Rats!

By C.J. Hirschfield

Quinn Costello’s new documentary film has it all: food, fashion, music and joy. The fact that its subject is 30-pound rodents that are taking over Louisiana – and encroaching on California – just makes it that much more interesting.

Rodents of Unusual Size will have its East Bay premiere on Oct. 2 at 7 p.m. at the New Parkway Theater. As soon as I heard about it, I marked my calendar.

Poster for "Rodents of Unusual Size"

Taking a Movie for a Ride

By C.J. Hirschfield

It was just announced that megastar Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson will star in a new Disney live-action movie based on Disneyland’s Jungle Cruise ride. A script is currently in the works. The attraction, which has operated since the park’s opening in 1955, and which simulates a riverboat cruise down several major rivers of Asia, Africa, and South America, features jungles filled with “dangerous” Audio-Animatronic animals and reptiles, and a skipper who fires his gun to scare off a rogue hippo. (The original plan for the ride was to use real animals, but the animals would have been sleeping during the day.)

Entrance to Disneyland's Jungle Cruise ride.

Putt 'er Here!

By C.J. Hirschfield

I love reading Funworld Magazine, the official publication of the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions. It was there that I learned that the enduring game of miniature golf will be celebrating its centennial this year. That’s right: 100 years of windmills, clowns, tubes, ramps, chutes, kitsch and Americana.

You may not know that Fairyland’s original sets, designed in 1950 by architect William Russell Everritt, were widely copied by developers of mini-golf courses in the 1950s and 1960s. Storybook theme parks and mini-golf courses both proliferated in the postwar years, as families sought out affordable places to have fun together.

Filmmaker and mini-golfer Amanda Kulkoski. Favorite course obstacle: the "Pachinko hole."

Amanda Kulkoski fell in love with the sport in the 1980s, when she was growing up. So it wasn’t surprising that her first job in her hometown of Green Bay, Wis., was at the local miniature golf course. She’d sweep the holes, move boulders to alter a course, hand out balls, sell soft-serve ice cream and clean the bathrooms.

“I loved to play – still do,” she says.