I don't think I've ever posted on here, but I had a friend start talking to me about some Six Flags stuff, and for whatever reason I've been fascinated by this thread and have somehow made time to read the last 250 or so pages of it.
I've only visited Magic Mountain twice, and I thought it was a really interesting park. The first time was actually linked to earlier in one of Robb's "good" trip report examples I believe, and I actually met Robb, although I'm pretty sure he wouldn't remember me. I had on a nametag at the time and was visiting from a different park.
I was back a few months later, and managed to sneak into the park as a guest for a couple hours and rode nearly all of the coasters there, really having a blast while doing it. X was in it's refurb at the time, but the park was really light in attendance, and I rode just about everything.
I haven't worn a nametag now for a number of years at any park, but am still interested to see how things are going at the parks. My take on it in a very small nutshell is this...
Premier ran the company the way that they did out of a failed belief that it would quickly turn the company into a giant profit-making machine. When this failed, they ran the company to try to cater toward the stock market (build big rides and talk about how much they will do for you!) while cutting everything they could at the park level because by then, they'd already have your money. After a while, some of the big investors realized this, realized it wasn't working and wasn't magically going to, and forced the change to Shapiro.
Shapiro had the right idea - bring back the families and stop spending so much on the huge rides - but was never going to have enough time to implement it before the debt crushed the company. Many people had this belief that the parks would change for a year, and suddenly all the families who had left after the horrible experiences under Premier would show back up. That didn't happen, or didn't happen quickly enough, so the company went bankrupt and...
...the new CEO came in and had to go a different direction than Shapiro, so the decision was to focus on thrill rides again. I'm guessing that the parks were given more free reign to try to save / make more money, and you see Magic Mountain reverting back to their 'old ways' so quickly because they were the park that had the most issues before Shapiro, so the four or so years of his leadership couldn't have fixed that, especially when we're talking about a park that had been run into the ground for years before that.
Jay Thomas was a very good Park President, but the management also gave him a lot more leash (and money) to try things out at which infuriated some other park presidents. Magic Mountain needed a LOT of stuff to get fixed, far more than almost every other park out there, and who knows what corporate has done since that he moved on. It could be the park no longer has the resources to try to fix things like they had.
What I find the most concerning with the new ride additions is that we're back to the miserable capacity attractions that Premier was notorious for adding during their reign. With the exception of X-Flight, all of these rides are marquee attractions that won't be able to move through probably half of their park's attendance in a single day. Think Magic Mountain ops are bad? I can't imagine that even with perfect ops, they will be able to put through more than 320 people per hour on that thing. That's equal to or worse than bad single train X2 ops at the park.
I'm interested to see where the whole chain goes in the future, but I feel like in many ways Magic Mountain is the canary in the coal mine. I hope it isn't, but their decisions so far simply don't leave me with tons of hope.
