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Yes, they could have added 90 degree drops, loops, in-line rolls and all BUT zambezi zinger had none of that. They are capturing the essence of a long gone ride and, I'd dare say, it's pretty damn identical. And in the spirit of the long gone coaster, this seems to be geared to families.

I firmly believe that Corkscrew will run basically forever. This has nothing to do with it's historical significance (which is overblown anyway because it's at Cedar Point), I'm positive that they don't actually care about that. I believe this just because there's no reason to remove it from a practicality standpoint. Corkscrew's entire ride path is over midways and and an employee storage and parking area other than the station and first turnaround other than two tiny slivers of track that hug a perimeter fence and a midway. It takes up no room at all. In addition, it has about as low of a staffing requirement as a Cedar Point coaster can have, there's no shortage of spare parts, it's popular enough, it looks great, it never breaks, it can run in almost anything and it probably does way better ridership numbers than it has any right to. I really think the best we can hope for in that spot is a flat ride, restaurant or hopefully a bathroom that's not an absolute disgrace. I could be wrong, but I really don't see this ride leaving.

Worlds of Fun has announced their new for 2023 roller coaster, Zambezi Zinger, a tribute to the original Zambezi Zinger that used to stand at the park! https://www.worldsoffun.com/new-in-2023/zambezi-zinger The new Zambezi Zinger roller coaster will take guests on a thrilling journey above its galvanized steel and wood hybrid frame, dropping guests from an iconic spiral lift hill into a low-to-the-ground track that races through the trees and terrain of the African Serengeti. Packed with several moments of airtime, banked turns and quick transitions, riders are connected to the feeling of an epic safari chase and fast-paced adventure! Designed by: Great Coasters International and Skyline Attractions Length: 2,428 feet Speed: 45 mph Duration: 2 minutes Track Style: Hybrid Titan Track Trains: New Infinity Flyer Trains, capable of taking on the most extreme coaster elements # of Trains: 2 Riders/Train: 16 The original Zinger was one of the park’s most popular rides – and one of three coasters – when Worlds of fun opened in 1973. Beloved by adults and kids alike, it had cars configured in a bobsled style that dashed through the trees for a fun and exhilarating ride. The new Zinger is sure to delight a new generation of guests while providing a nostalgic nod to the past.

This. The area opened up by moving Matterhorn and Scrambler is so minuscule, and Corkscrew's footprint is so narrow, I don't see much of anything fitting in the area. Now had they also moved the Super Himalaya (which they might as well trash it since they run it slow and forwards only) and Power Tower, you might have a theory there, @jarmor, but as it stands no way. Since we're spouting off crazy theories for the future literally the day after they just announced their 2023 plans, I personally foresee the rapids ride going for their next major coaster. It's a huge plot of land in an area that doesn't have any other rides except an up-charge.

Busch Gardens Tampa has (by my count) 2 flat rides that aren't kiddy rides and nobody cares. Cedar Point has somewhere between 15-20. I wouldn't say no to another flat ride, but they're fine in that department. Really they're fine in every department besides indoor rides, non-drenching water rides and food places that don't serve exclusively fried shit or BBQ, though if they want to add more of really anything I'm cool with it.

What in the world was the voyage and how is my head still on?

I think this is a net positive. I'd take a Wild Mouse, a nice refresh and an upper deck bar with views of the lake over Wicked Twister any day. For me, I'm definitely most excited for the pavillion. That upper deck bar really ticks all the boxes for me. As for the mouse, I'm almost surprised that it's not CGAs.

Why? i agree with the post above just rebuild the original Zambezi Zinger. Just get Gerstlauer to do with their Infinity trains instead of the bobsleds. LSMs on the lift hill...

Interesting to see (at least in the renderings) that this ride isn't entirely Titan Track. Large sections of it are, but there are a lot of wood track sections too. I would think that it would either be entirely one or the other. Maybe a cost factor, or maybe as a furthering test of Titan Track and it's capabilities?

You just can't go by back something that isn't for sale you know. . . Besides why do that when you can spend the same money on something unique and brand NEW.

Looks like a solid addition to the park. Interested to see how this Titan track rides!

I'd rather have this at Dollywood than BBM.

I’m pumped for this. Also worlds of fun’s website mentions a mid course tunnel( not seen in the vid).

Looks fun and fairly unique. I like it.

I like it, especially the spiral lift hill.

I fail to see how buying a SBNO coaster from a closed park equates to forcibly buying an operating coaster from an operating park, but you do you. But thank you for confirming the sterotype of a WoF (or VF, SFStL, Dorney, Darien Lake, etc. etc.) local enthusiast - no matter what you get, its never enough. Would you rather go another 13 years without a coaster?

You know what, you are right. It's a turd because base on your post, if anyone would know a turd it would be you my friend. . .

Uh, I am sorry, but Indiana Beach literally did exactly what you just described. Anything can be for sale, and any modern company could recreate it way better than what is essentially a junior Prowler. Hell, remove the spiral lift and add a family friendly launch to modernize it, that would fit the need more than this. This is a turd.

Drop Line is now open again.

They've improved their food offerings dramatically, but I have to throw in the caveat that they still have severe staffing shortages that leave many of their smaller stands empty and closed.

If your primary interests are hobbies in which a bunch of 17 year olds being paid crap wages are responsible for staffing them and providing you a service, then yes, everything sucks. If you have a wider breadth of things that you do with your life, the fact that we don't have anywhere near enough laborers to do the amount of labor our economy requires is not going to impact you to the same degree. Theme parks are intrinsically going to be one of the points of failure in a situation like this because they are luxury services committed to high margin-low wage operation. There's a million things to do instead that aren't as impacted. I have had no issues finding such things to do, and honestly, I don't feel as though my life is poorer for it. The opposite is in fact true!

Stoked for Facebook to implode from the complaints about another restaurant.

I'm really excited for this!

Nice ninja edit there to make me look silly. Before your changes, you said specifically "rebuild the original" with nothing else.

I never specified to rebuild the actual original. You merely inferred that. Why don't you think before you speak?

And how would you propose doing that, given that the original coaster is now operating in another park (in a third-world country to boot, so you know maintenance hasn't been done), has recently had a major incident, and is by a long-defunct manufacturer? Seriously people, think before you speak.

Can we vote to reverse it, that spiral would be much more fun to go down instead of up.

Looks like a fun ride! Obviously, it's not something that's gonna be mind-blowing, but it still looks like a super enjoyable ride. I think it's a great way to pay homage to the original Zambezi Zinger. I'm also really interested to see how those Infinity Flyer trains perform.

Then it wouldn't be a Wild Mouse. . .

Actually, if anyone is coming off upset, it's you.

I'm upset? Not sure why I'm even replying because its clear you're missing my point entirely. Not once did I question whether or not what you said was true, I just though the delivery was comical. That's it. No one is butthurt about anything. Are you sure you're only a park junkie?

There's plenty of stuff to do that's basically the same experience as before: Zoos, museums, national/state/municipal parks, to name a few. Casinos have been slow to bring back buffets by and large because A) disease concerns B) they're historically unprofitable, but aside from that, the experience of gambling is identical if not significantly better with the legalization of mobile betting. When I go to see a sporting event, the actual action on field/track is basically the same as it's always been, with perhaps the exception of slightly longer lines for food/drink. Even that's not really been anything I've noticed in my area or traveling for events. Concerts? Just the same as always. Theme parks though are so labor intensive, and have such a grossly outdated labor model that I've spent years pillorying here and elsewhere that when the labor crunch came and all the people who thought they couldn't do anything else with their lives suddenly found themselves able to seek new and higher paying forms of employment, that it was impossible for them to adjust meaningfully. It was bad before COVID. It's absolutely worse now in every way, and it's bled over into the actual products and services being provided. Cedar Point is down launched two coasters and a family ride, but hey, they got a new chicken restaurant located about 300 feet from another chicken restaurant. :makes the JO motion:

The layout is very interesting, bordering on the bizarre--which is OK by me.

So what you're saying is the carousel at Six Flags Saint Louis will be down for another season? I made a change to your post.

Couple of mini updates now Legoland is fully open and operational and since we popped by the park: I took my wife with me to get her opinion why Koreans haven't taken to the park to much when Lego is so popular here. Every town has many 'Lego Cafes' where you pay a per hour price and then can pick any of the Lego sets and go to a table and make them so it isn't like the brand isn't big here. I think weirdly being an enthusiast, especially one from the UK, has made my expectations lower. It's a Merlin park and pretty much comes with what you'd expect from that so I walk away with expectations met. Whereas as my wife pointed out, Koreans are used to places like Lotte World, Seoul Land, and Everland, where for the same price you get 10-12 hours in the park but they all come with parades, night shows, photo ops with characters (Legoland despite having many on the app in actuality only has one brief meet and greet at opening) , gardens to take photos etc. It seems Legoland seems to get targeted a lot in the news from accusations of unfair contracts in getting the park built, rides being evacced, and expensive costs. The park was dead on our trip which does make for a great visit but with all the negativity Merlin gets compared to the other parks which are owned by big Korean companies, I see it making future companies more hesitant to build here in a country that has been pretty stagnant for new parks and additions. I touched on this when Shinwha World opened on Jeju island but it also kind of applies to Legoland. Despite the park being in an area that sees a lot of tourists, I think the park suffers from having a high cost that warrants a full day experience in a are that is known and full of cheap drop in for a couple of hours tourist places everywhere. Shinhwa World suffered a lot from this and changed from day tickets to allow people to drop in and pay per ride. Legoland seems to have noticed because they've started running on summer weekends $30 tickets to enter the park from 3pm-7pm and changed the parking lot to a per hour charge. Final update, the park has now launched it's fastrack tiers priced at $40/$80/$120. Protesters are still here despite the park being fully open a while now. You have to walk past them and a lot of signs between the car park and the park. Like I mentioned in my previous TR, one of the big complaints about the park was expensive parking. Legoland has now lowered the price and switched to a per hour cost for people who don't want to spend the full day. Opening hype and experiences have truly worn off now. Just to give you an idea of how quiet the park was, that was the car park on the day of our visit. Even with only one side of the Wave Racers running, it was walk-on and the Coast Guard Academy was having to pull most of the boats off by 3PM to make room in the station for returning boats because nobody was around to fill the empty ones. One of the reasons we visited was to check out the signature dark ride that finally opened. My son loved it which was the main thing, but a lot of the effects were out of sync on the ride. The mini-figure scanner failed to detect people maybe 2 out of 3 rides for my son and wife and refused to recognize my existence at all. The mirror at the end would show our car but show the previous riders which means it was either out of sync also or a weird design choice and some of the videos would start too early. Our first two rides we went into a pitch black room before on the final ride it synced up and we could see we're supposed to be getting shut into a truck for transportation. My son is very young and I think this ride serves as a perfect introduction to dark-rides/motion based rides and it'll be easier for him to transition to bigger rides like Mystic Manor or Spider-Man/Transformers having been on this and it was a fun ride but I think out of all the motion base dark rides I've done it's my least favorite so far. The ride also has a huge queue line and is advertised as the parks signature attraction but seemed to be pretty ignored on our visit. We rode throughout the day and not only walked on but the cars that went with us were always devoid of riders as well. Once again, despite this post being doom and gloom, my son and I had a blast. Corona took from me being there on his first ever cinema trip but we did the 4D Lego City Police movie and seeing him experience 3D that comes out of the screen for the first time or his delight at the bubbles or getting splashed by a movie as well is a memory I'll treasure. He still loves here and spent maybe 2 hours marathoning the Driving School since there were no crowds so I really hope the park does gain more success as Merlin adjusts to the Korean market/media/expecations. Yes, we popped by the park on a weekday but friends who went on the weekend also experienced light crowds. Funnily enough the route home always takes us 2KM from Everland, and since we have year passes and it's open until 10PM, we always stop in to eat, catch a few night rides, and the parade and fireworks and that park still pulls in the huge crowds.

Another believer is born.

We got our first trip to King's Island as a part of our road trip about a week ago now and I think it might be my new favorite park. The operations were outstanding, the park itself is well maintained all around, and there is legitimately not a bad coaster built for adults in the park right now. Mystic Timbers is just below the top tier of woodies, awesome ride. Diamondback is probably my favorite B&M hyper now. Orion might be the weakest of the three B&M gigas, but that still makes it a top 25 coaster. We also made what turned out to be the right decision to wait for dark to ride the Beast for the first time. Not only did we get an amazing experience that was one of the most fun coaster rides of my life, but while in line we lucked into a great view for the fireworks/drone show which was great too. I left the park with zero complaints.

So I haven't seen a lot about either the history section that has been set up in the gardens, or the Phantom Theater Encore show, so I'll deviate from my big trip report to talk about them and show the pictures here. First up, the 50th Anneversary history section set up in the gardens. This area has stones for every year with the big addition on the ground, with blank stones set up for another 15+ years. Along the path are signs talking about the parks history, broken down by era, as well as model Eiffel Towers painted in the colors of major rides. And the Phantom Theater Encore show. It was entertaining enough...I definitely enjoyed the acrobats, and the talent and production values were there, but not knowing anything about the original ride, I found the show kinda meh. There was also a little too much union bashing for my liking. In the lobby of the theater there's a whole bunch of history about the ride, including reproductions of the lenticular posters, and the original model of the ride (which apparently the park had to buy back from a collector who had purchased it). I love park history, so honestly this part was better than the show for me, but I'm sure people who remember the original Phantom Theater ride will be very entertained by the show. Out front, one of the original ride vehicles. The poster on the outside of the theater. Inside the theater (no photo or video allowed once the show began). And the history section: And I'll close out this post with some pictures of the art contest winners and runners up, on display in one of the stores:

Because no one cares about anniversaries. How many other parks got huge coasters on their big years? Did you enjoy 150th anniversary cedar point just got?? Oh wait, they TOOK OUT a coaster for it lol.

Going to post this here instead of making a new thread since it's not really a full TR since I was mostly there with my son and although we rode most things I didn't photograph a lot of the park since it was mainly a father-son day out but I'll do my best to structure it as a TR. I'm not usually a first kind of person and will usually wait off opening hype, we'd heard enough stories of the park being quiet that we decided opening hype had died down and we'd go out before the hotel and factory ride opened and could potentially lead to a busier park. It's worth noting as of writing the Factory Ride had it's first operational day today (29th June) and the hotel is scheduled to open on Friday (1st July.) We'd heard a lot of negative things but I think a lot of it is just people not knowing what to expect from Legoland or who it is owned by. One of the biggest complaints we've heard is how childish the park is and how older children are bored. Personally, I expected Legoland to be aimed at children but I kind of get the point whereas most have 1 or 2 rides you could argue are for bigger kids this Legoland does seem the most full of young children rides out of all the parks. The other complaints we heard was pricing for parking and photos. $18 was parking but even I winced when my son begged me for a $28 ride photo. At least for my son, the only negatives for him were that despite the park advertising multiple meet and greet areas on the site, in reality, there is only one scheduled and it's park opening on main street. By time we made it through the ticked booth, they'd already cut the line off and that was the only chance for the whole park. No later meets and none in other areas such as Ninjago or Lego Movie characters etc. The other one was the Ninjago ride seems to be up and down constantly. The doors got shut just as we reached the entrance on the first time, second time we got to station platform and had to leave (but got a skip the ride pass at least) and 3rd time as we were about to board I joked to my son if it breaks down at least we're in the air con..... and it broke down, but at least we made it on eventually. Thankfully a 10 minute breakdown let us skip an hour since Wave Racers and Coast Guard Academy seemed to be the busiest rides of the park, never dropping lower than a 40 minute wait. We ended up using the queue pass we got for the Coast Guard Academy because loading was painfully slow for that and the line really crawled and never really died down compared to the other rides. My son knew I wanted to try out the Wave Racers and was willing to use them there but I knew he'd been eyeing up driving the boats all day and he was already tired. I figured we'll be back pretty soon to try the factory ride and at least the Wave Racer line moves compared to the Academy. Kind of bummed since it looked like a fun ride but dad points over being an enthusiast any-day. Anyway, despite hearing negative things, we had a fantastic day and will be back soon. Although there is a shuttle bus from the car-park, it's really not a long walk. The only weird thing is you have to walk past signs and protesters who are angry that the park was built on an old historical ground. The hotel opening July 1st although at $800-$1000 rooms it can be pretty pricey. Lines were pretty manageable all day. The park is pretty compact and you're never more than 10 minutes walking distance from any attraction. The Duplo area is thankfully shaded considering even in early June it was 32C heat. It wouldn't be Legoland without funky figures all around the park. Instructions said " Stack a skyscraper and shake it! Send your bricks flying thru the skies..." So we did. And got told off for making it too high and making the bricks fly onto the ground.... lol Turns out toddlers aren't too cooperative when you want to wait for the ride vehicle for your picture so here's an empty tower. Quite a few playgrounds around the park. With the heat it's kind of a shame one like this couldn't have been a water playground though. My son had been quite excited about this one before we arrived at the park. I think I underestimated how much physical labor there would be with me being the only one pumping for him This one had digital screen for the fire as opposed to holes in the wall from my trips years ago to Legoland Windsor. We'd heard horror stories about multi hour waits for the Driving School because this was the only one in the world that let adults also ride meaning a lot of people riding. At least, for the day we visited, and I presume from then on, they'd changed it to match the other parks and have it be children only and as soon as whole families couldn't ride it became walk-on all day. Apologies to the staff. I wasn't allowed in so I never saw what the safety video said but my son took it VERY seriously and didn't bring the car back when the ride finished because, and I quote: "The traffic lights all went red and you can't go through a red light!" despite the staff telling him it was OK to go through the reds. I don't think he was too popular when the ride was in moti0n either and he would stop for the lights forcing the other kids around him to blow through the light. The Ninjago ride apparently can been up and down a lot on most days. My son was excited for this one so he got a little bummed that it broke down a 3rd time on him. I want to say the staff were fantastic, although he was waiting calmly on the 3rd time on the platform, disappointment was all over his face and one of the staff brought him a Lego Ninjago mini-figure which really meant a lot to him. He got his ride in the end and was extremely happy, on the one hand I'm glad he got his ride but I would have been more than happy to sit in the air-con, and get another queue pass for an outdoor ride and try for a 4th time. 3rd time lucky, we eventually made it onto the ride. As an enthusiast being evacced to me is a cool way to see the ride, but I forget how confusing it must be for young children to have the ride stop on the track and screens turn off, even with lights on and having to wait 5-10 minutes for someone to get t you. Since this was the 3rd time and it was on his mind what would happen if he was on when "it was broken" I explained to my son what was happening in case and to prepare him but it backfired because a week later he had a bad dream where he was trapped on a ride. The apple fries are also located in this area of the park as Kai's Apple Fries. Some shots of the Korea themed Mini-Land. There were a few more exhibits but I was too busy keeping an eye on my son to snap pictures. He wasn't too interested in models he couldn't physically touch and check out. The Legoland Factory ride opened today but wasn't open on our visit but here it is on the backside of the hotel. The whole park is located on an island just outside the city. A look towards the back of the park and the car-park. The Ninjago area, and Pirate Splash Battle although strangely the Ninjago live theater is not in this area. Unlike other parks, adults are allowed to ride on the horses here. I never got this credit. Mu son kept trying to build up the courage, but I could see he was very hesitant. I'd rather ride it later when he's 100% ready than now and him have an awful experience. The full Korean Mini Land. And I'll round out this TR with some pictures from the peak of the Legoland Lookout ride. Hopefully, if somehow all my clients cancel the same day again (which can happen on a Friday when they're all from the same company) we'll be back out to the park in the next month or two to try out the Factory Ride and then hopefully I can finally try out a Wave Racers ride as well.

I’m always down for a nice place at parks to enjoy a cold beer. This looks fantastic. I’ll take this over Wicked Twister any day!

What a waste of titan track. Buy back the actual Zambezi Zinger and refurbish it, put the titan track on Prowler. What an incredibly underwhelming first new coaster since 2009…