The History of Paramount Parks: A Cameo in the Amusement Industry

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oC38-XhKudQ

https://greatamericanthrills.net/2014/03/03/beverly-hills-cop-3-filmed-at-great-america-20-years-ago/

The mid-nineties were awesome. Nickelodeon was just hitting its stride. The Soviet Union was no more. And a movie studio had just purchased the entire Kings Entertainment amusement park empire – with the intention of turning them into THEME parks.

With Paramount at the helm, the former Kings parks became valuable assets in terms of new shooting locations for films. Considering the advertising slogan at the time, “Where the magic of the movies meets the thrills of a lifetime” – it would only make sense that a feature film would eventually be made inside one of Paramount’s parks.

And in 1994, that’s exactly what happened at Great America. Coincidentally, a film was being pitched to the major L.A. studios at the same time. Essentially, it was “Die Hard,” but at an amusement park. Paramount looked to their stable of franchises to see if the concept would work, and they found their answer with, “Beverly Hills Cop 3.”

https://ew.com/article/1994/06/10/eddie-murphys-dangerous-ride/

Behind the scenes of ''Beverly Hills Cop III'''s Ferris wheel stunt

By George Mannes Updated June 10, 1994 at 04:00 AM EDT

In Beverly Hills Cop III, Eddie Murphy takes a scary ride for which you can’t buy a ticket. It all starts when he hops on an elevated, “three-armed” variation of a Ferris wheel featuring dangling oversize birdcages. When the ride goes awry, he leaps from cage to cage to rescue two children about to fall 100 feet to the ground from their damaged compartment.

An actual attraction at Paramount’s Great America theme park in Santa Clara, Calif., the Triple Wheel twirled too fast for the stunt jumps, says Cop III stunt coordinator Rick Avery. So the crew loaded some of the cages with sandbags and used the uneven weight, instead of the ride’s motor, to move the Triple Wheel’s arms. They also fitted the ride with safety cables attached to the jumper’s harness, and rehearsed the 12-foot leaps for a week before Murphy’s stunt double, Alan Oliney, went in front of the camera.

For one especially terrifying jump, “we knew that he could grab the side, but I wanted him to slip and hold on with one arm and make it look like he almost couldn’t make it,” Avery says. Oliney succeeded on the very first take. “It was so spectacular,” says Avery, “and we had three cameras on it. We didn’t need to shoot that again.”

https://variety.com/1993/voices/columns/cop-iii-displays-spectacle-for-wasserman-1117862394/