First of all let me just say:

It’s been, juuuust a little quiet around these parts.

Anyhow, it was announced  on January 28th that the Vekoma manufactured Invertigo would be removed from the Cedar Fair owned Great America in California and be relocated to another Cedar Fair park. And so the speculation began; who would get it? World’s of Fun maybe? Perhaps ValleyFair, they don’t have crap do they? Dorney? Nah, can’t be, they already have Posessed, an inverted shuttle type coaster similar to Vertigo.

But wait, what’s this? According to The Morning Call, Dorney is about to go to the town planning board seeking approval for a 138 foot tall coaster. Investigative work by us coaster fans is averted as the article states “(Invertigo) happens to be 138 feet tall and is being relocated to another park within Cedar Fair’s amusement park empire…”

So it seems almost a sure thing that Invertigo is coming to Dorney, however the possibility for a Cedar Fair switch-a-roo  is not out of the question. After all, Knotts Berry Farm was supposed to acquire Demon Drop for the 2010 season, only for it to make a 180 and head eastward to Dorney.

It’s also worth noting that this will be(err, might be…it’s not confirmed yet!) Dorney’s third relocated ride in the past few years, the others being 2010’s Demon Drop and 2008’s Possessed. I mean is Dorney turning into a repository of unwanted rides or what?

Lead Ticket Awards 2010 Results

Posted by on November 26, 2010 | 2 comments

2011 Lead Ticket Awards results are now in! Check them out!

The Second Annual Lead Ticket Awards ended on October 31st and the meager results have been compiled! Yes, the turnout was less than spectacular, much like US elections nowadays, however more than enough votes were cast to produce a definitive (coughskewedcough) result.

Park Categories

Park with the Worst Food for the Value

Hey let’s face it, some parks have bad food at outrageous prices instead of decent food at outrageous prices (the latter doesn’t seem to change much.) You all have spoken, and the winner is:

Cedar Point! Two time, two time winner of the worst food for the value category! Either it really isn’t very good or people just want to throw the Point under the bus out of spite.

Grossest Bathrooms

Not all parks have pristine peeing conditions. While some may have lovingly cleaned toilets and those Accelerator hand dryers that…well don’t work a whole hell of a lot better than the old ones, some are akin to prison bathrooms. I always remember Astroland’s old bathroom that cost 25 cents to use: cramped, humid and un-ventilated. Interestingly it didn’t smell like crap, rather a powerful, eye watering bleach smell permeated its tiny confines. Anyway, the park with the worst bathrooms is:

Great Escape! Well that’s surprising! Actually, this park won with two freaking votes while a mish mosh of parks made up the rest of the votes. Personally, I’ll go with any boardwalk parks bathroom.

Most Overpriced Admission

Not all parks can be Knoebels; free admission and cheap rides, you know the deal. More often than not a park will charge double digit numbers for parking and admission prices bordering on Bon Jovi concert ticket territory (ie. expensive.) According to you, the most overpriced admission is:

Walt Disney Parks! A lot of Disney owned parks popped up on the list so I decided to just lump them all together. Currently the going rate for a one day admission to any Walt Disney World theme park is $82.00. Yeesh, Cinderella better give me a lap dance for that much! However the price drops drastically as you add more days to the admission pass; currently a seven day pass comes out to $35 bucks a day which isn’t too bad at all.

Worst Theming

Speaking of Disney, not all parks can be up to par with Disney’s standard of theming. A tree, some concrete and an open air coaster station might be enough for some parks. The winner (loser) of this category is:

Cedar Point! Two time, two time winner! Cedar Point has once again claimed this dubious award by having coasters themed to the year 2000, birds of prey in general, and a bug that people are afraid to step on fearing legal action (a myth by the way…but don’t step on them!)

Worst Overall Park

Some parks just haven’t been updated, added to, or in some cases cleaned in years. The worst overall park as chosen by the voters is:

Six Flags Great America! Hahaha, oh wow, this is a surprise! I did a quick once over their selection of coasters on RCDB and found that they do indeed have a seemingly decent B&M hyper, Raging Bull along with the first B&M coaster Iron Wolf. But alas, they also have two wild mouse coasters and their new addition for 2011 will be nothing after Six Flags Great Adventure became the impromptu recipient of Chang, a coaster that was all but slated to be built at Great America.

Coaster Categories

Worst Coaster Name

Desperado is a cool name. Griffon is a cool name. Boulder Dash is a cool name. But a stupid and dumb name is:

Scream! Is this Six Flags Magic Mountain coaster named after the movie? Nope…it’s just named after the act of screaming. Its theming is pretty good too, those parking spaces are just uncanny! I have to give a shout out to whoever suggested Family Gravity Coaster however, that’s a pretty damn bad name as well!

Worst Attempt at Theming

This kind of goes hand in hand with the park category of the same name. Will Cedar Point win this one as well? Actually no! The winner is:

Bizarro (SFGAdv)! Oh boy, is this a slap in the face or what? Medusa, Bizarro’s previous identity, was once regarded as a poorly themed coaster; guess GAdv’s revamp just didn’t cut it for some folks!

Slowest Moving Queue Line

So, you get to the park and run to your favorite coaster. You can almost feel the first drop as you watch train after train crest the lift hill from afar. You just can’t wait for the crushing Gs, massive airtime and awesome speed! You finally get the ride and see half the switchback taken up. “Oh boy, this won’t be too long” you exclaim. THREE HOURS LATER…you board the train. This scenario has played out numerous times for voters and the culprit is:

Kingda Ka! I for one can concur with this selection. I think two or three times this past season I’ve waited in a ridiculously short line for Kingda Ka only to have the ride break down and add over 9000 minutes to the wait time. All other times they only opened one side of the station resulting in a stupidly sluggish wait.

Roughest Steel Coaster

Yeah it happens. Steel coasters are typically smoother than wooden coaster but sometimes you get horribly rough steelies that really pound riders. I mean, going 70 mph or something over rough track just isn’t going to feel like a bunch of fun. The roughest steel coaster is:

SLC’s in General! Among the results were coasters like Great Nor’ Easter, El Condor, Mind Eraser; all Vekoma manufactured SLC models. It’s no joke when coaster enthusiasts refer to these coasters has ‘Vekoma Hang n’ Bangs!’ Great Nor’ Easter at Morey’s Piers actually had overhead lapbars with vest type shoulder restraints added to reduce headbanging. It worked…but the ride is still like riding down a cobblestone road in an earthquake on a go cart with steel wheels and no shocks.

Roughest Wooden Coaster

Wooden coasters, on the other hand, are usually rough! Their made of wood for crying out loud! Some of them are pretty smooth however, disregarding woodies like El Toro and T-Express which are possibly constructed out of wood colored steel. Lightning Racer comes to mind when thinking of a ‘smooth’ wooden coaster. On the flip side, some wooden coasters are just a flat out pain party; even the lift is bumpy! The winner is:

Mean Streak! For the second year now Cedar Point’s Mean Streak has beaten riders into voting for it in the Lead Ticket Awards. The builder of this coaster, ‘LOL It’s Rough Dinn Corp’, are typically associated with horrifyingly rough wooden coasters; most of the crowning examples are either dead (Hercules, Psyclone) or have had extensive modifications to make them ridable (Texas Giant.) Mean Streak is one of the last Dinn Corp crap bombs to remain that subjects riders to ‘Dinn Shuffle’ at over 60 mph…perhaps this ride should be revered.

Most Overrated Coaster

Lauded by coaster fans and the general public at first, but then just lauded by the general public and voters in the Golden Ticket Awards. The coaster may have looks that thrill but the reality is a forceless, boring ride that’s all bark and no bite. The winner is:

Millennium Force! Is this really a surprise? Many coaster enthusiasts refer to this Cedar Point coaster as ‘Millennium Forceless” due to its lengths of straight track, boring layout and relatively forceless turns. It probably has a nice drop though!

Worst New Coaster of 2010

Finally, we have the newest stinker of 2010. Many new coasters were built this past year such as Intimidator 305 at Carowinds (which opened to much fanfare before the addition of some dreaded trim brakes on the drop,) Sky Car Sky Rocket (it’s just as freakin’ bad haha) at Kennywood, which actually made an appearance in the ‘worst name’ results, and Flying Turns at Knoebels…wait, actually that didn’t open yet. Anyway, the newest worst ride of 2010 is:

Ednör – L’Attaque at LaRonde! After looking this coaster up on RCDB, it became glaringly apparent as to why it was awarded this dismal status…IT’S A VEKOMA SLC! It was actually AstroWorld’s old Serial Thriller coaster which, after the park’s closure, was moved to Great Escape where it sat for four years in storage before being resurrected as Ednor: Attack! What’s Ednor might you ask? Well…it’s Ronde spelled backwards.

Video: Demon Drop at Dorney Park

Posted by on October 30, 2010 | Add a Comment

Demon Drop is an Intamin manufactured ‘first generation freefall’ ride. They were one of the first types of rides that offered riders the experience that only sky divers could have up until then. However, being the 80s when everything was rad and technology was ancient by todays standards, these freefall rides did it in the oddest way possible. Riders would first board a four seat car which would roll backwards into the tower. The car was then lifted to the top, pushed forward, hooked onto the rails, dropped down a hill that ended with riders laying on their back, braked, rolled backwards down a slope which flipped the car right-side-up before rolling backwards into the station.

In the mid 90s S&S Power finally got it right by simply having a set of seats and a tower; the seats rose to the top and dropped using air pressure…brilliant!

Demon Drop resided at Cedar Point from 1983 up until 2009 when it was decided to relocate the aging ride. Knotts Berry Farm was originally supposed to receive the ride but in a set of unknown circumstances, was sent to Dorney Park instead for the 2010 season. Knotts however noted that the ride “would not have been a good fit physically or aesthetically next to the park’s iconic Ghost Town” (source.) Huh? The ride would have made an awesome abandoned mine shaft! Eh, whatever.

Demon Drop at Dorney Park from The DoD3 on Vimeo.

I took a quick trip to Great Adventure this past Sunday to check out their Fright Fest festivities. I arrived at about 6pm and was met by moderate crowds, nothing too bad. I headed for El Toro first only to see that the line extended halfway through the nearest switchback; I decided to skip it for the time being. Bizarro also had a full queue line, at which point I got a bit worried that the park was munch more crowded than I originally thought!

I decided to just head for the other side of the park, passing through Frontier Adventures which had been transformed into ‘Bone Butcher Territory’ for Fright Fest. Didn’t see too many ghouls running around, but it wasn’t fully dark yet so that may have been the reason. Over in Movietown, which was transformed into Movietown for FF…I got in line for Batman: the Ride and found a stairway wait. While waiting in the stairway someone farted of course, making an already cramped, smelly stairway even worse. Luckily the trains were being loaded pretty fast, amount to a 10-15 minute wait in total.

Afterwards I headed to Skull Mountain and found pretty much a walk on…which was surprising. Next I checked out Dead Man’s Party, a big show performed on a stage set up in front of the Ferris Wheel. It’s pretty good with some decent choreography and pyro. It didn’t seem to change from last year however, with all the same songs I believe.

After the 20 or so minute show, I took a spin on Fantasy Fling, the parks Round Up. It’s not a bad flatride and being one of the parks few adult flatrides, I guess it’s better than nothing. Next I walked over to Bizarro and saw that the wait had shrunk to about half the size of before, so I just got in line. It was probably about a 15-20 minute wait and I took a seat in the last row.

Heading over to El Toro, I saw that the line was also half what it was earlier. This wait was about 15 minutes but it was an annoying 15 minutes since they only let a certain amount of people into the station at time before stopping the line. Once in the station, I made my way to the back which, as usual, had much fewer people waiting around than in the front of the station. A similar occurrence used to happen on Superman until they changed the stairway configuration going into the station, spreading people out more. Anyway, El Toro flew that night and the dude who jumped into the seat next to me was having a completely over the top blast, making the ride even more entertaining.

I decided to check out Kingda Ka next which, to my complete surprise, had nary a line at all! Both sides were sending out trains so I walked over the bridge to the left side of the station and literally had a walk on. That is an absolute first. I actually could have taken a re-ride since a couple of rows weren’t filled on the next cycle, but decided against it for no real reason.

Instead I headed to Twister and was treated to a pretty pitiful cycle. Towards the beginning of the season, this ride would do five or six flips in a row at the start of the cycle, now it seems to have reverted back to its barely one flip cycle. Finally I walked down the graveyard terror trail, which was all right. I didn’t get jumped by too many ghouls wielding cans with coins in them however, poor me. I left at around 9:30pm amidst the start of the parking lot rush. prior to the 10pm closing.

No photos with this TR unfortunately, instead I made a short video of it!

 

Somethings missing...

Fall Family Fun Night is one of two season pass holder exclusive events held by Six Flags Great Adventure; the other being Coasters After Dark in spring. The obvious perk about these events is that the park crowds are dramatically reduced allowing coaster nerds like myself to ride over and over and over. This does backfire occasionally as past events have been canceled midway through due to not enough damn people showing up, typically happening if the weather turns for the worst.

This year the forecast was looking dismal but cleared up prior the the park opening. I arrived at about 6pm (the park opened at 5pm,) checkout out pieces of Green Lantern sitting in the parking lot and took in the sight of Great American Scream Machine NOT being there before speed walking to the entrance. Before anything, I walked down to where Scream Machine entrance was to see what they had done. The Scream Machine arch is still there along with the queue house, but everything else is gone. I thought about riding Superman as the line was abnormally short, but I wasn’t wearing pants with cargo pockets and feared that my wallet, camera and phone would come dribbling out while in that flying position.

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I decided to walk over to El Toro, bypassing Kingda Ka for no particular reason. On the way I was treated to some dude with long hair arguing with a woman with two security guards/trash picker uppers standing around watching. The guy said something like “you always have to open your big mouth and ruin everything” before storming off. The women then turned to a guard and said “that’s my brother…he’s really into rides.” She continued to talk with the guard while the guy stopped, turned (with me basically standing between the others and himself) and yelled “you make me sick!” before storming off to El Toro. I tried not to die laughing at this flagrant display of coaster nerd rage.

El Toro had a one train wait and I waited maybe two minutes total. While waiting I noticed the raging coaster dude waiting for the back seat while excitedly spewing out El Toro facts to others waiting near him; he sure cheered up quickly. El Toro was fun as always with lots of air and a ridiculous amount of speed that doesn’t let up throughout the entire ride.

Next I headed to Bizarro to ride the only seven looping coaster in the park now that Scream Machine is gone. The area around the ride was practically a ghost town but they still made people enter the far end of the queue line instead of opening the queue further up like they normally do on low crowd days. The wait for Bizarro was literally nothing for most rows, however I noticed the front row had only three people waiting so I jumped in line for the front. It certainly is a different experience in the front with just track and nothing else around you. Bizarro also had the multicolored LEDs working on the shields at the bottom of the drop…a first it seems!

Afterwards I took the long walk to Skull Mountain, literally crossing the park and skipping Runaway Mine Train in the process, again for no particular reason. Skull Mountain had a nothing wait but my favorite seats had a line (those being the back ones of course.) Instead I rode in the second to last car. Skullie seemed to be going faster that night, possibly because the front cars were all filled with a big space in the middle. It was completely dark inside the ride save for a pumpkin prop that was awkwardly lit up with nothing around it. The ride also has strobes that flash while on the brake run for reasons unknown (maybe the drop is a better place for those?)

After Skullie I headed to Batman: The Ride expecting a total walk on. I was pretty much right, although the front row had a two or three train wait so I chose the second row which had absolutely no one waiting. As time goes on it seems that Batman is getting more and more forceful for some reason; the g-force while going the the loops and helix are really intense! After boarding I headed towards Dark Knight only to see the pre-show doors close. I didn’t want to wait so I just went to Nitro.

Nitro had a station wait and the last row had a couple of people waiting so I headed for the back. The two people in front of me boarded and of course took the two end seats, so I waited another train for my own end seat. When the next train came back, two kids stayed in the row while I boarded the end seat nearest to the air gates. Nitro wasn’t bad at all and had a lot of airtime going over the camel backs and especially in the bunny hops near the end.

I ran over to Dark Knight afterwards and got in the pre-show area prior to the doors closing. Despite the fact that basically everyone who was there that night has seen the pre-show (you know, being season pass night and all) we still had to endure the movie of Harvey Dent giving his ill-fated press conference (damn that Joker *shakes fist*…actually Joker is awesome!) I took two re-rides on Dark Knight without getting off since the pre-show hadn’t let out yet meaning that there was no one at all waiting in the station (ha!) I shut my eyes for the entire second ride in some type of attempt to heighten the thrill.

I was hungry by this point so I got a plate of fries from Johnny Rockets and devoured them while walking across the park to El Toro. Once I got over there, I decided to ride Rolling Thunder first which was only running the right track and had no wait. Rolling Thunder seemed to be running faster than normal that night and as a result I was COMPLETELY BEATEN TO A PULP. The first set of hills were rough as hell, the first turn totally killed as it tossed me to the left side of the seat like a hapless ragdoll; the ensuing bunny hops felt like series of boots kicking me in the ass several times a second, and the final octoganal-esque turn was like being tossed into a paint shaker. I exited the car a pile of mush.

Quickly regaining my composure I headed to El Toro. The line had now swelled to a station wait which was still nothing and I ended up riding near the back somewhere. Like Rolling Thunder, Toro seemed to be running swiftly as well, minus the riding a go-kart down a cobblestone street feel. Finally I ended the night by taking a spin on Kingda Ka which had a station wait. I mulled over waiting for a front seat, but decided to just wait two cycles for a second car seat. Good thing I did too! Upon returning to the station, the train stopped a few feet short of lining up with the gates and the ride broke down. We waited a couple of minutes before being let out of the train however the people in line were S.O.L.

I left at around 9pm; all in all it was a pretty good visit with like no lines!

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