February Happenings

Ah yes, I’ve successfully managed to not have a single post in January since there isn’t much going on. Or is there?

They did it again, THEY DID IT AGAIN! Just like last year in how Looping Dragon became El Diabo, the name of Six Flags Great Adventure’s 2016 coaster addition was changed from Total Mayhem to Joker. I’d like to think that RMC, who fabricates the track for these S&S Free Spin style coasters, simply made too much purple and green track when fabricating Discovery Kingdom’s Joker and Six Flags decided to run with it.

So now we have a super villain themed ride in The Lakefront, an area loosely themed to lake pirates or something. Sounds similar to Bizarro being in Frontier Adventures. At least with Bizarro they can chalk it up to being Bizarro World. This is exactly why I thought that Total Mayhem should have went where Stuntman’s Freefall used to be in Movietown; the space looks like it was tailor-made for it! Theming too! I know Six Flags isn’t really the bastion of good theming, but some consistency would be nice.

I saw a report recently that a group of kids broke into Dorney Park and managed to climb the 200 foot Dominator and steal the flag off of the top. Obviously it’s stupid and dangerous, but I can’t deny the level of stones needed to climb a 200 foot structure (looking at pictures, there seem to be ladders inside the towers, but they don’t have safety cages around them.) It reminds me of a story that my sister told me about how in the early 90s a group of people she knew in high school went to a certain NJ amusement park during the offseason and mucked around. They rode a massive slide that used to be there and one of them climbed the coaster and ate a bag of Doritos at the top. The coaster was only about 60 feet though, compared to the 200 foot drop tower in this article…still high enough to be killed from a fall, though. Stupid kids doing stupid things, just like in this story.

What the kids in the article didn’t anticipate is that Dorney Park has cameras all over the place and there’s about 5 clear photos of them screwing around in a control booth. Some people identified the booth as Steel Force’s, so they didn’t just go in explicitly looking to scale Dominator but to have a little field trip.

…Dorney Park, they’re giving Thunderhawk some TLC this offseason. The 92 year old coaster will be getting new trains, a new coat of paint, and track lighting. The new trains in particular will be PTC 3 bench trains with an open front. Looks like the buzz bars are gone in favor of individual lapbars. I love me some buzz bars, but as long as they don’t put some sort of pneumatic staple down lapbar, then I’m happy. No word of the coaster getting any sort of track work other than usual repairs that I assume take place every season. A lot of people complain about how rough this coasters is, but it’s over 90 years old, what do you expect?

Look at this thing, gat damn…