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"Absorbent and yellow and poised to take over the world!"
I was out late on Saturday, and really didn't feel like driving to a park two states away on Sunday morning. In fact, I didn't feel like doing much of anything on Sunday morning, apart from sleeping in. But that's not what a coaster nut is supposed to do on a nice warm weekend day! So I climbed into the car and drove down to Paramount's Kings Island.
When I arrived, there was a bit of a back-up to get through the parking gate. Naturally, I picked the shortest line, which happened to be the far left-hand lane. That turned out to be a mistake, as Kings Island had not indicated that they were running the booth "Six Flags style." While there was an attendant for each booth, the attendant on the left-most booth was standing on the right-hand side of the lane. When are these parks going to realize that in the United States, more than 99% of all vehicles have the driver on the left-hand side? I've run into this same trouble at Geauga Lake and at Great America.
The first thing I noticed was the new sign in the parking lot. You may recall that last summer, the old sign blew down in a storm. A month ago, large new concrete foundation posts appeared on the site where the sign once stood. I know that Kings Island has released a rendering of the new sign, and everything I had heard indicated that construction ought to be going on by now. So I was understandably surprised to see that the two new foundation posts are there, and nothing else appears to have changed.
From the look of the parking lot, the park would probably be crowded. Once I passed through the gauntlet of magnetometers, ticket booths, and entrance gates, that proved to be the case. You know, Kings Island used to be second to none in moving people from the parking lot to the entrance plaza; in recent years, though, first with the addition of the me_al detectors, then by reducing the me_al detector staff, then by limiting the number of open gates, then by adding more hoops for people to jump through (thumbprint scans on second-day tickets, for example) they have made entering the park into something of a chore.
Once finally inside the park, I successfully dodged the photographers, and set off on a circuitous route back to The Beast. That's right, my first stop of the day was NOT the Flying Scooter. With the large crowd, and the lack of any obvious traffic pattern in this park, I started with The Beast, knowing that line would only get longer. It should not have been an unreasonable wait, but for some strange reason, it was taking nearly three minutes for the crews to get the trains out. It's the same phenomenon I have seen all over this season: coasters that are taking an exceptionally long time to load, for no readily discernible reason. The result was a wait that was about twice as long as it should have been...a good half-hour when it should have been about fifteen minutes. Up on the platform, I noticed that there has been a significant change to the platform, and I don't quite understand why. A new surveillance camera has been added above the doghouse, with a view of the exit side of the loading platform. I know that's what it is 'looking' at because its signal is being piped to a 27" color monitor on the exit side of the platform at about Unload 3. I don't quite understand it because this camera is monitoring the one part of the ride that the operator in the doghouse can actually see directly while running the ride. I do have one theory...I have noticed this season that the platform attendants at Kings Island have become more picky about *what* crap they will allow riders to leave behind; specifically that they are now requiring that ladies take their purses with them on the coasters. I wonder if that new camera is feeding a video recorder in order to better insure the security of peoples' left-behind belongings.
Out on the ride, things have not changed a whole lot. They've changed a little, unfortunately, and that change is not for the better. The train is *bouncing* this year, and they've slowed it down more in the mid-course brake shed, so that once again it 'runs out of gas' in the long tunnel on the way to the second lift. When it gets down into the valley, it hammers up and down rather than rolling the way one would expect. I don't pretend to know what is going on in Kings Island's maintenance department this season, but I do know that The Beast is slipping badly, its rideability fast approaching that of Son of Beast across the park, and that is most decidedly not a good thing. After the second lift, the sustained lateral force of the helix was replaced by a lot of lateral jerking, a lot of vertical bouncing, and in general, a rough-as-hell ride. This isn't the way The Beast is supposed to run, and it isn't the way The Beast usually runs. When I got off the ride, I had a bad headache and no desire to do it again.
I went on up the midway for my Flying Scooter ride. The crowd had begun to build, but it was still only a one-cycle wait for the ride. I climbed into a tub and took off. Unfortunately, something has changed here as well. Of all the things they could have imported from Cedar Fair, why did they have to adopt their flat-ride cycle times? The actual cycle time on the Flying Scooters probably isn't any shorter, but the ride time is dramatically shortened...then once the motor shuts off, the ride coasts for an inordinately long time before finally coming to a stop. This long brakeless coast has forced a shorter powered cycle, making for annoyingly brief rides. When I got off, instead of riding again, I went to the Vortex.
I don't know what they are doing with Vortex, or maybe it is something I am doing different. But the ride feels faster now in the back half. The train still comes to a screeching halt on the mid-course brake run, but for some reason it didn't feel like I got dumped into the shoulder bar during the corkscrew this time.
On my way back to Flight of Fear, I noticed that the new parade obviously originates in the service area next to the Racer, entering the park through the service gate behind the Wave Swinger. Orange lines on the midway demarcate the parade route, which takes up nearly the full width of the midway, making me wonder where people are supposed to stand to watch this parade. Anyway, I visited Flight of Fear, but didn't ride it because the entire queue house was full, and the line didn't seem to be moving.
Racer has deteriorated a bit this season, but its biggest problem remains its AWFUL train. What is up with Kings Island and their wood coasters this season?
Adventure Express is still missing its third train. The park was getting hammered with customers while their highest capacity coaster was running at or below 66% capacity. What's with Arrow mine trains losing trains this season? Gemini went down to four trains, Adventure Express down to two trains...At least Adventure Express is a capacity monster to begin with (well, by Kings Island standards, anyway) so the wait still wasn't awful. Not like the hour or more that The Beast and Flight of Fear were showing.
I rode Top Gun, apart from its diminutive length probably the best suspended coaster in the United States, but escaped riding Son of Beast as the ride had just gone down mechanical when I walked past. I opted for lunch at Bubba Gump's, which has a fish and chips basket that is a pretty good value. What I don't understand is why, if you substitute one piece of fish and a bun with lettuce and tomato for the three generous fish fillets in the basket, there is a substantial increase in price. Is it some kind of convenience charge for a fish dinner you can eat without utensils? Are tomatoes and buns more expensive than fish? The world may never know, but if you eat at Bubba Gump's, bear in mind that the fish dinner appears to be a better value than the fish sandwich. And it's pretty darned good, three pieces of fish served with fries and cole slaw.
After lunch, I opted to visit the waterpark, starting with a trip to my car for more appropriate clothing. On my way back into the park, I got sidetracked when I spotted someone carrying a very large video camera and a set of sticks near the front gate. It was a local television news cameraman, a reporter, and a park PR representative (though not anyone I recognized). Wondering what was up, I followed them into the park. They stopped at the Sling Shot ride, an upcharge attraction where two riders are strapped into a gondola suspended on a couple of wire ropes connected to a cage full of springs such that energy stored in the springs is used to launch the gondola 200' into the air. I noticed that the ride was shut down, but there were no obvious problems with it. The camera man took a few pictures, then was off. I wonder why, on a busy day in the middle of the peak season, a news crew would be interested in a 3-year-old ride that isn't even operating. I never did get an answer, and from the sound of things, whatever the situation was apparently wasn't ultimately deemed newsworthy [Footnote 1].
My trip back to the waterpark was probably more noteworthy. I decided to ride the train back to Boomerang Bay, but I had apparently just missed it. The park was very busy, but the wait for the train was in excess of 20 minutes, because even with a large crowd and a packed station, only one train was running. This was rather odd. But you know, my last visit was for BeastBuzz, which was on a Saturday that was even more crowded than this, yet only one train was running. Kings Island has always run two trains except on the very slowest days of the season; now suddenly they are only running one on busy days, and the delays in loading and the number of people left on the platform after the train leaves suggest that the one train is not delivering nearly enough passenger capacity to handle the load. And yet, back in the early season they were running two trains on a day when it was almost too cold for anybody to want to visit the waterpark. Something fishy is going on with this ride.
In the waterpark, I lounged in the 'wave' pool, such as it is. I've seen better waves at baseball games, and parts of the pool were insanely crowded. Several times the wave machinery started up and was almost immediately shut down again, though I never saw an incident where a lifeguard actually had to enter the pool.
Out in the season pass parking lot adjacent to the waterpark, they had a tent set up. In the tent they were closing out some old Son of Beast, Face/Off and Drop Zone merchandise for $cheap. As I had left my wallet in the car, I couldn't exactly participate in the sale, but they had some nice stuff there. On the other hand, it was for Son of Beast....
I decided I wanted to see the parade. As 5:30 approached, I returned to the main park. I had just missed the train, and I asked one of the station attendants about the missing train. He claimed that they were now only running two trains on Saturdays in July. The nature of his response triggered my crap detector, and I found myself somehow doubting that the second train had run on the previous day as he suggested. Besides, "only run two trains on Saturday no matter how big the crowd gets" I thought was a Six Flags idea, not the kind of thing I would expect from Paramount, certainly not from Kings Island. At least I HOPE it isn't a new edict from Kings Island. On the other hand, there is a train missing from Adventure Express...
I opted to walk. Knowing that the parade originated at the pass-through under the Racer (the path back to Flight of Fear) I went over to Coney Mall, in one of the few areas where the midway is wide enough to accommodate both the parade and its spectators. The parade is a bit light on content, but then, so is Nickelodeon's cartoon collection. To keep it from seeming like such a short parade, the floats stop frequently along the route. There didn't seem to be a lot of logic as to where they floats stopped. Yes, there were some performance elements, but it didn't seem to matter whether the parade was moving or not when the song kicked in. Oh, yes, the songg. If you've seen one of the television commercials for the parade, you've heard the whole thing. Each of the floats in the parade represents a different Nickelodeon cartoon (except the first float, which represents all of Nick Jr. [Footnote 2], but there is one song that repeats throughout the parade. I would have expected each float to have its own performance routine or something like that, but it doesn't work that way. In fact, the parade is so short that all of the floats (a half-dozen or so) park in a semi-circle at the base of the Eiffel Tower for a couple of choruses, then move on into Nick Central and H-B. A sound system feeds parade audio along the route, sometimes using the normal background PA system, sometimes using special speaker towers. Some of the speaker sets, notably the ones next to the Huckleberry Dairy, are loud, distorted, and sound terrible, while others are loud and clear and sound quite good. I couldn't tell if the sound system was divided into sections to follow the parade around, or if the track played continuously along the whole parade route (I didn't stay in one place). The parade route continued through HB, cut across the tail end of Nick Central, re-entered HB around the back side of the Animation Station, and exited the park through the service gate next to the Beastie. Overall, a lot of work went into putting the parade together, and it has a good energy to it, but it could use some refinement. It's a good first effort, but I wonder if it is unfairly limited by the emphasis on a fairly small group of characters; after all, the only real superstar of the whole bunch is Spongebob Squarepants, who is quickly rivaling Scooby Doo as the Most Seen Cartoon Character in an Amusement Park. Had they included the park's other kiddie area and invited the Hanna-Barbera characters to join in, for instance, they would have had a HUGE parade. If there were some kind of unique performance element for each float instead of yet another repetition of the same 30-second theme song, that would also make sense. But then, the real challenge is that Kings Island lacks the infrastructure for a major parade...specifically, it is made up of narrow, interconnected midways that leave precious little space for large floats; certainly not enough space for very large floats and admiring throngs of onlookers. That isn't the way the park was constructed. That said, they pulled it off rather well. They clearly modeled it after elements of the famous Disney parades, they used one of the park's major design features (the Eiffel Tower at the base of International Street and its accompanying plaza) to great advantage, and they made it work. It could use some refinement, but it's a good first effort. I think it also gives us a really good indicator of where Kings Island is heading in the near future. Kings Island's parade suggests what we have known for a while now: They don't want to compete with Cedar Point, and they certainly don't want to compete with Six Flags. Kings Island is after much bigger fish: Spongebob Squarepants is out to eat Mickey Mouse's lunch. Kings Island isn't quite there yet, and they know it. But that's where they are headed, and they're going to take their time and try to do it right. It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the next decade or so. For now, the parade ranks about a C+ on the Orlando scale, but in Ohio it's something we've simply never seen before...and it is certainly not quite what I expected [Footnote 3].
After the parade, I opted to do a bit more riding. I finally stood in line long enough to ride Flight of Fear. I don't know why they can't get those trains out any faster. I know the safety belt is partly to blame, not because it is too short, but because it is awkward. But that doesn't fully explain it. I think it has more to do with the complicated procedure used to dispatch the train, in which the platform operators take their positions on the co-dispatch buttons. The controls operator puts down the beige phone, picks up the red phone, picks up the beige phone, hangs both phones up, then looks at the uptrack attendant, then at the downtrack attendant, gives a thumb-signal to the uptrack attendant, then to the downtrack attendant, then answers the beige phone, then signals the downtrack attendant again, signals the uptrack attendant again, pans slowly down the station, presses a foot pedal, announces "Clear!" on the PA system, hits an elbow switch, picks up the red phone, pushes two push-buttons, looks at the downtrack attendant, then pushes three or four more buttons to finally send the train on its way. I don't know, I've never seen the controls on that ride, but I have a sneaking suspicion that something in the dispatch procedure could probably be simplified just a little bit to speed things up.
I took a few more rides, including The Beast, then opted to leave just before park closing, in fact the fireworks were going off as I was walking to my car. It was time to go home; after all, I had to go to work in the morning!
--Dave Althoff, Jr.
Footnote 1: Not that it prevented me from devoting a whole paragraph to it... [Return to text]
Footnote 2: Is that what used to be called "Pinwheel"? [Return to text]
Footnote 3: Actually I was expecting a refined version of Kennywood's Fall Fantasy parade. [Return to text]
--DCAjr
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