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KIC members were guests for a Tower Topics Roundtable show about this year’s WinterFest hits, misses, and must-dos.

Fox 19 did a fantastic story on Gary Wachs, who was recently inducted into the IAAPA Hall of Fame. https://www.fox19.com/2025/12/03/how-kings-island-was-born-founder-receives-hall-fame-honor/

This is a very well-done story! It is wonderful that Gary has finally been inducted into the IAAPA Hall of Fame, an honor he has long deserved.

Am I getting this because of my 2 cats?

Absolutely, you need to match them.

So I recall the parks doing the same social posts last few years. Does anyone have any of those old posts? It’s going to be very interesting to see how the numbers change especially post merger. These are the 2025 ridership number posts I could find.

Maybe they've changed since I was there in either 2016 or 2018, but my jaw dropped when I saw that. Before COVID, SFNE had a solid enthusiast reputation (that my visit fully confirmed) for taking 3-5 business days to load and send a train.

I think someone said these "visitor cities" were where people visited from, not the cities where parks are located. My question is this: how do they know the home cities and how is NYC 2nd on this list? I believe the numbers, but it's interesting to see. Kings Island being in the top 5 overall is not surprising. As much as I want the other parks to also increase, I very much hope KI maintains its top 4 status overall. We have a very special thing going on and I'd hate to see anything happen to it.

There is some stuff that I think they could overlay between Haunt and Winterfest- for example how the Rivertown scare zone gets repurposed for Winterfest. You could keep the drive-in that you see for Winterfest- just put it up earlier and just play classic Halloween movies instead, so it’s less effort to switch over come Winterfest time.

An interesting article (there’s a paywall, but you get a few free articles first…) about how the proposed acquisition of Warner Brothers by Netflix could impact park licensing of WB IP. I’m sure all of the impacted park companies have multi-year agreements that account for changes of ownership, but few licensing agreements last forever (unless it’s Marvel at Universal east of the Mississippi ). I do have to wonder if part of SF’s strategy in keeping the Peanuts licensing was concerns over what might happen to WB’s IP library (a sale has been on the horizon for several months now) just to hedge their bets and keep some IP in their back pocket just in case… https://www.vulture.com/article/what-netflix-buying-warner-bros-means-for-wb-theme-parks.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=social_acct&utm_campaign=feed-part