Slick

Contrary to popular belief, he never worked with Disney Imagineers. You can read about it when I interviewed him about it where he said point blank (and is referenced in my audio transcripts) that it never happened. Tim Fisher was the CEO for all of those rides that were both themed and lightly themed so i'm not sure what your point actually is. If it's that parks have used IPs for rides (and that's bad) i've got news for you - everyone does it because it works to drive gate. I have no doubt Fisher picked this up at Paramount Parks and instigated that same use of IP at Wonderland Sydney. Dreamworld does it, Disney does it, Universal does it, big parks little parks - everyone does it. Bermuda Triangle didn't close because the all knowing Disney wasn't brought in. They also didn't play a hand in anything structural or anything engineering adjacent. It was already a retrofit of an existing dark ride system (Lassiter's Lost Mine) and it was closed because much like the Looney Tunes River Ride the current management considered money was better spent on new than the huge cost outlays to maintain existing. Having said that, the cost to maintain those attractions were also so high not because Disney wasn't brought in, but like everything built in that era, virtually no one from the industry at large was brought in. Eureka Mountain Mine Ride, Thunder River Rapids, Viking's Revenge, Looney Tunes River Ride, Bermuda Triangle, Rocky Hollow Log Ride, Dreamworld's Main Street and it's trains/boats etc. etc. etc. were all either built largely in-house or were all out knock-offs of international variants. That "she'll be right/can-do" attitude of doing things a little bit cheaply to try and get something as good as the Americans for a tenth of the cost all but evaporated when Dreamworld's incident happened in 2016, culminating in rides like Scooby Doo literally having walls of theming ripped of, Sky Voyager being re-wired with thicker cabling or Wild West Falls having entire sections rebuilt. There's that old saying of "buy cheap buy twice" and that's definitely been a hard lesson all our parks had to learn. I think of it as a course correction. There's been pages of discussion here about how parks need to be a solid day's mix of stuff for everyone and it's another hard lesson our parks (specifically Village's parks) had to learn. Skewing each park to a specific demographic doesn't work because at the end of the day, roller-coasters and big new things drive gate (and you don't get that when your park is aimed at three year olds) but having two parks so close to each other with identical rides also isn't a recipe for success either. I think there's some nuance in the middle somewhere that I hope Atlantis (and whatever Movie World builds next) will eventually capitalise upon.

Euuuuuuuugh.

The service sucks, that's the whole issue in one. US service is great because staff are incentivised to - when you're working on tips, you need to be "great" and give booths attention in order for both the employee and the business to succeed. In Australia, we give staff (mostly) good wages, and with no tip culture, staff aren't incentivised to ensure everyone is buying drinks, they're instead incentivised to do what their managers tell them to do. The net result of a US style hospitality business operating in Australia is that there's virtually zero attention given to patrons and it makes less money. At this point i've had dozens upon dozens of visits at Top Golf where it took more then five minutes to grab someone to serve our bay, let alone order a beer. And when your only option is to walk to the bar, you've effectively put enough barriers in place for people not to bother and just settle on having a sub-par experience. That in turn means they're spending less and they're less likely to return. In the past i've also had wait staff give us Movie World style operation spiels that felt antagonistic at best and hostile at worst, i've had extremely long bar wait times, i've had extended family find it impossible to book a bay... all of which culminates in a feeling that makes me feel like i'm a nuisance and not a valued customer and subsequently makes me want to not bother. The easy solution is to just have a Korean BBQ/ me&u system in place, the latter of which they've actually tried, and on my last visit "was unable to be used at this time." 😟 It just seems so easy. Accept that staff cost more in Australia and that Aussie expectations on service are different to the US. We don't need someone checking in every three minutes, we just need a way to order a beer when we need one. So give staff and customers systems (like me&u) that allow people to pay as they go. The couple of dollars that Village would forfeit to that company instead of their own back-pocket would be instantly negated by the increased revenue they'd receive by not being so hostile to the customer at every turn.

The calibri text and the removal of the iconic logo that’s been on it for decades is a theme park tragedy.

Given how close the new pathway passes the building now i'm sure guests will give it a red hot crack over summer.

It took me a hot minute but just realised those oil rig themed pieces are gone. Truth be told whilst they were some of the only moving themed pieces in the park it's still not a big loss - moving away from an oil rig theme and onto something better (especially if they ever take up on my idea of doing one side as a ground-facing gondola) will do wonders for that area (so long as it integrates well into the greater area aka the log ride site and surrounds).

Just as an fyi, it was doing full cycles Tuesday arvo. Here’s hoping what you saw was for some fountains. 🍻

I feel this - as mentioned in the other thread I slithered down to ride the snake but was told it wasn’t open. What’s been problematic is that they’ve been doing dozens of empty cycles in the mean time which has prompted a pretty endless wave of guests asking if it’ll open. Given how little it’s been open, from an optics standpoint I think it might’ve been the right call to not mention any AP holder openings at all and just let word through the grapevine be the indicator for whatever hour or two it’ll run for.

At the park as we speak - ride has been testing all day but hasn’t opened yet.

If we presume it's roughly 50-60 seconds going off the length of the ride, that's 200p/h best case scenario. My question would be is that a high or a low number in the world of waterslides?

It was, but was quickly replaced by a coffee maker which was far more profitable.

I agree with all of this. I think the best way to do it is to get a local microbrewer to do a dreamworld lager off-site.

Exactly - I'd love to drink a Kenny Kraft Beer, but only if it was $9 a pint and wasn't a hipster IPA variant.

My personal opinion is that the station should go asap. Having all these remnants of closed rides (Tower of Terror track/lettering/station is a prime example) doesn’t sell the new Dreamworld vibe I think they’d be wanting to achieve.

Ahh well no stress, I'll be sure to pass your feedback onto the guy that made both. This is a topic that's been done to death already, feel free to search. TLDR; they speed up hourly capacity. They won't stop guests doing the wrong thing 100% of the time, but much like vaccines, they're a tool in an arsenal, you know what I mean?

At least it’s better than the Arkham Asylum queue video, ammirite?

It’s like they’re reading the forums, taking our feedback but doubling down in some really strange ways. 😄

It really does.

I just noticed this too. It’s still semi-used throughout the site with food and retail outlets, but for the most part it looks largely abandoned. PS - this website refresh looks really solid.

But not to initially bring the speed right down, that's always been reserved for magnetic brakes and little skids that drop away. But you're right - in the stations of both Jet Rescue & Motocoaster there's no skids, just tyres. TIL.

Totally fine good sir - TIL.

I think for me it's the thought that fundamentally block brake sections have always had a way to physically hold onto a train with great force with some sort of fin being gripped, whereas this is just a bunch of spinning tyres. I'm sure Intamin figured the weight of the train was light enough that with the speed of the train they probably didn't need something with a lot of force to stop the train... 🤷🏻‍♂️ I guess it's just kinda like when companies started doing launches mid-ride - we all kinda thought that was just the stuff you'd see in RollerCoaster Tycoon or No Limits or whatever, now it's everywhere.

Yeah if we’re honest the tyre braking system seems super janky - like something out of no limits you do to get the trains to run. I’m sure it’s not in reality but it’s interesting none the less.

Here's a post with some cool new drone vision. (Dunno why it won't embed, @Richard what's the best way to get Invision to pickup FB video clips?) https://www.facebook.com/dreamworld/videos/200040588958621/

At the end of the day, everyone who is hesitant should speak to a trusted GP about vaccination. With that aside, here's my thoughts. They've been the most closely scrutinised vaccines in human history. Doctor Norman Swan (who's great on CoronaCast) has a great article about it. Billions of doses have been administered now - if there was an issue, we definitely would've seen it by now. We were able to rapidly develop vaccines for a multitude of reasons. Our own TGA (which is one of the strictest in the world) has a knowledge-base about this. We're so lucky to live on an island country. Other countries have not fared as well and countries like Germany with as much resources as us are still struggling. We're really lucky that we feel like COVID-19 won't impact us in Australia because our states, by in large, have done the right thing in using a system of resources to minimise spread and impact until vaccines arrived. Without it, we'd have a lot more deaths (see above) and worse, a lot more people with long-covid, which sounds awful. Every side-effect, every death post vaccination, every reported sniffle is logged and checked. That data is also widely available - nothing is being hidden. This data has been misreported by politicians and fringe circles en masse, circumnavigating our spam and privacy acts in the process. More often than not, opposing, conservative opinions cherry-pick data or publish data in journals that aren't well known and aren't subject to peer review. Our federal government wasn't bothered to build quarantine facilities that it was supposed to by law, it refused to roll-out a national strategy for COVID-19 until it was forced to and absolutely bungled/lied about getting vaccines when we needed it. During that time, they spent millions on an app that didn't use global standards and was essentially a massive failure. And when our states stepped in and did all the leg work, not only did Scott Morrison take credit for it, but when conservative voices rioted and suggested violence against our states, he side-stepped condemning what is absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt, abhorrent behaviour. Our federal government couldn't pour water out of a boot if the instructions were on the heel, let alone coerce and force people into getting vaccinated.