Solid Gold

Can't wait for Animal Kingdom's grand "Corrected opening" or re opening or grand opening. Even if the buzz is low for the new land, that park needs help. I'm with everyone else on Avatar...I'll take it. I just can't listen to anyone who promotes Animal Kingdom over any other major park in FL. The place is a shell. Right now, a shell of a shell.

Wow wtf! I can now add 88 train to the defunct coasters I've been on, and the sheer randomness of there being a South Korean freedom flyer clone out of nowhere. WTF! Does the crazy mouse operate now, or will it? I missed That one, Eagle's Fortress, Black Hole Express, Fantasia Special, Space Tour, and all of Woobang towerland as closed but visited attractions when I studied abroad there. Ugh missing credits.

For anyone who was interested in the ghostbusters dark ride: http://www.themeparkreview.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=65483 Control F below I'll take a moment to zoom in on one particular model that caught the attention of many including myself. Sally produced a dark ride concept based on the original Ghostbusters animated series, billing it as the "greatest dark ride never built."

Umm...aren't they getting rid of Wet and Wild? And umm...isn't this a downgrade from what was already there? Confused on this one.

This exists. Sally has a model of the entire ride that was never built, and it looks really really really good. My vote in the hat is for a Sesame Street shooting dark ride for Busch Gardens Tampa located behind the current safari of fun where your goal is to collect ABC's that are located throughout the ride. There would be a display with every letter and number on the ride vehicle in front of you, and your job would be to light up all of those letters. All while elmo and Big bird are cheering you on and making jokes. With all the scenes themed to different parts of Africa or something. Would be technically challenging but the most fun ride ever for both young kids and adults who would be obsessed in gathering Letters 1-26 and numbers 0-9 in a single ride. Also, it's apparent from this thread that every park needs a shooting dark ride!

What does unlimited actually mean? Can you book an immediate fast pass experience every 20 minutes once you enter the park?

Just passed by this...some humor. No problems with attendance at SeaWorld today.

All apologies for keeping Voyage propped up. My only time riding it was 2007, and for me it was twice as satisfying as any other coaster I've ever been on. Also, t-express>el toro. So much more airtime and a killer opening sequence.

The roses are just plastic covers with magic bands inside of them. I'm pretty sure they are meant to be phased out sometime in the future.

That's sad to hear about folks who haven't followed anything about Potter in the last two decades. The movies are all quality films (RT scores: 80, 82, 91, 88, 79, 84, 78, 96) with good to great acting and script, and are on ABC family every single weekend. Having zero interest is a little much Bah humbug to me. I HATED Avatar as a movie, but I am still extremely interested to see what they do with that land and can at least read a Wikipedia page to understand some of the nuances. If it's about storytelling i CAN understand knocking the ride and I do agree that Forbidden Journey makes no sense the first time even for a fan...but the freaking huge vertical whomping willow sequence...and the queue line...and the dementors sucking your soul, and the combo of motion/high tech animatronics/moving screens . It's just too crazy and unique. Nothing like it. And I'm a script matters deeply kind of guy anyway. I think there's enough there. And knocking the place because of crowds and not what it offers...yeesh it's Orlando...How about MK fireworks in the hub every night, or the horrible strollerfest in Frontierland? Or BGT's entirely annoying park layout? Or HHN in late october vs mid September? Or like, TDS/TDL/Half of Disneyland Park?

We're still missing the most important detail of all of this Harry Potter 2 stuff though. How do you get into platform 9 3/4?

I can't wait to see what disney's longer term plans in fact are with magic band. I think we will definitely see some rollout in the near future of more than 3 choices/non parkhopper, because the current system is not as good as its predecessor on that front, and doesn't account for seasonality. If I show up to MK on a freezing cold day where the park has 15K people it's a little sad to only get 3 fastpasses where 6 or 7 were possible just last year. But then again, I'm 1 percent of the guests on the aspect of planning... ...which makes me wonder, is the eventual purpose of FP+ to just cut cut cut on spontaneity altogether. The number one reason as a cast member why guests were always complaining was because of their own poor planning. Seriously. Fastpass+ is helping guests tremendously on that front...by forcing them to do it. It would be possible after all on a magic band to force guests into a full and complete daily schedule like some of the Japanese parks tend towards. "No admission into any queue unless you are within your two hour window of being allowed to ride Splash Mountain today folks!" Or at least give Disney that option. I mean, what are they going to do when MK attendance hits 20-23-25+ million in a single year? FP+ could just be a big herding and efficiency tool.

I wholeheartedly disagree on two things: 1. We did learn new stuff: Knockturn alley should have some killer new villainous merchandise for everyone. Not to mention the renderings of what London facade/diagon will actually look like. I grow more excited. 2. The coaster name ain't bad. Stop complaining. It is perfectly in line with anything from potter and is also descriptive for the average guest. Puhleeze. How could anyone not be excited about this? They debuted (at worst top 3) the best dark ride in the world, arguably the best and most detailed themed land in the world (and unarguably best in the USA), and some of the very best unique merchandising items in the world with the last HP expansion, and now they're completing the whole thing with a bigger phase 2. I'm so excited to still have my seasonal status from HHN 2013 attractions so I can go to any employee previews for this. And did we mention that this expansion will probably end up funding a Wet N Wild mega refurb or a third park? It's all good news.

I am completely with Robb on the notion that something is not always better than nothing. Too many rides out there to list, but if I was running a theme park every addition would be basically in the style of Holiday world. It's like they are the only people asking themselves "What can we build that will break records and get us press+ large attendance increases, but for the least money possible?" I can hold hope that for 30 Million we could see: A Dive Coaster with like two inversions and 4000 feet of track. Holy sh*t. A coaster that is exactly like Goliath at SFGAM, except 3000 feet longer. An exact copy of Mindbender at Edmonton Mall, except the scale is 2:1. Anything that is 300 feet tall from Intamin. Anything that is 300 feet tall from Premier. Anything that is 300 feet tall from Rocky Mountain!

Can't wait for 7-8 years from now when the park's attendance has doubled and something REALLY awesome comes in. Major props to whoever got the train to stop at the waterpark entrance. I have always wanted to jump off the ride at that exact point, and with the big expansion, it is very good foresight to see that people will want to use the train as transportation. Go Lake Winnie!

As an employee of Seaworld at the new expedition cafe... Yeah...the ride is justifiably comparable to Stitch Encounters. Huge Budgeting fail due to expensive trackless cars? My working theory.

Argh I worked in the expedition cafe yesterday for 12 hours but never saw tpr. But glad you enjoyed it! The ride is fun if you do the wild ride. The mild is kind of odd, at least my ride was. Definitely a lot shorter than I expected but who cares when 250 of the best animal in existence are at the end if the ride just doing their thing!

Guests already try to pay every time by touching their room key to Mickey at our Be our Guest QSR kiosks, though we haven't added that functionality yet. I feel that this technology will catch on very seamlessly. The way I figure pre-appointed Fastpasses will work is that it will just reserve a certain amount of them during every hour of each day for online users and take those out of the total number of fastpasses given out in the current system. This will definitely make getting fastpasses different. In the end, probably more difficult for those who don't have wristbands. Many users will be grabbing them from their phones on the go, which is easier than physically walking to the machines but is also subject to phone connectivity. Disney WiFi is not perfect yet, just like the meh cell phone service around the resort. Warning to parents: Never ever let your little kids wristband have room charge payment activated. Haha.

The Snow White coaster is shorter than 60 feet (Track anyway). It looks like 40-50 from the BOG bridge, it's really looking like Disney World's third mine train coaster variation. I asked a Nexgen-dressed up cast member if Cast will be able to eventually use the RFID gates too and he said during the tests no but soon enough yes we will. In that case probably anything RFID that's attached to Disney will be able to use them. Whatever, the current system used by Disney is leagues better than Seaworld and Busch. Watching FP+ work at most places I think these gates will be an improvement, though indeed they seem to probably require more cast to hold back the wolves... I wonder how Fastpass+ will impact the current system of getting onto Disney rides. I imagine it will basically all run the same for a non-fp+ guest, just that there are a lot fewer fast passes out there for those guests and the windows move up quicker. If that's the case it will be funny to see Toy Story Mania sell out of passes in the first hour of park operation someday.

Got to try out the new Test Track earlier yesterday and finally completed all the rides at Disney World. It is crazy cool, weird, and disjointed. The vehicle design process is my favorite part, you get about 10 minutes to complete it and do whatever the heck you want to your car. My friends and I ended up with 3 vehicles that ended up completely different from each other. I thought the ride itself had a bit of the 80's computer thing going on more so than futuristic stuff. Lots of grid lines, not to compare this ride to Tron because in the end it has NOTHING to do with Tron, but the computer grid styling is all there. The rendered concept cars often reminded me a lot of F-Zero X for the N64. As far as disjointed, it is a bit odd at times. The Front entrance and queue line really don't look much like the design room which doesn't really look like the station for the ride. Then the ride looks like the design room did, except for the outdoor section, which IMO is a really really odd and frankly poor transition going from "Futuristic Nighttime Highway" to "Modern Interstate and Very Ugly Epcot Backstage" even if it's fast and fun. DEFINITELY needs some audio. That's a no brainer to me. Maybe it's a night ride at heart... After the ride, everything is done really well and we had a hell of a time using our RFID cards to swipe on everything they had. Make sure to spend time on the post-ride stuff, it's really fun. Overall, it's Epcot's biggest attraction, so really really glad to see it reopen. It's thrilling and weird, didn't really do it for me but I'd have to ride more times on the ride itself to judge.

I love Brazilians so much. Everyone at WDW complains about brazilian tour groups...EVERYONE. I love them because they are so incredibly different from other guests. Crazy and chaotic, but also funny and laid back.

I've always wanted to have a 30 minute Gravitron trance rave.

Holy crap. In ten years when the wingrider craze is being looked back on, THIS will be the signature coaster to come from that era. It's a stunning, knock-out replacement for Disaster and fits the park perfectly in every way. Mega-looper, airtime hill, revitalizes that section of the park, great color scheme, incredible one-of-a-kind main entrance. I can find complaints in every new coaster announcement these days but this one is just really really good.

I don't plan to visit Aquatica while I'm down here in Orlando because it looks like a slightly enhanced version of any old "Tropical" waterpark. Whereas I do plan to visit Wet-N-Wild because it has a whole host of badass slides! And they're even themed!

Umm...Winjas counts and it only has one vote? I give it a second.