mudvayneimn

I am no longer lost....I see it!

That's a welcome change for me. Stinger's paint job looks great!

Wow, that made me lol so loud my co-workers gave me the eye, this forum has been on fire recently. I really need to get back to Europa Park, I have not been since 1998.

I would be in 100%. Falling 300+ feet down a B&M designed first drop to 80 degrees is going to be an experience in itself. I'm also hoping the little speed hill after the "barrel roll" will give air the way Titan's little hill does. Either way, Canada is imminent for me. Congrats CW on your new addition!

I'm really digging the name and logo. I revised my thinking. With the name Leviathan, my guess is this will be the first Giga with inversions, and one or two will take the "world's tallest" crown. Either way, it looks like a trip to Canada will be imminent next year.

Wow, I'm actually excited to hear what CW is planning to add for next yer, I might have to plan a trip up for this. Although there is that weird triangle footer, it'd be interesting if this turned out to be the world's largest flying coaster.

I had it on my computer a long time ago and lost it, looks like ACN put it on Youtube though...WIN

Most inversions/flips for a flat ride (or coaster) is what I'm getting from the pic....I mean Hammerhead did go upside down.

Either that or Desperado.

Great Report, thanks for the pics! I had a question about the ride, The carousel turn that goes through the dive loop used to have a small gap in the right guide rail when it was at SFKK, I was wondering if you noticed any major bump on the right side of the train during that section? I hope they corrected that during reconstruction.

You are killin' it (as they say) tonight! Second post by you that has pretty much made the day. In regards to GL, I don't know about that yellow loop, but farewell old friend. I really hope they fixed that horrible pothole/track gap in the carousel through the dive loop though, it was jarring to go through the whole ride smooth as butter and hit that right before the track tightens into that final corkscrew.

Make sure you don't have just Great Adventure's wall post selected. it was posted by some woman. Ah hell, here's the link to the video Apparently I'm too dumb to embed....

Well, the park kept teens employed for the summer and off my streets for the better part of the day, it brought in tax revenue for the city which in turned help fund services. It helped give residents of the city something to do, especially for the crowds that don't care for zoos and not old enough to enjoy some of the more adult oriented activities (bars, clubs). It was not the best park, but it wasn't the worst. The park might not have been a travel destination that some others are (especially in the later years) but it was another option in a list of activities to do in the summer where you could generally have a good time, locally. Don't want to be fan-boyish over it, because I'm not, but that question seems to be motivated by personal opinion of the park from one or two visits from the Six Flags years. Did you ever get a chance to visit the park from 1995-1998?

I guess they took it down. It's not listed in SFOT's videos. Darn I wanted to see it.

It is looking as good as it could right now! I'm 100% sold at this point.

Both are great ideas, personally I think the second is the best. In the end which ever one you choose, I know I'll be purchasing the box set if/when it comes out, especially with a bonus disk!

I knew I shouldn't have phrased that the way I did (upscaling should have been "quality bump" which is infinitely better word usage), which either way the rest of your response makes the point moot. Still I would buy this though. I would go for the full set vs. the single copies personally.

I would purchase them if you did sell them! Now if the demand isn't there, what you might be able to do is with future Raw blu-ray releases, you could include chunks of the upscaled standard def videos. I believe you had stated it would be a while before the next Raw blu-ray release anyway because it was taking a while to build up enough footage for a full release, this could be away to "fill up" the slots a little quicker. That might help in getting blu ray releases out much sooner than say 6-8 months. Either way, I'm hooked on blu-ray now and I'll be a customer of your products for a very long time lol.

All Ed has to do is continue to add a ride every other year, or two. Something that is unique to the area or a bigger/better version of what HW or KI has (flat ride speaking). What happened last time is that the additions pretty much flat-lined, and that also led to the luke-warm reception GL received. Because of Ed's 10-year expansion plan, when it came time for "coaster talk" in 2002, everybody thought something big, or at least substantial was coming since the park had gone without a major-thrilling coaster since 1998. That was why GL never really got too much of a chance with the normal folks here. It was not enough thrill, and a little too late. Anyway, there is an actual reason (other than my personal hopes) I'm betting KK can/will be successful again. My family have a "formula" for making trips to the regional parks, and it's one that most of the families I know do also. We plan for 3 trips to visit the amusement parks around here a year. The one (or two) that do add rides will get the first visits. Now if ride stands out and blows away expectations, the third park that didn't add anything runs the risk of being skipped for the year to make a second trip to the park with the "best new ride". Since my family didn't really care for the water park, and HW and KI started offering more and more, SFKK was only visited during the State Fair....maybe. As long as there is something new to check out at the park every other year, and ride additions don't fall of the face of the Earth, KK could become a healthy, profitable park again.

I personally considered GL the second best ride in the park (once TR really went to hell in a hand basket) but seriously, It was a dead ride to the GP. The weekend after opening weekend I managed to get 68 rides IN A ROW on it. In 2004 I tried it again and my niece and I got in over 120 cycles in a 2 day span, each day we were able to run a marathon. I definitely didn't agree with the way they positioned the Hellevator removal or the GL addition but it made me realize the overall reason for the "throw SF under the bus" tone. With the short term history of KK, people got used to every other year there being something crazy and fresh to check out. Under SF management, rides were removed (understandable) but nothing of significant importance was added. For us coaster geeks, GL was a welcomed addition, but that wasn't what the GP around here were used to out of KK. If an impulse actually had been built, I think the park would've seen another boost in attendance, as that would've been something unique to this area, and with NO inversions, couldn't be compared to the Vampire. With GL you got a launch, loop, hill, loop, slow down. Most of the people I was around didn't care for it just because "Vampire had more loops" and the launch couldn't make up for it. Believe it or not, people LOVED the Vampire, even with it's "curse". Getting stuck on Vampire gave you bragging rights, people still love to claim they got stuck on Vampire in one of the loops around here! GL couldn't compare in their eyes and while it was another coaster, you couldn't say it was better than anything KI already had at that point. I feel like SF screwed up understanding the park demographic. When I was growing up (pre-1999) it broke down to this, if you wanted quiet family fun you went to HW (Beechbend really wasn't on the map). If you wanted many different options for everyone in the family, you took the trip to KI. If you wanted the biggest collection of the most intense rides you will find within an hour drive (At the time KI had The Beast, FOF, Vortex, and I won't count King Cobra bc Chang obliterated it) you went to KK. That was the view my friends, family, most of my school mates, and I had on the parks in this area. Like I stated earlier, people here love to brag, and that's what KK let us do in the 90s! All you heard around here was T2 is better than Top Gun (seriously what people said in the first 3-4 years of it's life), Chang is better than King Cobra, Vampire is better than Vortex because it goes backwards, and Hellevator is better than the Eiffel Tower! When KI started adding to their thrill collection in 1999 and SFKK began to remove some and not add anything significant, it became more logical to go to KI, and that's what we did. /longest post of the year for me.

Does it count if I wasn't on the ride, but operating? If it doesn't then I'll still saying it! Ok, I was working at SFKK summer 2006 on Road Runner Express. It was a terribly hot day and it was actually packed. I seem to recall that the air compressor for GL and RR were either tied to the same power components or were the same. So I'm dispatching cars on Road Runner and the compressor goes as soon as Greezed Lightnin' launches. My ride automatically e-stops, and I'm fairly confident the same happened at GL. I've got a car close to the top of the lift on RR so they had prime views for what happened next. GL crawls through the loop and goes up the front spike, comes back down and spends a good second or two at the top of the loop (it vallied if you couldn't guess). The people on the my lift thought Final Destination 3 was happening right in front of their eyes so they went hysterical! I had to announce over my microphone that GL is fine and it'll come to a rest at the bottom in a few min. GL was down the rest of the day, and it took about 15-30 min for them to get everything back to where it needed to be with the air compressor. Since I melted on the platform that day, my sense of time might be a little off, could've been longer. I know that my team leaders brought water to the people stuck on RR The next day, as I was walking to RR to start my shift the same thing happened again. Definitely a weird thing to experience, but two days in a row was crazy. *edited since I suck at first drafts.

And it's about to go to, "well if they stick rockets on the back of the train, won't the structure burn down and..." I cannot wait to get back to Texas next year. I am going to ride the h-e double hockey sticks out of the new Giant. Then I might go gray-out a few times on Titan.

^^I would think the first option they would go with is finding a way to lighten the train to it's intended weight.

^^ Well I would like to see a period in your posts. I Guess we can't have everything we want. I cannot wait to see what the train looks like. To see B&M work to eventially create a working 4d model will be exciting, especially if it happens right in front of our faces with a full circuit coaster instead of a private warehouse.

Epic Robb! I have to say, ordering that latest version helped my customer service go up 15,000 points. People were wondering why I was so helpful and nice over the phone, straight up told them I just ordered a dvd full of coaster povs in the RAW. Can't wait to add it to my ever-growing collection.