Film looks at AstroWorld's last days

Meet David Purdie, a true AstroWorld fan: When he heard that the park was going to close, Purdie decided to capture its last days on film. With a hand-held video camera, he visited AstroWorld every weekend in October 2005, filming everything he could — from the drive down Kirby to the walk over the pedestrian bridge to the slow climb up the first incline on the Texas Cyclone. And then, when cranes and bulldozers moved in and began dismantling the park, Purdie filmed that, too. When it was all over, the AstroWorld site was an empty field — and Purdie had 150 hours of footage documenting the park's death. Now he's compiled some of that footage into a three-minute film, Astrowhirled (watch it here), which should be a trip down memory lane for any longtime Houstonian.

Purdie, a waiter at Tony Mandola's Gulf Coast Kitchen, said he visited AstroWorld a week after the park shut down and saw that crews had begun to disassemble the Dungeon Drop. "I got out and started filming, and I got all excited and sad at the same time," he told the Chronicle. "I went back later that day. I went back the next day and the next day and the next day." He managed to make friends with some of the construction workers who were dismantling AstroWorld's rides and got access to the park seven times after it closed; one of those times, he and a friend walked around the empty park unescorted. "I told [my friend] when we got to the Bamboo Chute, 'I can remember being a kid and wishing that I could be the only person at AstroWorld.' So here we are, the only people at AstroWorld, but we can't ride anything," he said. Purdie has collected some AstroWorld memorabilia, including a few signs, vintage maps, an ashtray and a lighter, but Astrowhirled is something totally different: a memory that anyone familiar with the park can share. It was also Purdie's first venture into filmmaking — he submitted it to a local film festival, but it didn't make the cut, so now he's trying to persuade the River Oaks Theater to show the film before its midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show on Saturday.

Though AstroWorld stood for less than 40 years, the fact that it is so deeply ingrained in Houstonians' memory shows just how significant a site it was, Rice University architectural historian Stephen Fox said. "The dismay experienced by Houston children — and generations of former children — when the complex was closed and demolished is for me just as good an indication of AstroWorld's cultural significance as a Houston landmark," Fox told the Chron. "It was part of the collective memory of Houstonians for nearly 40 years."