bkroz

The key is doing SOMETHING. If they heavily planted near Diamondback when they built the ride, it would look silly for a few years, but be well forested in 10. I think the unfortunate point of view in 2009 was that it wasn't worth it, so they planted two or three dogwoods in a grassy sloping field around the splashdown. It will look almost exactly like that in 2019 until they put something real in there. Banshee will rely even more on the woods. Instead of big, tall, parabolic hills, Banshee will be low to the ground, diving in valleys and following the terrain. Trees will be essential for that, so I hope and pray they invest.

Probably most inverted roller coasters have a lift hill!

You know, through your profile you can manage ignored members, whose posts on the board don't show up unless you specifically say "show me this post anyway." It's useful, trust me. Someone being intentionally inflammatory for the sake of being "that guy" is reason enough for me to spare myself the frustration. To say my two cents (and then be done with it, as I have been for a good amount of time), most folks over the age of 16 (and some under) recognize that different people like different things, and that opinions vary widely. The kind of person who flatly rallies for one thing over any others is doing so in hopes of coming across as an expert or a very informed and intelligent person. Ironically, their continued insistence and inability to do that dreaded "other peoples' shoes" thing actually makes them untrustworthy and weakens their cause. See PETA for example, whose unabashedly flat and unwavering stance is delivered in such a way as to come across immature, unbacked, and even worthy of contradiction. That is to say, even if you have a good idea, a barrage of constant repetitions of the same message and an inability to even begin to speak rationally about it makes you seem foolish, and actually invites people to rally against your cause just in an attempt to get you to think for a moment (which, with these kinds of people, really doesn't happen much... No great enlightenment will come of this or anything we say). Many vegetarians are embarrassed or ashamed to admit their choice because of the stigma PETA has inadvertently put around being a vegetarian. That can be extended to this situation which - again, I can't see, but - I assume is about Intamin. I like Intamin, but I wouldn't dare "side" with YoungStud because his opinion is so poorly delivered; agreeing with him would cast doubt on my own credibility here (not that I have any). Whether he is a "troll" or not, I can't say and have no business saying. But I hope he recognizes that his delivery does NOT come across as someone whose opinion deserves to be valued in this particular area. This has to do with Kings Dominion because it's hard to imagine that that park or any can be summarized with the advice to ride two roller coasters over and over and relegate the rest of the park and its history to "credits." There ya go.

Well that might be a little over-exaggerated, right? Opened late, and was modified ten years later before it was decided to remove the ride for various reasons, including a few "growing pains" problems here and there. Biggest bust of all time? Wellll... I'm not fanboy of Premier, and I'm not defending The Chiller. But biggest bust of all time? How many died on it? How many had an aneurism? How many lawsuits? How many tens of millions of dollars invested in fixing it? I truly don't know, I'm asking you to clarify for me since it's the biggest bust of all time and certainly that means at least one of those questions has a notable answer.

They're been trying ever since the ride (didn't) open in spring 2010. Has anyone ever seen a line for Shoot the Rapids, even on the busiest day? I rode it once and determined I wouldn't again. In my line of thinking, log flumes are meant to give you a cooling mist; shoot-the-chutes rides get you soaked; rapids rides leave you drenched. Cedar Point has one of each, but they all favor the 'drenched' option, leaving you walking around in sopping wet socks all day long. Shoot the Rapids sends you under a waterfall and down a drop where hoses are literally positioned at face-level, spraying inward. You get soaked - and that's assuming your boat can navigate the turns, stay afloat, and not capsize. That's a lot of danger for the most snail-paced attraction I've ever been on. Slower than Pirates of the Caribbean, and with nothing to look at. There are / were numerous defects on the part of the manufacturer, but the concept is also just poor. EDIT: LOOK AT THOSE HOSES! Outrageous!

ALSO beware: last I heard, Kings Dominion had not had the food service 'overhaul' that Kings Island had a few years ago. Very, very few options in terms of food, and you will pay over $8 for a burger under a heat lamp. $10 if you want "cheese," more if you want "bacon." No fries, of course. Don't worry, though - there's a magnificent sprawling toppings bar of shredded lettuce and water-soaked tomatoes. It's also much more difficult to leave Kings Dominion for an hour or two and return - it's not located near much other than a Denny's that's supposedly no better than those burgers. I think this year's Planet Snoopy overhaul included a more "fresh-food" oriented counter service place, but just be warned.

Very very very few rides at all have issues that compare to the Shoot the Rapids'.

Hey all, I'm working closely with the site Theme Park Tourist to develop Park Guides to... Well... Basically every theme park in the world. They're all online - free to download and print if you're interested - and need user ratings and reviews to really make them useful. Kings Island's guide is here. If you're interested, you can rate each attraction with a single click. Same goes for restaurants. The site's growing rapidly (currently it has about 50,000 Facebook fans) so they're also giving away two $50 Amazon Gift Cards each week for those who write reviews for attractions or restaurants (so rather than just clicking on a star rating, actually going to each ride's page and clicking "add review" toward the bottom and producing a quality review of the attraction - what it's like, how long it's worth waiting for, why you like it, the best part, etc). Each review counts as one entry with no limit. One of the gift cards is awarded for the "best" review, the other is randomly selected from all the qualifying reviews submitted. So if you're interested in a chance to win a $50 Amazon Gift Card and help improve the Park Guide for Kings Island, check it out. Tons of other parks to review, too, if you're interested. The site also has a live-updating list of the Top 100 attractions as determined by user ratings which, at the very least, is fun to look at and participate in. You can go down the list and rate the attractions you've been on and see how they stack up according to the community.

Experiences on the cloned rides can be vastly different. Don't go into it with the preconceived notion of focusing on two roller coasters. Kings Dominion is a really unique park in its own right, and in some ways superior to Kings Island. It's worth exploring and experiencing. For example, take the time to go to the top of their Eiffel Tower... Notice the differences in the fountains... In the setting of Boo Blasters... In the flat rides. One day you may look back on Kings Dominion and think "Did I really waste the whole day at that park focusing on "credits" that I don't even count anymore instead of remembering what it looked like, felt like, and offered?" EDIT: Their "Congo" area is one of the best themed areas at any Cedar Fair park I've ever been to. The Crypt with its water, fire, and synchronized music; the fire and screams from volcano; Avalanche in the corner; rock work, totem poles, safari jeeps... It's really great. Last time I was there, the area had its own music (something we beg for at Kings Island) - the score of the film Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, track-by-track. The whole park feels very, very different from Kings Island due to Virginia's massive, towering forests. International Street feels more realistic. Instead of dogwoods lining the Shamu-tank-colored fountains gushing out of white urns, Kings Dominion's International Street is practically in the woods, with a natural pool of dark blue water that has very natural-looking geysers shooting out. It's a completely, completely different place. Very cool to be in a place that feels so familiar, but so strangely different.

If at Kings Dominion does this, I really hope Kings Island does the same. When I read that Kings Dominion was bringing the Safari back, I wondered if they would get a new monorail or if they would do what Six Flags Great Adventure did with their animal preserve (Open air trucks). They're not bringing back the Safari ride. One of that park's themed areas was "Safari Village" (similar to Kings Island's "Adventure Village"). KD's Safari Village was renamed "The Congo," as Kings Islands was re-named "Action Zone." For 2014, the name will revert to Safari Village, and the rides that area will presumably get new details, paint, etc. with a few cosmetic changes to make the reversion to the "Safari Village" theme more obvious.

And the reversion of themed lands to old names... Hmm! Wonder what that will entail other than in-name-only. Very cool! Although I do prefer "Congo" to "Safari Village." But such a simple change will mean a lot for that park's dedicated fans.

Something tells me that for at LEAST a few years, having too much foliage won't be Banshee's problem! The concept art shows a magnificent, mature forest that the roller coaster dives through. Perhaps, like Diamondback, after a few solid years, it'll grow into a grassy field with a few dogwood trees.

Story of my life. Dinosaur and Indiana Jones Adventure: Temple of the Forbidden Eye also have almost identical layouts, too, though you'd never guess it from riding. I know the Indiana Jones image is smaller, but you can see that the track follows nearly identical paths. (Dinosaur just rounded out a few corners to shorten the track, eliminating Indy's "H" and connecting G directly to I, for example.) EDIT: If it weren't for them being identical, I'd still be rallying for a version of Indiana Jones Adventure to come to Disney's Animal Kingdom - let's face it, a mystical-temple filled Indiana Jones land would even fit at the park, at least better than Avatar. Simply make it "Indiana Jones Adventure: Temple of the Golden Cobra" and you've got yourself an Animal Kingdom appropriate ride.

Even the (EDIT:) very distinctive same colors! That surprises me.

This is very important and worth watching. Not too long ago, SeaWorld and Busch Gardens parks were owned by Anheuser Busch. After Anheuser Busch was sold in its entirety to a German manufacturer, the parks division (then Busch Entertainment) was put on the market and sold to the Blackstone Group, a private company who also held stake in Universal's theme park division and Merlin's. No jobs were lost (in fact, many were added) and under the new name SeaWorld Parks & Entertainment, the parks continued to be highly invested in. SeaWorld Parks went public this spring. Now, major cuts are occurring across all of the company's park. Hours are being shortened, positions cut, and schedules rearranged, supposedly due to the new need to answer to shareholders. No park has been hit harder than Busch Gardens Williamsburg (the company's only major park that isn't open all year round). In June, the park's Europe in the Air simulator ride - their new addition for 2011 - closed with no explanation, simply a message that it would remain closed for the rest of the season. In the entertainment division, contracts weren't extended into the Halloween and Christmas season (which had been an unspoken and reliable benefit to working at Busch Gardens over nearby Kings Dominion) and a series of public firings of veteran performers lead to walk-outs. As a result, entire shows were cancelled, and the park is without a cast for the shows that it intended to run through the end of the season. Most shows had already been ended for the year, anyway. Today, the park unexpectedly announced that all of the water rides in the park would cease operation tomorrow, even the ones that had historically continued to operate into the warm, muggy Virginia autumn in every year before. So, for the rest of 2013, it appears that Busch Gardens will have no shows (keeping in mind that this park is known for its quality entertainment, usually with four or five really grand spectacle shows), no water rides, no simulator, and no 4D movie (the venue was closed earlier this summer to be converted into a live stage show venue for next year). The park's five roller coasters are basically all it has left for 2013. I don't know the answers, but it's worth considering that in SeaWorld's case (trading under the symbol SEAS) it may not have been a wise choice to take the company public, even though expectations were high leading into it - and why shouldn't they have been? SeaWorld Parks offers a high quality product, doesn't it? I don't know. It's just worth thinking about, and worth wondering what changes we'll see at SeaWorld Orlando, Discovery Cove, Busch Gardens Tampa, and the rest of the parks besides cut hours and reduced special events that we've already seen....

You see theming with Banshee? The station, yes, but no more or less than Diamondback or Firehawk or Maverick. Cedar Fair honestly hasn't been terrible at intra-ride theming in the past, where they actually decided to go for it. Maverick has - really - a decent attempt at theming, and it's successful (or was back when the launch tunnel worked). If all of Cedar Fair's additions strived even to match that level, I'd be happy. In the case of Banshee, that'd probably mean a few graveyards back in the woods, some red eyes and fog at night, zero-G rolls over old cracked tombstones, brushing past old bare trees, and a mausoleum tunnel or two. What Ouimet probably meant is that his parks will never be Disney parks. They won't have immersive themed environments that cost hundreds of millions of dollars. That's not the clientele of these parks. Regional parks with a regional budget. A family ride at Kings Island is WindSeeker or Dinosaurs Alive. It might take the form of a reasonably-budgeted dark ride, but it won't be Haunted Mansion or Tower of Terror or Radiator Springs Racers. And when Cedar Fair builds a roller coaster, it's Banshee, not Big Thunder Mountain. It just is what it is. I agree with Terp - it's too early to tell where his evolution will lead. But I think we can safely say none of the Cedar Fair parks will ever get an Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man or a Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey or a Cars Land.

Agreed. It would be miserable enough if "Flight Deck" was truly the best they could come up with. It's downright puzzlingly awful that they also came up with Afterburn (still not great, but much better) and then only gave it to one of the rides... I mean... Why?

I feel sick saying it, but wouldn't Flight Deck be a more appropriate name here? The colors even match!

Another home run of a name choice. That aside, it'll be very, very interesting to see how this works out! The description is incredibly vague. It mentions roller coaster track, but it would seem more likely that the dark ride vehicle will pull up to projected scenes that will feature a sort of "mine train" motion simulating scene rather than actual roller coaster elements. Something also about "five layers" of the mountain, which is odd, but may relate to the storytelling element they mentioned of visiting a cave, a forest, etc. I wonder, too, how long this will end up being. Wonder Mountain is big, but not huge. The rumors of it using roving motion-base technology like Spider-Man or DarKastle are compelling, but how would that work with laser guns and targets if you're spinning from one screen to the next? Either way, I imagine I'll make it back up to Canada next summer to see this. At the very least, it sounds like Ouimet & Co. imagine this as a technology that can be franchised and extended to all the parks, so we'll see how a regional park handles "groundbreaking" dark ride technology. EDIT: I should also mention, there's rumors swirling that the Guardian is somehow related to the Gatekeeper, maybe in the same way that Leviathan and Behemoth are. That would be a cool little nod to us fans, to build a whole collection of dragon-esque species, each represented in different parks. A little interpark mythology never hurt anybody - as Tokyo Disney and Hong Kong Disneyland!

California is notoriously strict about amusement park operations and safety in their state. WindSeeker's odd contraption for unloading guests in emergencies is, to say the least, sketchy looking to the average park visitor, so I imagine California's OSHA and other oversight departments looked into it and apparently found unfavorably. That's why people are assuming that Knotts' will be transported to Missouri. The rides got lukewarm reception anyway, and now that California's has a notorious past to the average park visitor, it's not likely to drive ticket sales while in Missouri it can be resold to the public. The name change makes sense - for locals, imagine their surprise if they were to Google "WindSeeker" and found news reports galore about breakdowns, people being stranded, months of closures, and the weird evacuation device. Renaming the ride at least delays that sort of mass discovery. The ride will, by the way, be located very close to the park's existing Thunderhawk, which begs the question "Has Cedar Fair still not hired anyone to help with naming new rides?" and also "Do they know that there are raptors out there besides hawks?" Thunder, fire, steel, and night, now...

Just a quick update: The original voice has returned after near unanimous disapproval of the new voice. So now, it's a Hannah Montana situation: the best of both worlds, with James Earl Jone's narration and the new texture mapping effects. Huzzah!

Noah's Ark is one of two of its kind left in the world, and the only one in the Western Hemisphere. It's a classic walk-through dark ride, recently updated but still featuring a lot of really cool stuff. There used to be dozens and dozens and dozens of Noah's Ark attractions, so Kennywood's is a real gem to still have around. Kennywood is renowned for their dark rides, so don't miss Ghostwood Estate (trackless!) and Garfield's Nightmare, the newest incarnation of The Old Mill boat ride that's been around for more than a century. The Garfield overlay is odd, but the ride itself is as classic as dark rides can get. EDIT: Also catch Exterminator, a sort of Disaster-Transport-style coaster in the dark. It's just a good time, plain and simple.

Which parks use the system directly linked to your card and do not need "charged"? I was thinking of Disney's, which is not capped unless you set a cap (which for example, you can for different family members - kids get $25 for souvenirs, $10 for snacks). I suppose the bracelets are probably more accurately tied to a hotel room, though, which is in turn tied to a credit card.

We've all heard of Walt Disney World's new program NextGen / X-Pass / MyMagic+, which is literally an entire infrastructure rebuilding. Every single attraction at the resort has been retrofitted with new FastPass+ entrances, queues, scanners, etc. Kiosks appeared all over the parks. Every cash register has a scan pad. Every park entrance was remodeled. All of Disney's [free] attraction lockers are connected to this new system. Why? Now, when booking a Walt Disney World vacation, you receive a "free" MagicBand (the same RFID-enabled rubber bracelet as Fastpay) for each member of your party. Those MagicBands sync with an online / smartphone site and app that allow you to pre-book FastPass+ attractions months and months in advance of your trip. Those same bands ARE your park tickets, dining reservations, credit cards, room keys, etc... Simply placing your bracelet on an RFID icon at the park entrance or on your hotel room door or a kiosk performs a function, and your personalized, pre-selected schedule, budgets, dining plans, etc. are available 24/7 on your phone, on your computer, or at a park kiosk, all with the wave of your hand. No need to hold on to a locker key, or a password, or remember which fingerprint, or even remember what number your locker is. Scan your wrist over the pad, select unlock, and your locker illuminates and opens. This was - literally - a $1 billion investment on Disney's end. Billion. With a B. They imagine that this new ease of use will increase the guest experience so smoothly that guests will buy more, stay longer, spend downtime doing add-on activities, plan more in-park dining, and generally participate more in their own vacations from months before they start. It's obviously the far end of the spectrum, but recognize how these wristbands ARE proven and companies are reacting in massive ways to the proven success they bring. Disney invested over $1 billion, and NOT out of the kindness of their hearts. Even if it's not this year, or next, or the year after that, they have numbers that suggest that they'll make back $1 billion and then some.

Other parks that use the system connect the bracelet to a debit or credit card and an associated pin, so it's not "pre-loaded." Others do need charged and pre-loaded to a certain amount. Entertainment enterprises report many benefits for both the customer and the company from systems like this. For example, if I have a bracelet, I don't need to take a bulky wallet into a park and cling onto it on every ride; the bracelets are waterproof, so no need to leave someone on "valuables" duty at the waterpark or pay for a locker; and yes, it is recognized that the faster and more smoothly you can get someone to pay for something, the more they're willing to spend. Invaluable financial advice is - when you find your budgets skyrocketing - pay for everything in cash. A credit card makes it too easy to lose the connection. Pressing a bracelet to a scanner makes it even easier. That's why companies are investing huge sums of money in adding those "swipe your phone" payment pads, even as the trend doesn't seem to be catching yet on the consumer end. Eventually, they certainly imagine, the customer base will relent and begin paying for things through their phone, and these billion dollar corporations (Starbucks, McDonalds, etc) don't make hundred-million dollar decisions without first studying the costs and risks of retrofitting their drive-thrus and checkouts with the scanners.