PeoplemoverMatt

The half beard became no more when I woke up. [attachment=0]IMAG0291.jpg[/attachment] Well I hope you don't feel like you've lost a beard so much as you've gained a Monte road wheel and Boomerang shock. Thanks for all the help in the TPR Quest! Thanks TPR for another awesome event, and to Knott's for being great hosts and for the cool coaster nerd swag! Can't wait for Charlie Brown: Drop of Good Grief coming soon!

Can someone confirm which Knott's parking lot will be open for WCB parking at 6am tomorrow?

I remember visiting Magic Mountain as a kid when there was far more than just the one kiddie area in Bugs Bunny World. There was the Speedy Gonzalez little mice ride where Panda Express used to be, right next to the huge Viper. There was Spilliken Corners back where Shockwave used to be, and then it became Cyclone Bay for Cyclone but was still a pretty kid-friendly area with things to do while my older sister went on the big bad coasters. When sis wanted on Ninja, the Sky Tower was open as the kid-friendly alternative. There was Back Street with the fun flat rides that I could ride as a kid in what's now DC Universe. Of course, Log Jammer and Jet Stream were kid friendly, as was the METRO that went all over the park. Mystic Lake had that cool Batman Lazer Light Stunt Show for a while before the lake was claimed by Hurricane Harbor. Where 3-point challenge is now was the old Circus Wheel - a kid-friendly ride I could do. Where Goliath is now used to be the Jolly Roger tilt-a-whirl which was another kid-friendly offering. I remember doing Circus Wheel and Jolly Roger with Mom while Dad took older sis down to Colossus. If I needed a roller coaster along the way - Gold Rusher was the best option. It's great that Gold Rusher is still open, but it's sad that it's become more of a novelty for 20somethings than the kid-friendly coaster it used to be. The point is, when my family went to Magic Mountain as a family 25 years ago with 2 parents, my older sister, and me... we all had things to do all over the park! Unfortunately, almost all of the kid-friendly alternatives are gone now. The ones still there are running on borrowed time. What are they replaced with? Coasters, or nothing - which incidentally has been the park's attitude for the last 10+ years now. Even Magic Mountain knew it was a poor idea to put all the kid-friendly eggs in one basket, and only very recently (last 10 years or so) has become that way. I'm amazed people are defending this idea now. No cohesive family was to stay permanently separated. Splitting in various areas of the park is one thing - at least the family can walk from place to place together. Forcing kids to stay in one place while the others tour the entire park is completely different. We certainly wouldn't have wanted to do that back when I was taken to Magic Mountain as a little kid. I can't believe anyone really wants to do that today.

Trying out the Knott's flavor of WCB for the first time! Excited!

Sounds like "Now the Xtreme Park" and "Better than Nothing"-type thinking that's typical of SFMM... So the way to do business is to hype up your big bad new ride and then disappoint those customers who bought into the hype with terrible operations. And people wonder why SFMM draws the clientele that it draws. Since when is the choice between terrible operations and no ride, or no park at all? This is parly why SFMM is stuck in the rut that it's in. They spend money on these rides that they can't afford to run any better than one-train op, staff them for the most part with the scrap heap of the local teenager scene, and justify it by saying that's better than not having an attraction that can compete in the SoCal theme park market. It's a sad, sad way to run any business, much less a theme park. Any other self-respecting theme park would want to try to be better than that. Not SFMM! What was that line from Cool Runnings? "You're going nowhere...and you're thrilled to death about it." Yep, that about sums it up.

Maybe it's me, but I have a bit of a hard time believing that RMC will be able to tolerate how SFMM does business. I'm talking about how SFMM does its budgeting, bizarre marketing, and generally piss-poor operations. SFOT and SFFT are zero indication of how SFMM runs those aspects of their park.

There were about 89,352 different problems with how the show was presented, but it's important to note that the "jury" was about 50/50 split in the beginning of the show on if coasters are unsafe only to wind up 9-3 in favor of coasters not being unsafe. All 3 who ultimately voted that coasters are unsafe were openly suspectful of coasters from before this accident, and "didn't like them" when asked at the beginning of the show before all the coasters are death trap presentations were made. Did anyone else openly laugh at that absurd graph showing deaths on coasters? OMG fatalities went up from 2 to 7!!! UNSAFE!!! Then, when they asked why fatalities were "on the rise" the people talked about coasters going faster. Not a single word about how there are quite a few more coasters in 2004 than 1994. Just a total "OMG EVERYBODY PANIC!" about a positive slope on their nutty graph. Robb, I must say I envy your ability to not just go completely nuts at what that show was presenting. Kudos to you, sir.

Of course, if only there was more government regulation.

People forget there's a 1 in approx. 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 or so chance that a seat belt will snap and become useless. The whole discussion of "if there was a seat belt, she'd probably be alive today" is pointless, and only serves to defend knee jerk reactions that don't accomplish anything besides adding to the stupidity of the world. The only way to guarantee that you won't die on a roller coaster is to never ride one.

It was 110+ on Saturday, 107 was the highest I noticed today. Getting trapped in the Tunnel Station may have stuck them in the shade, but unless they added some new ventilation systems in there, I sure wouldn't want to be stuck in there for any length of time!

Never thought I'd see the Valencia Town Center and Abu Dhabi in the same TV show! And, to echo the point, while shows like these are primarily for GP, they are MUCH better than watching some dude call out coaster elements & proclaim every coaster we watch him ride as "my new #1!" over & over again.

Doesn't some sort of computer run the car/seat movements during the ride? (Not really sure that that's the case, just taking a guess here) No. The seat movements are primarily generated by a second set of rails on the track itself, then by any give the internal mechanics go through while the train cycles.

Neither X or X2 were ever smooth. Never. Whether it's been slightly less rough in the past or whatever, it's a very minor difference. From the first day it opened, X/X2 has always felt like someone whacked me in the stomach with a baseball bat multiple times.

Since it's hot as Hades around here these days, leaving a train out in the sun is probably a bad idea, and the tunnel is likely the only sheltered place they could put a train.

Right. That's what I was referring to when I mentioned maximizing revenue. It doesn't make sense for the park to have any seat on the Hogwarts Express not occupied by anyone who didn't buy the upcharge park-to-park access given the insane demand there will be to ride it. Allowing for 1-park'ers to either get back on or not get off at all fruitlessly decreases the amount of park-to-park paying guests who can ride the Hogwarts Express in any given day, and diminishes the increased value of park-to-park access that Hogwarts Express brings. Now, will there be a way to ride round-trip? I'm still leaning towards the Skyway-style one way trip, get back in line at the other station if you want to ride round trip. From the park's perspective that way makes the most sense. Of course guests would love a way to ride Hogwarts Express round trip for only the cost of a 1-park ticket, but given the insane demand there will be for Hogwarts Express, there is zero incentive for Universal provide such an option. They'll undoubtedly be able to fill every seat of every train every day with park-to-park ticket holders, and will probably increase their Universal Express' value by working that into Hogwarts Express as a kind of priority boarding as well.

There's a small problem in that forcing people who don't have park hoppers to ride the train back decreases capacity on both ends. In order to maximize capacity, there can't be a round-trip option of any sort for anyone. Want to ride the train back? Get in the other line. It becomes a sort of park-to-park Skyway. So I'm leaning more towards the Disneyland monorail-esque checking tickets before boarding, probably before entering the queue if I had to guess. The amount of people wanting to ride is going to be insane. I'd doubt they'd do anything to increase wait times that didn't maximize revenue.

If Full Throttle isn't enough, look what just opened down the street from SFMM. YOGO!!!

Yes, perhaps some of this people won't be as "special" any more if people can go to the parks and ride the attractions they want without referring to random sites for touring plans or whatever. This might impact their ad revenue from page views. Yeah, I cannot imagine why they'd be against all this new technology in that case... dt And they are wrong. Here's what's funny. We recently went to Epcot with some friends from overseas and they had two different "3rd party apps" telling them the wait times for attractions. They both told them two different things. We brought up the official Disney app, and while one of them was close to what the official Disney app said, they Disney one was the closest. I'll be honest, the Disney one hasn't been right all the time either, but it's always been within 15-20 minutes, and it seems to be getting better. In short, why would you want to put your trust in a 3rd party app, which gets its information (I'm assuming), input by other guests, when you get use an app that has the same (or close to it) information that is what Disney is using to update with in the parks? I just simply don't understand all the pointless complaining over this! It seriously makes me want to stop going to theme parks sometimes knowing these INSANE CRAZY people might be around me! --Robb Whenever anyone showed me one of those third party wait time apps, I laughed at it and could always prove it wrong inside of 5 minutes. There's never been a reliable one ever made. Having installed MyDisneyExperience and exploring it, it's immensely better than any 3rd party app I've ever seen. If this is indeed the same information that is what Disney is using to update their in-park displays and information, then it's the only app I'll ever want to use. If it's wrong, so are those same signs and displays I'd have used without the app; nothing would be lost. Sounds like this app is also improving by leaps & bounds rather quickly into its life, which is far more than those crappy 3rd party apps that have been around for years can say! Just the sheer principle of having everything on the phone app is great. Last January before I had a smartphone, I wasted 45 minutes of my WDW trip waiting in line for a concierge desk and then asking them to print out all my ADR info and such because I lost the paper I handwrote everything on, and had no internet access of any kind. Looking forward to not having to do that again thanks to this app on my new Droid Razr HD.

It'd be interesting to see how RMC adapts/modifies their design to accommodate CA earthquake codes. There'd probably be some unique supports in that design.

And it shall be known as "The Effect That Breaks Two Weeks After Opening and Never Works Again!"

It's hard to believe parents use theme parks as a babysitter for their under 14 aged kids? I'm sort of curious as to how this will be enforced. Will kids have to produce IDs with their birthdate on it? Also, since you only need the parent to enter, what's to stop the parent from doing a 180 just past the admission gates? I guess Disneyland is still willing to be a babysitter as long as they sell at least one adult admission in return for the service.

Unless the parking lot is insanely crowded and/or you mind the walk to the parking lots, I've always found it faster/easier just to rent a car the entire time and drive/self-park place to place rather than waiting to use Disney Transport buses that aren't on any schedule, or Mears that is but still has multiple stops to make. With the deals that can be had on the internet, the time saved by having the car more than makes up for the cost IMO, but of course that depends on how often you plan on moving about in WDW. If you're content with staying in one park for the entire day and would only want to go from your hotel to a park in the morning, and back to the hotel at night, the car might not save you enough time to justify the cost. On the other hand, if you plan on park hopping, resort hopping, going to Universal/Sea World/BGT and various other places, it'll absolutely be easier just to have a car the whole time even if you're staying on WDW property while doing all that.

Well, other than the "locals" themselves! Whenever I travel to FL, how different the people are is always the first thing I notice. It's amazing just how stark the contrast is.

When I've been to WDW, and CM's ask me where I'm from, the second they learn that I fit the definition of Disneyland "local" their next question is usually which place I like better. As if they're expecting me to either say WDW is better, or go all DLR fanboy and rave about how Walt's ghost still inhabits the only park He walked in. Instead the answer I usually give is basically the one you just gave. You can't really compare the two. One is 47 square miles while the other is one park smaller than MK with another built in its parking lot, with a couple hotels across the street. But I would argue Disneyland makes very good use of its limited space. The important part is they are both awesome places to visit, and I'm perfectly happy with DLR being my "local" park and WDW being my "destination" resort. If DLR was the place on the other side of the country that cost 4-figures to visit, I might never go, especially with WDW right there. He means exactly what he's explained a million times. Most of Disneyland's attendance comes from local markets (California, Nevada, and Arizona). So the guests are "locals." Disney World draws its crowds more from distant travelers from the Northeast, Midwest, the South, Texas; as well as international markets like Europe, South America, Africa, etc. There's nothing wrong with being a "locals park" at all. As Robb said, Tokyo Disney is far more a "locals park" than DLR, and it's one of the best theme park resorts on the planet. It's not a knock on a park to say it's a "locals park" of any kind. It's simply acknowledgment of the different audiences. Back when Millionaire was running on both coasts, DCA's Millionaire contestants would always, ALWAYS!, be locals who'd been constants numerous times. When I went to WDW to see Studios' Millonaire, contestants would be from New England, Tennessee, Missouri, Ohio, Minnesota, all over the place, including Europe and South America.

But you're acting like they're all on par with each other, and they're not. You're failing to acknowledge that USH's exterior is of far less quality. Those are glorified cardboard cutouts of Optimus and Megatron on the entrance facade! A super well done ride inside the building, but glorified cardboard cutouts on the outside. Looks like Florida's exterior will at least be not that, and that's a GOOD thing.