PeoplemoverMatt

Sky Tower is transformed into the first Polercoaster west of the Rockies. Hey, a guy can dream.

There is competition in the area but SFMM doesn't really compete with it. They're the coaster park of the SoCal market. That's what they've chosen to be.

Looks like a really fun coaster coming our way next year! I'll be excited to ride it. It'll surely make for a better ride than a painful old Vekoma!

^ Whenever there's something even slightly in common between Tokyo Disney and the USA parks, it can only mean good things for the USA parks!

Chili spaghetti! Probably the weirdest thing I ate on last year's trip and it was great! Looks like you guys had a great day. This is another park I need to get back to one day.

Wow lots of fun moments on the trip so far. Great to see you guys having such a great time!

Just curious...have you been to Shanghai to actually ride it? If not, then I think I'll trust the reactions of those who have been there to ride it in person. If there's one thing I've learned over the years, it's that often times a POV video of a ride just can't do justice to how amazing an experience that ride could be in person. You really have to be there, see it, and feel it to actually get it. Formula Rossa doesn't look like much in a video. Looks like a windy coaster in the desert, right? But to actually go there and ride that thing is very different than to simply watch a video. Robb says TRON is an absolutely OMFG incredible ride, as do most that have been to Shanghai and ridden it. That's good enough for me. I can't wait to ride TRON myself. Doesn't matter if I have to wait for WDW's to be built, or if I can get to Shanghai to ride it before then.

SFMM and Newhall Ranch are in a relatively far flung corner of the valley here. About 99% of Valencia residents would be almost totally unaffected. For what it's worth, the vast majority of residents do NOT want Newhall Ranch built and never have in the 20+ years this fight has lasted. With I-5 between 14 and Castaic now under construction through 2022 or longer for multiple projects, the timing to start building Newhall Ranch couldn't be worse.

With rides like Little Mermaid, Mickey's Fun Wheel and Goofy's Sky School completed within the last 10 years, I'm a bit surprised to see this area targeted for another makeover. The part of Paradise Pier from Midway Mania past Maliboomer to the Garden Grill I totally understand since that area was largely untouched except in a couple key areas (like removing that hideous clown). California Screamin' always has been way under-themed for a Disney coaster. I'd like to see Pixar bring new story and new life to a huge coaster like that. The rest though is a little confusing how/why it's apparently viewed as in need of a whole re-theme. Are we really going be saying RIP to the big Paradise Pier sign up on Screamin', the huge Mickey on Mickey's Fun Wheel, Goofy's Sky School, Silly Symphony Swings? How is Little Mermaid going to work in a Pixar-themed area? It's going to be interesting to see just how Disney moves forward with this.

Disney Parks Blog reports MaxPass goes live on 7/19. $10/day/person or $75 for all AP's that are not Premier or Signature Plus. Disney Parks Blog

More changes to FastPass have gone into effect. The system has become electronic but the MaxPass phone app functions are not available yet. What happens now is the FP machines store each reservation onto your park ticket directly. The paper ticket that is spit out now only serves as a reminder and a receipt. This is still useful because the Disneyland phone app does not keep track of your FP reservations yet. The new scanners at the FP entrances of each ride scan your park ticket to redeem the FP reservation just like at WDW. But since there's no Magic Bands, we have to haul out our park ticket from our pocket, purse, or whatever safe place they were being stored at each ride. As you can imagine, this sometimes creates lengthy queues at the FP entrances. Most of the time though, people seemed to be doing just fine with it. There are signs posted and CMs audibly warning guests approaching FP entrances to get their park tickets out. One interesting circumstance that I noticed was that now almost all FP return windows were opening a few minutes after the reservation was made, right as the reservation was being made, or in some cases, even before the reservation was made. It used to be even with a 20-30min standby wait time, the FP window wouldn't be for another 2ish hours later. Yesterday, several times, it was immediate, or 30-60mins later. At about 5:30pm Star Tours had a 25min wait time, but the FP return window was 5:30pm-6:30pm. I happily picked up a FP and went straight in through the FP entrance. Didn't mind that at all! Also, somehow, Radiator Springs Racer FP distribution lasted well past 5pm, after Guardians' FP had sold out. The standby queue never went much past 60mins. Aside from Splash Mountain, the longest wait I saw was for Space Mountain at around 60mins. Fantasyland was in the 10-35min range pretty much all day. Pretty crazy for a Saturday in July. If price hikes and summer AP blackouts are responsible for this, I'm all for it! It all made for a terrific day. Overall there's a few headaches, but it will work just fine once people are used to this slightly different way of using FP. Here's some pictures I took yesterday of the new changes: Just picked up my FP and as of 5 minutes ago, I can ride. Totally OK with this! Noted! Here's the new FP scanners. There's some similarity to WDW's but no Mickey heads. Scan your park ticket or AP barcode and you're good to go! Easy, but I still wish I could use my Magic Band instead of having to fish this out multiple times.

There isn't any argument. Rides that are built in both SFOT and SFFT, let's say, are not built with the avid coaster geek who'll readily make the trip to both parks in mind. What matters is that the parks are far enough away from each other to be in separate markets. Odds are the people who live in the Arlington area don't regularly travel to San Antonio and vice versa to have their park days slightly diminished by a common attraction. As someone from CA, when I travel, it always kind of amuses me to hear people who live elsewhere cringe at distances of 100+ miles as though it was some impossible length.

Except about 95% of SFMM guests will be seeing this for the first time with no idea that the same ride exists in other Six Flags parks. That's why clones are built. On the topic of trees, tree maintenance costs money. The less trees, the less there is to maintain. They can talk about sight lines all they want. Maybe it's just coincidental that shrinking the maintenance expense enhances sight lines. As far as the SCV heat goes, SFMM is not and never really has been the park that excels in creature comforts for anyone. I don't expect that to ever be a priority. Just something to know going in. You would feel like a professional artist who's told to paint a masterpiece with a spatula because paint brushes were too expensive.

It's puzzling to me why anyone would be all "Don't touch Pirates!!!" when it's already been altered so many times and the world hasn't begun rotating backwards. Seems like the same people who wanted to "save Colossus" and "save Maelstrom" are now trying to "save" Pirates from this or any other change. I suspect once it's done and the new scene put in place, it'll look just fine and end up being another time to wonder what the fanboys were all freaking out about.

Nice to see the park reclaim an area that was nothing but stagnate water (or lack thereof) for many, many years and make something worthwhile out of it.

Holy cats I need to see that fireworks display one day!

Well, they can say what they want. Disney is denying it and maintaining they always intended for HoP to reopen later this year. It is sort of interesting to see how this is covered seeing as the news media generally hates theme parks and Disney almost as much as they hate Trump. For now it looks like they're simply capitalizing on an opportunity to make both look bad.

Do a good job and your reward is the ability to wear a black shirt outside in 80-90 degree heat. Seems legit.

Someone really needs to make a feature film of Harrison Hightower's story, culminating with the disaster at the Hotel Hightower.

^ Don't overthink it. The Hyperion Theatre is the only building between Guardians and where the Marvel land is rumored to be. The trolley already goes out of Hollywoodland into BV St on one end. Now it can go out of Hollywoodland briefly into Marvel land on its other end. There's really no huge amount of mind-warping needed here, assuming it's needed at all. Just remember, all midwest towns in the 1900s had a medieval castle at the end of their Main Street, and a big snowy mountain off to the side.

Awesome photos Robb! I'm generally not a huge fan of water parks. They tend to be a giant hassle with needing changes of clothes, needing a locker, can't carry around camera/wallet etc, super low capacity slides, a free for all for tubes at the lazy river and wave pool, requirement of sunscreen (hate that stuff), etc etc. Bring kids along and these problems multiply exponentially. This was probably the part of the Dubai trip I was looking forward to the least. As Negan would say, "I have never been so wrong in my entire life!!" I have to say our day at Wild Wadi was just about the best time at a water park that I can remember. Not only was the place visually stunning, up there with some of the best theme park theming around much less water park theming, but the staff was extremely courteous and polite, the restrooms were clean, the park guests were orderly, the tech with the photographers and all was convenient, and all of the hassels I was familiar with experiencing at a water park were virtually non-existent. The slides were actually really fun. That really long master blaster that went all over the park was great for my first master blaster. There was no one trick pony tornado slide that you gotta haul a heavy 4-leaf clover raft up to. Instead, one slide had 2 or 3 tornadoes in it. The launch box body slide was amazingly comfortable, and great for my first launch box slide. It was also the first time I had ever been with a group that rented a cabana. OMG OMG OMG what a difference that made!! Spending the last hour or so of our time just kicking back in the shade, cool drink, awesome surroundings, no unruly crowd...that may have been the best part of the whole day. Then right as we left, the park staff brought fresh watermelon for us! They didn't need to do that, but they did anyway. That gave me a very positive lasting impression of the park, the staff, and our day. That was great. Now I might be hopelessly spoiled and need a cabana for every water park day going forward. Still not a big fan of American water parks but I would go back to Wild Wadi in a heartbeat!

I would buy it, but I'm one of the dying breed who prefers physical media to digital.

Right, MaxPass would have made it incredibly simple to max out (pardon the pun) FastPasses to both DL and DCA at the same time. MaxPass should theoretically still allow holding of FP times in both parks at the same time, assuming it parallels how the paper system now works, but this move greatly reduces the max amount of FP times any one guest can reserve during any one day, and that's a good thing. For example, it's 2pm and I use MaxPass to reserve a FP time for Hyperspace Mountain for 10pm-11pm. I can now get another FP time at 4pm. I can NOT immediately use MaxPass to reserve a DCA ride, nor can I walk over to DCA to a FP machine like I used to. Now it's 4pm. I open MaxPass and reserve Midway Mania at 8:30pm-9:30pm. I now hold valid FP times to a ride in both DL and DCA, but I had to wait longer now that the loophole's been closed. The current paper system allows this also. Extend this over an entire park day and you'll see how the max amount of FP's any one guest could have reserved with MaxPass has now been reduced. This will hopefully help FP's from selling out too quickly once MaxPass comes online which, again, is a GOOD thing. The short-sighted complainers, of course, don't understand this.

So Midway Mania's FP machines were turned on and people immediately started complaining about stand-by wait times. Also the FP system has been modified so all FP rides in both Disneyland and DCA are on the same network now. No more grabbing a FP for Indy or Space Mountain and then immediately hopping over to DCA to get a FP for Soarin'. Of course self-entitled internet people immediately started complaining about that as well. Matterhorn will have FP when it returns from its refurb so there'll undoubtedly be another round of outrage for that too. Obviously these changes are being made for MaxPass. These people are apparently too blinded by their own rage over losing their FP loophole/gravy train to understand that MaxPass is going to make things so much easier for all those non-terrible AP's who might be visiting with families, lots of kids, big groups, etc who can't just sprint over to Midway Mania from Space Mountain in a few minutes, and probably never knew they could have done that anyway. We can't get things we never should have been able to get in the first place but we've been able to for 15+ years because Disney never bothered to fix it before now! RAGE!!!

Made the mistake of reading some of the FB comments about this ride... The coherent opinions seemed to center around how "boring" the ride looked. I think people have played too much RCT and think every single ride needs to give near death experiences to every rider every time or it's not worth their time. What I saw at Ferrari World was not a record breaking launch coaster, but a very good middle ground kind of launched coaster. I wish this kind of ride was in more parks to provide a stepping stone to kids and those a bit more skiddish about riding coasters compared to insane coaster nerds. A broader appeal to the general population is a GOOD thing as it should grow the theme park attendance as a whole. Why do the complainers not understand this?