2019 North American Regional Park Preview

In 2018, we didn't do one of these. A primary factor in that was, well, we were busy. But 2019 is a different story. I'm actually busier and that makes it inherently tough to get this thing out the door before Memorial Day when the summer season actually makes headway. So I failed even at that. It's now June. And here we are. 

Parkscope Bonus YouTube Video #4: Nickelodeon's Mega Mess-A-Mania Stage Show (Paramount's Kings Island 1995)

Nickelodeon invaded the Paramount Parks in the mid-1990s and brought with it this theme park version of Nick's hit shows Family Double Dare and What Would You Do?

At Paramount's Kings Island, the Nickelodeon characters expanded beyond the then-Hanna-Barbera land and created a new mini-land called Nickelodeon Central. With it came smaller kids rides themed to Nick characters like the Rugrats and Wild Thornberries, a huge water maze called the Green Slime Zone Definery, and this 30-minute stage show.

For you Nick fans, this show looks like something you would expect to see at Nickelodeon Studios at Universal Studios Florida. A takeoff of Family Double Dare and What Would You Do, the idea of course for this show would be "now you are the star!"

The tagline for Mega Mess-A-Mania in the park guidebook was as follows: "Watch as the Gakmeister guides the audience through the History of Mess and, in the process, through some of the messiest, slimiest, sloppiest physical challenges ever seen! Who will triumph? The Red Team or the Blue Team? Prepare yourself for mess hysteria!"

Since the show offered so much audience participation, a videocasette was offered of each unique show to those who were included as a souvenir. Enjoy the the mess hysteria!

--ParkScopeJeff (@ParkScopeJeff)

Parkscope Bonus YouTube Video #3: Euclid Beach: Gone Too Soon II

Euclid Beach Park was a very popular amusement pier in Cleveland, OH. Built in 1895, Euclid Beach Park lasted until 1969 when it was torn down. Euclid Beach Park was one of the most famous amusement piers in the country in the 1950s and 60s, with original wooden Flying Turns coasters, wooden bobsled coasters, racing coasters, and the famous Euclid Beach popcorn balls. The memories of Euclid Beach Park is a haven for old amusement park fans. This video was created by an especially avid Euclid Beach fan in 1993, who had taken two decades of home movies and assembled them into this presentation, combining old footage with a documentary history of the park and several interviews from former employees and guests. It's certainly a treasure for those of you who are fans of the old amusement parks. Enjoy!

--ParkScopeJeff (@ParkScopeJeff)

YouTube Tuesday #20: Ultimate 10 Thrill Rides (2000)

Top 10 lists are REALLY fickle. Especially when we’re focusing on the theme park industry, which has a new “best thing” du jour every year and twice on Sundays. This little gem comes to us from the far-off land of the Year 2000. These were the coolest thrill rides (well, at least according to TLC) in the world at the time.

It’s interesting to see which ones would still make a Top 10 list today (I’m thinking probably the top 2, maybe still #4 as well) now that we’ve been privy to the flowing sands of time and a thousand new paint jobs. It’s also interesting to play Joe’s favorite game with specials like this, “guess which rides are still standing!” Or at the very least, which rides are still in their original incarnations. Some rides have been taken down. Some have been moved to other locations, some have new paint jobs, some kind of run backwards or whatever. It’s another worthwhile nostalgic look at the past.

In all seriousness, how would you structure a Top 10 thrill ride special? The structure presented here is not bad: they try to have as much variety as possible, so there’s one stand-up, one water coaster, two inverted (both very different), one flyer, one hyper, one giga, one Woodie, one freefall, and one reverse freefall. Besides being a Rollercoaster Tycoon fan’s wet dream, that’s a good amount of variety for a Top 10 list.

Or, would you stack your favorite rides on it, regardless of what kind? I’m sure there would be more than one giga or Woodie, right? But then you have to push out some quirky rides that might bear mentioning. Would you include themed non-coasters like Spider-Man or Tower of Terror? Certainly they would qualify as thrill rides, yes? And what’s the deal with having Buzzsaw Falls rather than Atlantis? I guess Buzzsaw is more roller coaster-y, but it wasn’t really that interesting of a ride.

This special is also noteworthy for the whacked-out elements it has to try and keep the material entertaining, as if the Top 10 thrill rides on the planet weren’t interesting enough. Among the more bizarro elements are the insane desire to have the feature riders be as random as humanly possible (we go from a team of ACE-ers in the first segment to, I’m not kidding here, the American Superstars female dance troupe. Aesthetics?) as well as the straight-out inexplicable tags and adjectives they give to each ride (Volcano is dubbed the “ultimate hot coaster.” Not sure how big the field is in that category). (Thinking more about the feature riders, I have this hilarious image in my head where all the feature riders come together at the end of the show and perform a finale number, Country Bears style, with Ric Turner doing a chorus line with the American Superstar dance girls). Also, take a shot every time the narrator makes a terrible pun. Here’s the hit parade:

“The Riddler STANDS for Revenge!”

“This water ride delivers a helping of H2-WHOA”

“Volcano is the hottest ride in Virginia”

“If you don’t roll with this ride, you’ll come up snake eyes”

“This is the coaster you’ll love the most-er”

It’s unfortunate that TLC went through a cringing “hip and edgy” phase at the same time that Disney decided to flog that horse. Seldom it works. But next time, how about letting the “ultimate 10 thrill rides” speak for themselves, huh TLC?

--ParkScopeJeff (@ParkScopeJeff)

Our Last Ten YouTube Tuesday Features:

#19: The Greatest...Thrill Rides

#18: Scream Machines

#17: The Secret World of Amusement Parks

#16: Coastermania

#15: Billion Dollar Fun: Creating the Film-Based Attractions at Universal Studios

#14: Amusement Parks: The Pursuit of Fun

#13: Extreme Rides 2000

#12: Thrill Rides: Designing Fear

#11: Inside Disneyland Paris

#10: Scream Parks: Inside Six Flags Magic Mountain

**Send Jeff a line at HamGamgee@gmail.com. We appreciate your feedback!

YouTube Tuesday #19: The Greatest...Thrill Rides

Now we’re getting serious. In week two of our three week roller coaster not-exactly-holiday-themed marathon, we present one of the classic roller coaster documentaries of all time. “The Greatest…” was a very popular (for TLC) series of “best of” documentaries at a time when people just loved them some cable documentaries. In this installment, we get to see the roller coaster installment of the series, since we knew for darn sure we were going to get one.

The Greatest Thrill Rides is an all-time classic coaster doc. It is very much the “thrill ride” version of the all-time classic Funhouse. Like its dark ride compatriot, this doc seeks to comprehensively take the viewer on a journey of discovery (…and awareness?...) though the past, present, and future of thrill rides. Like the best cable docs, watching a show like The Greatest Thrill Rides is like adventuring through a thrill ride museum, studying the best of the history and excitement of thrill rides the world over. It’s one of those features that you would show someone if you could only pick one thrill ride show, because it covers all the bases in the limited time it has to thrill you (blah blah blah!).

The past is covered through the occasional references to Russian ice slides and switchback railways. The present is explored through a whirlwind “best of” tour of the greatest thrill rides on the planet circa late-1990s. To be fair, the top of the lists are pretty bad (I won’t spoil them for you, but woof), but of course they cover all the late-1990s crazes, from inverted coasters to woodies to stand-up to hyper. Each one is given a quick feature and an obligatory post-ride interview with the Ric Turners of the world.

The next segment is focused on the creation of the coasters, and the construction. These features will be familiar with those of you who have been keeping up with our weekly YouTube output.

And then halfway through, the show does a complete 180. Because it’s not about roller coasters anymore. We’re going to the malls and arcades, and to the Vegas strip, and to Universal. Because we’re going to talk about the thrilling simulators which are just the bees knees these days (how many times do you think I can use the words “thrill” or “thrilling” in this article? I think at least a few more times). These, we are reminded, are called “immersive thrill rides.” Cue the Gary Goddard cameo appearance.

What’s cool about this segment is I have absolutely no idea what most of these rides are, or were. Were these simulators in malls or traveling exhibits? The narrator says there are more than 70 of these exhibits around the country…I don’t even remember this being a thing. Was this a feature at large malls like South Coast Plaza or the Irvine Spectrum back in the day? Did they have changing movies? If so, how often did they change? Did you get to choose your adventure like that enormous POS basement bench simulator at the Excalibur in Vegas? Over the course of a few seconds, we see simulator movies of: riding Revolution at SFMM, traveling through a collapsing mine, driving down a Mad Max-style desert road, a haunted cavern, a funhouse, a giant roller derby obstacle course thing (I don’t even know how to describe that one except to say it looks like a first-person view of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time sewer level), a trench, a large building, a pleasant Calabasas side road, a “street race,” a mountain, a pre-Spider-Man drop off a building, and Days of Thunder at Kings Island.

But when we get introduced to simulators, of course we have to explore the 1990s Vegas simulators! That’s right, for the first time on a theme park doc, we get an extended sequence featuring In Search of the Obelisk, Race for Atlantis, and Star Trek: The Experience! This has to be my favorite segment of the show, since I love love love me some Vegas simulators. My brother and I spent many a vacation visiting these rides constantly, since we weren’t yet old enough to gamble this was the next best thing. And we actually get to see some behind-the-scenes action! The IMAX camera for In Search of the Obelisk, some real 3D models and a feature for the HUGE 3D glasses for Atlantis (with an interview with Rhythm & Hues!), and a tour of the bridge and the simulator cabins for Star Trek! This makes me happy, since Star Trek: The Experience was one of the most mind-blowing attractions anywhere in the world when it opened in 1998, Disney or otherwise. I always wished they could have moved it to Universal after it closed. It’s that cool. And the Star Trek museum! Absolutely fantastic. The Transporter Room to this day is one of the greatest-ever pre-shows of all time.

And lastly of course, we get the future. And the future is not only Universal Studios but video games. And I’m not just talking about Sega Rally Championship or another one of those you’ve seen a million times. Ladies and gentlemen, I present….Vertical Reality. That’s right. Vertical Reality. At 43:12.

How many of you remember this one? It’s a 25 foot-tall freefall tower in front of a giant shooter game. When you shoot someone else, you go up. When you get shot, you drop. WHERE HAS THIS BEEN?! What happened to this idea besides the predictable number of lawsuits?

We end the show with an exploration of what this show considers the “ultimate thrill ride.” I don’t know what TLC’s obsession is of going out into the real world and saying the “future of thrill rides” is something we’ve been able to do for decades (like bungee-jumping and sky-diving). But anyway, this particular show’s idea of the ultimate thrill ride is Air Combat USA, a really for-real Top Gun simulation where participants actually get to shoot at each other. In real planes. Driven by Air Force pilots. That’s cool. I wonder if it’s still around? *Does a quick Google search* Hey it’s still around! And it’s in FULLERTON??!! How did I not know this when I was living in Anaheim? And it’s only…$1,700! And you save $50 when you book two people! That’s so cool!

And FYI, Alan Schilke (the guy who always interviews with Arrow D) just wants to throw out there at 51:30 that the “ultimate thrill ride” or roller coaster is one that can turn you independently in the car in any position at any time along the track. Direct quote: “if you can change the rider’s position relative to the car, it’s almost like a fourth dimension.” These words are actually said. In 1997. Isn’t that spooky? Nay, isn’t that…thrilling? (ha! I did it!)

Tune in next week for the conclusion of our three-week roller coaster fest, and one of my favorite all-time thrill ride specials!

--ParkScopeJeff (@ParkScopeJeff)

Our Last Ten YouTube Tuesday Features:

#18: Scream Machines

#17: The Secret World of Amusement Parks

#16: Coastermania

#15: Billion Dollar Fun: Creating the Film-Based Attractions at Universal Studios

#14: Amusement Parks: The Pursuit of Fun

#13: Extreme Rides 2000

#12: Thrill Rides: Designing Fear

#11: Inside Disneyland Paris

#10: Scream Parks: Inside Six Flags Magic Mountain

#9: Busch Gardens Tampa Revealed

**Send Jeff a line at HamGamgee@gmail.com. We appreciate your feedback!

YouTube Tuesday #18: Scream Machines

Arrow-Batic sighting! Arrow-Batic sighting at 57:20! Thought I had to mention that for all you pre-2000 coaster fans.

But first, a quick special announcement: starting this week, we have a three-week roller coaster theme for YouTube Tuesday. Scream Machines will be the first of three of TLC’s most popular roller coaster specials from the late 90s. Won’t that be fun! That is all.

This is when TLC really started to get serious about talking roller coasters. Once they got a few coaster notches on their docu-belt, they started really letting it fly (the next two weeks will feature the two coaster specials that really made TLC a must-watch destination for coaster fans).

Much like our Coastermania feature, this special is geared to talk about the craziness of roller coasters. We follow (again) some ACE members around and talk to them about why they like coasters and why we like coasters and why we like to ride them.

The late 90s was right at the tail end of the epic decade-long coaster wars (which never really end, but the 1990s were extra intense). The big blockbuster coasters of the late 90s are featured here, such as Millennium Force (though technically 2000), Goliath (ditto), Superman, and Stealth. This special can be hilariously dated because the narrator claims that amusement parks have to fill the seats because “it’s hard to convince folks to visit when admission prices are starting to climb above $40!”

We get some good coaster psychology and lingo here. We of course start by talking about how coasters are an adrenaline rush, that thrill rides are like a drug, etc. We follow around the ubiquitous ACE-er Ric Turner (who I guess is contractually obligated to be in every 1990s coaster special) and explain why amusement parks give ACE and coaster enthusiasts some ERT: because they are the “super-users” and influencers who will (theoretically) say such great things about the new ride as it opens.

Then we get into a surprising amount of coaster lingo. We learn about protein spills and code yellows. We learn how similar a launched coaster effect is to an F14 carrier landing, and what happens to the body during a blackout/greyout. We also get a cool side-by-side comparison of a Space Shot and the ejector seat training tower for the Navy.

The narrator then brings in a couple of behavioral psychologists (one of them has an eye patch! Seriously! If I were his patient I would BEG him to start our therapy sessions with “How ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR you feeling? I would lose it!”). They explain how coasters are designed to keep your brain in constant sensory overload, and that these surprises lead to euphoria when the coaster is successfully conquered. They also discuss the different types of screams (there’s 4 of them!) people use while riding coasters and how it relates to real life communication.

In one of the more interesting segments, the psychologists strap a woman with electrodes to monitor her heart rate and force her on Goliath. It’s a damn good thing she didn’t mind that much.

We have a few interviews with coaster designers who, in a departure from most coaster specials, actually talk about the tempo of the ride, and the psychological tricks they use to make the ride seem scarier. The anticipation of the first drop. Placing objects (or wooden infrastructures) near the track to make it seem like the ride’s going faster. The head choppers. The point is to straddle the line between terrifying people and getting them to come back. There’s also an interesting piece of rider narrative here that, though most coasters are un-themed, designers still approach coasters as a story, with the rider as protagonist, and every drop and loop a dramatic story element. It makes heroes out of everyone on the ride when the coaster is conquered. And that’s a nice lead-in to the IOA segment.

So I don’t know if they have this anymore, but apparently back in the day IOA had a “coaster stress management” course for coaster phobics. We follow some of their stories as they go through the class. And then the first coaster they go on is Hulk! Jeez, talk about a trial by fire! Some of them are predictably wetting themselves.

We then go into the Arrow Dynamics segment and the “FUTURE OF COASTERS!!!” segment now becoming all too familiar for these shows. We follow Arrow engineers as they help design the very strange Tennessee Tornado looper for Dollywood, then talk about the future of thrill rides which are, say it with me, CyberSpace Mountain, Universal, simulators, blah blah being successors to coasters. “But nothing will ever replace the real WHOOOOSH you get on a coaster!”

We talk about how “in the future, coasters will go 200 mph and will be 800 feet tall and yada yada” until we get to…ARROW-BATIC. It’s here! We finally found it!

Like the ThrustAir 2000 and the flying coaster, the Arrow-Batic was a ubiquitous “coming soon!” coaster through many coaster specials in 1999 and 2000. Arrow-Batic was, to paraphrase, sort of like an earlier version of Intamin ZacSpins like Green Lantern: First Flight. It featured two or three rows of overhanging cars that, because it was so compact, could perform many maneuvers that inverted coasters couldn’t, like diving down 90 degrees! Oh and flips and other stuff. It’s good that one of our specials finally turned up this old chestnut!

But wait, it gets better! Following Arrow-Batic we get even more ridiculous nonsense that never made it off the drawing board. Like Vekoma’s Cliff-Hanger Tilt, which stalled the coaster train on a platform and would tilt it straight down. Or how about Vekoma’s Hammerhead Stall (!), which…is basically an Intamin Impulse coaster except with standard above-the-rail trains and straight vertical towers and…trains shaped like airplanes. You can’t make this stuff up! Anyone ever heard of these? Now you have!

Tune in the next two weeks as we ramp up to the BEST TLC coaster specials!

--ParkScopeJeff (@ParkScopeJeff)

Our Last Ten YouTube Tuesday Features:

#17: The Secret World of Amusement Parks

#16: Coastermania

#15: Billion Dollar Fun: Creating the Film-Based Attractions at Universal Studios

#14: Amusement Parks: The Pursuit of Fun

#13: Extreme Rides 2000

#12: Thrill Rides: Designing Fear

#11: Inside Disneyland Paris

#10: Scream Parks: Inside Six Flags Magic Mountain

#9: Busch Gardens Tampa Revealed

#8: Inside Universal's Hard Rock Orlando

**Send Jeff a line at HamGamgee@gmail.com. We appreciate your feedback!

YouTube Tuesday #17: The Secret World of Amusement Parks

The Secret World of Amusement Parks is another 1997-era manifesto from TLC that seeks to explore the fascinating underpinnings of the silly fun park world (TLC and Discovery really loved talking about amusement parks around 1997). However, much like many of the pre-1998 shows (I’m not sure what happened in 1998 to suddenly turn these specials more enjoyable) the show is astonishingly shallow compared to what it promises. Instead of the “secret world of amusement parks,” we get “the secret world of Morgan Manufacturing, amusement park history, community college physics departments, and turning walkways into loops.”

The show suffers from a massive lack of cohesion. In fact, for a show that purports to be about amusement parks, over 40 minutes (two-thirds) of the show is instead about roller coasters. And the only “behind the scenes” we get at the amusement park (which, by the way, is promised in the opening) is a quick chat with a facilities manager and a couple of ride operators. Seriously. That’s it.

In fact, it is very odd (to me at least) that TLC would call this show The Secret World of Amusement Parks in the first place. It is very obviously a show about rides, and roller coasters specifically. Why not just admit the main purpose of the show is to showcase amusement park rides and coasters? Did they really think it would lose viewers?

If you’ve been following our video postings for the last few months, I’m sure you’ve noticed by now that there is a definite presentation pattern to these sorts of roller coaster specials (and make no mistake, this is a roller coaster special). I will give this one a pass, since it was created at the beginning of the amusement park documentary craze, and thus is probably one of the Cro-Magnon forerunners that was copied by uncountable number of specials since. But the same style and presentation format that you’ve seen countless times exists here.

There’s the ubiquitous mention of amusement park history, especially Coney Island in the 1920s and Disneyland. There’s the history of roller coasters, and that means mentioning Russian ice slides and switchback railways and the Flying Turns (not sure exactly why that one came up. One of the experts is really obsessed with that one). We see the standardized explanation of G-Forces and how engineers have to blah blah blah and interview the maintenance manager who says how they have to inspect the ride each day and yadda yadda yadda. And of course we get the whole thing about the coaster wars in the mid-1990s, and how cool hypers and inverted coasters and stand-up coasters are, and how coasters bring in money to the park, etc. You know how you can tell this show is really about roller coasters, and not amusement parks? The show talks more about the Matterhorn being the first tubular steel coaster than Disneyland itself.

The Matterhorn segment though leads to a semi-interesting section going behind-the-scenes with Morgan Manufacturing, who discuss and demonstrate the roller coaster design process in more detail than most other shows. For some reason they also seem to be obsessed with break zones. We also get a nice segment on the early days of S&S, when ol’ Mormon Grunkle Stan reveals the two loves of his life: the Space Shot and the Turbo Drop.

This is a legitimate historical find for theme park documentary aficionados. After this point, half of Stan’s interview time during his segments would be concerned with the upcoming Thrust Air 2000 (which of course became Hypersonic XLC). But here, we get a very interesting discussion as to what led Stan to create S&S in the first place (his love for bungee jumping and the desire to create a “reverse bungee jump” to catapult people into the air). This led to the creation of the Space Shot, which is discussed here in loving detail, and then later the Turbo Drop. The highlight of this segment for me is to see the ORIGINAL Turbo Drop rides in action, pre-Power Tower. For the first year or so of Turbo Drop’s existence, it had that funky kiddy carnival-style logo of a smiley face dropping downwards and the unique color scheme.

We then get some almost interesting discussions of how ride designers look to lure guests in the parks to the coasters (unfortunately, only the “it’s big and cool and loud” and “we try to place them over walkways” discussions are had, nothing new here) before we get into the “we’ve-seen-this-a-million-times” segment of some community college physics professor teaching his class how roller coaster physics work (you can get an idea how cringe-inducing it is when the phrase “that’s right kids, that’s called inertia!” is actually used here). We then get the standard trip to Magic Mountain to ride Superman and float things in the air. It was cool the first thousand times. (BUT, to be fair, the kid on this trip hilariously throws the orange up instead of letting it float and completely whiffs catching it, sending it on a 400-foot vertical death spiral. Probably the highlight of the show).

The only genuinely interesting segment for me starts at around 41:35, where we meet the minds behind the Duell Corporation, the spatial master planners of over 40 theme parks worldwide. In this all-too-short segment (which actually should have at least been the beginning of the program, if not the longest segment, since this is really what the show should be about), Randy Duell and his associates discuss the thought that goes into the spatial design of the benches, bathrooms, food stops, water fountains, etc. of the parks and why certain designs are the way they are. Duell is famous for the “Duell Loop” formation of park walkways, which encompasses a half mile to a mile of walkways and is usually covered in 6-8 hours, which also happens to be the average time for guests to spend at a park. There is also a short trip to Magic Mountain to show the effect of plazas, curves and bends in the walkways, and the specific placement of trees and foliage. Honestly, WAY more time should have been spent showcasing these folks.

And finally, since this is a park special, at the end that means we get a glimpse into THE FUTURE OF THEME PARKS. And of course, since this is the mid-1990s, the future of theme parks is VR, video games, arcades (RIP DQ), and simulators. What’s nice is we get to see some attractions not seen in other park specials, such as the giant XS New York arcade (a precursor to DQ) and the New York Skyride simulator at the Empire State Building. We can’t wait for the future of fun!

Overall, as I stated before I give this special a pass because it’s obviously one of the earlier examples in the canon, and a lot of the shows following can be accused of somewhat plagiarizing the material and the presentation format. But still, for a show that pretends to be about “the secret world of amusement parks,” it tells us a lot about coaster wars and very little about amusement parks. But still, some good stuff if you know where to look. I feel like this could have been a great multi-part miniseries if given the chance.

--ParkScopeJeff (@ParkScopeJeff)

Our Last Ten YouTube Tuesday Features:

#16: Coastermania

#15: Billion Dollar Fun: Creating the Film-Based Attractions at Universal Studios

#14: Amusement Parks: The Pursuit of Fun

#13: Extreme Rides 2000

#12: Thrill Rides: Designing Fear

#11: Inside Disneyland Paris

#10: Scream Parks: Inside Six Flags Magic Mountain

#9: Busch Gardens Tampa Revealed

#8: Inside Universal's Hard Rock Orlando

#7: The Making of Disney-MGM Studios Florida (1989)

**Send Jeff a line at HamGamgee@gmail.com. We appreciate your feedback!

YouTube Tuesday #14: Amusement Parks: The Pursuit of Fun

I am very proud to present this week my all-time favorite amusement park special.

Yes, ever.

Discovery Channel started making these amusement park specials in the mid- to late-1990s, with each one upping the last in production values (and that certainly is not an exaggeration). Beginning in 1996 or so, these specials were very spotty in the beginning and looked like closed-circuit TV documentaries. The Discovery team eventually hit their stride in the 1999-2002 time period, which is far and away the “golden period” for these types of specials. But before 1999, we see the first specials, the ones that tread the new ground, like “Wild Rides,” or “Top Ten Coasters,” or “Billion Dollar Fun,” or “Funhouse.” These were the channel’s first attempt to explain the weird and wonderful science and art of the amusement park.

And in 1998, right as Discovery Channel was getting the hang of making these specials, there came a landmark catch-all show that perfectly summed up the complex thinking and exuberant enthusiasm written into the DNA of our favorite thrill places. This show was called Amusement Parks: The Pursuit of Fun.

The format of the show is brilliant. After exploring the excitement people have for amusement parks, and why people continue to visit in record numbers year after year, the show states that there are four major elements that make up a great park. The rest of the run time is given to exploring these four elements, with each section given its own explanation and tie-in with an existing amusement park, which gets the equivalent of a sort of mini-episode. The show features the very best of the old and new: Cedar Point, Kennywood, Knoebels, Busch Gardens, and Universal Orlando, each given its own segment tied into the show’s greater themes. It’s a tour-de-force of amusement park enthusiasm. It’s so hard for me to explain how perfect this 45 minutes is. All the major aspects of amusement parks are covered in a very limited time. Extended time is given to our favorite parks, almost like mini-specials. The whole thing is wrapped up in a very easy-to-follow package, and follows an exciting umbrella theme. And the amount of information presented here is mind-boggling. I would ask you, as an experiment, after you’ve seen the show in full, to just rewind to a random part of the show. Familiarize yourself with where you are, then skip ahead, say 30-45 seconds. Then just look at the time you skipped and realize how much information is packed into that 30 seconds. This is literally a show that forces you to watch every second! I wonder if the Discovery Channel team didn’t know how many more of these specials were to be made, and packed as much information into this one as possible. It certainly gives that impression. We see in-depth looks at Cedar Point’s coasters and midways, Kennywood’s groves and old-school rides, Knoebels’s carousels, coasters, and haunted house, Busch Gardens Williamsburg’s landscaping, and Universal’s new high-tech attractions. All in 45 minutes! It’s in some ways the Snow White or Toy Story for the Discovery Channel specials: a thesis statement and blueprint for all others to follow. And you won’t find an amusement park special better to emulate, that’s for sure.

The Pursuit of Fun perfectly sums up the reasons why we visit amusement parks year in, year out, and how the parks draw us in and entice us for more. Amusement parks are ostensively a place for us to enjoy ourselves, and to have fun with friends and family. The amusement park is designed to place us in situations for us to have “optimum fun.” Rides are built and designed with the question of “how can this be the most fun” in mind. These rides are placed apart at just the right distance so they are far enough away from other rides that we don’t get overwhelmed, but not far enough away to force us to walk a long distance, tiring us out. In between, there has strategically been placed areas for our comfort: benches, restaurants, shows, shops, fountains, boats. It’s all to provide the “optimum fun” for each guest. The choices have been laid out and given, it is now up to us to determine our own path to optimum fun.

And once we are out of the gentle walkways and onto the metal machines, how is our experience transformed? It is a great way to let off steam, first of all, and provide a momentary escape from the drudgeries of adult life. They’re certainly an adrenaline rush that cannot commonly be found in our day-to-day lives. But, as the show tells us, these rides also help us push our own boundaries, past what we felt we could experience before. Remember your first ride on a hyper-coaster? Or your first ride on a coaster with inversions? How did that ride feel? Every truly new ride we experience pushes our boundaries just a bit further. They meet our need to constantly be challenged, and to push ourselves into new territory. And best of all, we share this experience communally, with dozens of other screaming passengers on board. For amusement parks are, above all, a communal experience.

And how do these parks entice us to visit, and to ride? Walt’s weenie theory personally encapsulates this. For amusement parks, roller coasters act as a flashing neon sign, billboards towering over the horizon, advertising the fun to be had within, enticing us through the gates. They promise us bigger and better high-tech fun every year.

And why do we keep visiting, once we’ve spent a day? The main reason is certainly because we had so much fun we’d like to do it again. It also could be for nostalgia purposes, to experience the same rides we did back in the day with our kids. But the parks also entice us back with innovation. Whether bigger or better rides appear on the horizon every year, or there is a new technology available, parks invest in creativity and authenticity to bring us new and unique rides for our riding pleasure. These new technologies allow the parks to offer new and exotic rides every year to push our curiosity and entice us back.

The show’s excellent presentation structure delivers an encompassing amusement park experience in four major sections, presented as elements to the theme park experience: first, the hair-raising thrills, second, the wide midways with savory aromas and classic attractions, third, providing ways for us to cool down on a hot summer’s day, and fourth, providing a communal experience for us to share our fun with friends and meet new people. These four elements are an excellent starting place for those looking to understand the allure of amusement park fun. One could do worse than to stick to these simple ABCs when designing rides or entire parks.

The thrill rides portion is dominated by Cedar Point (Magnum and Raptor) and Kennywood (Steel Phantom and Thudnerbolt). In it, the show explains how and why the thrill rides are the main attraction in an amusement park visit, as well as the history of the thrill rides from the original Expos and World’s Fairs to Coney Island, then to Disneyland, then to the parks of today. The emphasis, of course, is not just on thrills but also on innovation. From the invention of the Ferris Wheel to the Magnum, innovation has always been a major part of the thrill landscape, a fact many designers somehow forget nowadays.

The midways of the amusement parks have many purposes. They must be wide and inviting to keep people moving, but also be high energy, with bright lights, kinesthetic motion like a good swing ride, and the coasters abutting the midway and roaring overhead. The midway section is not only packed with the history of Kennywood and Knoebels, but also the explanations of just how many components can be packed onto a midway. There are train rides, swing rides, and coasters. There can be action shows in man-made lagoons, or roving marching bands. Fountains. Carnival games. Woods and trees. Savory aromas and classic foods and treats. Flowers. Bells. Fiber Optics and statues. Old rides can provide kinesthetic amusement, like Kennywood’s Turtle Ride or The Whip. New high-tech thrills can soar over the midway, like the Skycoaster, providing good people-watching. Or, the midway can also provide quiet leisure, a place where people can reconvene after a ride, and where old people can sit on a bench. But the beating heart of the midway arteries, we are told, is the carousel. Knoebels’s famous brass ring carousel provides the example. The sound of a carousel organ is an amusement park staple. People are unconsciously drawn to the carousel, and a park cannot survive without it. It’s telling that, on some amusement park surveys, carousels are more closely identified with amusement parks than the roller coasters.

There is no better place for Discovery Channel to explain the process of cooling people off than Busch Gardens Williamsburg. Amusement parks are open during the hottest times of the year, and they are behooved to allow their guests to cool themselves off for maximum comfort. How many different ways can you think of to cool off at a park? You can grab some ice cream. You could dip your hand in a fountain. There are plenty of rides that get you soaked: log flumes, rapids rides, shoot the chutes, and inevitably some water squirt-gun action in the kids area. But did you think of the experiences that get you out of the heat? How about the Sky Tower? Or the simulators and 3-D movies? There are rides like the swings, the parachute drop, or the skyway that cool you down. And at Busch Gardens, the amazing landscaping provides excellent shade, the gigantic air-conditioned restaurants provide great entertainment, and Escape from Pompeii provides not only air-conditioning but also a giant splashdown. (Too bad this show was created before Islands of Adventure opened. Be careful not to drown this time, kids!)

We sometimes forget one of the best traits of an amusement park is the opportunity to have fun with friends and meet new people. And yes, parks do try to communize the experience as much as possible. After all, it’s a very rare ride that allows only one passenger per car. A typical coaster usually has more than a dozen. And with this experience, parks also have certain ways to get people closer together. The classic example, of course, is the bumper cars. But there are also fun houses, carnival games, dark rides, and haunted houses. These experiences create memories real fast, and can introduce you to some new friends who share in your excitement or sheer terror.

Finally, as if the show hadn’t explored the amusement park world enough, it ties back to the original segment of innovation, surviving danger, and pushing our limits of trauma by diving into Universal Orlando and exploring the techno-rides available there, from T2 to Jurassic Park, and how they tie in all the elements that have been explained so far.

I hope you’ll agree that Amusement Parks: The Pursuit of Fun is a perfect example of what the blueprint of what a good amusement park documentary should be. I usually watch this show every Memorial Day weekend, right as the coaster season begins. I’ve never seen any show that gets me more pumped to visit the parks than this one. Off to ride!

--ParkScopeJeff (@ParkScopeJeff)

Our Last Ten YouTube Tuesday Features:

#13: Extreme Rides 2000

#12: Thrill Rides: Designing Fear

#11: Inside Disneyland Paris

#10: Scream Parks: Inside Six Flags Magic Mountain

#9: Busch Gardens Tampa Revealed

#8: Inside Universal's Hard Rock Orlando

#7: The Making of Disney-MGM Studios Florida (1989)

#6: Walt Disney's EPCOT Film and Walt Disney World Announcement

#5: Tony Baxter's Disneyland Construction Commentary

#4: Disneyland's 35th Anniversary Special, Starring Tony Danza

**Send Jeff a line at HamGamgee@gmail.com. We appreciate your feedback!

YouTube Tuesday #10: Scream Parks: Inside Six Flags Magic Mountain

Can you handle 200 Davids conquering Goliath? You’re about to find out!

Full disclosure: I grew up close to Cedar Point. It’s where my family and I liked to spend Memorial Day weekend since I can remember. We’d load up for 2 days/1 night at the Hotel Breakers (which, for the first 15 or so years of my life, was a complete piece of crap hotel. Thanks Dick Kinzel) and spend 2 VERY uncrowded days at the park (HERE’S A SECRET: Cedar Point is DEAD on Sunday/Monday Memorial weekend). Many, if not most, of my fondest amusement park memories come from the Queen of American Watering Places. And, since I grew up with Cedar Point, Six Flags Magic Mountain was evil.

It was. I (along with Joe and most likely anyone else in our tight age bracket and who didn’t live close to a SF park) first learned about Six Flags Magic Mountain (and SF in general) through an annual “Math and Science Day” math contest in the early 1990s. Every year during elementary/middle school, our classes would go into the library to watch the VHS introduction to the math contest, which took place from Six Flags Magic Mountain and featured the overly-hyped Michael Keaton Batman and Looney Tunes characters as they…talked about maths. And we’d all want to do better at math so we could win a trip to “Math and Science Day” at SFMM. And of course, though they were supposed to be talking about math, we got a glimpse of all the rides, coasters, and character encounters at SFMM. And we all thought, “cool, Six Flags is like Cedar Point but with Looney Tunes and Batman.”

Well played, Six Flags marketing team. Well played. But as we got older, we learned of the coaster war between CP and SFMM. And, since CP was in our backyard, we had nothing but disdain for SFMM. And in fact, we refused to visit Six Flags whenever we traveled to a nearby city just out of sheer spite. Six Flags was to Cedar Point as Universal was to Disney in the mid-1990s: an alien parasite that must be shunned and destroyed.

My first visit to a Six Flags came in 1999, when Geauga Lake became Six Flags Ohio. At that point I was old enough not to have a weird grudge against Six Flags any more (okay, I still did a little), but the fact that Geauga Lake would be getting a B&M Floorless, a CCI Woodie, and an Impulse (as well as a Vekoma Flyer the next year) I was absolutely over the moon. So I got a season pass RIGHT AWAY.

That leads us to just recently. I finally was able to visit Magic Mountain a few years ago, and the first time I went was with Joe (I think, I might have gone once before that). And it is legitimately an excellent thrill park. Though, the fact that the middle of the park is a literal mountain makes walking around annoying. But riding Superman, X2, Tatsu, Terminator (at the time), Riddler’s Revenge, etc. for the first time was going into a candy store. And I was impressed they still kept the pleasant central plaza area with the fountains, as well as all the green on the mountain. Those are memories I’m certain an uncountable number of SoCal residents have from their childhoods, just as Joe and I have memories of Cedar Point.

In 2000/2001, the Discovery Channel was on an absolute tear with theme park documentaries. I don’t know if there was an executive there who was obsessed with roller coasters, or if they got huge ratings on the initial shows they released in the late-1990s, but they seemed to be making them every five minutes. This particular show focused on Six Flags Magic Mountain, and was to my knowledge the first of a series they hoped to call “Scream Parks.”

One would assume, for example, that calling the actual show “Scream Parks” would begin a continuing series. You would expect, too, that most likely Cedar Point would be next. But instead, the next year Cedar Point would get its own show, called “World’s Largest Amusement Park.” And to my knowledge, the Scream Parks series would never really get off the ground.

Which is a shame, because Discovery Channel seemed to have a good thing going here. The show is framed with the periodic storyline of “building a new coaster,” as the construction of Goliath in 1999/2000 is explored in full detail during some transition points of the show, from the conceptual stage, to design, to the construction of the load area, to the testing, and finally to 200 DAVIDS RIDING GOLIATH DURING THE OPENING CEREMONY. Which, let’s be real, is brilliant marketing. Well played again, Six Flags marketing team.

I think this kind of series could have really took off. Think of the potential of doing a show on each of the major “Scream Parks” around the world. They could have followed the construction of Kingda Ka at Six Flags Great Adventure, or Hypersonic XLC at King’s Dominion, or Lightning Racer at Hersheypark, or Powder Keg at Silver Dollar City, or Voyage at Holiday World, or Manta, or any one of 100 Supermans. The possibilities are endless.

And, as I said in last week's Busch Gardens article, even though these amusement park shows seem to take us through the same behind the scenes activities (“look how big our central kitchen/gift shop/maintenance sheds are!”), since these areas are different at every park, it always seems new. So, tethered to the storyline of Goliath rising, we get some behind the scenes roller coaster maintenance footage (safety inspections on Viper, sensor maintenance on Riddler, , as well as some great footage of the tool crib, the landscaping with the Facilities Manager, the vehicle maintenance on the Batman stunt show, the communications center, Bugs Bunny World, and the restaurant kitchens.

But my favorite part starts at 35:38, when we see the FrightFest segment, and the behind-the-scenes of how they do the monster make-up and some scary effects. As a HHN fan, this made me happy.

“Scream Parks are all about thrills. If you don’t have major roller coasters, you’re never going to be a Scream Park.” –Six Flags PR Guy

Oh, and one last thing. Since apparently I fell asleep or something while recording this, there’s an old-school Apple iMac “Think Different” commercial starting at 29:32. You’re welcome, internet.

--ParkScopeJeff (@ParkScopeJeff)


Other YouTube Tuesday Features:

#9: Busch Gardens Tampa Revealed

#8: Inside Universal's Hard Rock Orlando

#7: The Making of Disney-MGM Studios Florida (1989)

#6: Walt Disney's EPCOT Film and Walt Disney World Announcement

#5: Tony Baxter's Disneyland Construction Commentary

#4: Disneyland's 35th Anniversary Special, Starring Tony Danza

#3: DisneyQuest Chicago Opening Coverage (1999)

#2: Disneyland Opening Day Special (Dateline: Disneyland, 1955)

#1: The Disneyland Story (Disneyland Episode #1, 1954)

**Send Jeff a line at HamGamgee@gmail.com. We appreciate your feedback!