In Branson, Missouri, there’s a full-scale replica of the Titanic where guests receive boarding passes assigned to actual passengers who died in the disaster, touch a real iceberg, and dip their hands into 28-degree water to simulate the conditions of the North Atlantic on April 15, 1912. It has a sister attraction in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. Both are thriving tourist destinations. No one’s outraged about either of them.
Knowing this makes the ongoing controversy over a children’s slide at a British fruit farm feel a little hard to take seriously. Graveley Fruit Farm in Hitchin, England has operated a Titanic-themed children’s ride for several years, according to The Sun. For around $3, kids board a replica of the ship, receive tickets styled as boarding passes, and slide down one of four chutes onto a crash mat.
On the admission ticket, you get to experience three “wrecks,” aka slides. It recently went viral after parents called it “distasteful,” “disrespectful,” and compared it to a hypothetical Twin Towers-themed ride.
Farm manager Will told the Daily Mail that the farm initially caved to the pressure and renamed the ride, then reversed course after hearing from far more people who wanted the name kept. “We get around five hundred people a day using it, and as far as I’m aware it has offended only a handful of people,” he said. “Titanic has become almost a byword in the English language. There are no survivors, or for that matter, children of survivors alive today.”
He’s not wrong. The Titanic sank 114 years ago. It has since generated a blockbuster film franchise, a Broadway musical, countless documentaries, a $700 million submersible tourism industry before OceanGate put that particular venture to rest, and two American museum attractions where guests spend hours simulating the experience of being aboard a doomed ship. The line between solemn commemoration and commercial entertainment hasn’t exactly been clear where the Titanic is concerned. A children’s slide at a fruit farm is probably not where that line gets crossed.
The ride is still called The Titanic. The farm is still open. Five hundred people a day are using it without complaint. The ones who aren’t happy about it are, as tends to be the case with this kind of controversy, louder than their numbers.
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