about here, from a full grown specimen, was a shark with the viciousness of a Great White that was as long as a yacht and had jaws big enough for a seven foot tall man to stand inside without crouching.... makes ya wanna go for a swim, doesn't it?

A few years back a book about these monsters called Meg came out. The opening scene was a flashback to millions of years ago. A T-Rex chases his prey onto the beach and into the water... a Meg rushes the shoreline and bites the T-Rex in half... Disney bought the rights to it years ago but did nothing with it... Either way, it's not a beastie I'd ever want to see up close...

The next thing that made me laugh was a display concerning the fact that of all creatures on Earth, pigs have the closest skin type to humans. They apparently can sunburn just like we do... When that happens, I wonder if it smells like bacon... I wonder if their skin peelings would taste like fried baloney. I wonder why pork chops don't taste like cocoa butter from all the sunscreen it takes to keep these porkers safe... I wonder why I wonder about such weird, stupid shit. I blame Dave Machia.

Here again we see a two-headed animal... but this time, it's in a room FULL of two-headed farm animals, cows with extra legs, a monkey with four asses, and so on... They also have a frankly disgusting wall mural concerning things that have been pulled out of the stomachs of cows... rail spikes, hug wads of barbed wire, John Travolta, etc etc...This room, above all others is the gross out room of the whole damned show... I thought for a moment I could even detect the faint yet unmistakable scent of cow shit... but then I realized it was just the guy standing next to me. Christ, tourists stink...

The next room is full of classic pictures from Ripley's books and TV shows... One that drew my attention was of a dog holding an upper denture plate in his mouth... I halfway expected a plaque explaining how this was the first dog to have teeth implants or to wear dentures, but as it turns out, it's just a dog that snatched his owner's chompers off the floor and someone thought it would get them 500.00 from the Enquirer. Funny, but I don't see why it ended up in a Ripley's museum...

Next we enter a room that has several busts of men Ripley either met or learned about over the course of his travels... you have the chinese man who was born with two sets of irises in each eye, the Chinese man who had a candleholder carved into his skull, and the Chinese man who became a master of kung fu when he drank too much... But my favorite was this guy, a British man who was born with an odd birth defect... a seven inch nose shaped just like a partially melted dildo... Sure, he's rather repulsive to look at, but something tells me this man had little trouble finding a date... I'm surpised a mold of his face hasn't been made into some kind of sex toy by now. Ripley's Believe It Or Squat...

Whenever I start to get bored, I begin looking for things to occupy me until something interesting happens... the moment I got to the room with the fake mirror where people try to roll their tongue whilst people on the other side laugh at them, I whipped out my game and started playing. This is a rare photo, as I on principal usually do not allow myself to be photographed without my goatee, as shaving my beard off instantly sends me back in time to when I was 15 and considered aloe vera my best friend.

Now you may notice that what I'm playing isn't my trusty Game Boy SP. Well keep in mind folks, I took these pictures back in 1999. 7th was playin' old school style... that my friends, is a Neo Geo Pocket Color, and I'm playing the handheld edition of Metal Slug... and yes, I still have that unit somewhere... I'll sell it to the best offer, you video game geeks...

Point being, not everything in the place is the greatest thing in the history of Ripley... Take for example the case I'm leaning on. That's a log cabin made from pennies. Impressive from an artistic standpoint, but I don't see anyone looking at it and saying "I DON'T BELIEVE IT! I SIMPLY DON'T BELIEVE IT!"

One constant I've found at Ripley's museums is that every one of them seems to have one of these "rotating hallways." You know, the old carnival gag where a bridge runs through a tube that spins around you, making you dizzy. The other aspect that fits with every Ripley's museum I've ever been to is that the damned things never work... In fact, this one wasn't even plugged in! I could clearly see the power cable for the motor just dangling from underneath the bridge... Again, I could believe it, so it's false advertising.

So there you have it. What do you think? Worth the 10.00 admission price? I guess that's subjective. I really didn't see anything as weird as I thought I would, based on what I've seen on Dean Cain's show... After all, have you ever looked at Dean Cain? I mean really looked at him? Isn't it kinda creepy? And doesn't it piss you off that he used to get to make out with Teri Hatcher every week? Well he did... he had to wear red and blue nylon underwear, but he got to make out with the Radio Shack girl. Believe it.

Next up, the final part of our St. Augustine tour, the Fountain of Youth...

-=7th=-