It is hot enough to fry a burger pattie on the asphalt at the rear of the lot. The parking area serves two newish warehouses not unlike others you would find away from the downtown core in any North American city. The only thing different about them is they are a desert sand colour, presumably to reflect the scorching sun.
The far corner of the one building sports two glass windows, a glass door and a clever logo indicating that inside is Acrylic Tank Manufacturing. It seems an odd place for an aquarium company considering that I haven't scented a drop of water in the last 100 miles.
Life is full of surprises, however, even for a well-educated Alaskan Malamute such as me. They not only make custom aquariums inside, they film the work and turn it into Tanked, a popular kids reality show.
Tanked follows two real-life brothers-in-law who run the family aquarium manufacturing business. They will built any size of shaped aquarium that a customer requests. They create them in the shape of cars, pyramids, phone booths or whatever and leave Tanked viewers amazed and laughing.
There's a little gift ship inside the plant and the guy running it tells me it receives up to 1,000 visitors a day. Las Vegas is a production town for a bunch of reality shows and tours of the production locations have become a business.
He explains that millions of kids watch Tanked on Animal Planet TV because their parents don't want them watching the violence and sex of regular TV channels. So any adult who brings a kid to Las Vegas and asks "what would you like to see?" ends up out here in the warehouse district.
It's a neat place to visit and there are no one-armed bandits there to pick your pockets.
OZ
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| The Place to Get Tanked in Vegas |
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| Marcus and John Outside The Tank |
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| How About an Aquarium Like This? |
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