Montezuma Is Coming Back From The Grave! But Should We Be Worried?

00:00 Intro
00:40 Knott's Reposts Video About The Forbidden Fortress
1:16 Photos From Site Showing Deconstruction
1:22 The KumbaK Situation
1:54 The Surprisingly Hype Around It
2:18 Details On The Ride
2:30 What I Think Is Going On
3:12 Outro

Off Ride Footage:    • Montezooma's Revenge at Knott's Berry...  
Trailer:    • MonteZOOMa: The Forbidden Fortress  

MONTE IS BACk






Knott's Berry Farm is a 57-acre (2,500,000 sq ft) theme park located in Buena Park, California, owned and operated by Cedar Fair. In March 2015, it was ranked as the twelfth-most-visited theme park in North America, while averaging approximately 4 million visitors per year. The park features over 40 rides, including roller coasters, family rides, dark rides, and water rides.

Walter and Cordelia Knott first settled in Buena Park in 1920. The park began as a roadside berry stand run by Walter Knott along State Route 39 in California. By the 1940s, a restaurant, several shops, and other attractions had been constructed on the property to entertain a growing number of visitors, including a replica ghost town. The site continued its transformation into a modern amusement park over the next two decades, and an admission charge was added in 1968. In 1997, the park was sold to Cedar Fair for $300 million.[2][3]

The park sits on the site of a former berry farm established by Walter Knott and his family. Beginning in 1923,[4] the Knott family sold berries, berry preserves, and pies from a roadside stand along State Route 39. In June 1934, the Knotts began selling fried chicken dinners in a tea room on the property, later named "Mrs. Knott's Chicken Dinner Restaurant."[5] The dinners soon became a major tourist draw, and the Knotts built several shops and other attractions to entertain visitors while waiting for a seat in the restaurant. In 1940, Walter Knott began constructing a replica Ghost Town on the property, the beginning of the present-day theme park. Ghost Town was Walter Knott's tribute to the pioneers, which included his own grandparents who came to California in a covered wagon from Texas in 1868 (when his mother was about four years old).[6][7][8][9] The idea of an amusement park picked up in the 1950s when Walter Knott opened a "summer-long county fair."[10]


Knott's first theme park logo, composed of a prospector with a pack mule

Wood carver H. S. "Andy" Anderson with Sad Eye Joe in the Ghost Town area of the park, 1941
Paul von Klieben was the key employee of Walter Knott in the creation of the Ghost Town at Knott's Berry Farm and the restoration of the ghost town of Calico, California. In 1941, he joined Knott's as a staff artist, then served as art director there from 1943 to 1953. He traveled to ghost towns in the West, conducted research, and designed most of the Ghost Town section of Knott's Berry Farm. He created concept art for most of the buildings that were built there. He also drew up floor plans, oversaw the construction of buildings, and even spent some time painting concrete to look like natural rock. His Old West paintings and murals adorned the walls of many structures in the park, and a number of them still do. His art was also used extensively in Knott's newspapers, menus, brochures, catalogs and other publications.[11][12][13][14]

In 1956, Walter Knott arranged with Marion Speer to bring his Western Trails Museum collection to Knott's Berry Farm. Speer had been an enthusiastic supporter of Walter Knott's efforts to create Ghost Town, and had written articles for Knott's newspaper, the Ghost Town News. In 1956, twenty years after creating his museum, Marion Speer (at age 72) donated the carefully cataloged collection (30,000 items) to Knott's in return for Knott's housing it, displaying it and naming Speer as curator. Speer continued in that position until he retired in 1969 at the age of 84.[15][16][17][18][19]


The original Western Trails Museum building at Knott's was either made of rammed-earth construction or concrete made to look like rammed-earth. This construction technique is fireproof and was used in the old mining town of Calico, California. This ca 1983 photo is courtesy of the Orange County Archives.
The museum was once housed in a building (which has since been razed) at Knott's Berry Farm between Jeffries Barn (now known as the Wilderness Dance Hall) and the schoolhouse. The Western Trails Museum at Knott's is now just south of the saloon in Ghost Town.[20][16][21]

The park became a popular destination for conservative college students in the 1960s, especially as conservative organizations like the California Free Enterprise Association, the Libres Foundation, and the Americanism Educational League were based there.[22] According to Assistant Professor Caroline Rolland-Diamond of the Paris West University Nanterre La Défense: