Thursday, June 2, 2011

Irrational Dinosaurs

I'm not afraid of very many things. Mostly just drowning, falling, and sticking my hand into dark holes in rock faces. Of course, I'm also terrified to death of animatronic animals (dinosaurs in particular.)

It happened a little something like this:
My family and I stopped off in Vegas on our way to Disneyland when I was five. At the time, the Circus Circus hotel had some animatronic dinosaur-based attraction that was supposed to be pretty cool, so we went to check it out...

 And that's how my life was ruined. Further exacerbated by this:
when we went to Universal Studios a few days later.... Which is why, when I went to Disneyland with my friends on my high school choir tour eleven years later, I spent the entirety of the Jungle Cruise boat ride trembling in my seat and trying very hard not to weep
 Sweet mercy, noooo!

Now, whenever I tell people that I'm terrified of animatronic dinosaurs/animals, they always laugh at me. For years I thought there was something wrong with me and I was just being silly about the whole thing, but in more recent years I've been thinking about it, and I've begun to wonder...
How on Earth is this NOT a rational fear?

 In what way are robots made to look and act like vicious wild animals or bloodthirsty giant lizards NOT terrifying??* I cannot think of a single thing that is okay about this! Sure, mom and dad assure me that they're "not real" but the fact that they are robots does NOT make it better. It makes it worse.

Laugh at me all you want, but when those things go rogue and start terrorizing cities across the globe, you'll have nobody but yourselves to blame for trusting them.

* "In the earliest days of man, nature instilled in our primitive ancestors an instinctive fear of dinosaurs. And robots."
-Probably Darwin

4 comments:

Doug said...

Are you scared in the Tiki room? Or do the animals have to be big scary ones?

The Erin said...

Naw, the Tiki room is fine. If the animals are singing it's all okay. It's just if they're acting like actual animals...

Splash Mountain animals are okay. Jungle Cruise animals are VERY not okay.

Laurel and David Lowe said...

HA! The troll face! I remember that trip. You could hardly function in Circus Circus.

Esmeralda Fitzmonster said...

I just want to say that I came across this blog post and I have the exact same phobia as you! For me, I was terrified by an animatronic t-rex at a museum when I was a child. I HATE the Toys R Us in Times Square because they have a t-rex in there and I had a pretty terrible panic attack on the Jurassic Park ride (my friends dragged me on it). I'm not scared of like It's a Small World or Hall of the Presidents, but I did refuse to go on the Jaws ride and freaked out on the King Kong ride at Universal.