TombRaiderFTW

Giga coasters and water coasters have also been industry trends for the last 15-25 years, and the park chooses their rides from the same catalogs we're looking at. I was/am not suggesting the park ignores enthusiasts entirely, but my point was that the park does not exclusively consult opinions on the KIC forums when deciding what to add. Nor should they.

Great! I had the exact same experience. That doesn't make it necessary OR okay to put down other people.

Respectfully, this is a bit rude. Trust me, I completely understand your passion for the things you'd rather see in The Crypt's building, but it's really not necessary to shoot down anything anyone else wants. The park doesn't make capex decisions based on opinions on KIC.

I think whatever happens at Great Adventure is going to be the defining event for me of Zimmerman's era at Cedar Fair/Six Flags. I've kinda gotten the vibe for a few years that, post Ouimet, Cedar Fair never had a strong sense of direction. Ouimet attempted to aggressively attract families while improving the value of what your ticket got you, which is where semi-themed new rides, non-typical shows (e.g. Cirque Imagine and the like), LARP-based experiences like Ghost Town Alive, (a mild attempt at) new dark rides, and higher-quality food offerings came from. Zimmerman at CF seems to have lopped off the more pricey parts but otherwise attempted to keep that status quo. Then COVID happened, and I feel like the goal was to position the company for the merger through cutting costs to make the books look good. At this point, I feel like they've announced the immediate closure of a third of Great Adventure. If Six Flags and Zimmerman are serious about bringing a quality experience (to stay in line with the Ouimet philosophy), in my opinion, we'll see more than just a coaster in that area. We'll see!

I'm gonna go ahead and speculate wildly: I think Magic Mountain will get the first S&S Axis coaster. Unless someone's been developing something in secret and not announcing its availability until after the first one is installed (e.g. B&M Wing Coasters), it's the only standout thing in the industry that comes to mind that hasn't been installed yet, to my knowledge. My money's on Ka getting the TT2 treatment. The real question: Will Zamperla be the ones doing it? Kings Island, I dare y'all to make the 2026 family attraction a top-to-bottom redo of Boo Blasters. Give us Justice League: Battle for Metropolis-style vehicles and a similarly-paced storyline. For the two weeks that all of the effects work, that ride would be AMAZING.

Sure, and I didn't claim it didn't. I just disagree with what you initially said, which is that the only reason the Giant Top Spin was unsustainable was because of the 9-flip cycle. Getting back to the subject at hand prior to the TRTR tangent: I think at this point I'd just be happy to see Action Zone have an actual theme, lol. If it's DC, cool. If it's something else, cool. I'm happy with Adventure Port, so if they can pull something off of a similar magnitude, I'm good. If they wanted to stay on the nostalgia train, they could resurrect Adventure Village in spirit and expand Adventure Port to the rest of Action Zone.

Except they presumably can't do that. The concept of a highly-themed top spin ride experience in a box is patented to Paramount Parks, and based on how the detheme into The Crypt went, the rights to that patent apparently did not pass to Cedar Fair. This is a pretty bold assumption regarding the cycle. I'd sooner guess that the locking/unlocking of the gondola required by the TRTR cycle was already doing quite a bit of wear before the 9-flip cycle showed up. We can assume that the 9-flip cycle, which was the same cycle used on KD's Tomb Raider/Crypt, had proven sustainable there, so they attempted to make it work on the Giant Top Spin. IIRC, Giant Top Spins were no longer offered by HUSS by the time our Crypt bit the dust (plus our Crypt only kept the KD cycle for a year and a half), so one could extrapolate that both KI and HUSS found Giant Top Spins to be unsustainable. Once upon a time, a user here claimed that TRTR was a test by Paramount to see if they could get an ROI on Florida-theme-park-level investments in their regional theme parks. Had TRTR been a bigger draw, it would have seen more money spent on refurbishing effects, and future additions would have been closer to the TRTR scale. I have no idea if there's any truth to it, but it does provide a context that, to me, makes sense for why Paramount went crazy on the budget for the 2000-2002 installations and then immediately dialed back to "cheap and cheerful" installations and unsustained theming until the sale to Cedar Fair.

It's a little sad to see that area become the focus it was over the last 10 years and then drop off farther than it had been previously. Probably one of the bigger combined fumbles of the Ouimet and Zimmerman eras is that nothing that landed there from 2014 onwards remains 10 years later (unless I'm forgetting something.) I also feel like it's probably not a coincidence that the plots of land being cleared are adjacent to each other. From a business perspective and how the now-Six Flags-but-formerly-Cedar Fair leadership team seems to prioritize things, I wouldn't be shocked to see a GCI announced for that plot of land in the next few years.

I'd love to go (I haven't been since 2019 and I miss it) but unfortunately the PTO gods didn't smile down on me this year. Hope you and anyone else who goes has a great time! The IAAPA Celebrates event at Epcot sounds like a blast, too. I've never had a bad time at the Celebrates events.

I think you're gonna be hard-pressed to see Banshee operate with more than one train until a thorough investigation is complete. I'd even go so far as to speculate that Banshee won't regain a second (or third) train until 2025, or the very end of Haunt at the soonest. Gonna take a guess here that the PLC thought Valravn had one fewer train than it actually had. If it had one extra/a ghost train, I would expect that the PLC would have put an extra block between the train in the station and the train on the brakes and refused to advance the train on the brakes to the next available block. On an unrelated gripe: KI PR hasn't released any kind of statement about Banshee's collision, and I think that is the most aggravating and disheartening move possible in this scenario. People should not be learning about this incident from Reddit--you've got to get ahead of the story! Every single amusement park in the United States is operating in spite of a cultural narrative that they are unsafe and operated by dishonest people who cover up safety incidents to make a dollar. The minute you don't set the record straight and you let social media control the narrative, you lend credence to that idea--and if that idea grows too big, it WILL hurt the industry, and especially the park. The distance between Carowinds's communication on Fury 325's support crack and Kings Island's communication on the Banshee incidents is staggering. It almost feels like there's a Titanic-like hubris among KI's PR leader(s)...

For what it's worth, I don't want to talk about The Crypt's building. I wish they'd demolish it, too. I apologize that I made you feel attacked for being interested in Son of Beast. That wasn't my intent, but I get where it would have seemed that way. The point I was going for is solely that this path of reviving old attractions is getting tiresome, and that's not specific to you. I don't want The Crypt back, and I don't want Son of Beast back. Son of Beast seems to lead the charge on people skyrocketing their expectations anytime anything remotely related pops up, and that's been true since 2009. And then those expectations don't work out and everyone starts yelling at each other. The cycle seems endless, and it's making it hard to want to be here. Which sucks, because I really enjoy the community here when it isn't all, "Valleyfair tweeted something with the number 5 in it, Son of Beast was Outpost 5, RMC Son of Beast is coming back next year and I'm right or else!"

I've accepted that all conversations on this site will always lead to Son of Beast, if given enough time and enough people participating. I thought we'd eventually someday escape this Groundhog Day scenario and settle into a The Bat-pre-2014 level of discussion about it, but then apparently someone on Six Flags's creative team decided this year that they hate me.

Gonna be honest, I'm feeling pretty intense nostalgia burnout with KI, and especially with Son of Beast. It was a terrible ride with the coolest marketing. Make a new legend and stop dancing around the idea of reviving old rides.

I believe this was what was aired:

It's worth noting that the AECOM/TEA attendance report is an estimation and not based on figures released by parks. I highly recommend not treating those numbers as factual. It's my opinion that AECOM/TEA does an alright job of generally tracking attendance trends (e.g. attendance is down at a given park in a year) but it's a mistake to use the attendance numbers themselves as proof of anything.

It's worth noting that the TEA attendance report is an estimation and not based on figures released by parks. If that's the only data point we're discussing here, we don't have definitive proof that Wonderland's attendance dropped that significantly. That being said, it's my opinion that the TEA report does an okay job of estimating overall attendance trends for parks based on the events of the year. I'm curious, @MisterSG1, what do you think happened this year at Wonderland to cause an attendance drop? Admittedly, I don't specifically follow what's happening at every park beyond big announcements, but I haven't been aware of anything big happening at Wonderland this year.

This feels like a question for @Captain Nemo. Apologies if I've forgotten any other former TRTR ride ops!

Who has been teasing it? How have they been teasing it?

It's a cool concept, with features unlike anything else on the continent, in an iconic location in the park. Love it. Totally agree with the Volcano comparisons, and I kind of love that another park is getting their own take on the concept. I'm a little concerned about capacity--Wonderland gets BUSY and two 18-passenger trains are a bit concerning. I also wonder if it'll have comfort collars, as those only make loading slower. But yeah, all in all, I think this'll be a win. Good for them!

Well maybe it wouldn't be if you'd just left your 3D glasses on.

Well, yeah. It's a Volcano replacement. In the spirit of what came before, Rapterra will also quickly gain a long queue in the morning and keep it all day. In all seriousness, that's a smart addition for a park that's been hemorrhaging popular rides for the last decade. B&M Wing Coasters maybe aren't my personal cup of tea, but they're marketable and there's nothing like it in the area. Good for them. It's a little curious that a 305 retheme announcement wasn't part of today's news. Wonder if that's gonna be for 2026 or if the announcement is just coming later.

I think it has collapsed collapsed at this point. You used to be able to just make out the brick chimney. It hasn't been visible for a few years.

I only miss that ride more with time. Great pictures. Thank you!

It is, thanks! I don't know exactly which year that is from, but to my knowledge, CF didn't make any changes to TRTR until the 2007-2008 off-season. As far as I'm aware, that's what TRTR's plaza looked like from 2002-2007. EDIT: Oh wait! Those definitely are CF-style trash cans. Yep, that does look like it's from 2007!

I unfortunately can't open that attachment, so I'm not sure.