DirkFunk

You're flying on Delta based on the clues (flying out of Terminal B and the previously mentioned crossword from the Delta Sky mag) and you connected in Atlanta (home of CNN) on the way to Minneapolis St. Paul (home of Best Buy). Your ultimate destination is the Mall of America, home to an aquarium (with mantas), green inside (indoors! also Nickelodeon slime is green), and its cold outdoors. Pepsi is also an official sponsor of the Mall and Nickelodeon Universe. That is my one and only guess.

I don't disagree with this. I do disagree with the premise that SFWOA was sold instead of those parks (many of which sit on much, much more valuable land) simply because it was easier to find a buyer and not due to ailing performance, difficulty of competing in the market, and so on. If all they wanted was an large infusion of money, the hundreds of acres of prime real estate SFMM sat on (or thousands in the case of SFGAdv) would have undoubtedly brought in more money, particularly circa 2004 in the midst of the real estate boom. The biggest difference between SFWOA and those other parks ultimately came down to performance, and lack thereof. As for SFAW, they also kept all the assets of the park and they may have even paid for demolition (I don't know?). I'm sure the land it sat on was worth a lot more, but the total number of assets sold to Cedar Fair was greater, in terms of gross acerage, rides on site, etc.

IMO, you can't argue they wouldn't be against selling due to market size when they turned around and shuttered SFAW in the US' 4th largest city (and the cornerstone of the 6th largest market: bigger than the one SFDK serves). If we're going to argue that the sales of the other secondary market parks was similar in nature to SFWOA as a way to purely to pay off bills, we might as well trot out that management group's very public attempt to put SFMM on the market. It seems very elementary to me: debt was racked up with the idea that investments would pay off in the long term. They didn't because expectations for attendance and per capita spending weren't met. SFWOA had one of the most precipitous drop offs in the entire chain after what was probably the largest investments the chain, made in one of the most competitive markets in the entire industry. That Cedar Fair was able to buy it for much less than Six Flags spent only speaks to Six Flags' incompetence and poor management at the time. Same as the death of Astroworld, their failures in overseas expansion, and so on.

I don't disagree that it was probably unwise for Premier to buy Six Flags, Walibi, or most of the stuff they bought on credit. But when SFWOA's was dropping the same year they installed a $15 million dollar attraction, you can't go pretending that the park's poor performance wasn't one of the reasons they chose to sell it instead of their other properties. They could have sold or liquidated any of their properties instead - they chose SFWOA ahead of any of the North American properties to sell at far less than cost for good reason.

One of the carnival companies in Ohio actually has a one of a kind coaster - its a shuttle coaster built by ARM with wing rider style seating. According to the internet, it sucks. Also, somewhere deep in Australia's back country or something lurks Cool And Fresh, SBF's most retarded creation with its beyond vertical first drop and mag brakes the whole way down.

The massive debt incurred by buying parks and outfitting them with large rides could have conceptually worked if attendance was capable of stabilizing. Attendance dropped in 2001, 2002, and 2003, negating much of the gains from the huge capital expenditure years of 2000 and 2001. They sold SFWOA for a fraction of what was spent to create the park/resort because the continuing fall of attendance made the place as Six Flags had constructed it impossible to produce a profit. I would say it is factually incorrect to say that SFWOA then was sold for any other reason than that it was an underperforming property.

Its a trade show and not one geared toward the public, so there really isn't a "one day ticket". There is registration which lasts for the entirety of the show. As a non-member, should you not be in ACE, the price is $309 for a pass. I'm not sure what they discount it to on Friday (which is closing day), but it is not going to be some cheap-o bargain. You can certainly register as a buyer on site. Wear business casual clothing.

Ghost Hunt at Lake Compounce went trackless a few years ago when it got overhauled.

The overwhelming majority of "enthusiasts" are just members of the general public trying to overcompensate for shortcomings elsewhere in their lives by being the elite among people who spend lots of money to partake in an activity geared towards children and adolescents. The general public as a whole isn't a "myth", but the idea that by buying more than one season pass and by riding X x 100 number of coasters that your money and opinions are better than the person who doesn't is basically delusional.

I think pretty much everyone would agree with this. It has more interesting topography, but as a matter of taste....I personally prefer Great Adventure. YMMV. Absolutely true. But then again, the other park that has such an object sitting in view has almost weekly blogs beleaguering the continued existence of said track. If Magic Mountain had an Al Lutzesque character covering the park, he probably would have eaten a .45 round somewhere in the late 90s before he could complain about it today.

As someone who isn't a local and doesn't go with regularity, I can appreciate that for you guys, Magic Mountain is a greatly improved park in terms of aesthetics. What I would say from an outsider point of view from someone who's been to the park twice in the last 10 years (most recently in August) is this: However improved you may deem the park, and certainly it has a very good collection of roller coasters right now, there is a lot of work left to go. My wife liked many parts of the park, but aside from the parking lot under Scream, she was more bothered by the decrepit and seemingly abandoned buildings atop Samurai Summit, the rotting monorail track, and the waterfront "wharf" area in the back of the park. To whatever extent things have changed at Magic Mountain that have been for the best - addition of rides, subtraction of things that never worked, updated paint/themes for various attractions, the reopening of the Sky Tower, et al - there is a lot of work yet to go. As for suggestions about Scream and how to make the aesthetics better...why not take lead from Great Adventure on this one? Green Lantern is basically a parking lot coaster. They hide that with gravel. Use some of the ideas from the Bizarro overlay on Medusa while you're at it, rename it, and re-market it. They've already done that with X and Superman to some effect. Might as well do it again.

On some level, Tilikum being put in a show trial for first degree murder and being executed in a giant electric chair would be sorta hilarious.

The website told me 2PM - 10PM for Saturday and 6-10 for Friday, FWIW.

Assuming you are serious, it'll have to go somewhere that's high visibility and probably be grouped with an assortment of other low cost, easy to manage attractions to probably be profitable. That or call up a *BIG* fairground - someone in the top half of the 50 fairs on MCW - and ask them if you can erect the mouse there and operate it as a independent vendor. Plenty of state fairs still do that with permanent skyrides and giant slides. A couple have done it into this decade with coasters. Its a tough sell but not impossible.

Honestly, if you're thinking about working as an operator at a park, California isn't the place to go. Costs are exorbitant. Your chances are better to move up the ladder heading south to Orlando where no one has had to do a documentary film about how those involved in the tourism industry of the local area are homeless/living in shelters/living in dive motels (which was actually done by HBO a couple years ago about Orange County). If you're looking to stay with Cedar Fair, consider staying with the seasonal parks and try to make contacts elsewhere outside of the chain so you can directly send in your resume if something becomes available. I wouldn't even consider moving to California unless there was a salaried position guaranteed in it.

Yeah, its a total "WTF why" sort of thing getting two of the same coasters. I remember hearing that Shamrock Shows (another Cali carny company) had two Galaxis with one just sitting in storage for no good reason. No idea what is with California and duplicates.

Butler had two Fabbri spinning mice and sold one to Castle and kept the other and tours with it. That's why there's a lot of confusion with that. Internet posts from that time frame from here from a dude that seems to know these things says its a different coaster: http://www.themeparkreview.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=48031

I don't think the idea of, for instance, placing seats on the outside of the track, or placing riders in a "flying" position is some sort of ingenious idea reserved only for the first company to construct such an attraction. I'm sure lots of companies at various points in time have considered this but didn't feel like they could develop the product, and if they did develop the product, it would seem that the results were predictable in some of these "risky" ventures with rider deaths, significant periods of downtime, maintenance problems, terrible rides, and so on. They've made it a point to build things that have seriously refined and generally bulletproof designs and they've effectively removed the one style they offered that didn't match that (standup coasters). I can't fault them for that. Yeah, putting seats outside of ride's center of balance was done 10 years behind Arrow and several years behind Intamin and Moser. But they got it right.

That's true. But even building just a 2-3 story garage is going to be a large investment and it will require endless investment for upkeep. Compared to, I dunno, eliminating a Mean Streak as far as an expansion strategy goes, I don't see it happening. Of course you do. Anything you build and plan to put people inside of has to be ADA compliant. Simply having elevators isn't going do the job either, since fire code would never allow them to be the sole way for people to transition in and out of any structure. You need stairs, you need lights, you need booths, you need security cameras, on and on and on. There's no shortcut here. Let's just cut this down right away - can anyone here think of a seasonally operated facility of any sort that operates a parking garage? Athletic stadiums and arenas all run events year round. I can't think of anything comparable.

Being realistic for a second: How much do you think it would cost to built the kind of parking garage Cedar Point needs to replace their lot? They're going to need a lot of spaces. A lot. Maybe 5000? Maybe 10000? Look, here's another comparison point: http://www.bizjournals.com/albany/stories/2009/09/14/daily51.html 1500 spaces, $40 million dollars. This is why a parking garage ain't happening unless they legalize video slots on the premises or something.

There's a lot of things involved with this. You need to have not only lights, elevators, booths, and gates maintained, but the non-mechanical parts too. Any building that close to a lake this far north is going to have all sorts of maintenance issues - flooding, structural integrity, the surface on which the cars drive, plant growth, integrity of the staircases and emergency exits, and so on. And that's just the X's and O's of the building maintenance. You also have to secure that thing, regardless of season. I mean, you've been around Sandusky proper, right? Its a dying industrial city filled with blight making a tough transition into a resort town. Most importantly though; it costs a lot of money to erect a concrete parking ramp, especially one as large as what Cedar Point would need. Consider briefly that Universal's parking structure holds 21000 cars, OK? Now, here's a link: http://www.beaconhill.org/Editorials/May20_01MBTA_parkingNOGO.htm It cites a figure of approximately $15,000 per space to construct as a baseline. A few other links I saw generally indicated that this is about on point even in 2011 money, if not more expensive. Concrete and steel cost more now than they did then thanks to the Asian building boom, inflation, and devaluation of US currency. Boring stuff, I know. So anyways, if you multiply 21000 spots by $15,000 a spot, how much is that? $315,000,000. Even if you assume union labor in Ohio is cheaper and they can score some deals on supplies that cuts it in half, its a figure bigger than anything Cedar Fair has constructed. It's more than it cost to buy Geauga Lake. There's a lot of dead space in that park that can be worked within first before demanding the moving of a parking garage. It would be cheaper for them to buy the decrepit factory across the water, implode it, and build a surface lot there instead. by a factor of nearly 10.

Its a shame you didn't check out the arcade there - its completely rad and filled with all sorts of old games.

The ones that spring to mind for me were the Garfield's American Adventure theme park that was supposed to go up in Indiana (never made it past land clearing) and a pair for Connecticut - one being the Utopia Studios project that never went anywhere (it was planned to go on the site of an abandoned mental hospital: YOU CAN'T MAKE THIS STUFF UP) and the planned Six Flags scratch built park at Foxwoods Casino's site, which was slated to get a Superman The Escape clone. That got terminated due to the Premier buyout of SF.

Its not going to be at the forefront of people's minds now, but another 40 years will pass and it will probably still be notable, unlike a lot of the accidents that people are referring to presently (like the SFKK accident). For me, it hits all the quotas - big death toll? Check. Lots of press? Check. Effectively killed the park? Well, it lasted one more season, but really that's a check. Led to an overreaction by authorities and the removal of lots of similar rides? Also a check. I think aside from that, most of the big ones have been mentioned, but I'm not sure any are really at the same level - the Great Adventure fire, the Mindbender derailing, the crane in Germany, and I think someone mentioned the disastrous Mission Space knockoff in China killing 4 people too. Those are the big ones in modern history. Of them, I think Battersea caused the biggest ripples.

Battersea. End thread.