robbalvey

Hey everybody! This thread is simple! Rather than having a million little threads about everything that goes on at Six Flags Discovery Kingdom, this thread is designed to consolidate it all into one user-friendly thread. Feel free to use it to post updates, trip reports, questions, comments, and of course, general discussion. For pictures and videos of the park as well as past updates, see TPR's Park Index Page. Official Park Website Below are some links to past updates from the park, you may be interested in. Enjoy! --Robb _____________________________________________________ 2005 March 1st, 2005 - Discussions underway for Six Flags Corporation to outright purchase Six Flags Marine World - SEE BELOW! 2006 February 3rd, 2006 -Tava's Jungleland new family ride area being built May 10th, 2006 - Park in the process of removing Zonga June 6th, 2007 - Six Flags to purchase park from the City of Vallejo August 8th, 2006 - Six Flags files to rename park: Six Flags Discovery Kingdom 2007 January 17th, 2007 - Park reveals Land, Sea and Sky theming to go with the rebranded park Septeber 26th, 2007 - Word of Tony Hawk's Big Spin appears on SFDK website 2008 November 2nd, 2008 - Park announces Odin's Temple of the Tiger a White Bengal Tiger show for 2009 2010 June 5th, 2010 - 2 seriously hurt in tram accident October 7th, 2010 - Skyscreamer announced for 2011 2011 August 21st, 2011 - Teaser for a new ride in 2012 August 31st, 2011 - New 2012 coaster info leaked September 1st, 2011 - Superman Ultimate Flight offically announced December 15th, 2011 - Premier confirms involvement in Superman coaster 2012 May 4th, 2012 - Superman Ultimate Flight construction update May 17th, 2012 - Shouka may be leaving the park July 29th, 2012 - Superman Ultimate Flight stalls with riders! August 20th, 2012 - Shouka the whale has been moved to SeaWorld San Diego August 30th, 2012 - Cirque Dreams SPLASHTASTIC Announced! 2013 August 29th, 2013 - Tsunami Soaker is announced and park extends operating season to year round 2014 March 13th, 2014 - Skyscreamer to run backwards from March 15th - April 27th May 12th, 2014 - Tsunami Soaker to open May 31st August 28th, 2014 - Dare Devil Chaos coaster announced for 2015 2015 May 23rd, 2015 - Daredevil Chaos Coaster Media Day July 16th, 2015 - Closure of Roar announced September 3rd, 2015 - Roar to be transformed into The Joker Roller Coaster in 2016 by RMC 2016 January 8th, 2016 - Park confirm Pacific Rim 5D February 6th, 2016 - Construction tour of The Joker May 25th, 2016 - Joker Media Day Report & POV Video! August 5th, 2016 - "Rage of the Gargoyles" VR coming to Kong coaster September 1st, 2016 - Wonder Woman: Lasso of Truth announced 2017 Augus 31, 2017 - Harley Quinn Crazy Coaster (Skyline Attractions' Skywarp) announced for 2018 2018 August 30, 2018 - Batman The Ride (S&S Free Fly) announced for 2019 2019 May 24, 2019 - Media Event - Batman: The Ride _____________________________________________________ From Times-Herald http://www.timesheraldonline.com/Storie ... 80,00.html City hopes to start talks with Six Flags to sell theme park back By CHRIS G. DENINA, Times-Herald staff writer A theme park operator may be returning to the bargaining table to buy Six Flags Marine World, only months after saying it might need five more years to close the deal. The Vallejo City Council plans to meet behind closed doors Tuesday to discuss the price and payment terms for the city-owned theme park to Six Flags, Inc. The Oklahoma City-based company runs the park, sharing its profits with the city, and has an option to buy the property. In December, the city extended Six Flag's contract, giving the company until 2010 to buy Marine World. "We still maintain that vision that we're pursuing the opportunity to purchase the park," park spokesperson Paul Garcia said earlier this week. "We'll continue to work with the city on moving forward with that." Garcia couldn't confirm if the park was actively negotiating to buy the park. Six Flags corporate officials were unavailable for comment Friday. City officials apparently are readying for a potential sale. On March 7, the Planning Commission is expected to vote on updating paperwork for an eventual sale. The park could fetch about $52 million, which is how much the city owes for the property. Vallejo borrowed money to save the ailing park from closure about a decade ago. Six Flags has since invested millions in the park, building roller coasters, acquiring more animals and adding new shows. The city now pulls in roughly $2 million a year as its share of profits. If Six Flags takes ownership, the city instead would take a cut of ticket sales of as much as $750,000 a year. City officials declined to comment on the potential sale, saying the matter is confidential because it involves real estate negotiations. "It's a work in progress," City Manager Roger Kemp said. Last summer, Six Flags officials delayed their option to buy the park, citing financial issues and uncertainty over a proposed renewal of the neighboring Solano County Fairgrounds. A developer is pitching a year-round attraction including shops and restaurants. In a July letter to the council, chairman and chief executive Kieran Burke said the fairgrounds project could leave little overflow parking for Marine World visitors and cut into parking revenue. He also noted financial issues. "Although we are having a good year at Six Flags Marine World, our performance in other markets has been inconsistent," Burke wrote.

We need to be able to watch it on TV, so if you are sending it in a data format, it HAS to be a high quality "DV" .avi file at 720x480 for NTSC that I can watch through a DV camera hooked up to the TV. If your data file satisfies this requirement, then please send it in! --Robb

^^ I have to agree with you there, Jim. Luckily my outage only lasted about a day, but I can tell you that I'm actively looking for a new webhost as well. --Robb

^ Ugh...yeah, you are SO right. Actually I think the bastardization of Journey is also my least favorite WDW ride....Stitch is close...but Journey I think might actually be worse......No, on second thought, Stitch is worse!!! --Robb

^ My reply is: Pointless posts like this will get your account suspended and possibly banned. If you want people to reply, create topics that are worthy of them. --Robb

Here are our photos from our visit in 2003: http://www.themeparkreview.com/buffalo03/sb/sb1.htm --Robb

^ They made up for it with the Disneyland Paris version! --Robb "Still the best version of Pirates ever!" Alvey

I was one of those people who went to a community college for a couple of years, and then kind of fell into the video game business accidently when I was 19 years old. I've been considering going back to school to finish up, but at this point, with as established as I've been in my industry over the past 17 years, I'm not sure it would really help that much. I have found a webhost (although one I'm not too happy about right now) that offers a lot of storage and bandwidth. If you notice on the video downloads, I actually have 5 different sites, most of them I just use for video storage. So yeah, it's costly because I'm paying for 5 full service web servers, but I think it's worth it! --Robb

UGH!!!!! That SBC Yahoo "Wonderin What Clothes To Wear" commercial is the WORST TV COMMERCIAL EVER!!!!! If I see it one more time it's going to make me CANCEL my service!!!!!!! --Robb

Hey everyone! The information a lot of you have been waiting for! Our 2nd annual coaster video contest is here! Videos need to be submitted by April 1st, so get your videos in soon! There have been a few changes to the rules and the details of the contest, for example, this year, we will wait to announce the "TPR" winners until all the ballots for the readers choice winners have been submitted and we will announce all winners at the same time. Please check out the contest rules for all the updates. The link to all the rules and everything you need to know is here: http://www.themeparkreview.com/contest2005/contest2005.htm Good luck to everyone and I hope we get a lot of entries this year! If you have any questions or comments about the contest, please post them here. --Robb

^ Yeah...what he said! Of course we make fun of ourselves and the whole 'credit' thing....for example, we always say stuff like "Yay! A new Carrabba's credit!" even though we don't actually count them! --Robb

^ Yeah....I mean, doesn't it seem to work better to have people vote for thier "least favorite" and then elminate them from the list? As it stands now, you may have multiple poll options with 0%. --Robb

We actually don't use MyDVD to compress, just to burn. I use a program called TMPGE to compress the files. I use the highest settings possible and it takes a good few hours to compress my raw .avi files into what ends up on the DVD. --Robb

Hey everyone! Now that the season is starting to get under way, here is a good example of how to make use of our calendar feature. Notice the calendar above? (I'm sure you have!) You can click on the event in the calendar and that will take you to the topic. So if you want to start a roll call for people going to "Six Flags Over Georgia Opening Day" it's very easy to do so! One of the goals of this forum was to be able to have a central location where people could easily see events going on in their area, and be able to meet up with other enthusiasts. There are some pretty major park openings this weekend. Post in the calendar threads if you plan on going: Six Flags Over Georgia http://www.themeparkreview.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=49 Six Flags Astroworld http://www.themeparkreview.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=64 Six Flags Over Texas http://www.themeparkreview.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=61

Last coaster I rode was Goliath at SFMM yesterday:

It adds additional descriptons to your topics. It's VERY common on most boards. It's a feature that *I* have wanted to add since I opened the forums. Please just be happy that I'm adding features to the boards to improve them. It's not a quick, easy thing to do you know. Thanks. --Robb

As it says in the topic header. You can now give an additional description to your topics by adding a subtitle! --Robb "Will continue to add new features to improve the forums!" Alvey

^ Hey Eric! Glad we ran into you guys. It ended up being a really nice group today at the park. And if you get that image scanned, of course you can post it! --Robb

Yeah, as crazy as it might sound, I use "My DVD" for the authoring part. I use this for a number of reasons: 1. It was VERY simple to learn. 2. It was what we started with, so changing over to a new authoring program will be a huge undertaking. 3. and most importantly, since it's so simple in it's authoring, it takes up VERY little room on the DVD. I have toyed around with other programs that allow me to do things like animated menu's, intro movies, etc, but all those things, like Elissa said, eat up disc space. So we chose to have more content on the DVDs than a flashy intro and sexy menus. I hope we made the right choice! --Robb

Ahh...good to hear they got S:TE back up and running. I'd love to know what happened to it! At least it wasn't too serious. --Robb

^ Yeah...I totally agree. SFMM to me is the largest collection of "mediocre" rides anywhere. Like our visit today...we took a lap around the park, rode all the major stuff once, and we were like "Do you guys want to ride anything else or anything a second time?" "No." Yeah...that's what I thought! There really isn't anything wrong with most of the coasters there, just none of them are really THAT good.... --Robb

To see the photos from today's visit click: http://www.themeparkreview.com/sfmm0227/sfmm0227.htm After our somewhat miserable day at Knott's yesterday, we decided to head to SFMM today, especially since Dave hadn't been on X yet. Overall, our day at SFMM was better than our day at Knott's. Marginally better, though. I mean, both parks have plenty of issues, but our day at SFMM was much more 'hassle free' than our visit to Knott's. We decided we'd get to the park EARLY, mainly because since everyone now gets a season pass when you buy a park ticket, we didn't know how insane the season pass line would be. We got there around 9:15, and yeah....there were a LOT of people there. So the first shocker of the day was that there was a couple of groupers in the area that were telling people that you did not HAVE to stand in the season pass line anymore, and you could use ANY entrance turnstile. That was really great that actually had someone out there managing the crowds! I mean, Knott's couldn't even bother to staff the season pass office with more than one person with a line out the door, and SFMM had groupers out in the crowd! Good for them! So then the next shocker....the park actually opened EARLY!!! At 9:40 they opened the main gates, and it wasn't just to open them to let people in the plaza area, they actually had coasters open early too!!! WTF??! I am certainly NOT complaining, that's for sure! So we ran up to the bridge leading to X, and the line for X wasn't quite open. It did, however open RIGHT at 10am, and we managed to get on and off X by 10:15!!! They were running two trains and seemed to be doing the best job they could dispatching. The ride itself was just 'ok.' Not the worst ride I've taken on it, not the best. I don't know why, but I just don't really like the ride all that much. But oh well.... Next we walked around to the closed Deja Vu so Dave could get his picture in front of it. He now has his photo in front of ALL THREE closed Deja Vu's! Awesome! We then made the rounds going on Goldrusher, Riddler's, then Batman. Ahh, Batman! At least it was cool to ride a B&M invert with forces this weekend! We made our way around to Scream! which was fine, I guess. It's Scream....clone of Medusa over a parking lot...fun, but nothing special, but fun. Colossus was down so we moved over to Goliath. Again, it was more like 'going through the motions' riding SFMM's coasters. They are all just 'ok.' Nothing really bad about most of them, but nothing that makes you really want to ride again. We noticed that Superman was stuck near the bottom of the tower. Turns out they 'broke it' as it ran yesterday morning, and today the car was just sitting there. You'll see a photo of what I mean if you click on the update. We noticed that Colossus was back open, but I don't think any of us cared to ride, so we let Josh & Amanda go ride some stuff in Bugs Bunny World, and then we headed out for lunch. I mean, overall it was a really good visit to SFMM. It sucked that Deja Vu and Ninja were closed, but the fact that they opened up early, had coasters open early, and we rode X by 10:15 was pretty amazing! Everything else we did was totally "hassle free." There were no waits, nothing annoying like running coasters 'one train empty, one full,' Batman, Riddler's, Goliath, Scream, X were all running two trains, and most of the crews seemed to be doing an 'ok' job. Anyway, that's my weekend report! Pathetic trip to Knott's....somewhat ok trip to SFMM! --Robb ps. To see the photos from yesterday's Knott's visit, click: http://www.themeparkreview.com/kbf0226/kbf0226.shtml

^ Because every time we go there, it sucks. Plain and simple. Knott's *USED* to run nice compared to other parks, but out of the 200+ parks I've been to, it now ranks pretty close to the bottom. Just out of curiosity, how many different parks have you been to? --Robb "Just wanted to get an idea what your basis of comparison is." Alvey

We film a LOT...but probably not as much as you would think. On average, I'd say we film about 30-40 minutes per park, which ends up being a 2-5 minute segment on the DVD. I used to film a lot more, but then you realize that the more you film, the more you have to import, and the more you have to edit. So you kind of get better over time knowing what you will throw away, so you know not to film certain things. The whole DVD takes pretty much the whole year to put together. This year's was a bit different, though, as we didn't start it until later in the year. I'd say we worked on it from August to December. --Robb

Damn.....reading the responses in this thread, I feel old! Everyone, please vote so we can get a good idea of the age range on the boards! --Robb