SFZIP

If you look at the current park map why would you say the Hannibarrels area would be considered part of Gateway To The West? I know the section dividing lines aren't really what they used to be, but the closet the Gateway To The West section gets on the map is Candy Storm (which is nearby, but not next door like the Airbrush shop). The reason that all the "set" scenes that are around the Hannibarrels area and the old Slingshot area is because this area was part of the Studio Backlot area back in the Time Warner days. The park can say whatever rides/shops, etc. they want to be in an area, but in the past and probably currently the Hannibarrels are not in the Gateway To The West section, that can change (which I know is possible), but it's in no way confirmed that this ride is replacing the Hannibarrels, they just showed the old picture on facebook to give a hint on what kind of ride the park is getting next year.

It is not confirmed that the new ride will replace the Hannibarrels, I have heard that they are gone, but they could be just removed and this ride placed elsewhere. I don't see how this ride would fit in that location without major changes to the surrounding area (it appears you need to be able to walk all the way around the new ride to allow the bystanders to be involved in the ride which you can't do at the Hannibarrels location). I don't know if the Hannibarrels area is really part of the Gateway To The West section or not, I don't think that it is based on the fact that the park lists the Airbrush shop next door as part of the Backlot area (and the park said that both the Sound Stage and Slingshot were part of the Studio Backlot area before, also the last season the Hannibarrels were open it was part of the Backlot area as well). So the other possible location for Tsunami Soaker in the Gateway To The West section is where Calico's (probably closed forever) and other "dead" buildings just south of Calico's sit not used. Since this ride will also need water and there are no water rides anywhere near the Hannibarrels site, I'm leaning towards the rides' location being where Calico's is since there are water rides and the kids fountain in the area, but I don't know for sure.

There is no chance that the Hannibarrels could ever operate again, they have not been maintained at all ever since they closed at the end of the 1996 season, none of the motors, gears to turn the barrels, etc. are worth anything at all. The ride is an Intamin ride, but I don't think that they would still offer parts for a ride that barely any theme parks have operating today (there weren't very many made to begin with), so it's finally time to say goodbye probably at the end of Fright Fest. It would be easy to change the look of the front entrance by switching the Ticket booths with the metal detection area, you should first buy your tickets, then go through metal detection and then the front gate (I think that the setup was to be temporary when it was installed, but since it's been around for about 10 years it's basically permanent) and it's doubtful it will change.

Zombie Paintball Apocalyse will be the hayride this year, the entrance will probably be near Axis games where it's been the last couple year. Holidead: The Bye-Polar Express is the name of the returning terror train whith a weird Christmas theme.

Six Flags White Water is not outright owned by Six Flags corporate, it is owned by the same limted partnership group that owns Six Flags Over Georgia. So SF corporate cannot just decide to close White Water unless that is what the limited partership group wants to do.

It is not very easy to figure out individual SF park attendance now a days, but for the past you can find a lot of information if you search for it, using old newspaper articles, old Amusement Business magazines and using other things you can learn a lot about the past when attendance was a not a "secret" like it is today.

The point about not spending much money on SFSL goes a lot deeper, for this park first 30 years or so it got probably close to an average of 15% (in some years 20% or more) higher attendance than what it currently does and has done for the last ten years or so. Why is it o.k. to give up whatever advantage that this park had as a regional theme park, by not spending a decent amount of money to keep people interested in the park and to keep attendance at the level it was. Do you think that 10 years ago, that people who live in Southern Illinois would choose to go to Holiday World rather than SFSL, probably not, but today why would you choose to go to SFSL over Holiday World. It's that same for people that live in central Missouri, why would they choose to come to SFSL, when they can go to Silver Dollar City or even Worlds Fun and get a better product. Six Flags St. Louis had the regional (Missouri, Southern Illinois, etc.) advantage for a long time, but over the years the competition stepped up big time and the park has failed to keep up and without significant investment in the park than nothing is going to change (that is a fact that has been proven for several years), but apparently SF corporate thinks that everything is just fine with leaving the park at the level it currently is (which is one of the bottom parks).

I don't know this for sure, but from what I have heard American Thunder (Evel Knievel) was not originally intended to be built at this park, this park was to receive one of the Dark Knight Coasters (which would have taken less land and probably just replaced Looney Tunes Town, allowing the Moon Cars to stay as they were). It's likely that is the reason that American Thunder construction didn't start until around October and the ride didn't open in July, because of the late change in rides the park decided that they needed to keep the Moon Cars (as a family ride) and not remove them, so they designed the short course in a short amount of time as well. As for next year, I think that the Twist N' Splash has a larger footprint than the Hannibarrels does, so there will likely have to be other changes made to some of the paths around that area, it is still very likely the only new addition for 2014 (I was hoping for another flat ride or kiddie coaster). It will just be another "cheap" year of additions to the park, something that seems to continue year after year (along with a few other SF parks that don't really ever get that big addition under the current management), this park has probably seen around $6 million in new ride capital in the 4 years that the current management has had control, which is pathetic amount to spend to try and help the park grow (back to a level that is was at ten years ago and was before that in the 90's).

Zombie paintball is really an enhancement to the hayride, it will still use the hayride wagons, with paintball guns, I guess you encounter several zombies to shoot paintballs at along the way, it may be an interesting addition or a complete failure, will have to wait and see.

Fright Fest appears to be much stronger this year, than in past years it includes the following attractions - (1) Total Darkness - new in Sound Stage No. 2, (2) - regular Haunted House (name?)- old Mine Train station building, (3) Blind Fury - inside shade arbors by Thunder River, (4) Insanity Alley - behind Empire Theater by Batman, (5) Zombie Paintball Apocalypse - replacing the Haunted Hayride and (6) Holi-dead - returning Terror Train (themed to haunted Christmas). The shows will include Love At First Fright, Trick or Trace hypnotist and likely the other shows that the park had last year, it all starts in just 6 weeks.

There should be at least 5 Fright Fest attractions this year - (1) whatever the main Haunted House will be this year, (2) Blind Fury, (3) Insanity Alley, (4) Total Darkness (will be in the Sound Stage) and (5) whatever the hayride theme will be this year. The rest of Fright Fest (shows and the other attractions) will probably be almost the same as last year, supposed to have more scare actors in the park and hopefully more of an overall atmosphere (several areas of the park had no theming at all last year).

It looks like the Sound Stage No. 2 is being gutted, so is it being gutted for removal? or possibly to be used for Fright Fest, the park is getting Total Darkness (which it looks like all the Six Flags parks may get), so it would need to go in a building somewhere, could they even use the Sound Stage for a haunted house? In other news, Colonel Cobbs had a small fire overnight, so it will be closed for awhile and the park is lucky it wasn't much worse.

The marathon didn't happen, don't if it was because of the accident or why, but it was moved to a friday night in September.

Whenever I said that most of Boomerang movement maintenance/electrical, etc. was done "in house", I meant that a lot more than usual was done "in house", usually Six Flags will contract out some of the work, but they choose not to with this ride and put the pressure on the parks staff to make the changes made to the ride when it was moved here, this is a lot of the reason why the ride didn't open until June and was behind schedule by a week. I don't really want to blame the park for the ride not working, but whenever your given crap to work with and don't really have the correct resources from SF corporate, the chances of Boomerang being a reliable ride are pretty slim.

Boomerang was one of the cheapest ride moves Six Flags has ever done, while SF did pay somebody to take the ride down in Texas, drive it here and the install it at SFSL., basically everything else that is usually contracted out when a theme park installs a new ride was done "in-house" by SFSL. Why?, because Six Flags of today is a cheap company that wants to spend as little as possile on the parks, but make guests spend more whenever they come to the parks. Boomrang was a very minor investment for the, park but since the park is getting very little ROI back from the ride,it's cost dosen't really matter.

It's rumored that some piece of track is either cracked or has some other type of damage (likely a result of the movement of the ride and it's age), the ride has probably only operated about 50% of the time since it opened a month ago. It's done absolutely nothing to help the park in any way and has actually hurt the park is several ways and it's showing in attendance on most days, maybe SF corporate will learn a lesson but I sort of doubt that (they likely don't care that much weather SFSL is that successful or not, it's not one of the major parks in the system).

Whatever any of the Six Flags park presidents have planned for their parks, does not always happen (they do have more influence today than before), but the final decision is still SF coporate's. I really doubt the park planned on getting Boomerang 2 or 3 years ago, it was decideded to be given to the park by corporate sometime last year, to I assume counter Outlaw Run in what was probably supposed to be an "off" year for the park, so the park got a cheap used addition. I would assume that the cost of remodeling the close of mile long track of The Boss and the time needed to do the conversion would be the reasons to cut down the track length (same thing about The Rattler).

The bumper cars won't ever be put back into the park, but are likely being kept for parts for other Six Flags parks (I'm pretty sure at least SFOG, SFMM and possibly more) have the exact same Soli 1970's model bumper cars, if the park ever got new bumper cars they would have to get new cars. As for The Hannibarrels, it's the most glaring example of nobody really caring about this park, is there any other ride that has sat in the middle of a theme park for 17 years SBNO (maybe, but I don't know of any). The ride has actually been SBNO through 4 different Six Flags corporate management teams, you would think that whenever somebody from corporate tours the park they would question why the ride is still there (I'm surprised that the platform hasn't collapsed yet). There really is no excuse that in 17 years that Six Flags couldn't either just remove the ride and put up a fence to block the back of the buildings around the ride or buy a new flat ride or move a flat ride from another park to replace it. The middle of the park (area in front of Palace, Hannibarrels/Sound Stage area and the middle hill by Miss Kitty's) is just dead all of the time, there are no rides in that area at all except for the train station and Colossus, yet Six Flags would rather put most of this parks new rides over the last several years around the edges of the park and ignore the middle of the park.

This Saturday (6/15) is a Christian concert day, the park will be packed, it will be the busiest day of the year so far and one of the top 10 busiest days of the season.

Six Flags St. Louis has had 1 of SFNO Megazeph trains ever since that park closed (used to be stored in employee parking lot), it also has twisted twins trains and the extra Boomerang train (the park has a lot of extra parts on hand if they are needed for The Boss, Ninja or Boomerang). About the passholder e-mail - Six Flags was supposed to have a new website months ago (like February/March), but like a lot of things with Six Flags it's just "slightly" behind schedule (when it will be done I don't know, it's up to SF corporate), that is why you will find errors on pages, parks not updating things like shows and it's the reason none of the parks have 2013 maps up either.

This has already been discussed in the past, but the Boomerang at SFSL is running an old Arrow train, SFOT had two different trains for Flashback, the train on Boomerang is NOT the wrapped ad train that SFOT ran for the last several years and ran up until it closed last year. The train on Boomerang is likely the original Flashback train that the ride opened with back in 1989, the wrapped train probably came from Six Flags Kentucky Kingdom/Six Flags New England's Flashback ride, when that ride was moved from SFKK to SFNE it got a new train, so the old Vampire (SFKK) train likely went to SFOT to run on Flashback throughout the last decade or so (the wrapped train is in storage at SFSL).

Media day is on June 6th, Season passholder ERT is on June 7th and general public opening is on June 8th.

The old bumper cars are in Six Flags alternate dump (the employee parking lot), along with the enterprise cars from Fiesta Texas, Ninja's third train and the wrapped Boomerang train from SFOT.

Boomerang will now open on June 8, with season passholder ert sometime on the 7th.

Superman was to be named Acrophobia (painted that way in the parking lot and installed when it was moved here), until Mark Shapiro came to tour the park and forced the name change to Superman: Tower Of Power, which is why it's out of place in it's location in the park (I assume that if the park got the hypercoaster it was rumored to ten years ago it would have been Superman themed). In some other news, the Boomerang train is on the track now, so testing should begin soon, the que area still needs some work done, but they did touch up the paint chips on the ride.