O Believers, Prepare to be Amazed!

[D. Allan]

Exhibition Review

O, Believers, Prepare to Be Amazed!

The New York Times

The Ripley's Believe It Or Not! Odditorium, which opened on 42nd Street in Manhattan, is "so entertaining and provocative that it's worth special attention," Edward Rothstein writes.

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

Published: August 24, 2007

Before you leave even the first gallery in the Times Square Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Odditorium, which opened on West 42nd Street in June, you have already seen a six-legged cow, a legless acrobat, a car made of wood, the world’s ugliest woman and an albino giraffe. Look up: A bulbous replica of a 1,400-pound man hangs above the main floor, held aloft presumably just as the man himself was when a forklift heaved his body out of his home after he died in 1991.

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Nature's Freaks and Celebrities If you are tempted to say, “Now I’ve seen everything,” believe it or not, you haven’t, because you have yet to see a miniature sculpture of Babe Ruth created from used chewing gum (“ABC Sculpture” it’s called); shrunken heads of an infant, toddler and boy executed by a barbaric Ecuadorean tribe (“No Child Left Behind”); a four-legged chicken bred by a Romanian farmer to produce more drumsticks (“All Fowled Up”); and a fossilized walrus penis used in tribal warfare (“Male Sex Club”).

By the time you pass through all 17,000 square feet of this attraction — museum is too solemn a word — you still won’t be able to say, “Now I’ve seen everything” because (as a character in the film “Team America” points out) you won’t have seen a man eating his own head. But you will have been amazed at many things, and perhaps even cry aloud a few times, asserting how much easier it would be to choose the second alternative in this franchise’s title than the first. This feeling is particularly intense when you are looking at something real rather than a replica — a shrunken head instead of the ugliest woman, an instrument of medieval torture instead of a photograph of a mutant.

And yes, along with the fascination comes a kind of unease, a sense that one is perversely peeping at a natural world immodestly stripped of its decorousness, or gazing luridly at its oddest human inhabitants. Circuses used to have freak shows in which (one cringes to recall) malformed, grotesque and exotic humanity was paraded before paying crowds. The freakish breaks all rules; it seems beyond belief because it fails to make any sense; it upsets comforting notions. The freakish is the ultimate avant-garde, a finger in the eye of the buttoned-up bourgeois vision of ordered life, like a tattoo parlor in the midst of a holistic spa.

The voyeuristic sense of gaining entry to a forbidden, exotic and at times unsettling realm is something Ripley’s shares with a neighboring attraction on 42nd Street: Madame Tussauds. Waxworks, since their origins in the 18th century, have offered a similar window into the world of exceptions, violations, disruptions. Royalty, celebrity and criminality were the great wax subjects. Madame Tussaud (who gave the attraction its now-jettisoned apostrophe) even made wax models from guillotined heads during the Reign of Terror. Waxworks traditionally include a chamber of horrors, even this one, which is more haunted by the personas of J. Lo and Britney than anybody resembling Jack the Ripper. But more about Madame and her institution a little later.

Despite some flaws (and some editing errors in the labels), the new Ripley’s is so entertaining and provocative that it’s worth special attention. Ripley’s hasn’t had a presence in New York since it abandoned Times Square in 1972, when the neighborhood started to become a bit too much like the shadowy world of extravagant desire and freakishness portrayed within. Now, the Odditorium can more comfortably be the exception to the surroundings rather than an extension of it.

But it is still intent on channeling the cartoonist, columnist and amateur anthropologist Robert LeRoy Ripley, whom newspaper readers in 1936 named the most popular man in America. His life could be recounted in the style he perfected for his “Believe It or Not!” feature:

¶Ripley, who came to New York from San Francisco, tried out for the Giants in 1914 and was accepted! But he broke his pitching arm the very first game he played.

¶Ripley began his cartooning career chronicling sports statistics and records, but he got more mileage from noting bizarre achievements! One Toronto man he cited “ran 100 yards backwards in 14 seconds.”

¶Ripley’s feature became so successful that he traveled around the world adding to his collections from exotic locales. But he was terrified of the telephone!

¶For all his tireless energy, Ripley, in 1949 at the age of 55, suffered a fatal heart attack during a live broadcast of his television show ... a show about the playing of taps at military funerals!

This was the man who, wearing a pith helmet, knickers and argyle socks, can be seen in videos at the Odditorium gleefully kicking up his heels with an African tribal dancer, or loading camels with memorabilia. His personal collections of beer steins, shrunken heads, tribal masks and “pranks of nature,” like a two-headed calf, are sampled here. They also form the foundation of the other Odditoriums now run by Ripley Entertainment, which continues to add to the oddities. The label style remains a cross between the Coney Island barker and the cultural anthropologist. We are told, for example, that not telling the truth was a capital offense in ancient China, and that violators were tied to a heated stove pipe. Ripley’s label reads: “Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire.”