Lion Country Safari Park Sign

Origin
This towering structure, which is thirty-odd feet tall, once stood at the entrance to the Irvine Ranch Lion Country Safari Park, which operated from 1970 to 1984 in Orange County, California. Resembling two white tusks elevating a stylized lion head that was the logo of the company that owned the park, this park has some notoriety as one of the unluckiest safari parks in existence – open for only fourteen years, the park was not as popular as it’s Florida-based predecessor, and began to sink financially from the beginning.

Frasier, a former Mexican circus lion that had been sold to the park once he had gotten too old and sick to perform, was surprisingly the park’s saving grace. Frasier proved to be extremely virile, and popular with the lionesses, siring over thirty-three cubs during his time at the park. Lion County Safari made him their star act, and even went so far as to agree to have him be the subject of a film (a terrible flop of a film, but a film nonetheless) called “Frasier, the Sensuous Lion.”

Unfortunately, Frasier died two years after the park opened, and the already low attendance dropped considerably. Soon the park began to fall apart, and the animals grew rowdy. Notable examples of this include Bubbles, the hippopotamus who escaped the park for 19 days as she wallowed in a nearby drainage pit, and Misty, the elephant who crushed her handler’s skull before running onto the highway and causing a traffic jam.

Kept at Disneyland for several years, it helped mold the tale of the movie “The Lion King”.

Effects
This sign seems to have captured both the best and the worst aspects of the park’s operation. When active, it creates a lush, fertile area that can halt and even reverse the aging process. However, the longer the sign stays active, the more dangerous it becomes, destroying everything man-made within its zone of influence.