Sunday was a gorgeous day, which is a bit out of character for a Kings Island opening weekend. But I did not let the absence of rain, sleet, subfreezing temperatures, low grey clouds, and general nastiness keep me from the park. I collected John Peck at his home, and we arrived at Kings Island just before 9:30.
$9 to park a car this season. I got the parking pass with my season pass renewal last fall, but really, a $9 parking fee is really out of hand for an amusement park. People like to trot out the stadium example, but I have to point out that it really is not a good comparison. Stadium parking is usually run by businesses independent of the venue in places where land is scarce and expensive. At a park, the park owns a huge chunk of ground set aside for parking. There really is no reason they can't include parking as part of the admission charge. The simple fact is, amusement park parking charges are out of control.
I forewent the upcharge premium parking area, and took one of the last non-wheelchair spots in the "secret" non-upcharge preferred parking area. I parked the car, opened the trunk, removed my Leatherman and pager from my belt, re-secured my trousers, grabbed my camera bag, and headed for the main gate. A huge collection of walk-through magnetometers has been installed at the edge of the brick patio, between the tram circle and the ticket booths. There are lots of machines, and the park had better plan on having a couple of people available just to direct traffic. I approached, pulled the camera from its bag, set the camera on the table and stepped through. Alarms sounded, so I divested myself of a pocket full of stuff, sailed through, then collected all my stuff. What a ridiculous pain in the neck. And now here I am in the park with no tools. I hope they do a better job of keeping the chewing gum off the midways than they did last season! [Footnote 1]
Once inside, I proceeded immediately to the new meeting place partway down the South side of International Street. The Royal Fountains have received a much-needed overhaul involving most obviously a whole lot of blue paint, and less obviously some service to the fountains themselves. At the West end of the fountain, a new park logo has been erected, where the big ugly Tomb Raider display was last season. The interesting thing about this new park logo is that it is not, in fact, the new park logo, but rather the old park logo, with the words "KINGS ISLAND" flanking the Paramount corporate logo. This is worth noting because one of the changes for 2003 is that Kings Island has a new park logo. It's very much like the old logo, but the park name is in a "friendlier" font, and the 22 identical stars of the Paramount logo have been replaced with eleven progressively smaller stars suggesting the motion of the Paramount logo found at the beginning of many Paramount films.
With a large group of coaster nuts present, park representative Jeff Siebert climbed up behind a penny press, which made a pretty good podium. In fact I had to look twice to see that it wasn't in fact a podium. Jeff welcomed us all to the second day of the new season, and noted that several rides would be opening late, and that Tomb Raider probably wouldn't be operating at all. He also noted that Son of Beast is getting new restraints for this season, but apparently seven months was not enough time for the unnamed supplier to get the pieces built. He then divided the group. The group self-selected into two bunches. One bunch went back to The Beast, the rest of us followed Jeff to the park's big new ride, Delirium.
Delirium is a Huss Giant Frisbee. Take a Pirat ride, scale it up to an 87-foot crossbeam, and replace the boat with a large ring, 50 seats all facing outward. The ring rotates slowly as the pendulum swings as high as 137 feet, more than 25 degrees past horizontal. The ride was slow to open as there seemed to be some unresolved issues with the ride controls, so we got to see the ride run a couple of times before all the appropriate people gave the ride their †blessing and we were invited to board. There are actually two boarding areas. Riders are collected into two groups of 25, and both groups are simultaneously taken to the ride and distributed to their seats around the ring. There is no platform around this ride, it is set low enough that the boarding area is flush with the midway. Because it is a feet-dangling ride, there is a circular drop-floor directly beneath the ride boarding area. It's a set of metal panels made from this European-style cheese-grater stuff with the holes punched from the back side. Once I start wearing sandals to the park I may think twice about riding just because of what that cheese-grater can do to bare feet! The floor is just big enough to give you a place to stand for loading, then there is an open pit in the center. I sat down in my seat and pulled down the shoulder bar. The seat mold is similar to that used for Tomb Raider (Giant Top Spin) and gave me plenty of space. The shoulder bar is a lousy design with oversized pads on the shoulders. These pads make it so that for a bigger, taller rider like me, the bottom of the bar cannot come down into my lap, They also hold the bar up high enough on the shoulders to largely obscure lateral vision. I don't quite know what the pads are for; they are not soft, and without them the bar might actually come close to fitting properly. As with all feet-dangling rides in Paramount parks, there is a safety belt which comes up between the legs and hooks to the shoulder bar. It's unnecessary with this seat mold and bar design, but Kings Island made it plenty long. Their caution in this regard is understandable. Once everybody was secured, the floor dropped in an interesting manner. It is hinged at the outside edge, so the center drops, and it changes from a ring into a funnel. Somebody described it as a "villain's trap," referring to the kind of trouble Adam West used to get into in the "Batman" TV series.
The ride begins by rotating, not very fast, but I didn't count the speed. Immediately the arm starts swinging, wasting no time in getting up to full amplitude. It's very much more like the swinging motion on a Ranger than a Pirat. It also differs significantly from the Psyclone, the Mondial version of this ride at Canada's Wonderland. With any pendulum, the natural period of that pendulum is described as:
T
= 2*pi(sqr(L/g))
...where L is the length of the pendulum and g is gravitational acceleration, here about 32 ft/sec/sec. For an 87-foot pendulum such as this one, the period of oscillation should be about 10.3 seconds. The time of swing is determined by the length of the suspension, and as Galileo observed centuries ago, remains constant even as the amplitude of the swing changes. On the Mondial ride up at Wonderland, the ride designers took advantage of this and timed the rotation of the ring so that one rotation of the disc required one full swing of the pendulum. That way, on every swing, you are in the same position around the ring. By comparison, Kings Island's Huss ride has a different rotation rate so that you are in a different position on every swing, so just about everybody on the ride has a chance to be looking up, looking down, or looking sideways at the peak of the swing. I think I like the variation of Delirium better than the consistency of Psyclone. There is a neat bit of weightlessness at the peak of the swing which is emphasized if you're inverted and looking up at a featureless, cloudless, deep blue sky. I tried to ask Iain which ride he preferred, since he rode Wonderland's Psyclone probably hundreds of times last season, but he was (dare I say it?) delirious.
It's a wonderful ride, but still new and imperfect. It came to a stop but didn't center quite right, and required a bit of electronic persuasion before it would allow the floor to come up and us to get off. Finally we were able to get off, and the final glitch with the ride became clear: It has a large capacity, but only a single exit gate. It really needs a double-wide exit gate. Apart from little issues like that, it's a tremendous new ride, very well received, and generally well executed.
By this time the park was completely open, and the enormous group of coaster nuts proceeded to Drop Zone. I once again ended up in the seat opposite the doghouse. That ride is a whole lot taller than it needs to be, it rotates scenically on the way up (you Kings Dominion people don't know what you're missing by not having the rotation!), and it drops for ages as it comes down the tower. It took two cycles to get all the coaster nuts through, then the group began to break apart. Before long it was down to me, John, Scott Short and Howard Gilooly. We decided it was time to head for the Flying Scooters. It took us quite a long time to get there, though. First we passed by the boarded up remains of the Oktoberfest Beer Garden, which is being renovated, then past the front of the building which is being renovated into "Bubba Gump's Shrimp Shack". It looks like it's gonna be nice, and the previews I've read in industry publications sound promising. I am a little distressed that bratwurst will apparently no longer be available anywhere in the park. I didn't think that was legal in the Cincinnati (Porkopolis) area.
Moments later we were boarding Adventure Express. I had heard that the ride was getting theming refurbishment, but there was still no dinging bell on the first tunnel and no moving spears. The creaking timbers on the first lift are louder than ever, though, and on the second lift all the guys are pounding hard, and both of the boss's eyes are lit up.
Around the corner from Adventure Express, and still on the way back to the Flying Scooters, is the Racer. A quick ride reveals that there is no evidence of any cosmetic repair whatsoever to the forward-running trains, and most important, they still have not done anything to fix the lap bars. To make matters worse, I have lost some weight over the past few months, so unfortunately, I got stuck. Those trains are absolutely terrible, they need new soft seats and the new, properly adjusted lap bar mechanisms. Combine the crummy train with a track that is running more than a little rough, and add in that brake on the turnaround that literally sucks the life out of the ride's return run, and you've got an amazingly mediocre coaster. Such a shame. Racer used to be fun. 8-(
We finally made it around to the Flying Scooters, bypassing Flight of Fear in the process. My technique is a little rusty, but I was still able to fly pretty well. A few flights later, the wait was getting longer and we opted to go visit the Action F/X Theater.
It appears that there are two new movies running this season in the Action F/X Theater, but only one was available to us, an animated 3D flick involving an interesting little critter called Spongebob Squarepants. As nearly as I can tell, Spongebob inhabits an undersea world where he is a line cook in a fast-food restaurant. The premise is that we're making up a Krabby Patty for a customer, and must include the last pickle from the jar, which is stolen, so we chase after it. Simple enough. The film is entertaining, even for those of us who know almost nothing about the Spongebob Squarepants phenomenon, but the film really doesn't stand on its own. It's a vehicle [Footnote 2] for the Iwerks Turbo Tour seat, but the motion really adds little to the film. It's in 3D, but how much of a 3D effect do you expect from a cartoon? It's a whole lot better than 7th Portal was, and a lot less likely to cause personal injury than Smash Factory. It was yet another attempt to get away from the car-chase movie with the motion theater, and it almost works, I guess.
It had taken us all morning, but we finally made it back to Rivertown's signature ride, The Beast. The most dramatic change here was to the ride's entrance queue. There is some evidence of this kind of thing elsewhere in the park, but The Beast has about the most dramatic example. The standard ride queue has been re-done so that you enter in the usual place, continue past the drink vending machines and down to the first queue house. There, the queue immediately doubles back, goes past a smaller queue house behind the vending machines, up the ramp, and into the uptrack end of the station. Meanwhile, a new entrance feeds around the back of the first queue house, through a new bridge path, up the ramp, and into the downtrack end of the station. The two queues run together up the ramp, which has already been the source of quite a bit of queue jumping. The theory has been that these added queues are for Kings Island's speculated queue management system, but the evidence suggests otherwise. On The Beast, for instance, the new entrance is a longer path than the standard entrance when the queue houses are not in use. If they wanted a short entrance for The Beast, they could have just split the entrance the other way, running the short queue on the right side of the fence, down towards the old nature trail, across the (existing) bridge and up the stairs at the uptrack end of the station. This suggests to me that the second entrance is for the Walk-On Wednesdays gold-pass program coming up later this season.
Anyway, this was pretty much a moot point for us as there were very few people on the platform when we arrived. We all opted to queue up for the lead seat for a change. I am told that for my ride I was one of six people on the train.
At least some of the rumors turned out to be true. At the bottom of the first drop, The Beast's first left-hand curve has not just been retracked, but totally rebuilt with a heavier structure. The other rumor was that this work would allow the trim brakes to finally be removed from the first drop for good, but so far that has turned out not to be the case. On the other hand, Howard noted that on Saturday, workers were seen still pounding away at the new curve even as the ride operated, so it is very possible that the construction simply isn't done yet. For the moment, there is still heavy braking on the first drop, heavier braking on the second hill, and really really heavy braking at the downtrack end of the mid-course brake shed. The result is that the middle third of the ride, between the mid-course brake and the second lift is depressingly slow. I guess it's the same old The Beast as ever!
More or less at this point, we took a long break for lunch, mutually agreeing to meet up at the entrance to the new dark ride.
(time passes, and the four adventurers do indeed meet at the entrance to the dark ride)
The old Phantom Theater building has undergone an impressive transformation. It is now the "Ghastly Manor" [Footnote 3], a stone castle trimmed in flourescent orange and green. We entered over the new "stone" bridge, with every Scooby Doo TV show theme playing in the background [Footnote 4]. Inside we begin in a room that looks suspiciously like the Phantom Theater lobby, minus the Maestro and his organ. In the corner of this room, a clearly-marked SECRET PANEL has been opened...a bookcase has been slid aside revealing a dark hallway. Personally, I think the park goofed here. There are metal handrails leading through the room and into the hallway; I think they should have left a gap in the handrails big enough for the bookcase to slide through. In the hallway, the openings containing the reverse-relief busts have been "carelessly" boarded over and pair of red eyes can be seen peeking through the boards. A very close examination, particularly when aided with the night shot feature on a video camera, reveals that the reverse-relief busts are still there. Nice to see that something has survived from the Phantom Theater.
Upon reaching the loading bridge, a curtain obscures your view of the start of the ride, but you can see the floor of the loading platform as it whizzes past. Yipe! The ride is FAST, and even though it has only half the cars of Phantom Theater, loading is a very quick process. It's the same old cars that Phantom Theater used, but the cars have new Mystery Machine paint jobs on them, and the hinged front hood of the car has been equipped with a new dashboard assembly with three guns, each with its own score counter.
The car cruises out of the station and for the first part of the ride your photo is taken, and Shaggy explains how the guns work. Then there is a series of cartoonish scenes. I don't remember much about them as I was mostly busy cussing at my clearly-defective gun. I scored something like 160 points over the course of the ride, so the gun wasn't completely dead, but a few of the targets are literally at point-blank range and I couldn't get them to work.
The disappointing thing about the new ride is that while Phantom Theater had gorgeous scenes in it with elaborate decoration and decidedly high-end animated figures, the Haunted Castle returns to flourescent paint on flat cut-outs. There are more actions, as most of the targets apparently cause the little cutouts to pop out from their hiding places (John's gun was sort of working). And there is a lot of stuff going on in there. It's a cool little ride, it looks neat, and it would be absolutely fantastic, except for one thing: It, quite frankly, doesn't look as good inside as Phantom Theater did.
The ride went from a highly detailed realistic theater to a blacklit cartoon. It looks great, in fact it looks more like a classic dark-pride than ever before. It's just a completely different style of dark ride. And it is apparently tremendously popular.
We crossed the midway to make another circuit of the park. Our next stop was Top Gun, which is once more operating two trains. It is clearly obvious that the first four cars of Train #2 have brand-new passenger tubs while the other ten cars are generally dented and faded. Car #6 of Train #2 is odd, as it isn't faded, but the molding on the side is dented. I wonder if that tub was replaced last season. Anyway, Top Gun is back to giving its usual best-of-its-kind-but-way-too-short rides. I'm glad to see this one back up to two trains.
Scott and Howard took off to return home (this was their third day in the park) and John and I proceeded to visit rides we had previously missed.
This meant we next waited for Son of Beast. We needn't have bothered. Son of Beast is down to one train now (remember, Train #2 is allegedly out having its restraints replaced), and it remains a wood coaster with almost no redeeming qualities. I must reemphasize here that IT'S THE TRAINS, FOLKS! The seats offer absolutely no cushioning, and the cars are incapable of properly tracking curves on a layout that is almost entirely curves. An undercarriage that can follow the track would first of all not tear the track up so badly, and second, would eliminate this side-to-side oscillation that beats riders up so badly. Seats that were properly padded would make the remaining wood coaster shuffle-and-bounce not hurt so much. And seats and restraints designed to accommodate actual humans would inflict less punishment on riders. Is it Kings Island's corporate policy that all wood coasters over 40' tall have to have lousy trains on them? I thought Son of Beast was going to be the coaster that proved that giant wood coasters didn't have to stink. Instead, it has inapropriately proved the opposite point. Dees-gusting. I just hope that the work being done to the trains this time is an actual improvement, unlike the last two half-hearted train mods. I figure there is hope, after all, look what they did to Flight of Fear. But how long do we have to wait for this one?
A short line led to another ride on Delirium. This is a great addition to the park's line up, and its popularity in two days of operation seems to prove it.
We finished up our day with rides on Face/Off, which is getting just a little rough, Vortex which has not changed a bit in the off season, on Beastie which still needs to lose that trim brake on the third turn, and on Rugrats Runaway Reptar Roller Coaster, which has received some interesting but subtle changes to the hardware covers on the chassis. The canvas "crap catchers" are gone from the hitches, and shiny new diamond-plate covers have been installed under each wheel set.
In the end, we spent the day taking in the park at a pretty relaxed pace, and as it turns out I pushed myself a little too far without food (I hadn't had dinner the night before, and I didn't stop through the day until dinner time after the park closed) so in deference to my headache we left the park a few minutes early. But in general it was a good day in the park. I'm a little distressed at the things that didn't get done in the off season, in that much of the park looks like it was simply abandoned for six months and then restarted. But the new installations are coming along nicely, and all of the major new attractions were ready on opening day, which has to be some kind of a record for Kings Island. I was also impressed at some of the less obvious stuff that did get done over the winter (the fountains, for instance: is it 1972 again?). I know from experience that the off-season really isn't finished yet for this park, so it isn't quite fair to judge their upkeep based on the first operating weekend of the season. There is a lot of cleaning and painting that can, and experience says, probably will, still be done in the next few weeks. I think Kings Island is going to have a good season this year.
--Dave Althoff, Jr.
Footnote 1: On one visit last season, in the darkness of the Flight of Fear queue I got my shoe stuck to a wad of gum. It took about ten minutes of scraping with a penknife before I was able to walk again...[Return to text]
Footnote 2: For the lack of a better term...[Return to text]
Footnote 3: Well it's painted in a ghastly manner, anyway...[Return to text]
Footnote 4: How many "The New Adventures of Scooby Doo" series have there been, anyway? [Return to text]
--DCAjr.
Next: Paramount's Kings Island (#2)
Back to Trip Reports 2003