[Lyle Wheeler] Concept, Budget and Design Archive for Southern California Amusement Park Jungleland

Item Details

[Lyle Wheeler] Concept, Budget and Design Archive for Southern California Amusement Park Jungleland 

Archive for proposed expansion of Jungleland consists of perhaps 100 documents stored in legal-sized file folder. Generally good to very good condition. 

"Jungleland USA" was first developed in 1929 by Louis Goebel to serve as animal training park for Hollywood movies. A wide variety of exotic animals were obtained, trained, and rented to the studios for use in films.  Goebel later opened a theme park to the public featuring wild animal shows including acts with Mister Ed, the talking horse, Bimbo the elephant from the Circus Boy television series and Tamba the chimpanzee, featured in the Jungle Jim movies. 

Sometime in the 1950's, a consortium of Jimmie Woods, Sid Rogell, Jim Ruman and Lyle Wheeler formed "Jungle-Land Incorporated". Likely buoyed by the success of nearby Disneyland and Knott's Berry Farm, these four intended to turn a sleepy zoo into the third major southern California theme park.   These four, all involved in Hollywood, would rely on Lyle Wheeler's design skills to conceptualize and design this new park.

From a Los Angeles Times article dated January 23, 1992: "In 1955, Twentieth Century-Fox executives James Ruman and Sid Rogel bought the farm (so to speak) and added 158 acres to its original 20. Their intention was to build an amusement park that would include rides and animals roaming freely, to be observed by guests in trams overhead. They felt confident that, with the newly opened Ventura Freeway giving Angelenos access, Jungleland could be a major attraction. Enter the late Lyle Wheeler, an architect, artist and set designer who worked on “Gone With the Wind” and other films. Wheeler’s drawings and far-flung ideas for Jungleland illustrate a real movie-biz, sky’s-the-limit zeal. Perhaps the illusory, ephemeral medium of cinema provokes its practitioners to consider creation in three dimensions, something concrete and kinetic. At least it seems so with Wheeler, whose Jungleland vision incorporated elements of the circus, a zoo and a nature expo. One could speculate that it typifies the Southern Californian instinct to dazzle and to build a bigger, brighter mousetrap."

Lyle Wheeler was at the height of his career as a motion picture art director having won academy awards for Gone with the Wind (1939), Anna and the King of Siam (1946), The Robe (1953), The King and I (1956) and later in 1959 for The Diary of Anne Frank. 

This archive contains Wheeler's very rough drafts of rides, animal acts, park layout, a mineral garden, food concepts (multicolored sandwiches), penguin pinball and several un-labeled sheets. There are punch lists of projects, budgets, schedules, spatial requirements for rides and concessions and early promotional press releases. 

Included is a 16mm movie from the World Jungle Compound (Jungleland went by a variety of names over the years) circa 1945-1956 titled "A Thrill a Second". An accompanying note claims the movie is about 300 feet. We have not confirmed content. 

Part and parcel to the design of the 'new' Jungleland was a proposal for "Jungle-Land Incorporated" to purchase the existing facilities and animals from Louis Goebel.  As best as we can tell, this agreement never happened and the grandiose plans for a larger, expanded Jungleland never occurred. Some changes were made to the park in the early 60's but the project was dogged by poor publicity, especially when Jayne Mansfield’s son was mauled by a lion in 1966.  Louis Goebel sold the land in 1969, closing the chapter on a once-promising attraction. Today the land is the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza.

Later in life Lyle Wheeler's fortunes turned sour suffering financial losses and eventually was forced to sell his home. He also was delinquent on storage bills and lost all five Academy statuettes at auction. His Oscar for The Diary of Anne Frank was purchased and returned to Wheeler in 1989 by a fan. He died in 1990.