UncleHenry

Taking the Maverick / IJST approach? And maybe this means two loading stations like Maverick! (Let the rumor mill begin!)

FIVE honors now! One of the most popular travel and places videos on YouTube today!

Well, the video got FOUR honors at YouTube! Work on the full video will commence again later, but right now I'm in Michigan.

TTD is a one trick pony. Maverick is just an amazing ride, my favorite now. Yep, it beat out Voyage. The ride never let up (except for right before the launch), and you had no idea where you were going next. Even with seeing the animations before hand, I was surprised by some of the elements. Loved every minute of this ride.

Maverick is soooo much better than Dragster. And there will be Dragster footage in the full video. This is just the start of the video.

Here is a sneak peek at the Cedar Point 2007 video I am working on. This is the intro, and parts featuring Maverick. Enjoy! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElkyIQYnzAU

I know no park is perfect. We went there knowing that. The point of the video was to show the highlights of our day, even those that were not perfect. Just show what happened. Anyways, our trip to HW was canceled, and is now a CP trip. We're heading out tomorrow.

No it doesnt, it takes a point and shoot balanced on a queue rail. Not necessarily. Shoot too soon, and you just have a regular shot of the train. Shoot too late, and you just have a blur. Shoot at the right moment, and you get a crisp "ghost train".

Think Cedar Point.

The reason pay rides cost more after you paid to get in? These rides are low capacity. Slingshot, two people at once. Skyflyer, six at once. If they didn't have some detriment to people riding, the lines would be multiple hours long every day. There needs to be some detriment to people wanting to ride these rides, and since pay-per-rides also bring in more money, they chose that. Plus, $5 for a ride on Skyflyer ain't bad by any means. One of my friends who travels the country going to parks (Clint Novak for those who know him) stands by his claim that the KI SkyFlyer is the best deal in any park for those kinds of rides.

Just thought I'd add my two cents to the discussion.

WE ARE... ST. X!!!

A pretty crappy Nikon Coolpix.

www.ruwedesign.com [/shamelessPlug]

Anyone can take a blurry long exposure shot. It takes skill to take a "ghost train" shot that comes out so crisp. And trust me, it took me a couple tries to get that shot the way I wanted it.

Sorry, but this picture I took is by far the best FoF launch shot...

To each his own. I personally loved it, and thought the loop was quite intense. I would NOT say it is a waste of time though.

Service used to be great, but over the past 3 years, it's just kept going downhill.

Note in my original e-mail that I said I did NOT expect this to be posted in the HW blog. I knew it wouldn't be posted. Who would do that to their own park? But to post something that does the same thing, but WORSE to another park on the official website of a park is uncalled for. Sure, if I worked at KI, I would not post something that shows bad things about KI. BUT, I would also not post things that said anything bad about other parks. Marketing should be about promoting yourself, not bashing the downfalls of other parks. EDIT: Boddah, by your own reasoning, it was unwise of her to post a report that flamed another park, because as you said, it's an industry as a whole.

Look at the end of the last e-mail. That was Paula of Holiday World. I used to really respect that park, but recent events have really brought it down in my eyes.

After Paula's recent post on the Holiblog, I feel that it is now time to post my e-mail. Yes, the employee I had a conversation with was Paula, writer of the Holiblog. First, my original e-mail to her. > -----Original Message----- > From: Bradley Ruwe [mailto:ruwebj@email.uc.edu] > Sent: Wednesday, May 30, 2007 9:58 AM > To: fun@holidayworld.com > Subject: Video Trip Report > > Hello, I saw your post about a video trip report on your blog, I too have made a > youtube video about my trip to Holiday World last year. It's a bit on the lengthy side > though. My video is 40 minutes long. We had to split it up between 5 youtube > pages since they only allow 10 minute videos. You can see part one here: > > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2HPgQWFx4c > > Each part has a link to the next one below the video. > > Now we are always pretty honest about our experiences. We have been to many > amusement parks across the country, so we don't play favorites. If we found > something that we didn't enjoy, it went on the video. Of course, if we really enjoyed > something, we of course put it in. Now I doubt this will go on the blog because we > do have some footage I doubt you would want to promote (including an employee > spitting long strands of spit onto the track for the railroad in the kids area). Just > thought you would like to view our video, even if it won't be put on your website. > > Oh, and for the record, I LOVE your park, and even with it's few flaws, is still my > favorite park I've been to. Of the 64 coasters I've ridden, you have 2 of my top 5. I > am currently planning another trip up there this summer, and we will be making > another video of our trip. I will send that one to you as well. > -Brad Ruwe > www.ruwedesign.com And her response: Hi Brad-- Oh, yes ... I saw your video a while back. People around here were pretty upset about the spitting -- and that you broke that portion out to make it its own video. There's no excusing that fellow (and he no longer works here), but would you like to have been "caught" on video ... maybe scratching where you itch ... and then have it posted? Do you really love our park? Maybe it would have been nice of you to report that employee to us that day if he was spitting ... it's hard to tell from your video what exactly was going on, was he sick? Wouldn't reporting it to management have been the decent thing to do? If he was ill, he needed help; if he was being crude, he needed a talking to... Of course we're not perfect; of course we have flaws. Why not give us the opportunity to fix something -- to make it right? Thanks for your email, but I think we'll pass on posting a link to your video. Paula Paula Werne, Director of Public Relations Holiday World & Splashin' Safari fun@holidayworld.com; 812-937-5209 New for '07: Bakuli family water ride & Turkey Whirl HoliBlog: A Walk in the Park 1) We could tell he was not sick, for reasons I already posted. 2) It is not our job to report things like the spitting guests to the park. Honestly, if we saw the guests nametag from the distance we were at, we might have reported him, but we could not see his name. My Holiday World trip has effectively been canceled. EDIT: For clarification, I was not planning on posting this. But when Paula decided it was a bad thing for me to criticize HW one tiny bit, but OK for her to post a trip report bashing Kings Island in her blog for the park, that was what changed my mind.

The Holiblog just linked to this... http://blawblawblog.com/2007/05/holiday-wo...ndorsement.html Holiday World just dropped some more notches in my book. Like I said, they will raise themselves up, no matter who says differently.

We could tell he wasn't sick, because he was doing it on top of the bridge over the railroad tracks in their kids area. He was aiming for the tracks. You don't aim when you are sick. Plus, the portion of the spitting we had wasn't the only bit he did. He started spitting, but we didn't have our camera out when he started. By the time we got it out and ready to go, he stopped because some other guests walked past him on the bridge. He watched those people go by, and waited for them to be a distance away from him. He then when right back to spitting, and that is when we started filming. So to wrap this up... 1) He knew he shouldn't have been doing this in public, why else stop when guests walked by? 2) Even if he was sick, wouldn't you do something like that in a behind the scenes area? He was not at a ride or anything, he was in the middle of a regular path. He could have easily walked to a behind the scenes area, and did his business. 3) It wasn't just a regular spit, like you need to get some junk out of your throat. It's hard to tell from the video (due to the compression for youtube), but he was making it LONG strands of spit. You don't do that when you just need to get it out of your mouth, it was almost like he was playing with it. I was informed by the employee that e-mailed me that they were able to identify the employee from the video, and he no longer works at the park. And again, we weren't going there thinking, "Boy, what if a ride breaks down, we can film it, and make the park look bad!" In the video when the Legend breaks down, we started off making jokes about it, because we knew it was nothing serious. "Maybe the Legend's second lift hill is just lagging." is a joke referring to Beast's second lift hill, and how the train will stop at the top of the first one if the train ahead of it has not gone over the second lift hill. Also, this trip was shortly after the Son of Beast incident from last year. The media was going crazy over-dramatizing it. They made such a HUGE deal about it being stopped on the lift hill. We mocked the media a bit in the video. "We should call the news, because obviously, this is a bad sign, because as you can see, the train is stopped on the incline position." Completely a joke about local media making such a huge deal about a train being on the lift hill. We were not planning on getting the ride starting with the employee on the lift hill, but again, it happened by chance. We saw the employee put his thumb in the air, and knew something was coming, so we got our camera out and filmed. No intention of making the park look bad, but it happened, and we as guests saw it, thought it was an interesting event, and put it in. Some people have asked me to post the e-mail conversation I had. I will refrain from posting that. As I already stated, I still consider the park a great park, just maybe not my favorite anymore. I still recommend going if you have never gone before. I just may not be going as much as I have been.

It's a five part video, each part is linked to the next one below the video player. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2HPgQWFx4c That's part one. Again, to get to the next part, click the "video response" link below the video player. And remember, this was not biased either for the park or against it, but to show our experiences that day. Finally, I have been debating posting the e-mail sent to me from the park employee, but for the mean time, I am not. I still do enjoy the park, even if they treat people with disrespect because we "dare" to show some unpleasant things. It was a part of our experience at the park, not a "look how bad this park is!" deal.

Don't get me wrong, the point of the videos is not to showcase how "awful" the park may be. We went to showcase our day at the park. We made it a mini-documentary. We showed our day at the park, good and bad. Now on the video, there is much more good than bad. Sure, we happened to get 2-3 incidents on tape that would be considered "bad", but look at all of the other fun things we experienced that day. I went into editing that video with one goal: showcase our day. I had no agenda to make it look awesome, or make it look bad. I am just upset that the park would get so upset at the video. I had no agenda to make the park look bad, just show what happened to us and what we saw that day. If it wasn't for this recent incident, I would still gladly call Holiday World my fav park.