Word: seaquariums
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Here comes Free Willy, this month's feel-good sleeper. Preview audiences have gone wild for Willy, the story of two 12-year-olds separated from their folks. Jesse (Jason James Richter) is a troubled boy who, while cleaning up the graffiti scrawled on the walls of a seaquarium theme park in the Pacific Northwest, bonds mystically with a 7,000-lb., 22-ft.-long killer whale named Willy. Aided by his foster parents and two sympathetic adults at the park, the sweet boy makes it his mission to free the sweet beast...
There's no denying, though, that Free Willy is a clever movie toy for the kid market. Most of the time Willy is played by Keiko, a killer whale (actually a type of dolphin) that the company found in a seaquarium in Mexico City. But frequently Keiko is spelled by a stunt double: a high-tech robot coated with 3,000 lbs. of eurythane rubber. (There is also a Turbo Willy - -- essentially the top of the whale, with mammoth hydraulic propellers on the bottom.) How real were the fake Willys? Persuasive enough so that the real Willy got the hots...
...moneymaker on the Strip, at least in part because patrons come to see the man-made volcano out front that erupts at night every 15 minutes, the sharks swimming behind the registration desk, the white tigers lounging below Roman columns in their glass cage and the dolphins in the seaquarium. His new Treasure Island casino, to open in October, will re-create at hourly intervals a cannon fight between two battleships and offer a permanent home to the elegant Cirque du Soleil. If Wynn gets his way, he will be permitted to build two casinos in Connecticut that will...