DirkFunk

I don't wish the residents ill because of terrible choices their elected officials made, but this is a real problem. It isn't like they're a classic Rust Belt city like Detroit/Cleveland/Cinci/Buffalo/etc. where people "left" but chiefly departed to the suburbs surrounding the city. They're a resort town that has no other industry which has been developed other than gambling in the last 40 years. Entertainment in the city was and is still dependent on casino money. Revel being turned into a giant indoor water park facility sounds interesting, I guess, but I don't know how much I believe in the viability of any of this while their crime rate is still something like 8-9 times that of New Jersey's average.

That was some spirited discourse right there. Never have small changes to a lapbar pad meant so much.

Bro, you live in Connecticut. Would you go to Pepe's or Carbone's for dinner? If the answer is "yes", then there's no reason to worry about UAE.

Depends how the licensing agreement reads between Lego and Lucasfilm (now Disney).

When someone is coming from a far away place like England, there is NO WAY I would say "not recommended to buy these until after entering the park and seeing how bad the crowds are" because I have watched people get to Kings Island, for example, only to have the Fast Lane Plus sold out and then they stood in line two hours for rides like Banshee & Nighthawk. Complete waste of time, IMO, when their wait could have been close to zero. Just my thoughts on the matter... It's an understandable take, to be sure. If you're on a budget, I would consider looking online in advance and seeing how often, if at all, a park sells out of queue management systems before taking the leap. $50 once may not be a huge amount to anyone doing an international trip, but paying that our 4-5-6 times starts to add up, particularly if you're an individual with a fairly strict budget. I can't say that I regret any purchases of a Q-Bot or similar, but at the same time, I know that (for example), trips to SFMM and SFSTL where I purchased them felt somewhat "wasteful" as I discovered nonexistent lines after doing a park loop. I occasionally waited longer than standby due to the sluggish nature of operations, though we're talking a matter of 5-7 minutes at most. Taking that tact with a recent visit to Ferrari World; man I'm glad I didn't blow another $60 to get the express passes there considering how much money we spent elsewhere on that trip. Everything, and I mean *everything* was a walk on. Sometimes waiting for riders, honestly. OTOH, if you're on a time crunch to go to multiple parks in a day or budget is basically not a consideration, then screw it. The cost then is worth the guarantee of getting out in a short amount of time, and the worst case scenario is some giant faceless international corporation grabbed a little more money out of you that you might have spent at a different faceless international corporation instead.

Meanwhile, hilariously, LucasArts has a licensing agreement with Lego that runs until at least 2022 and clearly seems to offer them the ability to construct Lego Star Wars attractions based on the fact that they already exist (see also: Star Wars Minilands in Florida, Windsor, and California).

It's owned by a private equity firm, and they don't generally care about the actual quality of the assets. The sale will probably be to another private equity firm, who, again, aren't any different structurally from the first one.

Since the sale hasn't happened yet: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Parque Reunidos is owned by Arle Capital, which is a private equity fund. The way these things work is that they purchase or create companies as investments with the ultimate goal of selling them off or spinning them into independent corporations. In this case, Parque Reunidos has been on the market with open attempts to sell it and all the holdings for over a calendar year at least. The company most commonly linked with purchasing PR is Apax Partners who are, surprise! another venture capital/private equity firm. They're raising the money to do so, sayeth the smoke signals online. So yes, very possible it and all the PR parks could have a new owner soon.

And to continue with this chain of posts from the MK and SeaWorld threads, Universal is now wanding everyone who enters Citywalk. Of course, since that doesn't preclude loose articles from entering, you can expect to be subjected to wands again before riding the coasters.

To be fair to Disney, SeaWorld Orlando installed metal detectors today too. Of course, it doesn't sound like Aquatica or Discovery Cove have them. I guess TERRAH~! is afraid of water.

It's still trash though. Anyone who thinks this makes them "safer" is probably so stupid, they need to actively think about breathing to keep doing it. I mean come one, metal detectors compared to no metal detectors has to be a little bit "safer"...... Might not prevent a pre-meditated attack but it might prevent some knucklehead who forgot to leave his concealed weapon in the car. Yeah, they might leave their gun in a locker or something. Oooh, I'm terrified.

It's still trash though. Anyone who thinks this makes them "safer" is probably so stupid, they need to actively think about breathing to keep doing it.

Get ready for pain: metal detectors installed in front of all the parks. At Magic Kingdom, this is going to be a nightmare this holiday season.

I would never willingly subject myself or others I know and love to the "its a small world" theme song divorced from the ride. Ever. Ever. I would be honestly surprised if it hadn't been used as psychological warfare either at Waco or in Guantanamo Bay.

I know parts of the midwest are supposed to receive stupid-warm temps for at least the next week (in the Chicagoland area, it's like open the gates and run some roller coasters stupid-warm). I assume that will make it's way over to northern-Ohio, as well. El Nino year. If you're building a ride north of the Mason-Dixon, you can't claim bad weather kept you from finishing it on time this winter. I won't be surprised if Valravn is all bolted together before February.

The parks way of saying they want more money. Yes. And the sports fields provide the potential for that by giving Ohio/Michigan/Indiana based amateur athletics a place to ply their trades for tournaments, camps, things like that, and then Cedar Point provides them the incentive of a fun thing to do in addition to those. Basically a slightly lower rent version of how Disney operates Wide World of Sports to bring in the traffic of cheerleading competitions and youth football.

Ringracer is the obvious pick to me in that it mechanically was a failure and also dragged down The Ring into bankruptcy.

Heh...I was talking with a friend just this week and we're like "Man, we should go to Tehran. It looks awesome!" Admittedly, none of that had anything to do with mechanical rides for kids, but I have to admit that the idea of riding bootleg Chinese built coasters and dark rides for an afternoon out there sounds kinda entertaining. Sorta the perfect thing to cap a totally absurd trip like visiting there.

It definitely does matter what the expenses are, as they may very possibly have nothing to do with day-to-day operation and may chiefly be compounded penalties on various unpaid bills dating back several owners and have occurred 15-20 years ago. If those are waived/forgiven, reduced, etc. that entirely changes the equation.

What you're describing isn't "net income". The book balance is -$599,137, but without knowing what their income is versus their expenses and what those expenses are, it is difficult to have an honest assessment of their viability. Ultimately what this comes down to is this question: will the local government offer some sort of break to help with the amusement park's debt? If not, then the park will close. If so, then the park has a chance. As Judge Deller suggests, an abandoned and liquidated Conneaut Lake may not do any better of a job of recouping that tax money than an operational Conneaut Lake would.

There's fine print in every theme park ticket/pass that says "subject to change..." The "subject to change" clause doesn't give carte blanche to entertainment companies to effectively cancel the validity of tickets and force owners to repurchase them. It is intended to provide them legal cover under a variety of circumstances, but they can't sell a pass for unlimited admission during operating days and then, at will remove 50 operating days from the calendar and repackage them. Maybe, or maybe the solution has more to do with the way the websites are managed. Who knows? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Heh, I suppose that's true. I guess you could also say that July park hours wouldn't be what they are if public school was in session then. In any case, it seems to have been a mistake on the part of whoever is webmaster over these sites (I'm sure given the uniform appearance they have a small crew doing all of them centrally). I think if they aren't already separately ticketing, they probably won't separate it now. The blow back would be significant in season pass sales, and I'm sure the inclusion of Halloween events are a major drawing aspect to Cedar Point and Kings Island's season pass sales given the number of surrounding Halloween attractions in their key markets.

Times change. Things change. In the case of many wood coasters, they get rough, reprofiled, or both. In the case of Ride of Steel at Darien Lake, the kind of pacing people expect from rides has changed in addition to the reaction to those sorts of negative G forces. Its no different than looking back to rankings before even the internet era and seeing stuff like Loch Ness Monster being a near consensus top 10 steel. What was the competition then?

It can't hurt. There's some young professional seminars and meet and greet things that could be valuable. I know someone working for a theme entertainment company in LA now who went to IAAPA 2-3 years ago and was able to network himself into an internship from that. But I think that may be easier for creative types than it is for engineers due to the comparative need within the industry for each. In short: it can't hurt, but you won't be able to do it just being on the show floor eating Minimelts.