Slick

And this is why we can’t have nice things.

For our younger members, here’s the original context for “drinking the kook-aid”: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=drink the kool-aid

Sometimes new shiny buttons need to be pressed, and sometimes people don’t get the joke entirely.

You mean to tell me you've never thought someone on here was drinking the kool-aid the parks provide before posting?

I think @Richard really nailed it, as did @AlexB in terms of land use currently. Particularly with Clark Kirby now at the helm, there's a big whiff of the John Menzies era of Village parks again, where long term vision, investment and focus on guest experience, and look, let's be honest here, doing the right thing has trumped maximising shareholder return at the detriment of what the brand stands for. And that's important, because with the right top level people having enough exerciseable power means money spent on things that may not realise a tangible or direct ROI are upheld. Think steam trains instead of diesel trains and you're in the right headspace. Sure, the diesel might be cheaper overall, but the steam trains create this intangible value to everyday guest experiences. The smell, the movement, the history, the immersion into a different world... these are all things that don't mean anything on a shareholder spreadsheet. However, something so intangible creates such a tremendously powerful impact on guest experience, and hey, let's not forget Dreamworld's brand was built on just this. Barbershop quarter didn't create a tangible ROI, but they were amazing. The horses clip-clopping through Main Street pulling a cart? The IMAX experience? The overload of shows & entertainment? All expensive, and all add up to being greater than the sum of the parts. To be frank, i'm not about picking Ardent or Ariadne or any other parent company, and for all the junk Ardent has copped, let's not forget that for the period the park was closed they supported the Dreamworld team very, very well, so for me, so long as who-ever it is treats one of the country's most iconic brands with the respect it deserves and ultimately, invest in enriching the brand as much as Village are with their brands, i'm happy. Buuuuuuuuut mayyyybe selling the land that's a link to the new Westfield shopping centre and the Coomera Train station isn't the wisest move. If I was as lucky as Clark Kirby and inherited a bunch of parks, except instead of Village it was Dreamworld, here's what i'd do: Get on the phone to Westfield. Start the conversation about a long term vision of developing a Universal city walk of sorts between Coomera Train Station, the new Westfield and the Big Brother house. Get onto the phone to who-ever has the Big Brother house land. Enroll them in the idea of the city walk. Get on the phone to Hilton, Sheraton etc. etc. about building a hotel in the citywalk. Get Dreamworld back to the 1980's vision John Longhurst had. Update, rennovate & innovate the theming from Mine Ride through to Rocky Hollow and Blue Lagoon. New rides, attractions, bars, food, retail. Develop a new entrance where Blue Lagoon is. Build a new steam train station there too for citywalk guests. Make the space amazing again. Build an RMC. Click "select all" on the Zamperla family rides page and just make it a good space full of kinetic energy. Quieten Tower of Terror. Make it work better. Remove most of the tunnel. Move Motocoaster anywhere else. Don't care. Needs to be moved. Develop ABC Kids World into something world class with the land that Motocoaster sat in. Tone down the fading pastels. Add more trees in, make it intimate. Add more food & bev. Make it a lovely area full of nice surprises. I'd go on but I think i've droned on about plans elsewhere. Point is, Dreamworld's a global brand, let's treat it as such.

They took an old B&M inverted coaster from Japan to France, so anything's possible really, but the chances of it duelling if it gets sold are still slim to none.

To my knowledge this is just a digital cut using existing vision & audio. No need to panic about new theme songs, the track they used has been around for around three years now.

Really dig their new entrance. Saw it in person last year and can appreciate the effort they made to clean up what’s essentially people’s first and last impression of the park.

"eSerrrrrrrrrve."

You should ask the park. I’ll wait here.

Then you my friend have the fantastic joy of supporting Dreamworld get back on track and taking part in a proud enthusiast tradition known as "buying new season passes."

Can I put bets on it now? I almost guarantee every person who has had any shade of doubt or worry about this project or whether or not they'll enjoy it will be replaced by a unanimous cheer of pride & joy, and seeing shots like the above make me very confident about the naysayers being super duper wrong. But what do I know, according to some members i'm still somehow a "VRTP shill" (I swear some people don't read OurWorlds or Parkz before they post).

So does the waterslide on the right, which would lend it to just a change in perspective or lens. Will be great to see how this Gyro Swing fits in the park in terms of when it starts swinging, and what size of the three Gyro Swing models it is. Also what I find neat is that Intamin have seemed to have done a bit of work in terms of the look & design in areas you'd presume they wouldn't worry too much about (i.e. the hand rails up on the top level there). It's surprising they'd suddenly start making changes to things that you'd presume is a stock model - it's something they've done with the last Half Pipe Coaster they installed in the Middle East (they swapped out the old style of track seen a Wet 'n' Wild in favour of their new track style.)

Since there's just so much crazy speculation, i'll clarify: Dreamworld's CEO has gone on record to say that "areas" will be refreshed and repurposed. Adding to that, the Mine Ride, Log Ride & Vintage Cars will re-open by December this year. So here's some logic: if you wanted to be smart with your capex (and the major reason for the Mine Ride's closure was due to changing safety standards (mainly the envelope of the ride's tunnels) then if you've got a team of folks who are removing the Rapids Ride, it'd then be cost effective then to get them to work on the removal of the Rapids Ride, removal of whatever you need removed from the Mine Ride and have the Rapids Ride landscaped appropriately & ready for whatever you plan to put in there next in one hit. From there, you, as an enthusiast can ask logical questions that flow on from that. If there's no Rapids reservoir, do you need any of the bridges or elevated pathways anymore? And if not, is that why there's a path being poured down the bottom of the Giant Drop as we speak? Is that why they've waited so long to install the electronic boom-gates for the train at Main Station? Maybe they were waiting to do two or three sets all in one hit? And from there, if i'm being conscious about capex, what do I, as a CEO, fill that land with? If I was Craig, i'd maybe move the Model T Ford Cars there. It's inoffensive, it's nostalgic, it's a great family ride and it would be dirt cheap to fill a large space with, especially with something that families love. It fits the old timey theme, and would help bridge the area well. There you go. There's some serious thinking there that's based logic and facts that I would love to see on Parkz more instead of constant back and fourth over nothing that happens constantly. As a side-note, Wipeout is being worked on as we speak. A lot of the areas where there was visible NDT have now been painted over with a primer.

Went out there earlier today, airtime hill is coming together nicely. Also, as you'll see, the mystery of the missing beam has now been solved and what's in place has got a little chunk taken out of it. If you want to see more VSCO-ish artsy shots of construction, you know where to go.

Also, what's up with Aussie parks watermarking everything? So un-necessary.

Yay, something legit for a change though that seems like it's not a land grab.

This guy gets it. I have no doubt they'll have learnt from the visual impact of Green Lantern and try and light some parts of The Joker's face appropriately too, in which case, at 60m+ in the air it'll just look amazeballs.

To be fair if we had a theme park videos thread it'd be 90% OurWorlds content.

Ahh I see, I stand corrected.

Dreamworld Express doesn't run on electricity, just FYI.

If we're being picky on semantics (& I get picked apart for a lot less) than instead of writing "instead it has a TOGO" write "instead it has a TOGO & Intamin." Will back @djrappa - him and @joz reign supreme on Disney knowledge. #1minute17seconds Getting back on topic - everything else what I said is on point.

Tokyo DisneySea has two roller-coasters, a Togo kid's coaster (in place of a Vekoma roller-skater) and an odd Intamin looping coaster that's a sort of clone of another in Disneyland Paris. I think it's worth keeping in mind that you can generalise brands like car-makers to a certain point (one's rough, one's smooth, one's reliable) but the reality is far more complex. With any project this large, this complicated and subject to differing local regulations (both government and company) means that every single install is unique. Let's just say that again: Every. Single. Install. Is. Unique. There may be common threads in design, parts and components or track layout, but even in Australia, off the shelf models of some notable rides differ greatly to their overseas counterparts for various reasons. Added to this, these days many of the same ride companies rely on the same third parties like Stengel or Ride Centreline to do a range of engineering, G-force calculations and even ride design. In which case, it really comes down to the client, the brief, budget and who's behind the project, and if that all comes together in harmony. And that human variable alone is enough to suggest that simply looking at stats and going "they suck but these guys rule" is at best causation through correlation.

Looks like a Huss Frisbee structure (their smaller model to the "Giant Frisbee" that's at Fuji-Q).

^ 100% this. Take the huge reconstruction of Uluru in the artwork, I could almost guarantee they didn't contact the elders for the tribe in that area or the local Yugambeh folks who are the tribe in the Gold Coast area to see if that was something respectful or allowed, let alone have a reconciliation action plan in place. I dig people's optimism but it's not like village aren't investing 600 million into a new theme park because they're all just scrooges, it's because there's no market for it. #logic