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remote and filled with animals people had never heard of. Creatures like bettongs, bandicoots, numbats, and quokkas. True, there were also a lot of kangaroos, which people liked well enough, but after walking for miles around the rest of the park, few guests felt like taking a fifteen-minute detour to see them. However, in the last few weeks the Land Down Under had become the most popular part of FunJungle, thanks to another of J.J. McCracken’s schemes to boost attendance.
    FunJungle had acquired a koala.
    Although zoos and aquariums are popular throughout the world, there are very few animals that can draw big crowds on their own. Giant pandas are probably the most notable for this, but koalas are a close second. For one thing, they’re adorable—they’re basically living teddy bears—and for another, they’re quite rare to see. Australia is very protective of its koalas and doesn’t allow many to be taken out of the country, so only a few zoos have them.
    J.J. McCracken, however, was rich and influential enough toget anything he wanted. He owned several businesses in Australia and was friends with a lot of politicians there. So he twisted a few arms, dashed off a five-million-dollar check for koala conservation (tax-deductible, of course)—and within less than a week a koala was on its way to FunJungle.
    There was only one catch: The Australians hadn’t sold the koala to the park; they’d merely lent the koala for six months as a “goodwill ambassador.” In truth this wasn’t unusual. Every giant panda in the United States has technically only been lent out by China. Australia had done it plenty of times for koalas. However, J.J. was fine with this. He figured that having the koala for a limited time made its arrival more of an event. And so FunJungle’s mighty marketing machine swung into action.
    The very first thing was to change the koala’s name. The koala had originally been christened Goongiwarri, which was an Aboriginal Australian word for “swamp,” but J.J. McCracken claimed it sounded “like an elephant passing gas.” Thousands of dollars worth of marketing research indicated that park goers preferred animal names that were short, cute, and alliterative—and thus Goongiwarri was rechristened Kazoo.
    Next a deluge of press releases went out. Within a day the story was all over the national news. In FunJungle-mad Texas, it was the lead story in every major market.
    A large section of the Land Down Under suddenly became KoalaVille, the center of which was a temporary koala exhibit built in just three days. (Luckily, koalas don’t need much room, so the exhibit didn’t have to be very big.) But Kazoo’s habitat was puny compared to the most significant part of KoalaVille: the Kazoo merchandise area. A huge tent, designed to look like it was part of some exotic bazaar (never mind that bazaars were Middle Eastern, not Australian) was erected and filled with anything you could slap a koala’s photo on: T-shirts, sweatshirts, coffee mugs, backpacks, license plate frames, beach towels, posters, pennants, jigsaw puzzles, plates, napkins, and of course commemorative boomerangs. (The photo on the items wasn’t even Kazoo. It was just some random photo that Pete Thwacker, the head of PR, had found on the Internet, but as Pete explained, “No one will notice. All koalas look exactly the same.”) The bazaar covered an entire acre. There were four aisles of Kazoo the Koala plush toys alone.
    The marketing push worked. People who’d canceled their Christmas trips to FunJungle now rebooked. And attendance numbers, which had been dismal, rebounded a bit. People who lived within a day’s drive of FunJungle streamed back to see the new arrival and snapped up plenty of koala merchandise to boot. Given the time of year, the crowds weren’t massive, but attendance predictions for the next few months were beginning to