SMOKE AND MIRRORS : Newfangled Effects and Old-Fashioned Storytelling Create an Attraction With a Message, but It’s Not a Tricky One: to Pass On Our Best to Future Generations

Technology marches on.

In one of Knott’s Berry Farm’s earliest Ghost Town attractions, the Covered Wagon Show, visitors look at a static scale diorama of a wagon train crossing a desert plain while listening to recorded voices retell the travails of the Knott family pioneers as they came out West. It’s an oddly affecting slice of Americana, but a special effects extravaganza it’s not.

Opening this weekend just outside the bounds of Ghost Town, behind the old Birdcage Theater, is Mystery Lodge. Inside a re-creation of a Canadian Indian lodge of the Pacific Northwest, an aged storyteller (played by a live actor) conjures images from the smoke of a mystic campfire: wispy silhouettes of his wife and children as they were earlier in life, the face of an owl portending death, a squawking raven that flies up into the rafters.

Through the 10-minute main show, the storyteller disappears and reappears, repeatedly and instantaneously. At one point his face is transformed into that of the raven, the trickster of his culture’s mythology.

The show is an impressive display of high-tech, how’d-they-do-that trickery. The patented process is called Holovision, which presumably involves holography, but the attraction’s creator will only smile and talk coyly about “magic” when asked how it all works.

Bob Rogers, president and founder of Burbank-based BRC Imagination Arts, is justly proud of the attraction’s technical achievements. But in an interview last week outside the show’s exit, he said the technology is meant to serve the story’s message, which he described as a universal call to find the best in ourselves and pass it on to our children.

“Each of us has something good and beautiful to give to the generations that follow, and the part of you that you give never dies, but lives forever,” the storyteller tells the audience, after giving a metaphor-laden overview of his life.

“What better way to spend your time than talking, laughing, telling stories, sharing what is good and true, sharing life, with those you love?”

If it’s beginning to sound like Mystery Lodge may not have as many death-defying thrills as the new Batman ride at Magic Mountain--well, you’re starting to get the picture. The point of Mystery Lodge is to “uplift the heart rather than the stomach,” said Rogers, which fits right in with the Knott’s plan of offering family-style attractions along with the roller-coasters.

The attraction is designed for a wide age range, Rogers said: Younger children will be captivated by the “magic” of the show, he predicted, while adults will also tune into the message.

Mystery Lodge is the descendant of Spirit Lodge, a BRC-produced attraction that was a hit at Expo ’86 in Vancouver, B.C. That’s where Terry E. Van Gorder, president of Knott’s, saw the show and took an interest, starting a series of discussions that has now brought a spruced-up version of the show to the Buena Park amusement park.

For both Spirit Lodge and Mystery Lodge, BRC worked with the Kwak’wala-speaking ‘Namgis people of Alert Bay, on Commorant Island in British Columbia. Theme parks have a less-than-sterling record of depicting Native American culture, usually leaning heavily on old cowboy-versus-Indian movie stereotypes, a hurdle that Rogers had to overcome when he first approached the ‘Namgis.

“It has not in general been a very good relationship,” said Rogers, speaking about the standoff between Native Americans and amusement parks. “By rights, they shouldn’t even have returned our calls.”

But for Spirit Lodge, Rogers’ company and its Native American and Canadian Indian advisers struck up a cooperative relationship, which they relied on to plan the Knott’s attraction. “They corrected us on every level of detail,” Rogers said, from “broad philosophical points to tiny details”--such as whether the ‘Namgis wear ponytails (they don’t).

Bill Cranmer, a Canadian Indian adviser to the show and the recorded voice of the Mystery Lodge storyteller, said he and the people of his group were “a little skeptical” when Rogers first approached them about the Expo ’86 idea, but “he convinced us it wasn’t going to be just a Hollywood show.”

So later, when Rogers returned with the concept of sprucing up the show for Knott’s, Cranmer was more than willing to help. Van Gorder himself made a trip to Alert Bay to talk up the project. “Terry came up to our place a couple of years ago and talked to us, and he seemed to be a very sincere person,” Cranmer recalled.

Cranmer is chairman of the board of directors of the Umista Cultural Center in Alert Bay, which displays many of the ceremonial items of his culture. Umista is a word meaning something that has been taken away and returned, an apt description for most of the works on display.

The potlatch, an elaborate feast and gift-giving ritual, is a central feature of many of the native coastal cultures of the Pacific Northwest. Early in this century, it was outlawed by the Canadian government, which was trying to force the assimilation of tribal groups.

Cranmer’s father, Dan Cranmer, gave a potlatch in the fall of 1921, and in 1922 more than 20 of the people who had taken part were jailed. The ceremonial masks and other items were confiscated and distributed to museums and other institutions in Canada and the United States.

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“A large part of the culture was lost when the potlatch was made illegal and our people were sent to jail,” Bill Cranmer said. Many of those items were returned beginning in 1980, and the Umista Cultural Center houses that collection.

Issues of sensitivity now surrounding depictions of Native American culture have scared off most theme parks, but with Mystery Lodge, Knott’s continues to buck the trend. In 1992, the park opened Indian Trails, a theme area in Ghost Town that includes re-creations of traditional housing and other educational displays, along with a stage for performances.

Paul Apodaca, curator of Native American art at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, was an adviser on that project. Even Knott’s well-intentioned efforts have been criticized by some in the Native American community, he said, but such complaints are often unrealistic.

Some have approached the attractions as they would a museum exhibit, he said, while in fact Knott’s is first and foremost a business, one that seeks to entertain. “If along the way they also seek to inform, that’s great,” Apodaca said.

“The fact that they were willing to not just use the entertainment image of Indians was wonderful,” he added. “It’s better to approach all these issues and try and develop them than to avoid them. . . . My take is, what they’re trying to do at Knott’s is a positive thing.”

What: Mystery Lodge.

When: Opens Saturday, May 28. Hours Saturday and Sunday are 9 a.m. to midnight; Monday 9 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Tuesday through Friday 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.

Where: Knott’s Berry Farm, 8039 Beach Blvd., Buena Park.

Whereabouts: Take the Beach Boulevard exit from the San Diego (405) Freeway and go north, or from the Riverside (91) Freeway and go south.

Wherewithal: General admission is $26.95 for ages 12 and up, $15.95 for ages 3 to 11, $17.95 for seniors. Through June 30, Southern California residents pay $19.95.

Where to call: (714) 220-5200.