Talk:The Thing (roadside attraction)

*Amanda Congdon dances in The Thing? parking lot
So ten minutes into this video there is a five second clip of some chick dancing in front of "The Thing" building. Perhaps the owner of this video could edit the video just to show that clip, otherwise I believe it is not something that should be there. Does anyone have a picture of the outside of this building to post, because then removing the video would be no problem. I just feel the video is more of a plug than anything. Fastestdogever 16:05, 20 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Dog, I fixed by adding time to show when the relevant portion displays. I did the total makeover of this page, including extensive research and links, and I can assure you it is not "a plug," since I have no affiliation with the creators of the videos, the Thing or any other aspect of the page. Pepso 16:33, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

The Thing in Popular Culture
I seem to recall a parody of The Thing in an episode of the Nickolodeon Cartoon "Doug" where they are driving to a "Painted gorge" and come to a sign labled "It" they go out of their way to see "It" which turns out to be a misshapen potato. -The accountless i

Music Inspired by The Thing?
I'm trying to remember, there was a one-hit-wonder alt-rock song from the early to mid 1990s, called The Church of something or other.. It was about The Thing? IIDK if it ever got national play but I remember Suzie Dunn played it on KLPX a bunch one summer..

Requested move

 * The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section. 

The result of the move request was: Moved. Apteva (talk) 23:15, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

The Thing? → The Thing (roadside attraction) – It appears to be called the "The Thing" and not the "The Thing?" Going by the refs in the External Links section Herostratus (talk) 17:23, 14 May 2013 (UTC)
 * NPR calls it "The Thing".
 * Grindshow calls it "The Thing".
 * Roadside America calls it "The Thing". (The article is titled "The Thing?" but that is just the title of the article not the name of the entity. The body uses "The Thing".)
 * The Phoenix New Times link deadlinks, so no way to tell what they do. Ditto the Explorer News link.
 * The signage for the site itself is subject to interpretation. Signs such as "The Thing?" are probably just interrogative exclamations (that is, "The Thing [interrogative]" rather than announcing "The Thing?" as its proper name).
 * Even if "The Thing?" is its proper name, which is not even clear, our style is not use idiosyncratic typography. We make a few exceptions when the entity is well known and supported by the preponderance of reliable sources (we do use "Yahoo!" but we won't use (say) "The B*I*G W*E*B S*I*T*E" for a marginal website unless most everyone else does). That doesn't appear to apply here. Herostratus (talk) 17:23, 14 May 2013 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Suggest removing image of The Thing
When you google "The Thing roadside attraction", the photo of The Thing from this page taken by user Thadrd28 is the first thing that shows up on mobile search results or in desktop image search. I'm not sure what Wikipedia editors' official/debated position on spoilers is but this image is definitely a spoiler, if for a non-traditional experience. The whole point/experience of The Thing is the mystery - when you encounter it in the desert, the billboards begin to tell you your distance from the thing at least a hundred miles away, which creates a sense of anticipation. Within the exhibit, a winding trail through multiple buildings heightens that experience. I'd even argue that this anticipation is the real meat of The Thing as an attraction, since the mummy itself is a bit of a letdown. Including the image in the wikipedia article and thus the first page of google results spoils that mystery for anyone who hasn't already been to see The Thing but knows to google it - which is pretty much how we navigate to anything we want to see these days. I'm just a fan of roadside attractions and I hate to see this classic one ruined for future visitors. Sabriel~enwiki (talk) 20:31, 11 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia does have an official position on spoilers, arrived at through community consensus; see WP:SPOILERS. In brief, WP does not include spoiler warnings, or censor information in an attempt to avoid spoilers. In this case, it sounds like your concern is about the results page of the search engine you you use, rather than the placement of the information in the article, so it would make more sense for you to contact the developers of the search engine about the image placement on that page. Sneftel (talk) 09:50, 13 October 2021 (UTC)

Horrible Muddle - Rewrite!
This is the kind of article that gives Wikipedia a reputation for being a half-baked mess that self-identifies as an encyclopedia and everybody has to pretend it really is one so the autistic kiddies who write it won't cry. Question: is the Thing a pair of real mummified human corpses or are they just crude papier mâché dummies? You give three conflicting answers. Under the heading "The exhibit" you seem to be stating as fact that the bodies are real, probably of either Chinese or Native American ancestry, and gives them a tragic origin story. And then you say: "But in this story, the harshness of truth will never be uncovered, and the "Thing" will remain a mystery." Excuse me??? Quite apart from the weirdly mangled English - this entire section seems to have been written by someone who doesn't speak English and translated by a robot - isn't this the exact opposite of what an encyclopedia is supposed to do?

You then say in the "Origins" section that an outsider artist called Homer Tate may have created the Thing, but in such a way that you imply this to be the personal opinion of Tate's great-great-great-grandson and nobody else. Your sources seem to be some random person's ramshackle website, the Roadside America site which for some reason I'm forbidden to access from the UK, and a newspaper article I can't read because the link is dead. But every other site I can find that devotes significant space to Homer Tate seems to think that he undoubtedly did create the Thing, and made no secret of it during his lifetime (he died in 1971, about 20 years after the Thing's debut), which he hardly could have, given its obvious similarity to the numerous other sculptures he was known to have created, many of which were for sale in his shop.

And then you say that "The origin of the Thing was established by Syndicated columnist Stan Delaplane, who interviewed Janet Price in 1956". Apparently in 1950 some unidentified man was driving around Arizona with a vanload of mummies "he got somewhere" and trying to sell them to storekeepers for $50 a stiff! Which is not only absurd, but conveniently leaves it open for the Thing to be two genuine cadavers and their tragic orgin story to be true, without actually making those claims. And I wouldn't exactly call Janet Price impartial.

Well, which is it? A mummy or a dummy? It's a pretty basic question! Are you seriously suggesting there's any doubt as to whether or not it's a genuine human cadaver? Any clear photo, especially one showing its gleefully smiling face in close-up, makes it obvious that it isn't really a dead body. (By the way, both your photo and your description of it being in a coffin under scratched plexiglass are out of date; since 2018 it has been displayed in a more naturalistic diorama representing the desert where it was supposedly found, under dimmer and more artful lighting which makes it look slightly less fake.) And if it really was a dessicated human body of unknown origin, wouldn't the local police have taken an interest at some point in the last seven decades?

Oh, but I forgot; you don't like "the harshness of truth" if it ruins a good story. Presumably your article on Atlantis states that it not ony definitely existed 10,000 years ago, it still does and is currently ruled by Aquaman?

This entire page is dismally bad. Even the tiniest details are garbled. After her husband's death in 1969, did Janet Price continue to run the attraction for "many years" or "several years"? They don't mean the same thing, but according to you they're both true. And how much signage for the attraction really exists? You give several confusing and conflicting claims, but only say for sure that the most ludicrously excessive of them isn't true. You quote a claim that there are allegedly 247 signs spread over 200 miles, but you don't seem terribly sure about it. Is there some doubt as to whether or not many large objects positioned next to a public highway whose entire purpose is to be as conspicuous as possible are actually there? And assuming at least some of then are, how many of them are there really? Perhaps your more aspergic editors are terrified to commit themselves to a total of 247 billboards in case there are only 246, but I think most of us just want to know whether there genuinely are about 250 of them, as opposed to the much lower number you'd expect.

Actually some of the higher figures might well be accurate; I've just found a photo of a sign (presumably quite recent, since it includes the Bowlins logo) pointing the way to "THE THING?" from a distance of 106 miles! An array of billboards 200 miles long would be remarkable under any circumstances, but when you consider that it's all there to advertise something that looks like a battered old prop from a very cheap funfair haunted house, it's even more extraordinary, and possibly unique. In fact, since the Thing would be nothing without the extraordinary effort that went into the hype (a superb examble of P. T. Barnum's dictum about selling the sizzle, not the steak), if there really are anything like 247 billboards, that's arguably far more noteworthy than the Thing they're pointing to. Maybe a few pictures would be useful? And perhaps a map showing how far they do in fact extend? Or is a map of Arizona with a line drawn on it too much to ask? 62.7.182.106 (talk) 21:29, 10 December 2022 (UTC)
 * It's frankly amazing that you exhausted enough effort to kvetch for roughly 4 paragraphs on the talk page instead of personally rewriting a single paragraph on the main page. Bravo, hotshot. Paragon Deku (talk) 04:10, 18 May 2023 (UTC)