Nightfall at Old Tucson Studios: Live Racism!

After living in the city of Tucson for around eight years, my wife and I finally saw Nightfall, the annual Halloween-themed event that takes place out at the Old Tucson Studios which, if you're not from around here, is a collection of old western sets that showed up in a bunch of Hollywood movies back in the the Forties and Fifties and now serve as a setting for wild west shows and such. For the month of October they have actors in scary makeup sneaking up behind people and going “Boo!”, plus a collection of haunted houses full of horror props and other employees doing much the same thing.

It was kind of fun. I was hoping it was going to be a little scarier, though I'm not sure why I thought it would be. Parents take their kids to this, so it's not going to be incredibly gory or edgy or anything like that. But it's fun. In the place of a wild west stunt show, they had an “aliens come through an unearthed portal at a military archaeological site and plot to take over the world” stunt show, featuring army guys fighting ghoul-faced aliens, explosions, guns, and a couple of instances of fountainous bloodspray (I really love fountainous bloodspray, and the inclusion of it was appreciated). A drone camera flew over the audience, the image showing up on a giant screen behind the set, and doubled as an extraterrestrial device during the show.

There was another show we saw called Monster Kitchen, a Halloweeny take on cooking competition shows, that left me feeling deeply concerned. It brought home to me--more than constant bad news about bigoted Arizona politics or people walking around with holstered weapons in plain sight--just how fucked up this state can be. In short, the show featured four characters: a vampire who hosts the show, a witch who hates his guts, a wolfman and a Frankenstein's Monster. The vampire and the witch are clearly supposed to be white, and they're portrayed as the smartest characters. The other two, the wolfman and the Frankenstein, are broad racist caricatures. The wolfman is a “Mexican”, played as something of a cross between Cheech and standup comic Paul Rodriguez, and comes complete with jokes about border-crossing and green cards (oh, and he smokes dope, because as we all know, Mexicans love their weed). Frankenstein had on a red track suit, a sweat band around his head, and sported an exaggerated “blaccent”, made all the more worrisome because the actor playing him was obviously white (and if I'm wrong and he was African-American—a hard thing to tell under all that green makeup—then it was even worse). He shills for a sport drink called Frankengreen, manufactured from his sweat. He loves to dance and say things like “Fo' sho', fo' sho'” and “chirrun” instead of “children”. I think the idea is that he's supposed to be like an NBA player or some other kind of stereotypical black athlete.

I'll cop to being Mr. Finger Wagging PC Guy, but this stuff bothered me a little, and I think for a good reason. Not to the point that I thought I'd write a scathing email to the Old Tucson Studios or anything like that (okay, I did write one Yelp review), but definitely to the point that I had to wonder if the same show would have been considered acceptable anywhere else in the US (excluding the southeast and Texas). It's not like I'm against racial humor, provided it's funny. There are terrific standups who do race material (Chris Rock, Louis C.K., and Bill Burr come immediately to mind) but that's not what we're talking about here. None of this was very funny, or funny at all really, and maybe that's what I found to be most offensive about the whole thing--racial humor that ultimately had nothing of value to say about race, and served no other purpose than to confirm the bigoted opinions of the worst people in the audience. I understand that actors need work to include on their resumes, but seeing as this cast seemed to be genuinely talented, I think they deserved better. I hope they didn't write it.

There was a magic show, too, performed by a Vegas magician who grew up here in Tucson. Pretty cheesy stuff, like most things from Vegas, but I enjoyed the tricks. How did he stuff his wife into such a little box and then stick swords and things in it? Beats me. He also used a disco ball for lighting, so points for that.

Maybe I'll check out The Slaughterhouse next time. Nightfall was amusing, but very, very tame. Little kids might be scared (a few absolutely will—an evil clown sneaked up behind one child and scared him so bad he cried), and no one else. It's family-friendly Halloween horror, on the It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown level. I'm glad we went—mainly because we got to see Old Tucson Studios—but we won't go again. What's the point?