Six Flags St. Louis (SFStL) Discussion Thread

[thisdougsforu]

Good on them for bringing back the classic name. It brings about nostalgia for many folks (I've seen friends of mine reposting the six flags post, and they aren't "theme park" people per se).

[Danrarbc]

I know it’s opening day but Mine Train’s operations are ABYSMAL. 
 

Joker’s location isn’t really seeing action right now. 

 

I get the feeling the Buccaneer decision was made a bit late. 

 

There are bunch of chargers throughout the lot. 

[prozach626]

lmfao @ no activity at Joker's location. Status quo for Six Flags. At least the Carousel looks like it's running good.

[jamesk25]

Sounds like opening weekend is going terrible, I wonder what was up with Justice League? That ride seems to have so many problems with things breaking. I saw on the website that Pandemonium and Screaming Eagle where down as well.

Joker construction reminds me of Racer, and how long it took to start construction.

They probably won't start anything till late spring early summer is my bet.

Carousel still has a way to go before the supposed later opening this year.

Don't like Buccaneer, sure a cool callback, but weird doing so in such a fairground themed way. Definitely looks incomplete and just odd looking now between Ninja and Batman. Axis Arcade should have been rethemed as well to something pirate or ocean like to at least add some cohesion theme to that area.

[jamesk25]

Has anyone caught the video on the official website of the animated Joker ride?

https://www.sixflags.com/stlouis/attractions/the-joker-carnival-of-chaos

 

[SteveStL]

Buccaneer's theming (lack thereof) is the very definition of Half-Ass.  

Why bother?  they should have called it The Swinging Boat Ride

[parkjunkie]

I find it sad that they didnt make it swing over Thunder's reservoir. Would have made it so much better, great ride none the least

[Danrarbc]

On 3/30/2024 at 11:12 PM, jamesk25 said:

Sounds like opening weekend is going terrible, I wonder what was up with Justice League? That ride seems to have so many problems with things breaking. I saw on the website that Pandemonium and Screaming Eagle where down as well.

Joker construction reminds me of Racer, and how long it took to start construction.

They probably won't start anything till late spring early summer is my bet.

Carousel still has a way to go before the supposed later opening this year.

Don't like Buccaneer, sure a cool callback, but weird doing so in such a fairground themed way. Definitely looks incomplete and just odd looking now between Ninja and Batman. Axis Arcade should have been rethemed as well to something pirate or ocean like to at least add some cohesion theme to that area.

Justice League was up but the first screen  didn’t have the guns working. Pandemonium and Eagle were both running to you probably just looked when they had a temporary error code. 
 

17 hours ago, parkjunkie said:

I find it sad that they didnt make it swing over Thunder's reservoir. Would have made it so much better, great ride none the least

Agreed. I mocked it up that way months ago and then showed using what seems to be the site plans that it absolutely would have worked turned 90 degrees. 

Just to highlight how rare it is for a Giga/Giant Discovery to be installed in an orientation that doesn’t highlight the pendulum motion I looked at 10 installed in North American parks. 8 of the 10 are installed so that most of the time from midways, especially the primary ‘approach to the ride, it’s angled so you can see it swinging in front of you. 

The two that aren’t are Discovery Kingdom’s and SF America. America is not a well run park so they just plain installed it the least impressive way on purpose. In DK’s case though it’s really tucked in behind and between two rides and even turned the way it is a support is partially in a road - if turned 90° a support would have been smack in the middle of it so it really wasn’t their choice. 

If SFStL turned this one 90° counterclockwise it would accentuate the pendulum motion as it swings above the arcade building AND this would also swing out directly towards the reservoir. 
 

Great America seems to understand what the most flattering angle is. 

[SharkTums]

So we unexpectedly ended up at SFStL for 75min on Saturday night before close. It was my first Six Flags park in 15 months!

- Electric vehicle parking was interesting and they had a lot of those spots, didn't realize it was new. Wonder if it will last?

- Employees seemed very friendly, but I would hope so as we were on day two of operation!

- Freeze still running amazing!

- New kiddie coaster decent, like what Vekoma has become and what they're doing from the kiddie to the big rides.

- Screamin Eagle ended our night with a double ride and a nice crew!

- When did drinks become $7-$10!?!?!?! People complain about Disney pricing need to go to Six Flags!!!

[KBrylczyk]

22 hours ago, SharkTums said:

- When did drinks become $7-$10!?!?!?! People complain about Disney pricing need to go to Six Flags!!!

Meanwhile, Holiday World continues to make money with free drinks.  Imagine that.

[Danrarbc]

1 hour ago, KBrylczyk said:

Meanwhile, Holiday World continues to make money with free drinks.  Imagine that.

Before their family boomerang they installed their last coaster in 2014, and it was intentionally built on a somewhat smaller scale with 5 car trains. That's a 10-year coaster drought (same gap as Boomerang to Rookie Racer). Beyond that it's been some flat rides and a couple waterslides, and they run the same trains on all of their woodies to keep costs as low as possible too. I'd venture to say more capital expenditures have been spent at SFStL in that decade than at Holiday World. 

That's not to say SFStL is better. Just to say that the comparison isn't cut and dried. Koch Development Corporation also happens to not be on the stock market with public shareholders and that plays a significant role in how it is run too. 

[prozach626]

On 3/30/2024 at 11:12 PM, jamesk25 said:

Sounds like opening weekend is going terrible, I wonder what was up with Justice League? That ride seems to have so many problems with things breaking. I saw on the website that Pandemonium and Screaming Eagle were down as well.

Joker construction reminds me of Racer, and how long it took to start construction.

They probably won't start anything till late spring early summer is my bet.

Carousel still has a way to go before the supposed later opening this year.

Don't like Buccaneer, sure a cool callback, but weird doing so in such a fairground themed way. Definitely looks incomplete and just odd looking now between Ninja and Batman. Axis Arcade should have been rethemed as well to something pirate or ocean like to at least add some cohesion theme to that area.

I just.

 

Can't.

[Danrarbc]

I'd like to again say that Justice League, Pandemonium and Screamin' Eagle were all open last weekend. Yes there was downtime - things come up when you go in to full operation for the first time. But all were able to open and continued to reopen after shutdowns.

Justice League, in particular, is a very complex system with a lot of moving parts. It's not the first themed ride with things that stop working and it won't be the last. Even Disney's rides have failures - the difference is generally they design both an A mode and B mode so if the primary elements fail there's a fallback that can still tell a story. Justice League doesn't have that (and for the most part I don't know of many other Sally rides that do either). Disney has even had a few notorious unfixed failures over the years - the Yeti comes to mind immediately, and of course Rise of the Resistance still goes down at least once a day.

That said Six Flags corporate itself is definitely is not providing enough of a budget to keep most of the Justice League rides running as well as they can. They don't have enough spare ride vehicles to keep capacity up when they have to remove one or four for motion base or sensor issues. They don't appear to have backup projectors (heck they probably removed 3D not only to not have to buy glasses but to also extend the life of the projectors - they can use them until they get way dimmer now). They don't have enough equipment on hand to keep the game system in good condition and we all know that they don't have anywhere near the ability to keep all of the effects operational. I'd argue ALL of that is on corporate - for such a signature ride across the chain and how big a showcase it was for Sally you'd think corporate would want to directly ensure it remains good. They have failed to do that on a corporate level. The only argument against that is the concept is near a decade old now so maybe it isn't considered important anymore. 

As for the carousel - putting chariots and horses on takes no time whatsoever. They've removed the construction wall surrounding it. The structure itself out in the park is nearly complete, with only a little painting remaining and replacement murals on the outer ring left to go. You can pretty clearly see the mechanical bits have already been restored and installed. We know that they're doing the final horses and chariots now because the park actually released that in a backstage update. It's perfectly reasonable to believe it'll open this year given the state it's in right now.

------------

The two complaints I'll entirely endorse are the state of Buccaneer and the lack of anything resembling real progress on Joker. Buccaneer really does look like a fairground ride - except worse as there's not even a lighting package. I get it's something simple and cheap to run that people will actually ride so they want it in the ride lineup, and they probably really did get a late start on the retheme but it doesn't look good at all, I'd really like to see more effort go into that in the next offseason if they plan on keeping it around.

I'd like to point out that by the end of March parts of CraZanity had already arrived at Magic Mountain and that ride even with the better weather in LA didn't open until July. To my knowledge there's no hardware here in STL yet. There was construction equipment and nearly complete site prep by mid-April and that probably isn't even close to happening here, foundation work was what they were busy doing in LA around Memorial Day.

There's clearly no effort being made to hit the start of summer with Joker and I'm not confident this will be open any earlier than Rookie Racer opened last year. And they already know how long it takes to get a Giga Discovery built so they'd have known when they should have started if they wanted it to be running this summer. I'm not sure if this is a corporate or local issue but it's not great either way (given the fact that footers are pretty far along at Great Adventure for Flash late opens probably aren't corporate policy).

[bert425]

Granted.. it's not a fair comparison, as SFFT is run much differently (although SFStL does seem to be copying style/ideas from SFFT now with the updates).

but Joker: Carnival of Chaos (previously planned as Joker: WildCard) is the exact same ride that's going here.

At SFFT:
they started clearing for Foundation pour on 2/23/19
footers poured by 4/7/19
ride pad, and queue house done by 4/28/19
ride parts arrived on site 5/18/19
main supports bolted together (on ground) and LED light package installed 5/25/19
ride vertical, and 1st testing on 6/26/19
finishing touches over the next week.
Ride was ready to go by 7/14/19, but did not open until 8/10/19 due to waiting for inspections.

so from actual starting of pouring the footers, until ride was up:  ~3 months.
and from actual RIDE PARTS ARRIVING ON SITE until ride was up? ~2 months.

(all dates from construction updates at SFFT source)


So, yeah.. they COULD still hit mid/late summer, if they get it going.

[Danrarbc]

I stand corrected - it could still beat Rookie Racer. I should have looked at more of the Giga installs to see how they compared. 

Definitely won't be a Memorial Day ride though.

[prozach626]

It's reassuring to know that SFStl's failures are on the corporate level. I told my daughter and it put her at ease. Looking forward to the merger.

 

No one should complain about the carousel not being open. If we look at it from a numbers perspective, a couple more weeks is only a very very very small fraction of time from when it first went down. How's that for positive thinking?

[Danrarbc]

I really do hope park opening day ride openings become a thing post-merger. It's a really nice thing that Cedar Fair seems to aim for and Six Flags never really has.

[teacherkim]

Quick jump in because I'm going out of town tomorrow. We were there on Easter, agree with most of what Dan said although the GP on FB were all thrilled that Buccaneer had gone back to it's original theme and no one at the park seemed to care that it looked Carnival like, just saying. 

FYI-Easter crowds were very manageable so a good day to go while all the pious are in church.

Agree there is no way Joker will be ready until later in the season, but I didn't expect it to be.

One thing to note on parking. We used the speedy pass thing. The lanes that were labeled speedy pass were closed but another lane opened up for us automatically anyway  So, we went to preferred because we get it on our pass. The security guard checked my pass level and let me in, but I did notice some people still had cards they had gotten at the tollbooth. I was chatting to him while my son was putting the chargers on plugshare and he told me that there would be days when reservations would be required but only on days they anticipated it to be really busy and he thought it would be on the website. He did not seem very sure and I'm thinking there are still some operational kinks to work out on this one.

Speaking of the chargers, we saw at least 4 getting used, mostly by plug in hybrids which have less charging opportunities than Teslas or full electric for example. There were 8 in preferred and 12 in regular. I asked the parking lot guard about non electric vehicles using them and he said it hadn't been a problem the first few days but that there was nothing they could do about it anyway since they didn't own the chargers. Ok, but they are on your property? I take that more to mean, we don't have the manpower or will to deal with it and don't want to start a fight. I get it, but irritating just the same. Hopefully, their proximity to the parking guard will discourage most.

Overall though, it was obvious that work had been going on and hopefully now that we have a dedicated park president once again the effort will continue which will result in better environment for the employees and better guest experience; the FB updates are a good start.

OK, I'm outta here for a couple weeks.

[prozach626]

Looks like Patriot at Indiana Beach should be opening this year. I wonder if it will open before the carousel. I think the timeline for it to get disassembled, shipped, refurbished, and reconstructed at Indiana Beach was shorter. All of that, yet Carousel didn't even kill anyone.

[Danrarbc]

Well. One of the Giga Discoveries is well on the way.
 

[prozach626]

So their vertical construction of the ride itself looks nearly complete. Meanwhile, at our carousel....

[Danrarbc]

Our footings are in.

 

[prozach626]

Those are massive.

[prozach626]

I'm getting pumped for the 2024 season so I can ride Joker in June when the park goes to full operating hours. I also wanted to hype my daughter up to ride the carousel. Carousels are fun rides for the whole family. I can't believe there aren't any recent videos of it.

Anyway, I was looking for testing videos for both and I couldn't find any. I must not be searching right. My youtube account kept showing me videos of a roller coaster called All American Tripple Loop at a small regional park called Indiana Beach.

[Danrarbc]

Funny part of that old looper is it took Indiana Beach nearly 3 years to install a PORTABLE coaster.