A 1971 Kings Island Parade Float: Selling Tomorrow Before the Park Opened
There are very few rabbit holes I love falling into more than the Digital Public Library of America. I went looking for something else entirely the other day and stumbled across an image, archived through the Indiana University digital holdings, that absolutely stopped me in my tracks: a 1971 parade float for Kings Island. A full year before the park’s gates ever opened to the public, this rolling advertisement was already trundling down a street in Indianapolis, promising children and parents alike that something extraordinary was being built just a short drive south.
For a kid like me, who grew up making annual pilgrimages to Kings Island from the Cincinnati area, the image hit like a flashbulb memory of something I never actually witnessed.
The Float Itself
The float is a three-car affair, the kind of long, articulated parade piece that requires a careful driver and a brave marshal walking alongside. Every visible inch of it is covered in flowers in three colors: red, yellow, and white. A heavy gold fringe drapes the bottom of each car, hiding the wheels so that the whole thing seems to glide rather than roll. It’s the visual vocabulary of the great American flower parade, and somebody clearly spent weeks pressing fresh blossoms into chicken wire.
The lead car is the driver’s cabin, dressed up like a tiny circus tent set inside a box. Two stylized shields, one on the front and one on the side, carry the words “Kings Island” in the now-iconic script. Even in 1971, the branding was locked in.
The middle car is where any kid in the crowd would have lost their mind. Rising up out of a bed of flowers is a roughly twelve-foot model of the Eiffel Tower. Standing guard around it, holding their own little “Kings Island” signs, are three Hanna-Barbera characters: Fred Flintstone, Yogi Bear, and Scooby-Doo. Behind them, a working merry-go-round spins with real children riding it. Along the bottom of the car, in the same elegant script as the shields, are the words “Those Wonderful Years of Tomorrow.” If you didn’t know any better, you’d swear the float had been engineered specifically to embed itself into the brain of every eight-year-old within fifty feet.
The third car is the one that gets me as an adult and as someone who has written more than once about Kings Island’s coasters. It’s a flower-built roller coaster, maybe ten feet high, with yellow flowers forming the structural supports and red flowers forming the steel-look track. A little white-and-red coaster car sits at the very top of the lift hill, poised at that wonderful tipping-point moment before the drop. There’s some text along the bottom of the third car that’s hard to make out in the photo, but it appears to advertise the park’s distance from Cincinnati. Given the era, I have to believe that little flower coaster is meant to be The Racer.
Promoting a Park That Didn’t Exist Yet
This is what I keep coming back to: in 1971, there was no Kings Island to visit. Taft Broadcasting had broken ground in June of 1970, and the park wouldn’t open until April 29, 1972. There were no commercials playing during Saturday morning cartoons that a kid could rewind and rewatch. There was no website to scroll, no Instagram feed to follow, no TikTok creator vlogging from a construction fence. Promotion had to happen in person, in real life, in places where people already gathered.
So imagine being a kid in Indianapolis in 1971, standing on a curb with a paper cup of lemonade, when this float comes around the corner.
You don’t know what Kings Island is. You’ve never heard of it. And then you see an Eiffel Tower. You see a merry-go-round actually spinning. You see Fred and Yogi and Scooby holding signs. You see a roller coaster made entirely of flowers with a tiny car frozen at the top of the hill. And in that moment, somewhere in your head, a whole imagined park gets built, brick by brick, by your own brain. The float isn’t selling a place; it’s planting an itch. By the time April 1972 rolled around, that itch would have been almost unbearable.
There’s something quietly genius about the slogan, too. “Those Wonderful Years of Tomorrow” is such a strange, lyrical thing to put on the side of a parade float. It’s nostalgic and futuristic at the same time, the way Walt Disney was nostalgic and futuristic at the same time. It promised you that the future would be a place worth missing. I bet this also is a tribute to Coney Island, which was in its last year of operation in 1971. The regional amusement park had entertained Cincinnatians for 85 years and represented classic and historic amusement parks. Kings Island represented the future of amusement parks and family entertainment. The slogan promises the memories that will be made in the park in the years to come.
My Own Wonderful Years
We were a Kings Island family. Every summer through my childhood, we’d make the drive, and the day always started the same way: spotting the Eiffel Tower from the highway. I’ve written before about how the park’s rides formed the geometry of my early summers, and how a single visit to The Monster or The Flying Dutchman could carry me through an entire school year of daydreams.
And then life happened, the way it does, and I didn’t go back for more than thirty-five years.
In 2016, I finally returned. I wrote a few posts about it that summer because I couldn’t help myself: about the roller coasters, about The Monster, about all the strange double-exposure of seeing a place that had grown up alongside me. The Eiffel Tower was still there, of course. The Racer was still racing. But International Street felt smaller, and the trees were taller, and I was the one who had changed.
In 2022, I went back again for the park’s 50th anniversary. Fifty years from that rainy April day in 1972. Fifty-one years from this parade float rolling through Indiana with a flower-covered Racer and a Yogi Bear in tow. Standing in the park that day, watching kids who are now exactly the age I was on my first visit, it was almost impossible not to think about all the parade-goers in 1971 who had no idea what they were looking at, but knew it was something they wanted to see in person.
What the Float Knew
The wild thing about looking at this image in 2026 is how much the float already understood about what Kings Island was going to be. The Eiffel Tower would become the literal and symbolic center of the park. The Hanna-Barbera characters would anchor an entire themed area that countless kids (myself included) would meet their first costumed character inside of. The Racer would, almost single-handedly, kickstart a worldwide roller coaster revival in the 1970s and would still be running when I returned decades later.
A flower-covered float promised all of that. And then the park delivered.
I’m grateful for the archivists at Indiana University and the Digital Public Library of America for making sure this image survived. Somewhere, in 1971, a kid stood on a curb and watched this thing roll past and decided that whatever Kings Island was, they were going. I like to think that kid grew up, and went, and is still going.
I know I am.
Check out these two great books on Kings Island: