Marine Studios Dolphin Show, Marineland, Florida, 1950s

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Marine Studios Dolphin Show, Marineland, Florida, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Marine Studios Dolphin Show, Marineland, Florida, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-644243

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At Marineland of Florida, billed in its heyday as the world's first oceanarium, a dolphin has just launched itself clear of the pool in the kind of vertical leap that in the 1950s passed for scientific education and drew touring families from across the eastern seaboard. The sign behind the pool credits 'Marine Studios,' the facility's original production-company name, advertising what it called 'aquoted surprises' — a promotional language that managed to make marine biology sound like a game show. A white-uniformed trainer stands at poolside with the practiced calm of someone who has watched this trick performed forty times that week and is quietly counting fish. The whole enterprise operated on the postwar American conviction that nature, properly corralled and given a corporate sponsor, became wholesome family entertainment, and that a dolphin jumping on cue was more or less the same thing as understanding the sea. Marineland would spend the next two decades insisting it was an institution of science, right up until SeaWorld arrived in Orlando and made the argument moot.

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