The Great GoogaMooga: A Tale of Two Festivals

This past weekend The Great GoogaMooga took over Brooklyn’s Prospect Park for the first event of its kind – a hybrid music/food/beer/wine festival. GoogaMooga was put together by Superfly Presents, the organization that produces Bonnaroo and Outside Lands each year. While Saturday was marred by long lines everywhere you looked and disorganization, which led to hundreds of complaints on both Twitter and Facebook, Superfly learned from the issues of the event’s first day and recovered for a much more successful Sunday.

[The Roots via @droolius]

The event’s founders have just released a statement about the inaugural fest…

A huge thank you to everyone who helped make the inaugural Great GoogaMooga so special: all of the food & drink vendors, our excellent staff & volunteers, the amazing musicians & chefs, the park & mother nature for the unparalleled weather and most importantly, all of you fans!

And to those who had a frustrating experience on Saturday – we are sorry. We truly regret the first year glitches and really appreciate your patience as we worked to smooth them out. As with all our festivals, creating and providing an enjoyable experience for everyone is the driving force behind all that we do, and a responsibility we take very seriously. We couldn’t have done it without you and hope to see you all next year!

Jeff and I attended on Saturday and even though we were frustrated by the lines, we made the best of it and had a good time. While we didn’t make it back on Sunday, we were hopeful Superfly would take the criticisms coming at the company from all directions on Saturday to heart and it appears that’s exactly what happened. The terrible idea of having patrons exchange cash for “Googa Moola” was done away with on Sunday and ID’s were checked outside of the gates, which led to smaller lines for beer and wine on Day Two. If you searched “googamooga” on Twitter on Day One of the fest, all you saw was one complaint after another while it took 20 minutes of searching on Sunday to find a tweet with a complaint about yesterday’s festivities.

We’re glad the statement above mentions “next year” because if Superfly could fix so much in one day, imagine what they can do with a year?

Did you attend the debut of Great GoogaMooga? What did you think?