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Slick

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Everything posted by Slick

  1. It was a guest satisfaction/safety thing. Many guests initially complained when the ride did a double cycle, thinking either something was wrong or hated it because it was too much/not what they expected. It was eventually codified into the procedures, which meant there were pretty major ramifications if someone caught you breaking said procedures.
  2. I think we can all agree that when it comes to flow and overall park layout design, Movie World ranks as one of the worst offenders out there. Fancy having flow be such an issue that you have to open up access to a closed ride (Arkham Asylum) to offer guests better access to the front of the park. It definitely shouldn't be used as the standard for best-case design principles. It's also sadly a product of its own success - complaints about noise have necessitated rides being huddled awkwardly towards the front of the park.
  3. At a high level the idea makes sense - build the kind of ride that can be opened as an up-charge for night markets that doesn't give away the gate and de-value the park's day ticket proposition. The problem is when you scratch deeper, there's a litany of reasons that should tell you why it shouldn't be a thing. For example, every park planner or designer will tell you why it's bad to concentrate so much stuff into the first few metres of a park. The obvious one is that it hinders crowd flow management in a significant way - on a busy day, Dreamworld will have two rides, a show-stage and a critical photo point within centimetres of each other. Think about this then - people typically move to the first thing they see when they're in a park - as a result, will a guest's first experience of the day be stuck in a line that's overflowing because due care wasn't given to filtering people out first? The second reason is that there's a well-established tipping point between time in park and per capita spend. By extension, if you're concentrating your experience into a few square metres, people don't journey as far through different lands, they don't stop to buy F&B, they're not being immersed in different themed environments (marginal affinity relationship) and so on and they're less inclined to spend more time in retail etc. etc. Thirdly - there's a reason why Disney (yes, Disney) don't have a kiddie ride right when you walk in, they have a train that gets people out of that space - it's out of place thematically. Those that say "well Sky Voyager this" or "it's a different park" are negating the fundamental reality that the park doesn't look the way it did precisely because of a continued culture (or rather, ignorance of culture and heritage) to preserve and plus what they have. Instead, we've got make revenue-first strategic choices that place all else second. Finally, it removes a strategic point to place shows and events. If you're worried about kinetic energy, put in a better fountain display. 🤷🏻‍♂️
  4. I don't recall seeing this online or on the news, how did you come to hear about this?
  5. Let's also keep in mind that after Scooby Doo Next Gen opened to a roaring thud that the park spent a fair bit of coin on lighting and effects to make high-zone (aka the wild mouse section) enjoyable again.
  6. Are they actually the same kangaroo? The proportions are wildly different. The height is the only thing that’s similar.
  7. Really enjoy reading your trip reports as always - was there a particularly memorable moment from any of the parks that stood out for you this time round?
  8. You can clearly see the question I was answering because I quoted it. Sure is, and I've discussed lots of stuff in this thread and have contributed years upon years of ideas and thoughts about future projects for Dreamworld, and as much as I enjoy seeing Dreamworld both simultaneously lament and leverage this site for commercial gain, even I have my limits. Matthew Ball's paper on marginal affinity paints a great picture of the things I was alluding to earlier and answers the question well. Again, I've mentioned both IAAPA and Google Scholar have some great stuff on the topic if you want to really deep dive on the topic.
  9. That wasn't the question that was asked, FYI. Not really keen to do free consulting/fanfic in any case, Ardent has folks like AEDP to do that for them.
  10. The BBC/Disney agreement is a distribution deal, they didn't buy Bluey.
  11. I'll just leave that there. Both rides are roughly 90 seconds of actually good stuff. Yeah, because it's so new. It's like saying a new puppy will never wee on the carpet only because it didn't wee in the car on the drive home (I could've picked a better metaphor but it's 10pm and it's what you get).
  12. See @New display nameand my confirmation of his post. Dreamworld's current CEO was appointed in April 2021. The board he reports to has been largely the same since 2017. See this post for more information.
  13. It's empirically not true. IAAPA has a ton of resources about how IP can drive a 20% bump in revenue if done well. There's also dozens of research articles you can find on Google Scholar that cover marginal affinity and what defines great IP synergy/execution and how it impacts long term bottom line revenue. I think that's where you might be getting your wires crossed - just because your favourite theme park CEO retires an IP doesn't suddenly make all IP's bad. If that were the case Disney wouldn't be the world's most valuable IP-house. That's not to say the particular Dreamworks IP's they had were tired, but to replace it with really no nationally recognisable IP is ultimately a measure in austerity not growth. Sky Voyager. Lol, you absolutely can't attribute Sky Voyager to the current CEO. That was three CEO's in the making and it didn't include the current CEO. Furthermore, and I can't state this enough, Ardent have had the same key board members for the last four CEOs ranging back to 2017, and whilst I can't understate how tough a CEO's job is, they report to the board and its strategic directives/interests, which have included ride procurement and theming in the case of the current activist shareholders. Therefore, this whole new/old management thing is a misnomer at best. Call it for what it is - you just like this CEO. And that's okay, too. CEOs aren't an island, and the ones that do often fail pretty quickly. People really like this one and I can totally understand why, but revising history and ignoring facts (like saying Buzzsaw was a maintenance nightmare but miraculously runs perfect at Gumbuya World) to suit this second coming of Jesus narrative is a bit cringe. The current strategy has largely purposefully avoided replacing the mix of attractions what was previously closed because current sentiment is that a smaller Dreamworld was the smarter move. And maybe that was justified back when the park was on death's door during the pandemic, but it's clear to see in the current demand across all parks that people don't want the Dreamworld that's being offered. Remember, a quiet park and short queues is a feature for enthusiasts, but it's a bug for profit and a successful long term organisation.
  14. I think what you've missed there is that even most regional theme parks have a pipeline of attractions five or ten years in advance so that when something closes, something is ready to take its place. Dreamworld being caught with its pants down in the form of the incident really showed that the business not only had no long-term succession plan but failed to maintain what it had in place of a long-term plan.
  15. It's always been a back-of-house tiger pen. Nothing more, nothing less. Keep in mind the cats were on a constant rotation program between pens, the island, dens and daily activities like walks to keep them enriched, all things that are vastly more complicated without tiger-handler interaction. My guess is that the redevelopment of Tiger island (which is at best a huuuuuge waste of money in the endeavour to have overzealous risk management for risk management's sake, going so far as ignoring the best professional opinions in the industry to do so) is going to require millions of dollars of new chutes and pens to move tigers from A to B, and this is the start of those works.
  16. You can have a scan through Qimagery, you can juuuust make it out in some of those aerials.
  17. The two parts that were fabricated were stored roughly where the koala sanctuary is now behind Tiger Island for roughly a decade before they disappeared (likely for scrap).
  18. You're 100% on the money. Also, now's a great time to point out how invaluable that northern parcel of land is. Ardent's short-term interests to turn a quick buck at the expense of the business's future viability as a whole can't be overstated enough - remaining competitive against Village requires that land, and having the parent company try and parcel up the remaining land should ring alarm bells. I'm quietly thankful the latest flood reporting has come out that shows the flooding situation for Oakey Creek, and by extension, how nearly impossible it will be to build there without major infrastructure investment, and has in turn slowed down further quick sales.
  19. Just to touch on this - I think most folks understand the reality that in order for a theme park to be successful it requires constant investment and therefore there's almost always going to be something being built in a theme park. Having said that, is it more the sentiment that people find Movie World lacking when Scooby Doo is closed? Or is it more the whole Tower/Wipeout/Log Ride/Big Red Car/Flowrider at Dreamworld thing?
  20. How long are you staying for and does the rest of the party you're going with love theme parks?
  21. I tried to get John Longhurst to recall some information about it on a few occasions - what I've been able to cobble together is that he got exclusive rights to build a Corkscrew Coaster with Arrow Dynamics to do a midway style install similar to Cedar Point or Nagashima Spa Land where the corkscrew would head over the top of the pathway. During the construction of Dreamworld, he had a corkscrew fabricated to see how it would look in person, hated it, and when Keith Williams called about building one, he gave the rights away. Interesting to think how that would've shaped the identity of Dreamworld, or if he had the funds he wanted, had built a castle instead of leasing the land to Kenny Lord to build Thunderbolt.
  22. That’s some ace early 90’s Dreamworld right there, especially with the old horse-drawn carriage. The horses were kept in a field where the maintenance shed exists today, along with an un-built corkscrew element and other odds and ends.
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