Theme Parks : Sunday in the Parks With Calendar : Sea World: Treading Waters of Education

Welcome to Sunday in the Parks with Calendar--the Sequel. And please fasten your seat belts.

For our second annual survey of Southern California’s major theme parks, our intrepid reporters visited the parks on a recent Sunday, unannounced. Accompanied by family or a friend, they bought tickets, stood in lines, sampled the park’s rides and menus and withered in the heat.

Afterward, they put in calls to the various park publicists for assistance in compiling our comparison chart. (Some of those publicists would have preferred that we attend their parks during special “media days”--when the parks operate without a glitch and are especially clean and when we might have been wooed with “cuts” in line, as well as special edibles.)

It’s no surprise that Sundays in the park have changed since the serene turn-of-the-century depiction “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte,” by French artist Georges Seurat, (the inspiration for our illustrations). In fact, Sundays keep on changing, as the parks continue in their mania to always be one step/ride/attraction ahead of the competition. So how do they measure up? Read on:

Sea World, situated on 135 acres of lush garden and sloping sidewalks on San Diego’s Mission Bay, has only two rides. The Skytower is a 5-minute revolving elevator trip with a panoramic view, and the Skyride is a 6-minute ski lift that crosses and recrosses an inlet of the bay.

But people don’t come to Sea World for the rides. They come to see the killer whales, the dolphins, beluga and pilot whales, seals, otters, sea lions, penguins, sharks and even starfish.

In keeping with its ownership by textbook publisher Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Sea World’s emphasis is on education. There’s even an area called Places of Learning, with a true-to-scale, one-acre map of the United States that visitors can walk across. Plus a bookstore that actually sells children’s classics and best-sellers--along with the obligatory souvenirs.

Sound boring? It can be. There’s only so much education one can fit into a high-priced afternoon.

Even the shows are pretty much “no-frills,” in which the creatures’ often-spectacular leaps and acrobatics provide the excitement. The hype is in the build-up to the tricks. Visitors hear two or three times what that cute dolphin is going to do before he/she (who can tell?) gets around to doing it.

The No. 1 attraction at Sea World is Baby Shamu, a killer whale born at the park Sept. 23. The beautiful creature is a miniature version of the adult orcas whose majestically simple black-and-white color scheme is shared by pandas, puffins and penguins. Baby Shamu tags along beside momma, who is known as Mamu, diving and leaping on cues from the seven trainers stationed around the pool in Shamu Stadium. (The late Orky fathered Baby Shamu.)

The stadium itself consists of two tiers of aluminum bleachers (thankfully, the benches have backs) that peer down on a 6-million-gallon tank of carefully filtered seawater.

The 20-minute show includes a sappy Shamu theme song, and the trumpeting, “The waiting is over. The family’s complete!” Then come the performances, in which the beasts wave at the audience with their tails while diving face-down in the water. The trainers also get into the act, talking about how “these special creatures have made our lives special too.”

None of this obscures the audience’s sense of awe at the strength, size and swimming capabilities of the orca. When these monsters pop out of a dive, lean over onto their sides, and send an enormous wave across the top of the tank--soaking the first few rows of people--well, there’s a show that impresses.

Elsewhere: Penguins and puffins, their seagoing Arctic cousins, populate an extremely educational exhibit called Penguin Encounter. Did you know that penguins feed their fledglings “regurgitated, semi-digested fish”? Maybe you didn’t need that much detail.

Want to look at sharks from underwater? The shark exhibit will let you. Beware: this exhibit’s exit is through a gift shop. Now that’s really scary!

The petting and feeding pool gives visitors a chance to get their hands on some raw fish--and on dolphins and pilot whales. For a buck, you get a cardboard platter of half a dozen smelt and the critters come right up to you, mouths open, for a treat. It’s messy, wet and children love it.

Not so lovable: the food service. Lines are long, service seems to take forever, and not enough people are working behind the counters. Worse, the ones who are there are disorganized. Maybe these teen-agers have only been on the job a short time and will improve over the summer?

At Cap’n Kid’s World, hundreds of children can partake of an enormous playground with plenty of gym equipment--plus cargo nets to climb up to one of the three treehouses, swinging bridges, air-filled trampolines, a cluster of punching bags to stagger through, barrels to tumble in, suspended tubes to crawl through, a two-sided vertical trampoline that can leave a kid vibrating like a cartoon character, and lots more. Stop here before loading the kids in the car, and they’ll sleep on the way home.