castaway_kid

Six Flags St. Louis received 5 pixel mapped trees in front of the Palace Theater. The middle one is 30 feet tall, then 2 15 foot trees, and then 2 10 foot trees. It was pretty impressive. Oak Island Creative is the primary contractor but they subcontracted out the programming of the trees.

Here are a few more photos from last nights employee preview. Oak Island Creative and the Six Flags install team are still not done so there will be even more out by the time the park opens on Friday! Generally the park looks pretty good, the Palace Garden area has 5 pixel mapped trees in different heights, along with the 18 other trees programmed into the show. The only area I did not like was studio backlot, very underwhelming but maybe more will be added. The inside of Miss Kitty's looks incredible. I'm not going to share the other pics from inside the saloon as Oak Island hasn't finished yet so I don't want to show the partial product.

You asked and you shall receive! The park had a small media day yesterday and shot a bunch of footage for commercials. Without giving away too much as the park wants to keep a lot of the lights a secret until they open, here are some pics. The flag pole trees can be seen very well from the highway along with the lights on top of the palace, and the big green tree also.

Fox 2 was at the park today filming HIP, set up has definitely kicked into high gear the last few days. They had 5 cherry picker lifts in front of palace putting the large Christmas light trees together, they were loading in the pens for the live animals for the palace show, and they have been turning on large sections of lights every nigt this week. You can now see many of the lights as you drive past on 44.

Small teaser from HIP up in the Bugs Bunny national Park area, this is from about 2 weeks ago so there is even more up there now!

Yup, they were running cycles all day yesterday, Its funny they are going to open it for this weekend, then close it again for the rest of the season for HIP.

For anyone going to the park this weekend, you are going to see A LOT of HIP décor up! It amazing how much has gone up in just the last 5 days. But even more impressive is that almost all of Fright Fest has already come done and stored away. I have never seen FF put away this quickly before. The FF crew is seriously kicking it into high gear this year.

To those coming this weekend, more HIP décor has gone up this week, the lights have been up since august and more going up every day, but they now have Jonny Rockets covered in gold garland. This is going to be a very fast turn around from FF to HIP!

Wow. That really sucks, but after 24 years of teaching in a middle school I cannot say I'm really surprised. I guess the only thing that might help is higher wages, bringing in (theoretically) higher caliber workers, but I assume that would have to be a corporate decision and obviously negatively affects the bottom line. Do you know if this is a problem across the boards at most Six Flags parks or is it unique to our area? We were at Great Adventure in July and they didn't seem to have as big an issue with too few employees in any venue but don't know if that is always the case or we just hit a good day with low attendance. It was a Tuesday when we were there. I'm not sure about all of the parks, but Chicago and STL both use boosters during FF to try and help fill in some of the gaps, but this too comes with problems as you are not going to have a very knowledgeable "employee" if they get trained and do their one and only shift all in the same day. As for the caliber of employees you are spot on about the wages. First off Eureka doesn't have that many teenagers wanting to work there, and those that do generally flock to the Aquatics and Entertainment departments, which are the highest paying for seasonal workers generally. The Rides, Games, and Retail also get quite a few of the "locals". The main problem is retention of the Culinary department which seems to be primarily teenagers bused in from north St. Louis. Of the over 700 hired throughout the season they have around 200-250 left roughly and will get around 50+ callins on some days, and if they do show up some of them try to get off as soon as possible without even finishing their shifts. A higher wage would definitely attract a higher caliber of employee and in the end would probably save them money as they wouldn't have to hold a new training class (Discovery) every couple of days.

There will always be more than just 2 "scare actors" in a house. Blackout has the smallest staff and still has between 5-8 people...

Having multiple registers open or having multiple expeditors is always the plan. But when nearly 100 culinary service employees call in on a Saturday with 27,700 people in the park that is hard to do. They try and pull as many people from other departments as they can to help but they can only rob from one department to fill another so much. Funnel Cakes on Saturday had the Director of IPS, an entertainment supervisor, an HR supervisor, and 2 crowd control (lifegaurds) in there helping out. And they were the fastest ones in there. The actual culinary employees in the front is what slowed down the process.

Wouldve thought it would be NEXT weekend. I went to Creepyworld on Sunday and it wasn't too crowded. Only annoyance was the group in front of me that screamed at everything. Actually the last weekend of Fright Fest is almost always the lowest in attendance. It will probably be a little busier than the last few years next weekend since Halloween is not on an operating day. Halloween is a ghost town at the park... pun slightly intended.

Just a heads up for anyone planning on coming to the park this weekend, this weekend is historically the busiest weekend of Fright Fest and the whole season. But then again, the weather is going to be awesome and there is plenty to do besides waiting in ride line... like watching some of the shows, waiting in food lines, going to a haunted house, waiting in guest relations line to complain about food lines, and looking at the décor! This should be an awesome weekend.

Yesterday was the busiest day the park has had in several years. The lines were long everywhere but with just shy of 27,000 people in the park they kept up pretty well, food not so much but that's a problem even on a 5,000 day...

So after a few weeks of having a rep from Vekoma at the park on and off the train for Boomerang has been put back on, and on the loop you can see probably and additional 20 or so braces from the spine to the rails. They are still bare metal and there are two large lifts sitting next to the ride.

Clowns were relocated due to it being a blacklight theme. Batman plaza had too much ambient light that the black lights did not work properly. The sewers are not from Insanity Alley, Night terrors still uses them. These are in addition too those, plus there are like 5 more large tunnels sitting on the backroad to use if needed.

Never did the Fright Fest haunted houses, but if you'd only be going for those, I'd say do scarefest instead, specifically The Darkness and Creepyworld. Hoping to do Fright Fest this year, but it could be bad timing, since if anytime, it would be a Sunday, but they're only open until 8(thought they were open till 10 last year). They have closed at 8 on Sundays since at least 2010, not sure about before then. AS for the Darkness and Creepyworld, there props looked very nice and the scenes were well designed for the most part, Creepyworld not near as well as the darkness, but as for actual scare actors, I think Six Flags might actually have them beat. Now I'm not very impressed with SF houses but after going to both the darkness and creepyworld I found them even more understaffed and the majority of the "scares" were just them cocking their heads and then after you pass them they might scream.

Based on how much new power was just added to the roof of Justice League on the American Thunder side for HIP, I'd say there is an extremely high chance that whole path between Moon cars all the way to DC will be open. They wouldn't drop that many new electrical boxes all labeled as "HIP Roof" if there weren't plans to light that area up and be open. Plus as someone already said, they need a path open to First Aid.

Got the chance to watch the Love at First Fright show in the Palace Theater tonight. The show was very good and the special effects were far better than one would expect from a theme park show. The cast did a really great job. Towards the end of the show however the fire alarm went off. After the initial confusion of what was going on when all the lights turned on and the music stopped mid song and the alarm started, the cast and crew did a really good job "evacuating" the building. In just over a minute they were able to get probably close to 500 people out of the building. They seemed just as shocked as we all were when they went off but they handled it very well! I look forward to going back and seeing the whole show next time!

The App says down temporarily The ride was closed all of last night

For anyone coming to the park for FF, the hours of the dining passes have changed a little to fit within the different park hours Snacks are from 12:30-8:30 (one hour later shift from regular season) Lunch is 12:30-4:30, no lunch available on Fridays Dinner is 5:00-8:30 giving you an additional 30 minutes than during regular season. Snacks and Dinner end at 8:00 on Sundays Hope this helps!

yes! Sometimes extremely long, there is an express slasher pass that is kinda like a flash pass that speeds things up but it is still a little wait with those as many more people buy them than they do flash passes.

They have something called a slasher pass. It gets you into all of the attractions for that night. I cant remember the exact cost but it is somewhere in the $30 range I think. You can also buy individual tickets if you want to. My suggestion is don't waste your time in BlackOut, previously voided vision and total darkness before that. It's just not worth the time.

In case anybody was curious, this past weekend the park started using custom made SFSTL flags for the six flag poles by the front mall fountain. The flags at the marquee by I44 are still the original nations flags, well, with the new version of France and Spain.

Sure does!!!! That little thing is way more fun than you'd expect for its size. Yes, yes. That's what she said. Ok, so I feel like someone should point out that American Thunder won't be open for HIP. According to the thematic map & renderings, the path from Moon Cars too Log Flume won't be open. Remember, there is only about two weeks of true turnaround time from Fright Fest to HIP. Blind Fury has to completely come down and be replaced by some light lighting, in addition to the entire graveyard in the palace garden be removed. The logistics of everything is being planned out meticulously. I'm getting pretty excited just to see the transformation. It is definitely going to be challenging and exciting. Last year, with anticipation of HIP coming, they changed a bit on how tear down happens. So FF can almost completely be taken down and at least moved to the back road in a bout one week now. Then properly storing it can happen later. Fury took a little longer but there is a new plan for that as well. As for American Thunder it is my understanding that that section is still in question. The rides wont be operating most likely but they were talking about keeping the path open as another way to first aid. Also if this is anything like the first year of Fight Nights, they have discussed opening "closed" areas of the park just to help relieve pressure from the streets, even if nothing is open in those areas.