Written by Kent Learned, 21 March 2018, originally posted to the Wonderland History Facebook group.
Audio-Animatronics Dinosaurs were very popular in the early 1990’s. Wonderland had two different dinosaur displays. First was “Dinosaurs In the Wild”. It was created in The Grove. The park brought in a display of about 5 or 6 Audio-Animatronics Dinosaurs and the sound department was given the task of amplifying them and creating smoke for a theatrical effect. Amps and speakers was the easy part, we just used some extra show equipment and made them weatherproof.
The problem was the smoke machines. They’re designed to make a lot of smoke very quickly, making lots of noise in the process. The next problem was getting the smoke out of the chamber it was created in (this chamber also muffled the noise).
We ended up using a large computer fan for each smoke exit pipe. That way the smoke just drifted out gently. I created a control box that gave an adjustable 2 to 10 second burst of smoke about every minute, creating the amount of smoke needed, and limiting the amount of smoke fluid need, at $10+ a litre. When you walked in the grove of an evening it was actually quite magical. We used some of those recently recreated Green Mushroom speakers for the ambience sound system.
The Second Dinosaurs event was installed in Hanna Barbera Theatre after all the seats were taken out. We needed about 20 reasonable speaker, and we couldn’t afford what the vendors were selling. I had made a speaker cabinet with 2 x 20cm speakers in it for use on Beach Mission back in the mid 1980’s. We built an improved version, adding a treble speaker and Dino Mk I was born. It worked well enough and we built another 20 for about the cost of 6 or 7 similar commercial speakers. These affectionately became known as “Dino’s”.
I don’t remember too much about the dinosaurs on this one, but I do remember making a sound track of an old plane flying over the area, as well as about 5 other sound zones. We re-used all the smoke machine systems and we bought a 200 litre drum of smoke machine fluid in the end for about $250. Quite a savings. We even had an old plane bought in behind the theatre with sound and smoke in it.