abovethesink

For this to be relevant, we would need to be at that point in the theme park industry. Do you think we are? If so, why?

It is hard to say, honestly. It still feels wide open in terms of how AI is going to impact any sector. Ride design seems like an obvious application. A refined, more specifically trained/designed AI model could probably already spit out workable rollercoaster layouts that could be picked through and tweaked by an engineer rather than have the engineers design from the ground up. It is hard to imagine that the actual physical running of a park would ever be less human labor intensive though. I think we are a long, long way off from being accepting of the failure of machines in terms of how it impacts human safety. For example, if my home state of NY switched to all self driving cars and there were 1000 deaths a year from the AI in them screwing up, we would be outraged. Absolutely pitchforks to the capitol building levels of outrage. I don't think it would matter that that would be a tenfold decrease in deaths from auto accidents. Our brains don't work like that. We are emotional animals. As for your larger AI concerns, they are far from unfounded but we are also going to hit a wall really quickly in terms of what they can do for one reason: Power. These models are incredibly demanding. We don't generate enough energy on our grids, or even come close, to move them along lot further than they are now. In the next decade, there is going to need to be a dramatically increased efficiency in the models in terms of their power consumption AND a dramatically increased output in the power we generate. This is all under the political landscape of climate concerns too, so it might not be long before these models start getting regulated on those grounds as well.

I've read your posts. There isn't much of anything in them that I see as completely unreasonable. There are definitely reasons to be concerned here. Like I said, the track record for consumers with large mergers like this is not great. Competition breeds better results. The only other reason I am not as doom and gloom about this other than what I said above is that I don't think the chains competed much anyway, only in a couple markets overall, so in that sense this might not be as impactful as most comparable mergers. But I could be wrong, for sure.

I have become more cautiously optimistic about this. I get all the concern though. The track record of large corporations merging his historically not benefited consumers to say the least and that could very well happen here. I am not blind to that very real possibility. It is just that this "merger of equals" is PR bullshit and I am happy about that. Cedar Fair is legally the acquirer in the deal. Cedar Fair shareholders are getting more than 50% of the stock. All the high level management is coming from Cedar Fair. This "merger of equals" is Cedar Fair acquiring Six Flags spun in a way to try to not impact the Six Flags brand, full stop. Long term, it is harder to make predictions about the future. It always is. Again, there could be some bad outcomes here. But in the short term at least, it seems to me we are going to see the Cedar Fair model applied to the current Six Flags parks. For the smaller Six Flags parks, not great probably! But I can at least look forward to the flagship parks currently in the old SF chain to get cleaned up and improved presentation coupled with much more aggressive capital investment in new attractions.

I got to the park on Sunday and took three laps on The Bobcat, two in the back and one in the front. Very good ride. This was our third Gravity Group family woodie with the other two being Wooden Warrior at Quassy and Kentucky Flyer at Kentucky Kingdom. The Bobcat ranks well against both of them. I think Wooden Warrior is my slight favorite by an ever so slim hair still, but The Bobcat is a very fun ride that is right on its heels at worst. Excellent addition to the park. I preferred the back compared to the front too if anyone cares, but it wasn't by a lot. Some of the mid-ride airtime was stronger in the front, but the double down and first drop were worlds better in the back. We also marched back to Comet for a back row ride and that thing was hauling to say the least. Still a super solid classic. Mostly we were there for our two year old twins though, so we spent time in the kiddie area. They loved most of the rides, but I don't think they liked their first credit very much in Frankie's Mine Train! It was the only ride they didn't try to demand to get right back on. Before we even went over to Great Escape, we went into Lake George Expedition Park (formerly Magic Forest) too. That place is great. It is full of classic flats from the 50s and 60s, mostly for little kids, all with displays on what park they came from and details on their origins. Very cool and very charming place. The mile long dinosaur walk was impressive too with the towering animatronics in a "realistic" wooded setting. The littles loved it. My 13 year old son and I also were pleasantly surprised to find that they had thrown up an SBF Visa in the offseason too. We had no idea and left with a bonus credit.

I did read that the Cedar Point president (or some other very high up if I am remembering exactly who wrong) did say recently on a radio show that this would not be an all summer issue, but I am still surprised to see any movement this quickly from how it sounded.

June 1st will officially be the opening day of The Bobcat. Also, there is no cat on the front car in any of the pictures.

Hopefully I don't ruin your tried and true standup routine, but I did add "if they care to". Honestly though, as an accountant with lots of experience with corporate accounting, I would be shocked if they didn't have the data available. There is probably one poor soul locked in basement using the turnstyle counters to measure throughput rates with tears in his eyes as he contemplates why Six Flags has him do this if they are never going to look at the data and also his life choices in general.

Everyone who would care about the figure knows it is a theoretical maximum. I am sure the parks/chains have their own data on what percentage of that maximum they tend to hit and do the math for their own situations accordingly if they care to. That's all there really is to it.

That's too bad! Bummer. Great Escape is usually pretty good at delivering what the park has to offer, old ripped out Bobsled not withstanding. Anyway, I remember the original target for The Bobcat was Memorial Weekend, which is next weekend. Have we seen any indicators that this is still on the table? We are only a few days out.

Yeah I doubt they are doing anything close to the Morey's SLC re-do, but even just tossing on the better trains is night and day. See Riddler's Revenge at SFNE as a regionally close example. Add at least some reprofiling too and we are probably going to have a real winner here. I didn't expect this and it is a very pleasant surprise to couple with the work the company has been doing on Predator each year. I really hope they continue working on the existing coasters (trains please!) before looking forward to any new big capital investments that would take away from their ability to fix the current problems.

With Triple Loop now open at IB, I wonder if they will ship their now experienced refurbishment team up to the Niagara/Buffalo area to start working on the shuttle loop for Niagara Amusement Park. That could be dead in the water though. Haven't heard anything about it in what feels like a year at this point.

Well it is good that they identified a problem and are getting it addressed before anything happened. At the same time, it is less good that the whole stated mission of this Zamperla overhaul was increased uptime and it is down for an extended, unknown amount of time pretty much right out of the gate. Hopefully this is the one big issue the ride will have and it will be reliable going forward afterward.

We last went in 2022. SkyRush had an awful shake in the wing seat I rode in and was pretty smooth on an inside seat. I only had the two rides. Looking forward to getting back and trying it with the new restraints. They didn't completely ruin the ride for me, but they were very, very bad. Now I just need SFNE to replace the god awful bricks on Superman.

I know I am not saying anything original here, but it will always blow my mind that a park with this much land LITERALLY within the distance of human sight from a top ten most visited tourist attraction in the world has amounted to so little. Any park in this spot should be a slam dunk success on paper.

We don't see a lot of non-launched, steel coasters have these sort of extended issues these days. It makes me wonder if it isn't somehow the foundation or the ground under footers not being strong enough.

Haha yeah, I was being facetious. Obviously it is a stylized, cartoony Bobcat. They just don't have stripes like that all the way through their outside of their fur. Just hints of them as you can see from your picture. They also aren't orange. They basically hybridized a Bobcat and an exotic cat like a Leopard/Jaguar/Tiger/whatever for effect.

They revealed the front car for The Bobcat and it is beautiful. Personally I would have put a Bobcat on it instead of whatever that weird hybrid cat is, but it is still an awesome front car regardless. Again they exceed my expectations with what the chain would ever do at Great Escape.

My view on this has evolved to basically one smaller concern that impacts manufactures and by extension mostly us coaster nerds. Think about the last decade or so, (not going to worry about an exact window) and compare what coasters Six Flags and Cedar Fair have purchased for their parks. Cedar Fair has, for the most part, gone with the tried and true big manufacturers and their established, proven models. Six Flags has been much more willing, for the most part, to play around with the cheaper and more experimental upstarts. Six Flags may have been moving away from this anyway prior to the merger, but whether they have or not we have lost the reality of two different companies having the potential of having two different minds as to what type of attractions that they want to build. The big example is RMC. They probably never get off the ground without the penny pinching Six Flags we have known. The chain also tossed up 4D Free Spins, brought back the compressed air launch, worked with Premier Rides, the new Vekoma boomerang model, etc. How much we like these things individually aside, they were decisions Cedar Fair has been much less likely to make. By extension they are decisions that the new combined company would be unlikely to make had they not already happened. Of course, you can easily flip this too. Six Flags wouldn't have done all these Gigas or worked with the more expensive Mack Rides as obvious examples. The loss isn't specifically the chances that Six Flags has taken, but that we will have lost an entire independent way of thinking about these decisions. Where there were two corporate minds, there is now one. The coasters going into all our regional parks going forward are going to be much more homogenous in nature. Maybe better overall, maybe worse overall, maybe there will be no overall quality change. Either way, there is likely to be less variety. That is a bummer to me.

There is no ground for the FTC to block the merger. There has to be a legal argument that the chain would be anti-competitive and there isn't one like there is with the big tech companies that the FTC is going after. Whether those arguments against the tech companies are strong enough to be legally valid is beyond the purview of a forum like this, but they are easy to understand and follow with a couple minutes research. What argument could they put forth about this being anti-competitive? There are the three well documented markets with arguable competitive crossover, but those markets are still saturated with other competitors. No argument there to block the whole merge. Maybe to divest one of the properties, but with all the other nearby competition that would be a tough argument to make. I think the "nightmare" scenario for the new chain is that they have to pick one each of SFMM/Knotts, SFA/KD, and SFGA/Dorney and sell off the other and I would call even that unlikely. There is nothing to work with in terms of blocking the whole merger.

They have competed because they had different ownership. Parks next to each other don't necessarily have to compete. They can use a synergy based strategy instead. The main example of this in the US right now is all the sister parks in Orlando. If there is a market big enough to replicate that in, I would say LA fits the bill. Sell two day passes with a day at each park, offer a shuttle if it makes sense, offer a cheaper season pass option that includes those two parks and excludes the rest of the chain, etc. There is a small change regulators make them divest one of the properties but I doubt it.

On the bright side, while you probably will have to take out a mortgage for it, there will likely emerge a one price pass for all of Six Flags and Cedar Fair parks after a while. That will be great for us enthusiasts.

Ya'll ready for Six Flags Cedar Point? Joking (hopefully, I don't think they would mess with that branding) aside, this leaves me with a sick feeling in my gut. If we get an elevation of the Six Flags parks towards previous Cedar Fair standards, I will be the first in here and everywhere I post to praise the new mega-chain. That just isn't what my gut is telling me to expect. When corporate power consolidates in a well developed industry, consumers suffer more often than not. Here is to hoping this is an exception, I guess. There certainly is a world in which the mega-chain maintains the Cedar Fair standards and slowly elevates the key Six Flags parks up to say a King's Island or Cedar Point quality experience. It isn't like the elite Six Flags parks are THAT far behind, I guess. I just don't feel good about any of this. Maybe it is just the Six Flags branding sticking around that is getting to me. Maybe that is a meaningless distinction. In one sense it was probably a no brainer to go with it from a marketing perspective. Six Flags is a nationally known brand while Cedar Fair isn't. I just don't want one national brand. I want unique regional experiences.

I don't think Darien Lake is getting anything, but there is reason to suspect that the announcement wasn't all-encompassing for the chain. Discovery Kingdom, for example, has been teasing taking the park to "new heights" in 2024 and didn't have anything in the video.