John Lennon once remarked that “before Elvis, there was nothing.” This was not literally true — as Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, Chuck Berry, and others might well have seen fit to protest — and yet we all know what Lennon meant: Elvis was the sort of figure to whom one attaches “before” and “after” labels. He changed the game, and nothing has quite been the same ever since.
The same is true of Kumba, an iconic, industry-bending roller coaster, which closed yesterday after 33 years of operation. The United States had played host to some serious thrill rides prior to 1993, but, until Kumba opened, nobody had ever seen anything quite like that. Painted in red and turquoise and woven seamlessly into the palm-tree-strewn terrain of Busch Gardens Tampa Bay, Kumba was strikingly photogenic. (If your high school’s physics textbook had a roller coaster on its front cover, the chances of that roller coaster’s being Kumba were close to 100 percent.) Having benefited from the advent of computer-aided design, along with some well-timed breakthroughs in the fabrication of steel, Kumba was refreshingly smooth. And, thanks to its hollow, undamped box-spine track, which resonated with the vibration of its wheels, it was unusually loud. “Kumba,” Busch Gardens insisted, meant “roar” in Kikongo, and for nearly a third of a century, the attraction did precisely that. You could hear the thing from miles away.
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