coasterbill

Annual passes are gone again and season passes are back. They now have more new names. These are season passes instead of annual passes/memberships--Instead of expiring 12 months from date of purchase, Gold expires on Labor Day 2023, but Platinum and Diamond expire 1//2/2024. This is for Great Adventure. Other parks are probably different for maximum confusion. This brings the number of annual pass types currently outstanding to 34. Source

They can just reroute the boats through Hadrosaur Cove.

Magic Mountain doesn't exist in a vacuum. I'd be worried about it if these kings of things were only happening there, but operationally the chain as-a-whole is in the worst place it's been in in about 15 years. The CEO miscalculated and nobody is coming to the parks so they're scrambling to cut budget, making the product worse which makes the prices even more insane and hard for people to justify and the cycle is going to continue until someone else takes over.

We went to the park yesterday for the first time in years. It was a pretty huge shitshow. By park close, "only" Crazanity, Scream, Ninja, Superman, X2 and Drop of Doom (or whatever it's called) and about half of the smaller rides remained closed for the entire day, but every major ride that wasn't up front opened around 2 despite a 6pm close. This included the brand new ride. The only exceptions were Goliath, Riddler and Batman that ran all day for some reason. Also, the rapids and the only indoor air conditioned restaurant were closed for the entire day. It was 102 degrees. As for positive things to say? Uh... the mountains are pretty and Tatsu exists. That's all I've got.

I'm going to be cautiously optimistic that they'll fix it. I 100% expect them to do the bare minimum though.

Lol. Keep it up, you’re doing a great job.

Crowds were apparently very light.

I’ve tried to convince Brit to get a bunch of women together and march on Washington demanding real pockets in women’s clothing. I don’t understand why there aren’t millions of women there with pitchforks every single day, I really don’t. If I were a woman I would be burning shit. Full disclosure, this is slightly self-serving because then I wouldn’t have to carry everything all the time, but let’s ignore that for now.

Yeah, it’s just the regular line. If you go up the regular line as a single rider then they put you right on with no wait. If you go up in a group of 2, same thing. ...or a group of 3 … or 4 … you get the point.

Oooooooh. I've been doing it all wrong then. My bad.

Every park likes to brag about how historic their carousel is but I really would venture to guess that in almost every situation this is something that like six guests per year care about. I would imagine that number is even lower at a Six Flags park. They should build a cheap POS carousel, put it in the same building and not tell anyone. Almost nobody would notice. I know I wouldn't. This isn't Knoebels, this is a park that caters heavily towards guests under 35-40 who want to ride coasters.

If you're talking about Medusa, yes it unfortunately has 3 trains. Mercifully they've been running 2 more often lately. We all used to hate it because their operations were so atrocious that all it accomplished was making you sit on the ride 5 minutes longer.

^^ Yeah, I expected Timberwolf to be awful but it was running really well. We instinctively rode in the front and leaned forward because it’s a Dinn and it always worked for Mean Streak but I have no clue if it was even necessary. The ride wasn’t amazing or anything but I 100% enjoyed myself and I didn’t expect to.

Glad you enjoyed it! Also yeah, I've only done that drive once but banjo music was playing in my head the entire time.

It's tough to predict Fright Fest crowds this year. Every day of the season so far has been empty, but Fright Fest has historically been the busiest time of the year by far. I feel like it could be really anywhere from every single ride being a walk-on to every major coaster having triple digit wait times. Everything about this season is unprecedented. That said, just go to Knoebels. It's closer and better and El Toro is closed anyway.

Lol wow, this is really back from the dead. Great update!

This is one of those things that I just ignore, not because it's necessarily wrong but it just strikes me as one of those things that someone said once and everyone just took it as gospel forever. None of us have any clue what the limitations are, and technology is always evolving. I'm sure it's possible if they want to do it. They can even put LIMs up a curved hill if they want to, Intamin does it all the time.

We visited for the first time this past weekend. I was surprised at how nice the park is compared to Valleyfair and Dorney. Mamba was probably our favorite ride there, but I don’t want to overhype it too much. It was a lot better than Steel Force and a bit better than Wild Thing but I prefer every other Morgan hyper that I’ve been on.

Yeah, I’m really not convinced that Sky Ride is reopening.

Well it probably doesn’t have much wear and tear since the ride never runs…

^ This. My assumption is that they took this as an opportunity to evaluate everything about the ride even if it had nothing to do with the accident and weigh the costs / liabilities and headaches with ROI and guest satisfaction. I was dead wrong, I expected them to do the absolute bare minimum and keep on chugging along with an unreliable and expensive (but popular) ride. I'm impressed that they're (seemingly) going beyond that. I guess they don't want to throw a ton of money at fixing this issue just so they can wait for next year's unrelated customary breakdown that makes the news and takes a month to fix, only so it can go back to only being closed 25-50% of every other operating day once it reopens. It's also possible that they're doing something that they've wanted to do for years that may lead to long-term cost savings and more uptime but never did it before because it's a time consuming fix and they didn't want to take the ride down. Who knows?

Great update! I still wish they had kept the old dark ride, but this looks fun and will be an awesome upgrade from a giant empty box.

Holiday in the Park was my favorite time of year at this park, but this has been reported for about a year now so I'm not surprised to see it all-but-confirmed. The event is apparently gone from every park north of Atlanta aside from Great Adventure. Hopefully this isn't the last year for that event since there will be absolutely nobody there, as there's nobody there any day of the year anymore.

I have no idea what they're doing, but it's definitely interesting. I would imagine that they announced it when they did because with the park closed on weekdays now they might really start making some pretty-obvious changes pretty quickly.

At-least 6