Richard

Wonderland Sydney currently rates absolute bottom for me with regards to food quality and portions - and I've certainly got the theme park food experience . Movie World's up the top, Sea World comes next, Wet'n'Wild following (the three do have noticeably different food quality), Dreamworld next (they've got some aweful stuff down at Rivertown, but the occasional quality fried chicken from Snack Attack really can be good). Wonderland is somewhere well below these ones. I had a chicken burger combo from the place in Botany Bay. The burgers were nothing special - about on level with Dreamworld's equivalent (same basic product - cheap crumbed "chicken", lettuce and mayo), but it was the pathetic small, cold chips and the over-iced (+50% ice) tiny Coke (regular was about the size of a small from McDonalds, which is bad considering the enormous things you get up here at theme parks). Oh, and for some of the best chips ever, you can't go past Luna Park - they use 'steakhouse' style chips, fried perfectly - no magical chicken salts or seasoning, just quality. Plus they serve Pepsi on tap, which is the best tasting soft drink to me (more restaurants and fast food places need Pepsi).

From the press release: As much as I (more than anyone) would like for it to be a ride, it does seem somewhat likely. But hey - we could always go down the "Movie World wants to blow us away with a surprise part of the attraction" route, but you know me, I'm more towards the realist/pessimist end of the spectrum.

They didn't sell any license. Warner Bros. only ever had the rights to three films, the third of which is due out in around a years time. Theme parks and films work on totally different levels - just because a parent company has purchased the film rights, doesn't mean they can stick the same film onto rides or attractions at a park they own (similarly, if I were a shirt manufacturing company and I bought the rights to print Harry Potter shirts, it wouldn't mean I could just go out there and start making my own HP movies). Disney doesn't hold the rights to the movies or future movies. ABC (in America) has bought the rights to show the Warner Bros. movies on TV, which includes some Disney channels, but that's about it. Disney is actually in the early stages of making their own franchise similar to Harry Potter, complete with their own books, TV shows, movies and rides etc., so getting Harry Potter would be a bit of a waste. I know you're a whole lot more informed than us, Cokecool, but I wouldn't exactly call Matrix a filler ride. Firstly, it's not a ride, it's a walkthrough attraction. And by calling it a filler, would suggest it's a cheap attempt to keep people coming until they put in something huge. Yeah - it probably doesn't cost as much as a ride would, but it has just as much value to Movie World as a ride, and will probably result in the same sort of increase in attendance that a ride would.

Nah, that's not me on ride. There is one picture of me on a ride on this site though...

Unfortunately, particularly in the case of the latter, they don't see to give the ride the respect it deserves in the form of maintenance (seriously, Scenic Railway makes Bush Beast seem like... a really smooth coaster that sadly doesn't exist in Australia).

Yeah, you're right about the way Eureka Mountain tosses you around, but that's because it's a much more intense "out of control" ride than Scooby-Doo. But at least Eureka Mountain has sturdy trackwork and cars that can take the track. Scooby-Doo on the other hand, has track that's not welded (which is normally not a problem - Intamin and B&M don't use welded track, but their cars have the structure to deal with it), and some pretty awkward transitions, that even the cars don't like tracking, let alone the bodies in the cars (the last dip in the coaster section and the s-bend leading into it are very awkward, as is the final drop into the brake run). The fact is while Eureka Mountain's very sturdy trains glide over anything with ease, Scooby-Doo and it's somewhat "light" trains don't handle the tight and fast turns too well, and have some jumping or rattling tendancies. But of course, roughness is such a subjective thing - everyone's got their own opinions. I'm trying to talk in terms of the cars alone and the way they track - whether this translates to roughness for individual riders or not is dependant on a lot of external things. And there's no way I'm doubting that Scooby-Doo is the better of the two rides.

Thanks for them - I never visited the park, along with presumably most people here. It's good to get an idea of what it was like. A few years ago, while staying down in Sydney, we were looking for things to do one night - I thought about Sega World, but I thought Nah, it'll be here next time, and so went off and hit the town for just a night of fun. Needless to say, the park closed not too long after.

Almost certainly not a full retracking - you'd need a bit more than a few weeks for a retracking. I'd expect, if anything, that they're fixing problem areas of track, replacing sections of wood, maybe giving the trains a quick rehab while they're at it.

I did a quick count, because when I first saw the middle picture, I thought it did look packed. There's around 450 cars in the right carpark. Just for fun, I used a pretty inaccurate arithmetic progression model for the left carpark, assuming that each row (total of 20 rows) has two more cars than the row before, and the initial row had 32 cars. The total for the left carpark ended up for me being around 1700. There are 80 buses too, so we've got around 2250 vehicles. Let's assume each car carried four people and each bus had 40, then we had 12,000 people there that day. Now, we need to get an idea of the average per capita spending at the park, and we can work out the day's takings, and extrapolate it for the entire season. Factoring out the expenses (wages, supplies, maintenance, power etc.) over the year, we now know earnings before tax. Of course, Six Flags doesn't work on a model of earnings before tax, it's all about earnings before interest, depreciation, taxes and amortisation. So, I suppose the conclusion everyone's at now, is yes, joz, the carpark is quite full.

Scooby-Doo may be the better ride of the two, but for smoothness and grace, Eureka Mountain really does hold up. I'd challenge you to find a ride (I mean any ride) that comes up to the level of Eureka Mountain with regards to the way it glides around the track so smoothly. The ony thing I don't like about Scooby-Doo is the way some of the turns and drops really jolt you around (the s-bend and dip before the "I escaped down here. He he he..." section at the end are most notorious). The laterals may be tough (certainly more so than Scooby-Doo), but it really is a damn smooth ride. Now, if we're going down the arms up route, then Eureka Mountain would have to be the winner again. I challenge you to ride that thing arms up all the way. If you've got the guts to, chances are you won't have them attached to you at the end.

You must be proud of that secret. I posted this in another one of his posts... http://www.nfn.com.au/gold1.htm CokeCool - I suggest you credit your sources in future.

The site is here: http://www.nfn.com.au/gold1.htm They're quite out of date - you won't find anything added in the past few years.

This has run its course and gone far enough. I ask everyone to shift the construction discussions to a new thread, leaving the attitudes and closed-mindedness here.

Regardless of what Six Flags did for Movie World Madrid, the fact remains is they only invested 5% of the total into the park (under €20 million). I don't know what the exchange was back then, but it wasn't really a great deal. Certainly when they spent more than that on SFMM's 2001 coasters alone. The Jazzland deal came along and was good value. $25 million to add a new park up to the standards of their "midrange" regional parks - they'd have been crazy not to go with such a deal. I don't know what attendance they're projecting, but I'm guessing that if they don't make back their investment this season, it'll happen some time next sason. A deal like that won't come to them too often. I didn't say that they're not buying parks. They put in a bid for Tussauds in England, and I think they looked seriously at the Vivendi (Universal) properties. Just I really doubt that they'll be buying a park that will cost them USD$75++ million, that will only make them USD$5 million each season. They've kept clear of Orlando Florida, and I'm going out on a limb to say that the Gold Coast parks are in a very similar position to those in Orlando (obviously on a smaller scale etc.). They could probably raise an equivalent park to Movie World in another part of Australia (just a few hours north of the Gold Coast is the Sunshine Coast - which is currently experiencing the growth of the Gold Coast of 20-30 years ago), for a lower price than they'd pay for an existing park. I didn't say that the managers were faceless, I said that that is the perception of them. I was speaking about the USA market then. Of course trying to disect that statement I made is irrelevant to the point I was making in that paragraph. I never said B&M did anything more than engineering. Though they are still responsible for every part of the ride's construction, from the very early phases up until the opening day. The park is quoted a price by B&M, and from there they make it happen. The fact is, the competition between these parks is, and certainly would be more so if Movie World was bought out, very tight. It's nothing like the "competition" that SFMM and Cedar Point experience. As I said earlier, this is more up on the levels of the Orlando competition. They may have mutual agreements etc., but the fact is, if Dreamworld really wanted to (and got the finance from Macquarie Leisure (i.e. $100's of millions), as well as scrapped the town center etc.), they could have WVTP on their knees begging for mercy. Just as WVTP could do the same back to Dreamworld (with the same sort of finances, but also some serious changes to the entire structure of the parks). Of course, John Menzies probably meets with Tony Braxton-Smith for lunch every now and again, and they're well aware that they're currently operating such that they benefit each other to an extent, but there is the really potential for serious competition, but neither parties either have the finances available, or see the benefits too short-term to be of any use. A bit off topic, but hey - I only go as far off topic as the person above me. Where the discussion goes, it goes (unless we start talking about watermelons, which I think is a little too far from home).

Six Flags only holds management rights for Warner Bros. Movie World Madrid, and only a 5% stake in the park - contrary to popular belief, they don't own, nor were they responsible for much of the development and construction of the park from what I can see. And with Jazzland - Six Flags really would have been stupid not to buy the park. With a $5 million price tag, plus $20 million invested into the park, the place will have paid itself off within two or three years maximum. The difference in this situation is we've got a park that will cost them far more than $5 million (more in the realm of US$50 million I'd expect), and wouldn't have returns quite as luring as Jazzland. And really, if Six Flags did come along, they'd still have to put up a fight for market share. With what would be two directly competitive parks all within around a ten minute drive, as well as one water park right next door that'd be competitive to a certain degree, they'd certainly be putting up a fight for their share (and then some) of the market. They could do this with flashy new coasters every year breaking their own records, but I'd like to think that they'd continue with their own unique movie edge. The fact is that those faceless Six Flags managers you hear about that are responsible for every bad Six Flags park won't just appear here and start running the place. The park would largely be run by the same team of management. Sure, they'd be answering to different people, and be given different budgets to work with (higher or lower is anyone's guess), and have different agendas, but at the end of the day, I don't think we'd see too much change - certainly not for the worse. I thought it'd be useful to mention, while I'm rambling, that B&M subcontracts their steel work. Giovanola does their European steel as I'm aware, and an Ohio-based company does it in America. BHP has done many of Australia's coasters, and I'd expect them to be doing any future coasters where trackwork isn't done in-house. Consequently, additional costs would probably only be for things like trains, electronics, etc. :bert:

These rumours are here every year around this time almost without fail. Six Flags is several billion dollars in debt. Their current goal is to reduce that debt, hence reduced expenditure in the short term (or long term?) future. That's why we only saw new rides at their major parks this year. That's why the only park they've bought recently was one that's probably already paid itself off twice over this season. It's also why we're hearing about customer service improvements, and other general (but vital) improvements in many of their parks. Now, Australia's dollar is around 2/3 of the US dollar. That means that every dollar they make here is worth only 2/3 to them. Movie World, a year-round park, is currently doing its best to bring in somewhere in the vicinty of a million guests each year. Take your bottom Six Flags parks, say Kentucky Kingdom or Elitch Gardens - both of which beat out Movie World for attendance (I don't believe that many, if any Six Flags parks don't beat out any Australian parks - and they're all, bar SFMM, seasonal). It's not exactly screaming out "Look at me, this is a great deal!" Perhaps someone along the lines of joz can confirm this, but I'm under the impression that John Menzies (WVTP CEO) basically lives at Sea World (in the little turret atop the main entrance building according to reliable sources ), despite his 'official' office, along with the WVTP management, being located at Movie World. Cedar Fair (owners of Cedar Point, Knotts, Dorney Park etc.) would be even worse. They have a strict policy of return on investment (ROI). Essentially, they've got to be guaranteed that a park will gain significantly from any capital expenditure - quite unlike Six Flags' "build it and they will come" philosophy. This is why all their parks bar Knotts and Cedar Point are somewhat lacking in the new rides department (Knotts is number one for attendance, followed by CP, but that's location more than anything, which is why CP gets most of the money). I'm not getting terribly caught up in the worry etc. that everyone associated with Six Flags coming here. What ruins their parks is the individual parks' management, who are dictated by company policies. Like Six Flags Europe, if they came here, they'd be fully structured as a different sub-company of Six Flags, and would make decisions based on the Australian market. Still definitely don't see it happening though... And just seeing as it's come up here, I'm going to say that I'm undecided as to which is my favourite park - Sea World or Wonderland Sydney. Probably for entirely different reasons, which we don't need to go into here.

Let's do our best to keep this to the topic at hand, whatever that might be. Site/Forum issues should be in the Total Thrills forum. If you've got requests/queries regarding your own account or the forums in general, post them in that forum or PM me directly if some sort of privacy is required.

boycotta created the new account prior to me disabling his old one. I disabled the old one because he had a new one. I don't want people running around with multiple accounts. If you want your username changed, let me know - if you want to create a new account, that's fine, but if I find out, I'll disable the old one as you obviously don't need it. And just in case you're wondering, I changed boycotta's title to "Account Disabled" last night. But I didn't actually disable the account until this morning at around 11am - after Nightshifter said: "richard for som reason disabled my old boycotta account.so i started a new one."

The file seems to have vanished for the second photo. If you delete the broken one, then reupload it, it should fix it, Slick.

I'd be lying if I said I've even gotten around to thinking about starting it. Thanks for the reminder though.

I've done what research I could about the Wonderland Business Park and all things related over the past day or so. I'll try and clear up what I can here. The first stage of the development, consists of Sunway City Berhad (Sunway's property development company)'s Australian unit (Hartford Lane Pty Ltd) selling 40ha of land to Australand Holdings for the sum of $26.5 million. All subsequent land assigned for the Business Park (160ha in total) will be developed in a joint venture (50/50) with Australand and Hartford Lane. The property will be developed and I believe that they (Australand in stage one) will be selling off sections of land once developed (for instance, the Woolworths warehouse will presumably owned by Woolworths). The way I see it, there will be little to no connection between the Business Park and theme park (unlike what I believe were the original plans). Clearly Wonderland (or their parent company) has seen the surplus land that Wonderland owns could be put to a better use. Because they don't have the structure to develop property (they're a theme park), they've entered an agreement with a second party that will be able to maximise the potential of the development, and mean the park can concentrate their resources towards the park as they should be. One person at Theme Park Insider suggested that the 2003 Sydney UBD has the carpark to the left of the entrance to the theme park (i.e. those huge overflow carparks in the hilly land next to the main carpark) has been marked as "Wonderland Business Park". This is nowhere near The Beach, and as a result, I'd expect that any earthmoving etc. going on towards that end of the park is for the waterpark. Wonderland seriously owns a lot of land there. It's a huge block - if you follow the Great Western Highway out towards the Blue Mountains you really get an idea of how long their block spans for along the highway. They're developing 160ha for the Business Park alone - Dreamworld takes up 30ha of a 85ha block. Wonderland Sydney was over 60ha back when Hanna Babera Land was still open (take off a few hectares to compensate for that).

I don't think Dave would terribly mind his pictures being posted here. It certainly beats directly linking them to his site, chewing up his site's transfer. However, a big fat www.ride-extravaganza.com link in your post would have been the least that you could have done, boycotta. Anyway, the changes made between Luna Park and here were as follows: A coat of paint for everything - supports were changed from white to blue, and the track is now a lighter, brighter shade of yellow. The train was repainted. Because the ground under Big Dipper's station was actually raised from ground level, and Cyclone's site wasn't, some of the supports were extended (look at the support for the turnaround into the station if you can't see it - the one closest to the front). It's been changed from a reasonably smooth ride to a rough ride, as a result of Dreamworld's stellar maintenance teams.

It's August 13 - not for a long while. http://www.ekka.com.au/

An updated Dreamworld gallery is coming later this week. It's mostly to include Nick Central (around 15 or so quality shots of that). I might be getting some photos of Ekka 2003 up as well when it's on. It all depends on whether I feel bothered enough to go. The fact is, there seems to be an inverse relationship between the quality of the rides, and the entry price to the grounds (last year, it was $18 - the only reason I went was because I did volunteer work for RNA and that got me in). Carnival rides aren't exactly my favorites (didn't ride anything last year, but that was largely because of the lack of quality) - if spinning around were my thing, I'd be doing it right now on my chair. But I might get the inspiration some time to be ripped off. The Wonderland Sydney gallery yet again been postponed as I didn't manage to get down there (otherwise I'd be in some nice warm chalet somewhere watching bad TV in bed and eating lots of chocolate). I'm going to see if I can get down there in September to catch the end of the season, otherwise it'll be next July (it could happen over Summer, but I really doubt it). 'til next time!

You must be very proud of your accomplishment.