Trip Report: I-X Indoor Amusement Park
Brook Park, Ohio - 04/25/2004

"The chain should have been a dead giveaway."

The International eXposition Center (IX Center) is a cavernous rectangular building on the grounds of the Cleveland airport. I had heard that the place was scheduled for demolition for an airport runway extension, but a kiosk inside the building indicates that the building has been spared from destruction until "at least 2017, probably longer." For fifteen years now, the I-X Center has played host to Bates Amusements and Bates Brothers Amusements which every spring set up both shows and a slew of booked-in rides for a month. The I-X Indoor Amusement Park has traditionally been a good place to ride new carnival rides, as new rides have frequently been booked into this event on their way to carnivals across the country. A Soriani & Moser Top Spin appeared here a month before the Texas Twister (Huss Top Spin) opened at Geauga Lake. The first Skycoaster I ever saw had no towers as then ropes were attached to the roof of the I-X Center. Chance booked their first Chaos in here when it was new, and it was at the I-X Center that I took my first rides on the Inverter and the Tornado. There isn't enough room for some of the big European super-spectacular rides, but it's still an extensive show.

Parking is free this year, so I selected a space, entered the building, and paid my $18 POP. Just inside is the entrance to the event. The corner of the building closest to the entrance was laid out as an extensive kiddieland, featuring several beautiful new kiddie rides built by the Bates organization. One of these was particularly interesting...its vehicles resemble Plymouth Prowler automobiles, and because the vehicles are so long, they are staggered two rows deep. The way they were attached to the center caused them to run at a kind of a strange angle. There were also a couple of Hamptons, a kiddie swing, a kiddie Scrambler, and the centerpiece of it all, an Eli Spider Mania. Picture a Scrambler mated with a Yo-Yo and you get the general idea.

On down the aisle I finally got to the big rides, starting with a Yo-Yo that isn't big enough for those of us who fall outside the ASTM guidelines [Footnote 1]. Behind that was a roller coaster.

I must be out of practice or something. I looked at the decorative fencing around the ride platform and promptly misidentified the ride as a Galaxi. Sorry, this one is a Zyklon. And I have ridden it before...in 2000 it was sitting in this very spot. In fact, that time I shot on-board video of the ride. Not this time around. The operators would have permitted it, but...well, quite frankly, I already have video of this one! They had a bunch of cars running and were pushing people through very nicely with only a short wait. It runs about like any good Zyklon.

Next to the coaster was the log flume, which is insanely popular, but which didn't seem to me to be a good idea in a dark, air-conditioned building. I think it was a Reverchon. Walking past it took me to the back of the hall, past the Ring of Fire, to an odd new ride that was making a lot of noise. It's called the Mega-Bouncer, and was apparently built by ARM, like seemingly most of the rides in Bates' collection. The ride bears a sort of passing resemblance to the Flying Coaster [Footnote 2] though equipped with molded seats and shoulder bars (strike 1...). Each sweep is mounted on a pneumatic cylinder, and as the center rotates, the sweeps literally bounce up and down in a rhythmic pattern. I'm a big fan of the Flying Coaster, so I had to give this thing a try.

I'm afraid I was more than a little disappointed. It's certainly capable of doing some neat things, but the ride profile is all wrong. When the sweeps go up and down, they bounce. Or rather, they half-bounce. The sweep goes up rapidly, slows, stops, goes down, then suddenly bounces back up again. That is to say, all the bouncing happens on the downstroke. So when the tub goes down, the rider gets hit with a sudden strong downward force as the tub reverses direction, but when the tub goes up, the rider feels nothing at all. What was the designer thinking? Is this what flat rides have come to? Where is the fun in that? The whole point behind the Flying Coaster is that sudden bounce at the top of the jump ramp, and this ride doesn't do it at all. The designer took a brilliant classic ride concept, applied modern technology...and completely screwed it up. Okay, it isn't as bad of a screw-up as the Chance Aviator. The Mega-Bounce is eminently salvageable...it wouldn't be practical to just reverse the valve polarity, but it wouldn't be terribly difficult to fix otherwise, either, and could probably be handled through software. But as it now stands, it tries to be a Flying Coaster, and it fails at that miserably.

Let me see...there is a Banzai, a Skymaster, and a Ring of Fire, all variations on a theme. Across the midway is the ARM Quasar, and unlike most Quasars I have seen, this one is operating [Footnote 3]. Across from the Quasar is a familiar looking, but somehow strangely different ride. It's a dodecagonal green expanded-metal cylinder mounted on a trailer. Iain would absolutely hate it, but I decided I needed to give it a try. It's a Dartron Zero Gravity, and it is new this season. The operator brought it to a stop, walked up the stairs, unfolded two railings, released a safety catch, and lowered one wall of the cylinder to form an exit stairway. Thereupon, 33 people came trotting out, and 33 of us walked up the stairs and into the cylinder. Each of us stood in one of the spaces around the outer wall and waited for the ride to begin. The cylinder rotated, and once it got up to speed, the boom on the back of the trailer began to rise. The ride is an updated copy of the Hrubetz Round-Up, and it gives a nearly identical ride...perhaps the forces are just a little stronger, and the ride has full-length pads on the outside of the drum, so it's a little more comfortable than the Round-Up. I think it also tips up a little higher than the Round-Up, but like the classic rides, it doesn't go completely vertical. It gives a ride very much like the original, but it looks like this thing is a lot simpler to set up and take down, and it's a much simpler ride than a Zendar. Given the success that Dartron has had with remaking the Paratrooper, they might sell a bunch of these things.

Speaking of which, there was a remade Paratrooper, specifically a Cliff Hanger sitting idle across the floor, right next to Amusements of America's Crazy Mouse coaster, which I last rode at the Ohio State Fair. I rode it here, as well. It was my longest wait of the day at about 20 minutes. The ride runs efficiently enough, but it feels odd going up the lift hill sideways. Unfortunately, right after the tub pin released, as we careened around that first spin-inducing U-turn, I felt something bad happen in my left shoulder. I like these Crazy Mouse coasters, but after that, I was ready for my ride to be over. My shoulder hurt like hell, and there wasn't a thing I could do about it. Ouch! I'm hoping this turns out to be something related to the construction project I've been doing at home. I exited the ride and started wandering the floor.

Ah, yes, that will do nicely.

The Cycloid has lost the light panels from the backs of the seats, but it has lost none of its force, and the sustained rearward force was exactly what I needed to soothe whatever I had screwed up in my back. The Cycloid, you may recall, is the oversize, updated, bi-directional, trailer-mount hydraulic drive Scrambler update that Eli Bridge built in 1997 and apparently never sold again. That ride simply felt good. Much more than I can say for the Dartron Downdraft that I rode later. It's a neat ride, but the lateral force on it is just too strong to be pleasant.

The hall was absolutely filled with rides, including a free-fall tower and all the usual lunch-recyclers. Bates amusement companies are to be commended for putting on a nice show and for keeping all of their rides in tip-top condition. Including their Hrubetz Tip-Top, an increasingly rare and possibly antique flat ride. It even has its original signs on it. Bates was showing, as I recall, two bona-fide classic rides, the other one was an Eyerly Rock-O-Plane. If you didn't know these were classic rides, it would be hard to tell, as both are in showroom condition. I was going to test their committment to the "no single riders" sign on the Rock-O, but ended up not going back for a ride after I screwed up my back.

I did take a ride on the I-X Center's Chance Ferris wheel, the one that is mounted with its hub at the building's roof line. It's an interesting idea, although the view you get through the barrel-vault is of the I-X Center's expansive roof, with the Cleveland Airport tarmac and runways beyond, which are only slightly more interesting. The most appropriate word for it would be, "flat." The aerial view of the carnival is somewhat more interesting.

In all, it was a decent show. There is a nice selection of flat rides, along with two good-but-not-spectacular coasters. Hey, for the month of April, it's the best that Northern Ohio can do. And it's well done, with Bates providing two of the best looking traveling shows I have ever seen.

The I-X Indoor Amusement Park closed for the season on May 2, 2004. Web sites with routing information are available for both Bates Amusement and Bates Brothers Amusement Company (show contractors) and for Amusements of America (owner of the Crazy Mouse).

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

Footnote 1: Chance has changed the restriction on the Yo-Yo to reflect the fact that ASTM says the weight limit goes to 264 pounds when you have a 22" wide seat...but Bates still says 170 lbs. [Return to text]

Footnote 2: Flying Coaster - refer to Kennywood where they call it the Kangaroo [Return to text]

Footnote 3: Usually when I see a Quasar, the center is propped up, a deck plate has been removed, and unbroadcastable words are emanating from the open pit. [Return to text]

--DCAjr

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