The Interpreter

Knowing Cedar Fair, there is no way I would advise changing the name of this here website until the park name has been changed. Cedar Fair has a way of changing its mind at the last possible minute. Remember, for instance, that that which is Mantis was not supposed to be. Media announcement made...comments came flying in and then it was suddenly Mantis...some t-shirts had already been made with the B word on them...

Heck, *MY* card doesn't even have a picture on it... Then again, perhaps I have said too much!

They are e-mailed. I get the email newsletters from all of the Paramount Parks and from all the Cedar Fair parks (which I doubt surprises anybody...)

Article contains a MAJOR error, which is not like Mr. Munnariz at all... http://www.fool.com/news/commentary/2006/c...m?ref=foolwatch

Maybe CBS intends to invest as much in the studio as they intended to invest in the theme parks!

If Cedar Fair drops the "Paramount's," they no doubt would not want anything out there to refer to the park as PKI....unless, of course they could come up with something the P stood for...but even then, I would think KI will again become the preferred designation. I suppose there is some minor chance that they would keep the Paramount's designation, but I don't see that happening unless they were paid to do so...and I don't see Viacom or CBS doing that.

I don't think they are the same guys. The Geauga Lake Lumberjack show played this weekend, too; you know! They may, however, be the understudies. And yes, it is the same stadium where the boat incident occurred years back...

Heck, everyone with a fat wallet is welcome to come in ANY day the gates are open. Regardless of who owns the park! If the wallet is fat enough and open enough, the park needn't even be scheduled to be open, given enough notice. Seriously, if the wallet is fat enough and open enough, Six Flags and Cedar Fair both offer VIP experiences at most of their parks, where for a payment of a sum certain, one can avoid lines and have a personal concierge escort them around the park. The fee for this at Cedar Point is very high. If Kings Island had such a program under Paramount, it was not advertised to the public. The Cedar Point program IS. $350 a person, minimum of four people, and twenty four hours notice (or an additional $50 per person, if available) gets you: http://www.cedarpoint.com/public/visit/vip.cfm

From the Christian Science Monitor: http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0703/p02s01-ussc.html

Phantom Theater wrote: Uh....like every other item in an acquisition, that was negotiable. If Cedar Fair had wanted the animals, they no doubt could have bought them, and probably at a VERY attractive price. Cedar Fair made quite clear it was NOT interested in keeping them. Moreover, originally Six Flags DID take almost all the animals out. Only after a precipitious decline in attendance did the killer whales come back to what was then Six Flags Worlds of Adventure.

Six Flags bought Sea World of Ohio because it was for sale. Had Six Flags not bought it, it might well have been condos now. I am sure Busch was very, very pleased with the price that Six Flags paid....but that's another story entirely. Busch does not hold on to parks it doesn't think it can run in the fashion that it wants to while earning an acceptable return. Busch no doubt had problems running a Sea World type park in an area as far north as Aurora, Ohio.

a. Kidz Works is NOT the old Geauga Lake kids area. Instead, it was installed as a Warner Brothers themed kids area by Six Flags. Didn't you see the carrots EVERYWHERE? And the traces of the old Six Flags theming that CF has left behind? b. I have no clue what happened to you on Dominator. I rode it a week ago yesterday and had a grand time on it. The park was packed, it was Cleveland Clinic Day... c. You must not have ridden Steel Venom in the front seat! Just amazing. THIS is the ride Cedar Point slightly modified and installed a weaker version of---Wicked Twister. d. The food prices at Geauga are far, far less than at Paramount's Kings Island. Have you been there this year? e. Too bad Big Dipper was down. For my money, it is by far the best operating wood coaster in Ohio (the best was Screechin' Eagle, now closed, at Americana) f. I have found that to a very large extent the fun one can have in a park depends on one's expectations. It sounds like you went looking to find a bad time, and succeeded. g. Geauga might be busier had Cedar Fair not (a) done away with the animals and ( built the waterpark with non-union labor in a very highly unionized area. Also, the nine dollars to park is a very tough pill for many to swallow...especially for the mall across the street... h. The entertainment at Geauga Lake is produced by and/or for Cedar Fair. You now know what we can look forward to show-wise at Kings Island. Sigh. Actually, I think that lumberjack show is at Kings Island this weekend.

Be careful. Proofread is one word, you know.

Ever use a small laptop, especially if you have large hands? It makes a HUGE difference, as well I know...

Except now CBS is NOT part of Viacom. It was truly odd that CBS was promoting Viacom's Paramount Pictures when CBS didn't have a dog in that race. Then running parks that they had already made quite clear they had no interest in running as they didn't fit their "core" businesses. No matter how you slice it, the Cedar Fair acquisition was the best thing that could happen to the parks under the circumstances. Cedar Fair is a pure amusement park company. They don't sell cars, make movies or have as their goal the promoting of other products than amusement.

That's NOT what the Paramount history says. It says March 11, 1994, so we are both wrong! http://www.paramount.com/studio/history.htm Thanks for that....in any event, CBS didn't enter the picture until this season. Thankfully, at least in my book, they no longer have anything to do with running the former Paramount Parks.

Like Hydra???? --The Interpreter, running for the door

Probably the closest to being salvageable, but I bet the City of New Orleans ends up with it as part of an eventual settlement.

The New Orleans woodie is beyond repair. It sat in water for weeks and weeks and weeks...and had a steel structure that now has virtually no foundation.

One MUST understand that this partial season was when we saw how CBS operated the parks. From 1993-2005, Viacom ran the parks. Paramount's only season was really 1992, and they had very little effect on the parks while they ran them. In fact, for a good part of the time that Viacom ran the parks, they were in the Blockbuster division of the company. Paramount Studios involvement with the parks was minimal, at best.

Since Kentucky Kingdom is a very profitable park for Six Flags, I don't think you have to worry about it going anywhere, so long as there is a Six Flags Theme Park company. . .

I, for one, want to give credit where it is due. I STILL think for the most part Paramount (and Viacom) were good for the parks. CBS? Don't get me started....

I would bet that IJST will not be the first ride currently in the park to be removed by Cedar Fair. Rethemed? Perhaps. Removed first? Very, very, very doubtful. It's not a bad ride. Not at all. It certainly could have been sited better, but it's by no means a bad or even unpopular ride.

If CF wasn't running operations and management now, who would be? Good question. It's one of tone. Answer: The combined management of the new Cedar Fair...with some acknowledgement of the great talents and assets of the new combined company. Something totally absent from that announcement. Instead, look at paragraph 4 of that same release for a hint: So Cedar Fair's employees have a long history and strong reputation within the industry. But only MANY employees from the Paramount Parks have that history? And the second sentence seems to refer to the Cedar Fair employees and MANY of the employees from Paramount Parks. Not all, just many. There's more than a hint there....

Yep, that they did. Especially for a while there. Let's see...they moved corporate operations from Cincinnati to Charlotte. For quite some time, they led one and sundry to believe that the flagship park was near corporate headquarters, in Charlotte. The busiest Paramount Park in recent years has been Wonderland. In more Paramount years than not, Kings Island was NOT the park that received the largest capital investment of the five... Yep, as a sale was coming, in the past couple of years, they started making noises when they were in the Cinci area that Kings Island was the flagship park, but the noises were louder than the actions. In any event, that was then. During the conference call on the day the acquisition was announced, Mr. Kinzel himself pointed out that Cedar Point is the engine of Cedar Fair and will remain so. This is true even though the company has now acquired two parks that do more business at the gate than does Cedar Point. It will be interesting to see both who owns the now-current Cedar Fair parks five years and ten years from now, and how the corporate emphasis is placed on the individual parks, in marketing, capital expenditures and prestige. I really don't buy that the Paramount Parks are going to be treated and run differently long-term than the "original" Cedar Fair parks (of which all were purchased at one time--except, perhaps, depending on one's viewpoint, Cedar Point). Even if that is the current intention (and I am not sure that it is), it may well fade over time as a single corporate culture develops. To me, it speaks volumes that on the map of Cedar Fair properties, there is no differentiation between the old Cedar Fair properties and the old Paramount Parks properties. Really, though, the bigger question is how much of the Paramount Parks culture makes it into the new company and how much is left behind. Not to even mention the question of how much SHOULD make it. Much depends on what happens to the middle and upper managers from Paramount. Will they be allowed to stay? If so, for a year or so or permanently? Will they want to? Will their pay remain the same? Will they seek better opportunities elsewhere? Will they get helpers from Cedar Fair? Will their jobs even survive? Or will 'snyergies' in the new Cedar Fair make many of them redundant? If so, will the company find out, too late, what some of these people really did and that it was far more necessary to the company than they thought? And all of this is really on a person by person basis. The one thing I KNOW is that some people WILL leave...and they might not be the ones that the company would prefer did. More likely, they will be among the best and the brightest. As for directing parking at non-Cedar Point Cedar Fair parks, even Geauga Lake, with the relatively low attendance it is getting, directs guests to parking areas. The last time I was there, they probably had 6 people working the parking lot directing parking! On the other hand, I have never, ever seen a tram in the parking lot at Cedar Point. I am not even sure they own one. Come to think of it, I've never seen a tram in ANY Cedar Fair park. At least I don't remember seeing one. (I have seen the hotel shuttles, but those are not trams in the parking lot...)