As you walk about the park, you will also be greeted by the Seven Dwarves and 
Donald Duck, all direct copies from Disney animated films. It is possible that these bearers of Westernization were missed by the authorities because they go back so far in time that most Iranians in authority today grew up with them and may not conceive of them as Western invaders.
That would be much like the linguistic purists who want to purge “pizza” from Farsi, but have no complaint about “merci,” which has been used more than a century and seems natural Persian to most everyone. However, Eram Park also displays a cutout of Shrek, who was created only in 2001, sufficiently recent that he should be seen as obviously a tool of the Western cultural invasion.
Stefan Zwanzger, 32, a German who is obsessed with theme parks and roller coasters and travels around the world trying to see and ride them all, pointed out the anomaly of Eram Park to CNN. Zwanzger has visited 150 theme parks on five continents. He loves Iran. But he hates the roller coaster at Eram, which he found rusty, not to mention stomach-churning. Zwanzger said of his arrival in Iran, “What surprised me is that I didn’t even get the slightest cultural shock.
The Iranians I met made me feel like I was in Europe.” Whereas on the streets of Tehran, US icons such as the Statue of Liberty are used to create anti-American graffiti, Zwanzger witnessed Mickey Mouse and his pals being pressed into far less sinister tasks.
At Eram Park, Mickey simply welcomes people to the funfair, while the Seven Dwarves urge people to enjoy themselves. Shrek offers tickets to rides and Donald Duck helpfully points to the exit.
As with his other experiences of places, including North Korea, Zwanzger says Iran’s theme parks offer a glimpse of the country’s citizens as they relax and forget their day-to-day concerns, even if the rides struggle to merit the low admission fees.
“I highly recommend Iran as a place to visit. It’s a beautiful country with fantastic people. The local amusement parks provide great opportunity to mingle with locals.”
Sadly, however, with their rusting roller coasters and “drainingly dull” sideshows, not even the presence of Mickey, Shrek and the Seven Dwarves could save Iran’s theme parks from rating badly on Zwanzger’s scorecard.
He says one ride, in which visitors are squeezed into a car shaped like a soda can before being hurtled around a cramped roller coaster circuit, could be world-beatingly bad.
“The soda can-shaped roller coaster in Eram Park I’m still trying to find out who the manufacturer was, even my specialist friends don’t know was maybe the worst I have ever experienced. “I was scared. The loop is the tightest I have ever seen and the vehicle’s headrests are too low to keep your head stable.
You can hear the riders’ joyful screams rise when the coaster plunges into the loop and vanish within a second once they enter the murderous brain-turner itself. “It was genuinely unpleasant and leaves you with some neck pain to remember.”
