Richard

Done... don't worry about postage (I edited my post to say that just before/after you posted). PM me your address details. Thanks for playing...

I've been cleaning up a but and I really don't collect park memorabilia. I was about to toss out a whole lot of park maps, flyers etc. when I thought maybe someone here would like it. It's mostly maps etc. from US parks from around 2003-04. There's the odd Australian park map in there but all in all there's nothing historic or of value. A lot of duplicates and I expect most is not worth keeping. There's maybe around 40-50 items in total. Whoever wants the lot, it's theirs. I'll cover postage to east coast states.

I love that I can go away for a weekend and everything stays so civil here. Seriously, keep it on topic. If anyone has a problem with another member, take it up with them via PM or ignore them via their profile because I can assure you no one else is in the least bit interested.

OK well I guess the cat is out of the bag. More details on this roller coaster can be read on this top secret page. Please keep it to yourselves because if Dreamworld find out they might change their minds and scrap it.

Stories went around for years about people injuring or killing themselves on various slides at Amazons, as they seem to have done for most suburban water parks around Australia. In reality it closed for purely financial reasons. It did change owners quite a few times before the end, but it generally operated pretty consistently during the summer seasons. There was a year or so when it closed between owners that it didn't operate, which is probably what you're thinking of. I'm sure had they spent a bit upgrading and adding new attractions every few years the park could easily have survived, but in the end selling the land became the most lucrative path for them as the area really took off with other residential and commercial developments around it.

I think anyone visiting on a day with an average crowd would be hard pressed calling the park anything but a half day park. Most of the street performances are very thin at best, so without Police Academy the park is more or less a handful of rides. Queuing for 20-30 minutes each even and you'll still have everything ticked off by early afternoon -- and for much of the year you'll be lucky to queue for 15 minutes for most things. Yeah of course it's quite possible to spend a whole day there, and with Australia's best collection of rides it's certainly not hard, but it's not a park that you need a full day or more to do everything in. Sea World has its wide range of shows and exhibits that easily fill a day. Even Dreamworld in addition to its dreadfully low capacity rides that eat up most of a day has a good range of minor attractions and animal exhibits that make it a full day park. Yeah it's a good park blah blah blah, but at the end of the day (i.e. 3pm) you're short about half a dozen more major and minor rides to really balance out a day, even with a major show in the park.

You would most likely find that the contract was conditional on the show actually continuing and probably a whole host of other conditions. Given how tumultuous the television industry is I can't see there being a contract which would reward either party in regards to the house location if the show is cancelled. Good riddance. Surely this has been a long time coming and perhaps Ten will finally start to be a bit daring in programming and add some variety to the airwaves instead of nine months of the year being dominated by three shows.

Chalk this one up as a failed attempt. One thing that a teaser marketing campaign needs is something to tease about. Parks overseas will commence such a campaign months before anyone anywhere knows what's going on and it becomes a precursor to the actual mainstream marketing efforts, normally they're useful in drumming up annual pass sales for the coming year. The problem here is that they tried to use it as the initial phase of their core advertising efforts, by which stage anyone who would be interested either knew or could figure it out upon seeing the thing staring at them as they walked through the park gate, or through a Google search that'd lead them to a site like this. You've gotta give them points for giving it a shot, but really, anyone with a semblance of marketing experience could have seen this wasn't going to work. As far as dreadful advertising campaigns go, I think the torch has been well and truly passed to Dreamworld for their latest run of Motocoaster ads. Doesn't get much more cringeworthy, and I'd hate to imagine how the 15-16 year old kids they're targetting are responding. Doohan = Doin'... what kid doesn't love that!

Nothing advertises a water park better than having people stand for excessive amounts of time in a queue that overlooks it. Of course the beauty is the slower they run the ride, the longer people have to (perhaps "get to" is the phrasing they'd use) look at the park. With little hyperbole Cyclone in its original state can't have been far off from having the most poorly designed ride queue at any theme park anywhere. Who'd have thought they could actually make it worse?

Of course they're going to try and get as much as they can out of the Government, as any large business does. In all likelihood the numbers add up such that they'll be able to proceed with minimal financial assistance, and that anything they can get from the Government only serves as an added incentive to go ahead. I really must say I don't agree with the way that big business uses its weight and influence over governments for their own financial benefit, but it seems to be the way things go these days. On the unrelated matter of Speed Racer, I read somewhere recently that it had an $80 million marketing and advertising budget for merchandising alone, so I wouldn't be holding my breath for any profits to come out of it. I thought that parts two and three of The Matrix were proof enough that the Wachowski Brothers can't make a decent film to save themselves...

The pump on Motocoaster is a smaller one than most previous hydraulic coasters as it is designed to run constantly rather than intermittently. By simply using a larger pump and then having enough capacity in the accumulator tanks will satisfy the demand for multiple launches. In this sense it's really like your average household air compressor -- just a matter of having a motor and tank large enough to handle the amount of air required. As far as leakages, of course it'd be an issue where the more piping there is, the greater the risk, but it'd be no different from if it were a longer single launch for instance. I'd think a booster launch is one of the better benefits of this technology over the cable launches, which in turn has been one of the advantages of LIM/LSM to date. Whether this is how they go is another matter, but from a technical standpoint there's no reason it's not possible.

No doubling up on any of the launch equipment is needed. The great thing about the latest incarnation of Intamin's hydraulic launch technology is that it's not a centralised system; rather it features centralised pump and accumulator but from there the hydraulic fluids can be pumped more or less anywhere for the actual launch with little else needed by way of infrastructure. It's just a matter of having a system that meets the demand of the two launches.

FHM contacted me asking if I wanted to contribute to the article, and that was pretty much it.

You can guarantee that the closure is indeed related to upcoming construction. Haven't you ever been to Sea World? The train most definitely does run on rails... the map even shows this. The park is basically broken down the middle by the train line, which runs around the perimeter of the back half of the park. It runs along the eastern edge of the park, behind Corkscrew and I'd expect that the construction site access point will be along here, with trucks etc. coming straight off Sea World Drive onto the site.

As a general rule, if it's on one of our database pages and doesn't include phrasing like "at this stage..." or "rumoured to be" etc. then you can be pretty sure it's true.

That's really my point -- most of the new stuff ProSlide is coming out with these days is just variations and amalgamations of their existing concepts. Nothing wrong with that as such, but these two water parks are fairly unique given how close the competition is, so for either to get ahead of the other, it'll take something alternative, which is where other manufacturers like Waterfun can hopefully step in. Unfortunately I don't think there's much pressure on the industry because there aren't too many examples of competition like WWW/WnW out there in need of alternative manufacturers for novel attraction styles and ProSlide well and truly has the market cornered. Obviously there's still lots on offer from ProSlide that would be new to Australia and no question they've most definitely earned their popularity as a ride manufacturer, but the majority of it has that feeling of familiarity, especially in the context of the two Gold Coast parks. If it were up to me, Wet'n'Wild would be decked out with basically the entire ProSlide range, because capacity-wise the park needs it, but I think increasingly we'll see the park really competing with alternatives to ProSlide, like SurfRider or evidently this Sidewinder.

Promising to say the least. With ProSlide's range more or less been and done it's good that they're expanding into new territory rather than trying to one-up WhiteWater World's versions of the same slides. I must say I've always been intrigued by the Sidewinder since it first came out several years ago, but with that said there's a handful of other attractions I'd pick ahead of it because it does just seem like a smaller and less impressive version of the Tornado.

But then all a developer has to do is take the Council to court over such double standards and the restrictions will invariably be overturned. My feeling, as discussed in topics about Sea World Eye in the past, is that yes I'd love to see such taller attractions permanent fixtures at the park to make the most of its incredibly unique location, but not at the cost of one of the few remaining unspoilt areas on the Gold Coast. As for Ron Clarke being an anti-development mayor; if there's one thing the Gold Coast needs, it's someone to step in and stop the endless irresponsible development that the city is seeing. Fact is infrastructure is not keeping up. There is nothing wrong with progress, but what the Gold Coast has seen in recent years is not progress, it's rapid expansion with little concern for the ongoing repercussions of it. I can't understand why anyone would argue that there's something wrong with residents wanting to keep one final vestige of oceanside land in the area free from highrises.

My thoughts are that the integrated branding needs to be rethought substantially. The whole website feels way too cluttered and in that sense takes away from their biggest asset -- the Gold Coast theme parks. Their MyFun branding is a huge asset that they'd be crazy not to use for their new aquisitions but they've expanded a website that was designed for their six Gold Coast properties to include all their others. In regards to annual passes, it seems like such an obvious opportunity if their three-park pass was expanded to be a company-wide annual pass for the same price. Of course, now that they've got some national and international properties, it's a very easy way to boost the value of the passes with very little in the way of added costs. The only reason that Six Flags etc. are able to offer such seemingly generous annual passes is because the buyer in all likelihood would typically only visit a handful of other attractions at the most. On top of this, buyers of such passes at their other locations -- e.g. a family in Sydney buying them at the Aquarium because they are planning a Gold Coast trip in six months -- gives WVTP an immediate edge by securing their purchase long before their competition is able to have any influence.

The user's content page is slowly on its way. Hopefully I'll get some time in the near future to sit down and get it finished off. I was thinking the exact same thing about ride profiles the other day. I'll be making it so that it appears in the list, much like company/resort boxes on park profiles.

That 'rather pointless tunnel' was to shelter the skid brakes, which lose effectiveness when wet. We've got a whole heap of photos of the ride if you've not already looked: http://www.parkz.com.au/photos/AU/Gold_Coa...46-Thunderbolt/ All in all it was a pretty miserable ride. Forget trying to figure out what was wrong with it; you'll have a hard time finding anything that was right with it.

All other aspects of the ride aside, the single biggest problem with Motocoaster is its restraint system that is uncomfortable and leads to a dismal capacity. The family vs. thrill ride thing has been done to death, but at the end of the day I couldn't care less who they market it to because if it's a pain to queue for and a pain to ride, then it's of no interest to me.

Rest assured neither served any meaningful purpose to either attractions. Lethal Weapon's was just a car chase scene from one of the Lethal Weapon films. Not sure which film exactly but Mel Gibson was well mulleted, though that hardly narrows it down. In true 80s/90s action film fashion, the picture was so dark that, coupled with the projection quality and ambient light, there literally wasn't a whole lot to see. Wild West Falls' was a montage of Warner Bros. westerns. Perhaps ironically for a film about movies at a park called Movie World, it contained only still photos. It featured an ambiguous narration ("You're looking at a place that can be any place. East or west of the mighty Mississippi, north or south of the whole new continent..."), which served no purpose to tie the film in with the ride. It's been Dodge City, Cheyenne and a hundred other places...") which made no attempt to tie the film in with the ride. I'd imagine that this film was originally produced for the Warner Bros. studio tour in Burbank, California because it makes no sense that they'd intentionally produce something as irrelevant as this for an $18 million ride. Given that for a long period these were the only two major rides in the park, you'd typically ride both many times, so they quickly became incredibly irritating. I'm all for meaningful pre-ride films which contribute something to the storyline of the ride (e.g. Bermuda Triangle), but these two were nothing short of pointless. Be thankful that they're gone.

Most would attribute that to Disney's 'dark period' of cost cutting and mismanagement through the 1990s and early 2000s under the helm of Michael Eisner. A number of things at Disney went somewhat pear-shaped (by Disney standards) but it appears that the 50th anniversary celebrations were a turnaround in many ways for the park, company and managerial environment. So that then begs the question, is this Dreamworld's dark period? And perhaps more importantly, is there light at the end of the tunnel? As for Eureka Mountain, just about every possible conceivable situation has been discussed to death on the prior pages of this topic. I've got nothing more to add that hasn't been said countless times already.

Tony I essentially agreed with what you were saying; just expanding on the main aspects that I'm "cautiously optimistic" of. Yeah don't get me wrong; I'm not saying that spending money on a show can't improve its quality. Fact is to produce a 'blockbuster' show significant funds do need to be injected. There's no two ways around that. I mean they're spending around $7 million on 'Hollywood Stuntdriver' so evidently their goals and expectations are for a high quality production. As it stands, Police Academy was without a doubt one of the best theme park shows out there. Overlooking the dated/simplistic set, from a pure entertainment perspective it rivals any big budget show from Universal or Disney that I've experienced. It will be very difficult for this new show to live up to its predecessor, even with all the money in the world, which really was my initial point.