Orlando, Fla. ? It is billed as a leisurely boat tour. The shark surfaces, its fin slicing through the water.

The boat’s captain, armed with a grenade launcher, blasts away at the bloodthirsty monster. Nearby gas lines explode and a column of fire erupts into the blue sky. We feel the heat from the flames, hear the shark’s body churning in the water. A child hides her face in the crook of her mother’s arm and whimpers as chilly water sprays everyone on the boat.

Of course, it isn’t real. It’s the “Jaws” ride at Universal Studios in Orlando, an attraction that runs hundreds of times a day.

Just miles away, officials at SeaWorld are holding a news conference to explain the death of Dawn Brancheau, a trainer who died when she was dragged underwater by a killer whale named Tilikum.

Orlando is billed as a nonstop adventure capital, ground zero of thrills and chills and action-packed fun — all during family-friendly hours and with a $3.99 breakfast buffet to get you going.

There’s Congo River Golf — which takes one of the world’s most dangerous countries and turns it into a putt-putt course. At Disney’s Animal Kingdom, you can “climb” Mount Everest in a roller coaster car. A little ways away, for the really adventurous, there’s indoor skydiving.

And it’s not just Orlando; across the globe, manufactured thrills entertain and amuse.

Yet every once in a while, something goes wrong. A roller coaster jumps the tracks, or a tiger leaps out of its pen, or a killer whale attacks a trainer, and that sense of safety is shattered.

“An event like this really shocks people,” said Glenn Sparks, a professor of communication at Purdue University who has studied fright reactions to entertainment. “We say, uh oh, we didn’t have control over this like we thought we did. It’s a loss of control in this fantasy world. In our entertainment experience, we don’t want reality to interfere. It’s not something we bargained for.”

When danger is packaged for our consumption, what does it do to our perception of reality? What happens when there’s a real instance of tragedy in the safe tourist cocoon of Orlando?

In the words of Kelly Vickery, a young Tallahassee mother who was ushered out of SeaWorld on Wednesday because of the trainer’s death and back at the park on Thursday to see the shark tank: “It feels weird.”

It sure does.

But the things that the parks are best known for — thrill rides — also allow visitors to court danger. Safely.

“For most of us, our lives are predictable,” said Lou Manza, professor and chair of the psychology department at Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Pa. “We like to be entertained a bit, but we don’t want to really put ourselves in real danger. We want to sit and watch whales but we don’t want to dive into the ocean and play with whales.”

Maybe all this isn’t surprising in a world where on-demand entertainment is not only available but expected, where a few keystrokes and a mouse click can call up video on just about anything — including a clip of the final moments of an Olympic luger, or the topic “killer whale trainer death.”