It’s Not Putting with Pluto, But It’s Very Close

Not long ago, humor writer Dave Barry lamented that he and his wife had spent “two-thirds” of their disposable income taking their son to see Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. “If we weren’t actually in Disney World, we were standing outside the fence,” he said. “If the lines were too long, we just threw money over.”

For families like the Barrys who are in need of an alternative, the answer may lie in one of entertainment’s hottest new concepts: pint-size suburban parks that don’t require a plane ride or two days of travel and don’t take a $300 chomp out of Mom and Dad’s paycheck. Popping up along highways across the country, the supermarket-size playpens are quickly capturing the niche between mega-theme parks and video arcades. The range of activities — batting cages, bumper boats, go-cart tracks — lures exhausted parents, bored teenagers and desperate baby sitters who prefer to spend $5 on one good ride rather than a $40 flat rate for access to a dozen their kids won’t use.

One of the most successful ventures is Mountasia Enterprises, based in Alpharetta, Georgia. Proprietors Scott and Juli Demerau started their first park in 1986 at an abandoned skateboard center in Mobile, Alabama. Within weeks the crush of visitors forced them to hire traffic police. In six months they had branched out to two more locations. Three years later things were going so well that they decided to get married — on the miniature golf course at one of their Georgia fun centers. Since their debut, the Demeraus have expanded their original investment of $450,000 into an amusement empire that includes 26 parks in the U.S. and two in Spain, generating more than $20 million in annual gross revenue.

Of all the activities at the new parks, the biggest draw is miniature golf. The high-tech courses, which boast indigo-tinted waterfalls and animated jungle creatures, are a far cry from the concrete dinosaurs and creaky windmills that made these kitschy creations an icon of America’s vacation landscape. Not bad for a pastime that was pooh-poohed during the 1920s as “nitwit golf.”