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Transcript
Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 109. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is rarely longer than 15 minutes. So let's get started.
Buzludzha comes up a lot on Museum Archipelago. The monument was built in 1981 to look like a futuristic flying saucer parched high on Bulgarian mountains. Every detail of the visitor experience was designed to impress, to show how Bulgarian communism was the way of the future. Once inside, visitors were treated to an immersive light show, where the mosaics of Marx and Lenin and Bulgarian partisan battles were illuminated at dramatic moments during a pre-recorded narration.
But within a year of Buzludzha welcoming its first guests, all the way across the world in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, another museum opened to promote the exact opposite message. And it even had its own flying saucer connection.
Barrett Huddleston: The framing device of the museum is you have these two alien puppets that crash down in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and they need to get fuel for their spaceship so they can go back. I saw these animatronic puppets and I was like, oh, well this is just like Disney World, except they're talking about having to commodify their space technology so they can buy gold to put in their spaceship so they can get back to their planet or whatever.
This is Barrett Huddleston, who first visited Enterprise Square, USA as an elementary school student in the mid-1980s, and later worked there as a tour guide.
Barrett Huddleston: Hi, my name is Barrett Huddleston. I am
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