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Why MGM’s strange, doomed theme park of the ’90s was a touchstone of a generation and radically ahead of its timeThe MGM Grand Adventures Theme Park was born in the Las Vegas backlot of the brand-new world’s largest hotel on December 18, 1993, and died for its business sins less than seven years later. The 33-acre park about half the size of Disneyland’s appendage, California Adventure was a celebration of a hypothetical studio with hypothetical sets for hypothetical movies. The core attraction was a river tour along which fake films with names like Temple of Gloom and Jungle Storm were being fake-shot. It was an unwitting mockumentary, a trip behind the scenes of scenes that never happened, an investigation of the façades of façades to reveal the plywood plank of absurdity on which real blockbusters, dumb as the fake ones, rested.When you got off the raft, you could explore such environments as turn-of-the century Brooklyn, French Street, and Asian Village. These, too, ....