the_man

If Universal successfully stops this development then the community should rally against whatever they have planned for Wet N Wild's spot.

The Pixar film is obviously a stop gap. I wonder if it's a direct result of other things (Shanghai/Avatar) being grossly over budget.

Interesting decision to make a big ride with a lift consisting entirely of tires in the state that gets the most rain in the country. I don't know of any coasters with the "tire lift" that run in even light rain.

Is it me or is Sea World really bad at announcing things? I am more confused about their strategy now than I was before. SWSD - no more stadium whale shows and maybe a hotel SWO - whale stadium show (for now at least), maybe a hotel, maybe a truck ride/dark ride sometime in the future? SWSA - whale stadium show to stay (for now at least), maybe a roller coaster sometime in the future? Other than the show leaving SWSD is any of this stuff actually official? They basically showed a bunch of pictures and said "this is the land we have to build stuff on, someday we might do that." I'm sure they have more detailed plans than they are letting the public know about but seriously what kind of announcement is that? Looks like they just wanted "Sea World" and "expansion" to be in the news.

The Blue World project is a huge waste of money. Before being canned Atchison basically handed each park a $100 million project that they could have used on other new attractions and now it's illegal to breed whales in California. Sea World doesn't have Disney or Comcast money to be lobbying so much and spending $100 million on something that may not work out, for the sake of their business long term IMO they should just stop breeding and move on.

There seems to be a theme here from the trip reports. 1 hour wait for fast food is obviously unacceptable no matter where you are or how busy the place is. Places like Cedar Point and sports stadiums can have 40,000 people in them and still keep food waits reasonable, it makes no sense why SFGAm can't do that. The sad thing is they are probably spending way more than they should be on their food service because of turnover. More turnover = less staff, more people that don't know what they're doing, and less experienced managers. In my opinion the pay isn't even that relevant because these kind of jobs are low pay everywhere. They need to ask themselves why they are having so many issues staffing the place and try to fix that.

Hulks renovation is not unprecedented, Disneyland did it to Space Mountain in 2005.

virtualglobetrotting.com/map/james-reid-andersons-house/view/bing/ An interesting note the CEO's estate is very close to Great America. I'm assuming he's moved to Texas since becoming CEO but the home is still owned by him, so I would think he visits SFGAm probably just as frequently if not more than any other park.

I think the only reason they are spending so much fixing the place up (again) is because having it be crappy is a huge black eye for the Walt Disney Company. I don't think Disney believes it has a great future like the American/Japanese/Chinese parks otherwise it would get a major new attraction at least once in awhile. Has this place ever made money on a somewhat consistent basis? The only reason it hasn't closed is because it would be a huge PR nightmare with all the job loses and all the government favors they got to build it.

Also another thing to remember about Six Flags is that for the past few years the company has actually been making money. So their current strategy (cheap season pass/sell lots of Flashpass/ads all over the place/build cheaper rides) seems to be working. Obviously it makes the parks feel more like money grabs than full fledged theme parks, but since it's making money I seriously doubt the CEO is going to change strategies. The shot callers aren't standing in lines in the park, they are in the back room looking at the amount of money they are making by selling more Flash Pass. I'm sure they get a lot of letters from people complaining, but like I said, with no competition it's just one of those things where people can either go to Six Flags and deal with it or not ride roller coasters (maybe a very small percentile will travel to CP instead, but those are a very small amount of statistical outliers).

Sounds like a classic example of being crappy due to lack of competition. There are 10 million people that live in Chicagoland alone, what incentive does Six Flags have to try and be good when the place is always jam packed anyway? If another park opened up in the area i'm sure you would see a big improvement, although that will never happen because SFGAm has such a huge head start and a big waterpark nobody has that kind of money to build something that would compete.

The fact is this is a big noticeable attraction that people will want to go hang out/drink at that's not Citywalk, and it's only a mile down the street from Universals precious future hotels where wet n wild is. The motive is pretty obvious here. The whole idea of "we support at a [substantially] smaller height" is BS, they know the developers not going to build at 200ft.

It's kind of funny, theme parks are always having to deal with nimby's but now that Universal is so successful they pull a 180 and are the nimby.

People with no conceptual understanding of elasticity of demand should not be allowed to be in this discussion because they are wasting everyone's time (including themself). Instead of babbling about something you know nothing about try to learn something about basic supply and demand. Do you really think Disney gives a **** if they price you out? It's their job to make money, not to make it affordable for everyone. It has nothing to do with your feelings, it has nothing to do with "Walt wanted it to be affordable for everyone," it has nothing to do with "i'm never going to see another Disney movie because their parks are so expensive" (which is BS). If their executives knowingly leave lots of money on the table guess what, they get fired. That's how it works.

An upper deck ticket for a Clippers game is usually around $60-70, and a lower deck seat is usually around, get this, $200-300!! For one 3 hour basketball game. And parking is between $15-25. I have no idea how expensive season tickets are but without knowing I still feel confident saying it's way more than I can afford or be willing to pay. But it doesn't matter because they will probably sell out anyway. You can't beat the ole supply and demand curve. Disney is probably under priced as well I was watching an interview with Bob Iger and he said they are not priced to elasticity.

I just make a mental note of anyone who would claim it as a new credit and add them to my list of people I don't want to hang out with. I find it far more entertaining to quietly judge people and use it as a weeding out process. You would totally discount someone as someone you don't want to know just because of how they count their roller coasters?

I remember going to Six Flags when Fast Lane (which it was called there at the time) was like $5, and the insane amount of b*tching from the people waiting in the regular line when they realized people could buy their way to the front. It's amazing how times change, now it's 20x the price and no one blinks.

You must have really bad luck because of the 3x i've been to CP Dragster, Maverick, and Wicked Twister have all broken down every time i've been in line for them. I haven't been to CP in years but did go to Carowinds this year and didn't see any of their B&Ms go down and we even rode Fury in the rain several times without any issues. Trust me the industry is in a much healthier state now than it was 10 years ago or so: the leadership of Kinzel and Kieran Burke brought this industry to it's knees. I was good friends with one of the maintenance managers at CP back then and he told me about when SF called them and offered to fly them out to NJ as well as pay them to help make Kingda Ka more reliable (which was not only breaking down every 30 minutes when it was open, but also had an incident and went SBNO for most of its opening summer as well). I am definitely not a B&M fanboy, I don't even like many of their new rides (i'm a Batman and Kumba guy myself), but it's extremely obvious why Intamin's aren't being built near the frequency they used to.

Super unreliable? Please list example of exactly what you are talking about and compare them to rides from other manufacturers that have never ever had problems. Dick Kinzel stated in an interview with NPR that building Top Thrill Dragster was the worst decision he ever made as CEO. The ride was SBNO for half the summer the first year it was open, major disappointment. Can you imagine the amount of people that were not only upset but also went to guest relations and demanded refunds? Maverick was built the during the season in 2006 and still didn't open with the park the following year. Had to be re-profiled before it opened and was extremely unreliable for a long time. That Shoot the Rapids ride had a huge accident that made national news. Xcelerator has been SBNO more times than I can count. Intimidator 305 had to be reprofiled and rarely ever ran more than 1 train when it was new because the wheels were literally melting. Wicked Twister (and all the other impluses at the time) had to add supports. Both TTD and Xcelerators cables have frayed while the ride was running causing major PR nightmares and Millennium Force's cable has snapped while it was operating as well (although I can't really verify if this is Intamin or CF's fault, probably a mix of both). I haven't been to CP in years but last time I was there Maverick, TTD, and MF all opened late and all 4 Intamin's broke down while I was in line for them (Maverick broke down at least 10x during the day). It's well known in the industry that Sandor kept giving Kinzel big discounts on new rides because of how unreliable the last ride they built was. It doesn't surprise me at all that now that they have a new CEO they have gone a much safer route.

Matt Ouimet has totally changed the direction of Cedar Point from super-unreliable Intamin rides, to more reliable slighly-but-not-too innovative B&Ms. Although I find these big B&Ms generally boring: they do look nice, are easily marketable, high capacity, and much more reliable than the Intamin contraptions they were building before. Can't say I blame him, I wouldn't want to run a business where thousands of people are pissed off every day and many demanding refunds if I didn't have to. I am a little surprised though that they are building a dive machine at this height, I think that if any park is eventually going to break the 500 foot mark it would be CP and a dive machine seemed like a safe and reliable way to do that (and there is plenty of space where Mean Streak is now).

Not that this matters at all to 99.99999% of people out there, but it drives me crazy that they renamed it to "Superman The Ride" instead of "Superman Ride of Steel." I'm getting getting older, it's getting harder to keep track of all these coaster names, and this is name #3 for this ride.

I can agree with all of you on that - the one good thing about the new entrance is the lack of metal detectors / turnstyles

Would you rather the coaster to be sitting on a parking lot No I have no problem with a coaster being built over grass, i'm just saying the entrance re-do [to me] looks really lackadaisical. They could have blended the old with the new and made it look really neat, instead they just bulldozed everything and made a very bland look that Cedar Fair historically is known for. As the pictures show they had a neat entrance before that was kinda southern and kinda colonial, and looked really inviting. Now it was bulldozed to appeal to the YOLO crowd - lots of concrete, stereotypical urban gentrification looking ticket booths, and BIG SCREEN .

I don't mean to be overly negative because I like the idea of what they did to the entrance, but holy cow they butchered that area bigtime. To me looks very stereotypical Cedar Fair "pave it and put a coaster over a grass field." Walking up to the park and seeing large open space with lots of concrete, little landscaping, and the blue sign with white letters with the generic Cedar Fair Carowinds logo. Even the stone work in the lamp posts are gray and just blend in with the concrete. The ticket windows just look....meh. It's like they said "well this looks fine at Cedar Point so maybe itll look decent at Carowinds." I do like that the metal detectors and turnstyles are gone though, thats always nice. I just hope it isn't finished and there is major landscaping work coming. Cute Awful

/\ I would in this case, you don't just build a B&M giga coaster and re-do the entrance of the park without believing that there is major potential in that market.