It took a dreamy demigod to catapult Nashville’s Parthenon past oh-look-a-building status for countless adolescents.

Paid attendance at the landmark jumped to 15,413 in March from about 10,000 the same month last year. Parks department workers attribute the difference to Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, a movie about the adventures of Poseidon’s earthly son.

A film crew shot at the Parthenon for three days in August, facilities manager Lauren Bufferd said. After the movie’s February opening, parks employees fielded so many questions about it that the department distributed a question-and-answer sheet.

There’s a scene in the movie where someone says, ‘Who would have thought there was a full- scale replica of the Parthenon in Nashville?’” Bufferd said. “I turned to my husband and said, ‘Our numbers are going up.’ ”

Parthenon not in books

The Lightning Thief is about a quest for Zeus’ bolt, and a celestial scavenger hunt takes the star and his friends to the Parthenon’s Athena statue. It’s based on a series of books that use Greek mythology as a backdrop for teen adventures.

Ward Fleissner, a humanities teacher at Chattanooga’s Baylor School, said the school quit assigning Percy Jackson books as summer reading because so many students read them on their own. Many of his sixth-graders saw the movie on its opening weekend, before a planned school trip to the Parthenon in early April, and gave it mixed reviews.

“It’s the same way with every single movie,” student John Carlson said. . “If there’s a book, it’s going to be better.”

Trouble is, the Parthenon isn’t mentioned in the book series, leaving some Tennessee fans conflicted about seeing it in the movie.

“If I’d known it was going to be in the movie, I would have taken a million pictures,” said Baylor University student Keyonna Phinizey, a book series fan who visited the landmark last year.

For those who missed the Parthenon’s close-up, The Lightning Thief is scheduled for a June release on DVD and Blu-Ray June 22.

Source: Tennessean.com

Written by Heidi Hall

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Nashville’s Parthenon