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All gigas with lift hills have a wow factor based on how tall the lift hill feels as a rider. In my opinion, gigas are most enjoyable when they follow that up with extended high-speed moments to let riders grasp just how fast they're going. Millennium Force, Pantherian, and Fury 325 do this excellently. I think Fury does it best. Orion and Leviathan, in my opinion, try to make an impression based on height alone. To me, the remainders of both rides don't feel different from the respective B&M hypers in the same park, and I can't fully explain why. I think part of it is that the "look how high up we are" factor just doesn't calculate for me once I'm already past the anticipation of the first drop. If I'm experiencing floater airtime over a camelback, my mind isn't lingering on how high up we are; I'm thinking about how odd weightlessness feels with just a lap bar to hold me in. Which is the exact same experience I have on Behemoth and Diamondback, which coincidentally I already don't have strong feelings about. Orion breaks the mold just enough that I do like it marginally more than Leviathan, but like... As someone whose favorite ride in the park is Adventure Express, I'll take a mine train over a B&M hyper or giga any day (except Fury.) I guess I'd probably "fix" Orion by giving it more Fury-like low turns. If the wave turn must exist, make it take the ride behind WindSeeker, over Racer, and over the midway to the east half of Vortex's plot, where a gorgeously-lit ampersand turnaround a la Shambhala becomes a cool icon of the park before a low camelback takes riders back across the midway.

As far as a potential sale goes: Interesting, and not unexpected. If true (and if WoF and Great Escape are being sold with their respective water parks), I didn't expect Six Flags to pull out of Missouri entirely. Then again, none of the major Missouri parks except maybe Silver Dollar City have been meaningfully growing over the last 20 years, so I do kinda get it. One could extrapolate from the lower-cost investments at SFSL and WoF over the years that there isn't a strong ROI there, for any number of reasons. As far as that name goes: Oof. "Enchanted Parks" is the least compelling name I've ever heard, lol. United Parks used to take the cake, but it at least falls in that realm of Tacky Corporate Names where you could conceivably imagine, if incorrectly, "Yeah, okay, maybe the first owner decades ago wasn't super imaginative and they've just stuck with the name." "Enchanted Parks St. Louis" sounds like the first-draft name of a long-closed amusement park from a Scooby-Doo episode where the gang gets chased out by Old Man Peabody in a ghost costume. It should be noted, IAM seems to make their money by "flipping" parks that aren't doing great, then selling them. They seem to have largely owned small water parks and FECs. WoF, SFSL, MA, and Great Escape would likely be some of the largest properties they've ever owned. I'd be extremely curious to see what about them gets "flipped" if the plan is to resell them. One could assume that Herschend has already had their opportunity to make an offer on any properties they want, so the questions that immediately come to mind are: 1. Who would be the remaining prospective buyers once these parks are flipped? 2. What kind of operating budget would prospective buyers be able to commit to these parks? (I assume it would be less than what is currently needed, or else those buyers would presumably have already offered to purchase them directly from Six Flags.) 3. What additions/removals will be needed to make those parks and their operating budgets more appealing for prospective buyers? Not to beat a dead horse, but as someone who thinks that Michigan's Adventure overexpanded years ago and that's why it doesn't get significant additions, I will be extremely curious to see if some rides disappear there or have further measures taken to reduce operating costs. RMC is comparatively cheap and they've already started replacing track on Shivering Timbers, so I look for the rest of the ride to get I-Box track but keep the same profile. Presumably something similar will happen with Wolverine Wildcat. I wonder what the future holds for Corkscrew, Thunderhawk, or Mad Mouse. Camille Jourden-Mark, whose father bought MA in the 1960's and who had been VP and GM of MA from 1988 till 2024's Six Flags corporate restructuring, has been replaced by Carson Weingart, who had previously been director of food and beverage at Cedar Point. Camille has been quoted as saying that Dick Kinzel told her after the purchase to "run the park as her own," so one could assume that the corporate team has largely been hands-off with MA for a significant amount of time. That being said, the Jourden family is, as I understand it, no longer involved in major decisions at MA for the first time in decades, so I wonder what happens now that people with presumably less of an emotional attachment to the park are calling the shots, especially if those people are incentivized to make the park seem more appealing to a new buyer.

Can I just say: You're my favorite part of this website. I feel like you show up every 2-6 months, tell us how hot you think Jim Cummings's voice is on Flight of Fear, and then disappear without a trace for another 2-6 months. I first heard his voice in The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, so he will always and forever sound like Tigger to me. It is always a jumpscare to hear someone actively thirsting over Tigger, in the most entertaining way possible. What a legend. Please never change or leave. I love you. EDIT: Sorry, I forgot to actually respond to the thread topic, lmao. Flight of Fear, at least to my millennial sensibilities, is kind of a cornerstone of Kings Island. Like, if I think of 4 rides that define what KI is to the majority of people at this point, I'd say (in descending order) Beast, Racer, Diamondback (or Orion), and FoF. COULD FoF go away someday? Sure, but the ride itself seems popular enough that I feel like there could be value in it getting retracked, a new LSM launch system, and new trains at some point in the next 10-15 years so it can keep doing its thing. Like, don't get me wrong, I love Adventure Express more than I love some people--but if Adventure Express can earn an ROI with a simple theming update, I feel like FoF absolutely could. Reimagined theming (probably without Jim Cummings, I'm incredibly sorry to say) and a retrack, at minimum, seems like it'd pay for itself with some kind of subtitle on the name to differentiate it from what we've known since 1996 (e.g. "Flight of Fear: Race to the Void") and some advertising.

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.

While the CGA closure decision predates the merger, I think we technically have two examples of there being two parks (at least one of which isn't a top performer in the chain) in the same market and one of those parks gets shut down. I have no insider knowledge and I'm definitely not an expert, but I'd keep an eye on Six Flags St. Louis/Worlds of Fun and Six Flags Great Adventure/Dorney Park. My money would be on WoF and SFGAdv staying. Whether that means SFSL and Dorney would get demolished or sold, it's hard to say. Herschend is the only domestic chain that seems like it'd be willing to purchase a park of that size, but neither of those parks make a ton of sense in terms of the kind of experience Herschend typically offers**. Would a European or Asian chain be interested in them? I don't lump Knott's and Magic Mountain together because LA, in my mind, operates like Orlando in that destination parks are more able to coexist because of the large local population and high tourism. I don't lump Michigan's Adventure and Cedar Point together because Michigan's Adventure is a large FEC and surely isn't pulling people from anywhere other than central/northern Michigan. It's a local destination whose pre-CF ownership overinvested in it and it wouldn't be able to sustain becoming any bigger than it currently is, which is why it doesn't get new additions. Texas is an odd one. SFoT and SFFT have both been heavily invested in recently. San Antonio is able to sustain both SWSA and SFFT and has done so for years. The Dallas area is about to get a Universal park. (Meaning, there's competition for SIX to pay attention to in both cities.) I wouldn't count on either Texas theme park going anywhere, but I'm curious to see if there will be a change in the investment in either park going forward. I feel like the smaller parks without much competition (Michigan's Adventure, Valleyfair, Great Escape, La Ronde, Frontier City) could go any direction. If the chain is HURTING hurting for money, I expect we could see them either get demolished and have their land sold (if they're in locations where the land is valuable) or sold to another chain. Otherwise, they seem to be able to sustain themselves and bring in money without needing frequent or big investments, so there might be an argument for keeping them. If I were to take a stab at what I think will happen with the smaller parks: Michigan's Adventure and Great Escape will stay open, La Ronde will be demolished, Frontier City will be demolished or sold to a chain like IB Parks & Entertainment, and Valleyfair will either stay open or be sold to whatever chain might be interested in a park that size. (**Neither does Kentucky Kingdom, though, so it's hard to say.)

Herschend's recent expansion combined with Six Flags's announcement that they'd like to offload more parks makes me wonder which Six Flags parks we might see become Herschend Parks. And if those parks have "Six Flags" in their name, what those parks' names become.

I'm glad to see this happening. I hope the work extends into the turn off of lift 2. That turn has always tracked really poorly with age and always seems to devolve into two big, uncomfortable jerks to the left, just before the track straightens out. I assume that's an issue with the support structure. Maybe we can even lose the trims on that drop...? My biggest hope for one of the next few off seasons is that they have Gravity Group reprofile the last turn before lift 2. I assume that the suddenness of that turn is a big reason why the first half of Beast has as many trim brakes as it does even now. (Think Magnum's reprofiling of the valley before the turnaround early in its life, where riders would go from airtime to positive G's very quickly and were getting hurt.) If that turn was less abrupt, it could potentially ditch some trims or even the whole "MCBR."

Diamondback would be less forceful with the 4-across trains. The layouts of all modern coasters are initially designed around the forces at the center of the train, so the farther you are from the center (e.g. the front or back rows) the more forceful the ride is. The forces have to stay within certain limits for the ride to be safe, so longer trains require the ride to be more drawn out so the forces at either end stay within the limits. Compare how small the radius of the top of the lift on Orion is compared to Diamondback. If you swapped out the staggered trains for the 4-across trains, everyone would sit closer to the center of the train, so the ride would be gentler. See also: Voyage being more extreme in the front and back rows with the original 7-car trains than with the current 6-car trains. The inverse is true with Orion: If you put an 8-car staggered train on Orion, the forces in the front and back would likely be way too high for people to safely ride.

Was really hoping you meant the one at Six Flags St. Louis. Disappointed.

It's almost like, and hear me out, casting some chains as "the impossibly good ones" and others as "the irredeemably foolish ones" was never the appropriate lens for enthusiasts to view the industry through. Not least because the largest "irredeemably foolish one" is, at the moment, operated by a large majority of people from a former "impossibly good one." Theme park chains don't operate how y'all play RollerCoaster Tycoon. Anyway, back to your regularly scheduled "[park with slow ROIs] deserves a new coaster."

I feel like almost the inversion of this is more what I've noticed--Son of Beast profits unfairly in the enthusiast zeitgeist from being the "child" of a well-established ride. I think many, many, many "what was it like"/"who got to ride it"/"was it as awesome as I imagine it" conversations post-closure, including this thread, would not have happened if it was simply a terrible ride with a standalone name. It was given unearned rose-colored glasses from the moment they decided on that name--which is personally a bit annoying when that weird reverence is coming from someone who otherwise unequivocally has negative opinions of the Paramount era. Paramount did such a good job in marketing a bad ride that we're still somehow talking about an almost universally disliked ride. Had they given it a Cedar Fair-type standalone name, we'd probably talk about it no more or less than we talk about Firehawk or Screamin' Demon. Anyway, to respond to the original prompt: I think Twister at Knoebels does a better and more interesting job of being a "sequel" to The Beast than Son of Beast ever was. Given the era in which SoB opened, it could've been interesting to see CCI do their take on Twister.

I'm not about to pretend that SFA was some underloved gem--I went once about 10 years ago and have never craved a return--but it's worth pointing out that the widespread downtime you experienced really doesn't seem to have been a thing prior to this year. You're judging a store based on its "everything has to go" sale. Also, the fact that an amusement park is having the maintenance equivalent of an "'everything has to go' sale" is its own issue, but that's for another post.

The question here is if this is the actual Jeff Putz or not, lol.

Respectfully, I can't figure out if the tone of this thread is sarcastic or if someone loves them a muffuletta with a side of theatricality.

I am so old.

Well, yeah. Also that.

A Vekoma Madhouse.

I'm not trying to be difficult here--there's every possibility that you're 100% correct--but you do have to admit that there have been many posts over the years that claimed to factually have insider knowledge of what's coming and going that are still active posts on this site. Not to mention that if the person claiming The Bat is on its way out is correct, there wouldn't be equipment on site in December 2024 if it's being removed in late 2025 or early 2026. You've got me as far as the whistleblower thread goes. I'm not enough of a conspiracy theorist to be sure of myself here, but there's a part of me that wonders if, since the ride removals are allegedly being done without warning in order to minimize loss of season passholders, the park would have a vested interest in not letting that story gain a lot of visibility. It IS odd that one thread stayed while the other disappeared.

Neither. A post was made here claiming to have insight that, much like how Kingda Ka's, Green Lantern's, and Nighthawk's removals were handled for SFGAdv and Carowinds this year, The Bat will be quietly removed in the 2025-2026 off-season. It could easily be someone making something up, but it does track for how things are currently being handled by SF corporate, which is why I think it's reasonable to expect a statement from either KIC leadership (e.g. "we have asked the park for confirmation and will share responses"), KI's PR, or both. Instead, the thread was quietly deleted. I've been around here long enough to know what pressure from KI PR often smells like.

^ I agree so much with your post, but I do want to talk about one thing: Where is the idea that outsiders are making these calls coming from? I was under the impression that the leadership team of the new Six Flags was entirely made up of legacy Six Flags and (especially) legacy Cedar Fair execs.

Love this new era for the industry, where the biggest seasonal park operator is operating under the notion that selling a season pass means only vaguely selling access to a theme park. Don't worry about the fine print. You'll receive what experiences and availability they determined is financially good for them during yesterday's meeting, effective immediately, integrity be darned. Heaven forbid any kind of stink gets raised about a ride being quietly removed so people don't notice until passes are bought and it's a dirt pile.

To me, the interesting question out of all of this is, "What happened to the situation at Six Flags to where they needed to axe their most maintenance-heavy and/or least reliable and/or less-popular older rides rides across the chain in the course of a single winter?" That's what's happening--La Vibora, Kingda Ka, Nighthawk, SFGAdv's Twister and Sky Ride, Snake River Falls, and potentially our Invertigo and Congo Falls all meet those criteria. It's a bad look at any park to remove rides without warning. It's an especially bad look to remove some of the most well-known and unique rides without warning. It's a colossally bad look to knock down a quarter of Great Adventure and the only way anyone knew beforehand was rumors on Reddit. And the Six Flags management team is smart enough to know that. So what happened financially behind the scenes to force this to happen? Surely this wasn't the plan the entire time, right? Isn't maintaining the status quo with fewer people the entire shtick with a merger line this? I was braced for a decade or more of all parks but the top of the top performers to get small flat rides every few years until smaller properties get unloaded--not this. EDIT: And like that, context was provided: https://KICentral.com/forums/topic/49150-the-bat-closing-in-2025/

Cedar Fair does not exist. And no, they don't. Six Flags doesn't operate how YOU play Planet Coaster. You didn't read what I said.

Yeah, it's definitely weird favoritism for literally no reason (the current Six Flags CEO was GM of Kings Dominion from 1998 to 2007, a.k.a. a time in which Paramount Parks was in competition with Cedar Fair and in which Kings Dominion added things like Volcano, Hypersonic, and Tomb Raider: Firefall, which were big deals at the time) and not because Cedar Point is the closest thing to a destination park in North America outside of Florida and California. YOU think Orion and Leviathan are lackluster, and YOU think getting a smaller RMC is a sign of disrespect or whatever. That you think those things does not make them correct. Coaster enthusiasts do not know how to run amusement park chains. Intamin hydraulic launches are unreliable and always have been. They've shredded launch cables multiple times and injured riders. They have more moving parts than any other launch type in the modern era. Intamin's spare parts availability seems atrocious. That they've lasted as long as they have is honestly surprising--I think if the upfront cost wasn't as large as they were, we'd have seen them go away sooner because parks wouldn't have bothered trying. Note that when a train on TTD shed a part that hit a rider, CF didn't bother with, for instance, building barriers between the ride and the adjacent guest areas, which surely would've been cheaper. Cedar Fair tried an alternative on Top Thrill 2, the ride they sold passes and tickets based on the promise of riding, that worked so well that it operated for a few weekends in May and then closed for the rest of the year. I think that, very understandably, was the last chance for the industry to try to make the stratas sustainable. I expect that SF will do what they can to make TT2 work for 2025, but if something major comes up, it'll get removed and fall into that The Bat-Son of Beast-Hypersonic XLC category of rides where in 10-15 years, people on social media will incessantly post things like, "Who here got to ride TT2 while it briefly existed? What was it like compared to the original? Don't you think Six Flags should've tried harder to make it work/shouldn't Cedar Point rebuild TT2?" In the meantime, I honestly understand the decision to remove Kingda Ka, and I think Xcelerator is ABSOLUTELY on borrowed time. Amusement parks are businesses.

I dunno, I'm not really on board with the whole "Vortex's replacement has to be an inversion-heavy coaster" thing folks have been saying on here for a bit. I'm not judging because I am FULLY guilty of doing the same thing, but I think it's easy for us to fall into a pattern of wanting certain things to not change, even when it might not make business sense to keep them the same. I feel like whatever goes in a well-loved attraction's place has to be marketable as a distinctly new ride from what was there before. (Not to mention, the next coaster doesn't necessarily HAVE to go in Vortex's spot... but it does seem the most obvious place, right?) Problem is, without jumping into theming-heavy stuff that already wasn't Cedar Fair's schtick, ever, and especially probably wouldn't be Six Flags's thing right now with the legacy CF parks, I don't know of anything that jumps out particularly well for the park. We're more than good on wood coasters, and I think our bases are more or less covered on launches, inversions, and anything inverted. The trend right now for most big names in the industry? Intamin's and Zamperla's and Gerstlauer's and Premier's multi-launch coasters, Vekoma's new looping coasters and family inverts, GCI and Gravity Group's new wood coaster technology and designs with inversions, RMCs with inversions, Mack's launch coasters, and B&Ms with launches (and sometimes also inversions.) We don't have a lot of those things exactly, sure, so we COULD add them, but I fear they'd end up a bit lost in the lineup. So like, if I HAD to choose something that actually seems semi-likely for the state of the chain right now, I'd probably pick a 10-across B&M Dive. I'd put a first drop facing towards the walkway around where Vortex's batwing was, tunnel it under the path, and come up into an Immelman over the walkway right about where the basketball game currently is. I have no idea what to add to it after that point to make it stand out, though--we've already got a B&M with a splashdown, and I don't know that there are many other quirks that B&M does these days that aren't already represented on our other B&Ms. I'd hate for us to get something unremarkable. We've got lots of quality supporting players in our lineup, but I think it's important to also take a few risks to make some headliners, lest we develop what I lovingly think of as "the Canada's Wonderland problem." So, what I'd rather see happen, if we're sticking to coasters, is a Firechaser Express-like ride that's debatably more theming-heavy than Mystic Timbers. We've got the bases covered as far as base models go from most manufacturers, so it's time for something more than a fresh-out-of-the-box coaster. That's not me just really liking theming--I think doing Dollywood-level theming on a family coaster, which aligns with KI's current target audiences, would be the right move for a standout attraction in both the park and the market. Unless I'm forgetting something, no major players in the seasonal park world except United Parks and Herschend are doing themed coasters right now. Heck, you could even go so far as to have a drop track like Verbolten. (If we're considering options besides coasters, I'd absolutely put a themed log flume in Vortex's spot. But that's not this thread, so I'll keep that to myself! )