Steely Dan

Close a classic CP ride for an entire season that thousands upon thousands of families enjoy every year all in an utterly vain attempt to thwart a small group of roller coaster nerds from taking spy photos of RMC mean streak and posting them online for their fellow roller coaster nerds?

Yep, there are only 15 operational Schwarzkopf's left in the US. I've only ridden 6 of them, so hopefully I can get to a few more before they all go the way of the dodo.

Wow, now there's an unconventional opinion. I loved Wildcat's zippy little ride, it was truly an unsung hero among CP's legendary giants. but to say that it was CP's best coaster? That's definitely a path I won't follow you down. In a better and alternate universe, CP would have held off on building Corkscrew and waited a couple more years to get a looping Shwarzkopf along the lines of SFOG's Mindbender or SFOT's Shockwave.

^ Interesting theory. I was under the impression that independent vendors were out of the picture by the '70s and that the park had moved exclusively to a POP model, but I'm certainly no expert on CP history.

That was the original CP Wildcat from 1970 that stood close to where Windseeker is today. It was removed after the 1978 season and shipped off to Valleyfair (and eventually to Ocean City) and CP received a new identical model Wildcat that was erected near the former Jumbo Jet site (which was also removed after the 1978 season and sent to a park in Maine, and eventually to Europe). That Wildcat remained there until the 1984 season when it was moved over by the current Valravn site to make way for Avalanche Run. Does anyone know the story behind why both CP Shwarzkopf coasters were removed after the 1978 season and why an identical Wildcat model was built to replace the one that was sent to Valleyfair? It seems to me that it would have been easier to just leave well enough alone with the original Wildcat at CP and send the new one directly to Valleyfair.

Oh for sure! Wildcat was a great little ride, as are most things Herr Achterbahn had a hand in creating. My main beefs with DT were: 1. So very goddamn ugly 2. Terrible investment 3. Intamin/Giovanola bobsleds just weren't very good in my opinion. They're neat and add diversity to a coaster line-up, but there's a reason why only 5 of them were ever built worldwide over the span of 2 years in the mid-'80s. I rode two of them: AR/DT at CP and Rolling Thunder at SFGAm, and whether outdoors or enclosed, the ride experience just seemed very short, lackluster and disjointed to me. Shallow drop -> turn-turn-turn -> MCBR -> shallow drop -> turn-turn-turn -> MCBR -> shallow drop -> turn-turn-turn -> End. They're not terrible or objectively bad or anything like that, they just never really dId it for me. A Schwarzkopf Wildcat on the other hand, now you're talking!

Unless you have a specific thing for intamin bobsleds, you really didn't miss much in my opinion. I've only ridden one mack bobsled (avalanche at KD), but I found it to be far superior to the two intamin versions I've ridden (3 if you count Avalanche Run and DT seperately). Sure, DT was neat because it was a bit different and helped fill the dark ride hole in CP's line up (especially after the pirate ride closed), but I honestly just can't fathom why they sunk a further $4M into a profoundly mediocre and short intamin bobsled ride on top of the $3.5M they spent to build Avalanche Run in the first place just 5 years earlier. That's a total investment of $7.5M (1990 dollars). Back then, 7.5 big ones could have gotten you a ride/attraction that was a whole hell of a lot cooler than DT. And let's please not forget how atrociously ugly DT was and how its presence marred the beachfront at that end of the park. People can say whatever they want about DT's replacement Gatekeeper, taken on its own, but anyone who might try to claim that it wasn't a MASSIVE upgrade would sound like a crazy person from crazy land to me.

Yes, I'm aware of KI's Invertigo. I was being more restrictive to just the classic non-inverted boomerangs.

Yeah, the upper midwest doesn't currently have any boomerangs, and in the midwest region at large, only WoF and SFStL have boomerangs, and Michigan and Missouri are far enough away from each other to have very little market crossover.

It seems to me that there's 4 likely outcomes for Boomerang. Ranked by my prediction of likelihood: 1. MiA 2. VF 3. sold outside cedar fair 4. scrapped Vekoma boomerangs are still some of the most easily relocatable big coasters around. And of the 52 boomerangs that Vekoma has produced over the past 33 years, only one has been lost to scrapping, while one additional example is currently SBNO. Over 20 of them have been relocated at some point. Even thought it's 27 years old, I believe that KBF's Boomerang will still have value within the chain or to someone else that exceeds its scrap value.

well, the poll began in 2005. 12 years can make an awfully big difference.

Amen! I've been LOVING all of these "Magnum Memories" posts. I find them genuinely interesting, as opposed to something like 5 more pages of '17 vs. '18 bickering. Besides, it's the off season. I seriously doubt any of us nerds have anything better to do with our time than taking a little stroll down memory lane. But perhaps Magnum nostalgia is now getting played out in this thread for the time being, so lets switch gears to something that I think everybody will enjoy: Disaster Transport virginity loss stories!!! A Disaster in the Making It was the winter of '89/'90 and the whole world was waiting with baited breath to see what CP would do as an encore for Magnum. I was 14 years old by that time and now a CP veteran. My getaway guide for the 1990 season arrived sometime in early spring and I flipped open the cover to find the big announcement for the year. They planned to turn Avalanche Run into some kind of space-themed dark ride. uhhh, ok. wait, what? Avalanche Run is lame as hell. WHY? Thoroughly underwhelmed, I still went back to my parents to plead my case for another summer trip to CP because I desperately needed more Magnum (who doesn't?). They made arrangements for another trip; I was over the moon all over again. We stayed at the breakers again for a two-day stay, and somewhere in the middle of our first day, we made our way down to DT. Anticipation levels were low and for good reason. The line was long, about 90 minutes I think, and as a build up for the ride that followed it, it was a painful 90 minutes. We didn't bother riding it again over the course of that two day trip. And I think I only rode it maybe a small handful of other times on subsequent CP trips. Disaster Transport was probably the most aptly named amusement park ride in the history of amusement park rides. I mean, they put the word "disaster" right in the name of the damn ride, basically warning you ahead of time that it was gonna suck. And starting from an Intamin bobsled, how could it ever hope to be anything other than mediocre. CP spent $4M (in 1990 dollars, mind you) trying to polish that turd and all they managed to do with that sizable investment was take an existing mediocre ride and make it ever so slightly less mediocre and orders of magnitude more ugly. What the hell were they thinking? Avalanche Run was certainly no great shakes, but I could at least appreciate the absurdity of locating a snow-themed bobsled ride right on a bright and sunny beach. However, with the DT transformation, any small amount of ironic charm that the ride might have previously had was obliterated with big giant beige boxes festooned with cryptic lettering hanging in the sky with tubes protruding out of them here and there. ugly, ugly, ugly. As for the themed queue, I guess you could say that they tried, but the story line never made much sense to me (Alaska? Why are we going to Alaska? And through space? WTF?) and despite the vast sums spent on the theming, it was still way beyond apparent that you were definitely not at a disney park. The ride was the ride; I guess it was made a little bit cooler being in the dark where the twists and turns were harder to anticipate, but it was still just a lame old Intamin bobsled coaster: way too many MCBRs and way too short. For 4 million dollars they could have knocked-down Avalanche Run and built a medium sized wood coaster like WoF's Timber Wolf which was built the prior season for $3M (I know Timber Wolf is held in very low regard these days, but when it first opened it received A LOT of high praise from the enthusiast community). To me, the only really surprising thing about DT was that it managed to hang around for as long as it did, though that was probably helped in large part by its former themed queue areas being taken over for halloweekends stuff. Inertia is also a pretty powerful force. TL;DR: The Disaster Transport transformation has to rank as one of the all-time worst ride investments in CP history.

It really was. Back in '89, Magnum was a sensation, an inspiration, a revelation, just an all-out grand-slam smash-hit triumph! As I said in my post that kicked off all of this Magnum nostalgia, the energy surrounding the ride when it first opened was unreal. With one fell swoop, Cedar Point had completely changed the game forever; the roller coaster world would never again be the same. If you were gonna name the 10 most important roller coasters in the entire history of roller coasters, Magnum XL-200 would firmly be included on that list, possibly somewhere near the top.

Fair point. As was mentioned a couple months ago, if they really do remove V2, they should just replace it with a rebuilt Tidal Wave. I'd be more than perfectly happy with that outcome.

Those all look really fun, but capacity could be an issue at a park like SFGAm. Can anyone who has ridden both an intamin impulse like V2 and a premier skyrocket II compare/contrast the two ride experiences? And are there any S&S triple launches operational yet, or is Gale Force gonna be the first one?

NEVER! It's still a little surprising to me that SFGAm has the only new-build B&M in the SF chain over the past 11 seasons.

For sure. Goliath all on its own makes up for iron wolf and ragin cajun. I've not ridden a 4D free spin yet, so however good joker ends up being will be pure gravy. And if the loss of V2 leads to something better in '18 or '19, then by all means ship it off to SFA, I just hope that it's replacement features a launch of some sort because I have a special fetish for launched coasters and the loss of V2 would leave my home park without any.

Is anyone else getting a little worried that the two screamscape rumors of SFA getting a launched coaster from another SF park and of SFGAm removing V2 later this season are lining up a little too conveniently? It'd be a shame to lose V2 in my opinion, even if it is the weakest of the impulse coasters with its deactivated holding brake. Are we really gonna lose yet another coaster to SFA? What else might SFGAm ship off to maryland in the future?

^ For all intents and purposes, Magnum WAS my first girlfriend.

All of the recent Magnum talk has me feeling nostalgic. Maggie & Me, a Love Story It was a cold Sunday morning in January of 1989. I was a few weeks shy of my 13th birthday. I was reading the Sunday comics section (the one in full color!) of the Chicago Tribune on the floor of our living room when I turned to the back page and saw an advertisement for an amusement park called “Cedar Point” somewhere in Ohio. The ad touted a brand new roller coaster opening up later that spring that was going to break the world records for height and speed. Having had my mind blown the previous summer on (my homepark) SFGAm’s then record breaking Shockwave, my interest was thoroughly piqued. The newspaper ad contained a mail-in form to send away for a special trip planning brochure full of more info and deals. I eagerly asked my parents if I could send away for the brochure, which they agreed to. I told them that we needed to start planning a trip to Sandusky, Ohio sometime that summer. I said that it could count as my birthday present, that I’d do extra chores around the house, that I'd earn money mowing lawns in the neighborhood, that I'd do WHATEVER it took to ensure that I could get to Ohio that summer to ride the roller coaster that would break the 200’ barrier. My dad replied in that frustratingly parental non-committal tone “we’ll see, son”. The trip planning guide arrived about a month or so later (ah, the good old days of snail mail). I flipped open the cover and on the 2nd page was a full-page image of this futuristic roller coaster descending to planet earth from outer space. “Announcing the highest, steepest & fastest roller coaster in the universe!” By that point, I was beyond excited. I thumbed through the magazine and in the middle of the guide there was a centerfold map of the entire park. I started drooling as I counted up all of the roller coasters I could find. There were 9 roller coasters! NINE! I had no idea such a roller coaster paradise existed. And the layout of Magnum on the park map was most intriguing, there didn’t appear to be any inversions of any kind. As a child of the arrow multi-looper coaster wars of the ‘80s, this was very perplexing. Exactly what kind of roller coaster was this going to be? So tall, and so fast, but no loops? This was something altogether different. I showed the guide to my parents and told them about all of the coupons for great deals on admission, the on-site hotel, and other expenditures. I told my parents that we needed to make the trip happen, that I wasn’t going to let it go, that I simply HAD to get to Ohio that summer to ride Magnum. Fortunately, my parents had good friends who lived in the Detroit area who had a son close to my age. They reached out to them and started talking and eventually a plan was hatched that we would travel to Detroit to visit them that coming June and then both of our families would travel down to Cedar Point together for a couple of days, staying at the hotel breakers. It was probably the happiest I had ever been up ‘til that point in my young life. As we were driving down the causeway, the CP skyline kept getting bigger and bigger, as my anticipation levels skyrocketed to all-time highs. We had to loop the long way around the property because we had to check in to the Breakers first. We got to drive directly underneath Magnum, my face plastered to the window of the back seat of our car as I tried not to miss a single sight of it. Though I tried as hard as I could to exhibit some degree of patience, the whole check-in process took an agonizingly long amount of time, but finally we got in to our rooms and dropped off our bags and our two families reconvened in the lobby. Then, it was Magnum time! I’ll never forget walking through the parking lot from the hotel over to the Soak City entrance just utterly entranced with Magnum’s impossible height and steepness. This thing was no joke. Nothing like it had ever existed before. This would be a journey into the unknown. It was going to be scary. We entered the park and got right in line for magnum. I think it was around a 90 minute wait, if memory serves, not that I would have cared if it was 90 minutes or 90 hours. There was an energy in the que line, a buzz, an electricty; Magnum was a really big freaking deal. We eventually got to the station and I led our group towards the back car. We were finally at the gates, the next train entered the station and unloaded its human cargo as the gates opened. It was our turn! Here it was! Magnum! Finally! The seemingly never ending climb up to the heavens. The infinity of Lake Erie stretching from horizon to horizon. The height of that drop. The steepness of that drop. The speed of that drop. My god the speed. And the 2nd drop was better than any other coaster’s 1st drop. MASSIVE 3rd hill air. Pretzel turnaround zaniness. Beach-running airtime glory. Tunnels, tunnels, tunnels. And the fact that it just never let up, tearing up track with speed and power the whole way through. And no freaking OSTRs! My 13 year old mind was thoroughly blown! My dad, wobbly-kneed and clutching the exit ramp railling with one hand and his heart with the other, claimed that I was trying to kill him. They’ve since built ‘em much bigger and taller and faster and steeper and whateverer, but there will forever and always only be one Magnum in my mind. I can never be 13 again, but i'm glad that I was 13 when it was the greatest roller coaster the world had ever seen, and that I was there in person to see Magnum XL-200 completely rewrite roller coaster history in that glorious summer of '89. Favorite. Coaster. Ever. TL;DR: I just really, REALLY, REALLY love Magnum XL-200!

^ perhaps the unpainted rails on those other coasters was just a temporary solution while RMC did some R&D on a more durabe paint finish? Either way, the new pic of the outward banked 3rd hill looks dazzling. If it really does lead into a.drop inversion, as some have speculated, then holy sweet flying crap!

If Kennywood's Thunderbolt doesn't count because of the final 90' drop, then the best sub 75' woodie that I've ridden is a tie between Mt. Olympus' Cyclops and Kennywood's Jack Rabbit.

I dug a little deeper into the wikipedia story links and got to an article with this quote from Kinzel himself: source: http://newsplusnotes.blogspot.com/2009/10/blast-from-past-magnum-xl200-at-cedar.html So I guess Tom Selleck really did have something to do with it. It still seems odd to me, but whatever. The name is great. The ride is great. Everything about Magnum XL-200 is just really, really great! There's a reason why it's my favorite roller coaster of all time.

^ What's really weird about the wikipedia Magnum P.I. story is that the show's popularity really waned in its later years, and by '89, it wasn't even a show anymore. Yeah, in the early/mid-80's it was a huge hit show, but it seems strange that CP, in 1989, would try to tie in the name of its brand new world record breaking roller coaster with what was by that time a has-been TV show. i believe the original definition of magnum is the over-sized (2x) wine bottle known as a "magnum", but the word is also used more informally to describe anything of great size or power, which I suppose works equally well for both record breaking roller coasters and giant condoms. Bandit does indeed look like a fun ride from the POV (though what's up with the OTSRs?), but other than being tall, long, and non-inverting, it doesn't seem to have that much in common with Magnum. Togo has a deservedly poor reputation in NA based on the 7 roller coasters they built here (big apple, ultra twister, viper, windjammer, and the 3 KECO stand-ups), but I'm curious if those who've been to Japan and ridden rides like Bandit and Fujiyama might have a more nuanced opinion of them.

Yep. My first thought was helix as well. Though the blue track doesn't fit. It looks like one hell of a great coaster!