Richard

The PGA Ferris Wheel is a three-armed version, not two like Zodiac. Wonderland's Zodiac came from Paramount's Kings Island (as did many of Wonderland's flat rides - back in the 80's when PKI was seemingly ridding their park of all flat rides). Though, this isn't really to do with the topic at hand...

Well, most parks work on a 3+ year plan, which at least give a general idea of what the coming years are to focus on (even if it is as general as "New Thrill Ride", or specific as "New B&M Floorless: 6 inversions, red track & blue supports..."). So I'd say yes, Wonderland do know what they're doing. That and the fact that most manufacturers will need several months preperation for any ride, before any track is even assembled (except Vekoma, who under previous management, had one complete ready-to-go SLC and Boomerang in their plant). Just as a disclaimer: nothing I said in this post is at all reflective of what Wonderland may or may not do. This is all hypothetical talk from me, and any similarity to future announcements from the park is entirely coincidental.

As suggested, I'd make an appearance if someone brought this up here. The coaster goes by the wonderful original name, Mad Mouse. It's a Herschell travelling mouse, dating back to some time in the 60's or 70's. I'd imagine it was advertised in some industry classifieds within the past 10 years or so, and someone brought it over here for the park (known as Downunderland). The park operates weekends, and holidays. I got the credit last year on the way home from a ski trip (I had previously seen the coaster in 1999 on a similar trip, and vowed to someday return and ride)- it can't have been above 5ºC at the time. It's really nothing special. Apart from just about rusting itself into pieces, it has this strange habbit of "jumping" when a car engages the lift (as it's merely standing on wooden chocks, the force of the car "clicking in" makes the supports shake, and lift off the ground a tiny bit). It's got a tiny drop of airtime in the bunny hills leading into the brake run (that can't be more than 75cm tall). Do it for the credit, but that's all you'll get out of it. Here's an RCDB picture, and accompanying information (courtesy of me ): http://rcdb.com/installationgallery2399.htm?Picture=1

Well, there we are - a few things have been answered. 1) It's not quite a factory. 2) It IS part of the Business Park 3) By the looks of it, it isn't replacing the carpark (which would be just plain silly).

Thank's for that wonderful piece of insight!

The park was built for an opening in 1985, owned by Taft Entertainment. At the time, they owned the "Kings" parks (PKI, PKD). This company was bought out by Paramount in around 1992, and so naturally, they got Wonderland Sydney. They held onto it until 1998, doing the bare minimum to keep the cash flowing (i.e. adding Space Probe to counter Luna Park's Big Dipper). I think they wanted to get rid of it for much of the 90's. Let's face it - the Aussie dollar isn't exactly great, and add onto that the park only gets about half the attendance that their bottom US parks gets. You've got profits, but nothing to be terribly proud of. They sold the park in 1997 or 98 to Sunway, the Malaysian company who are the current owners. They're the ones responsible for bringing some life back into the grounds, turning what was once a very dirty and unimpressive park, into one that is certainly very presentable (and it and Sea World top my list for most impressive overall park) and quite pleasing to walk around. That's the basics, add Demon some time around when Paramount got the park, and add that they changed the name for the Sydney Olympics in about 1999, and you've pretty well got everything that's happened at the park.

Let's all chill out, and stick to the topic at hand. If you're not going to say something nice, then don't say anything at all. I personally don't play the rumour game. To me, it's all nonsense until it's confirmed.

It is the most popular thread we've had here, but that's the thing. There is no set topic here. It's quite hard to follow when there are several different topics being spoken of. Let's keep Construction to the new construction thread, and if you want to discuss any other aspects of Wonderland, keep that to a new thread. It'll make it much easier to discuss a variety of things at the same time.

Please please PLEASE, use the button that is in each post, to add anything to your posts. There's no need to post three times in a row like that, within 11 minutes.

I hardly think this is the place to discuss Vekoma clones, or comment on Avatars.

You'll have all gotten a copy of this in your email account. I thought I'd post it here, just in case.

You'll see that its somewhat back to normal. There's still some changes that need to be made to make nicer, but you've got all your features back! Stick with me for a few days/weeks/months/years and everything will eventually be nice again!

The album: http://www.totalthrills.com/forums/album.php Personal Albums: http://www.totalthrills.com/forums/album_p...sonal_index.php You'll have to remember these links until I get it fixed again.

While modifying the theme this morning, I happened to corrupt a file. :x :x Until then, we'll have to make do with the old theme. I'll get it fixed over the coming days.

Well, this is the 130th message in this thread, and I think it is time to get some new topics started up. Let's get some new topics started - this one is getting really hard to navigate. If you want to talk about construction/rumours, start a new topic about that. If you want to discuss other stuff, start a new topic dealing with that stuff. Thanks for making this so busy and popular! 8)

Wonderland lost their Hanna Babera license and didn't renew it, which is why it originally changed to Little Wonders Land. The reasons stated by the park of the closure was that guests thought the park was too big, which is fair - it IS a big hike from Beastie to Bush Beast. And one point to make - just because Movie World holds the rights to HB, doesn't mean Wonderland couldn't simultaneously. Of course, this is irrelevant, as Wonderland did let their rights expire, eventually replacing it with Marvel.

The animal park happens to be one of their most important attractions. It is what brings in foreigners, who are big bucks.

I personally thought that the show that replaced it, Outback Celebration, was a very well put together show. Compared with other theme park musicals in Australia (Looney Tunes Revue, Superstars: Live in Concert), it's certainly one of the best I've seen. Granted, rather lame story, and the songs were adequately tacky, but it was very enthusiastically performed both times I saw it, and was very different from your average theme park show. And did have its moments, and some catchy tunes ("Three cheers for Daphne, she's our outback queen!"). It was only ever going to run for a year, celebrating "Year of the Outback".

The fact that you guys have posted photos of more coastets than there are in the entire of Australia is somewhat depressing. The fact that they're all on-ride makes it even more depressing.

Bermuda Triangle is proudly 100% in-house! I'd imagine most of the technical stuff was subcontracted to local companies - stuff that was out of their league. But hey, why pay another company to design and build a ride, when you can just steal all their ideas? As for Looney Tunes; I wouldn't get too bogged down on the storyline - let's just say it perhaps wasn't the best thought-out.

Well, the show is replacing a clone of our Police Academy Stunt Show, hence the identical set etc. (look at the second picture - even the stadium looks identical). But I think the world "random" does quite correctly describe the show from what limited amounts we can gather from it.

This link was on the latest update at Screamscape. It shows photos from the new show at Movie World Germany: http://freizeitparkweb.de/dcf/DCForumID39/743.html Now, maybe its because the show is depicted by about a dozen photographs, and accompanying German where I couldn't do much better than realising "nervös" is "nervous" (I've never studied German ), but sorry - that looks like the most pointlessly strung together set of stunts and other stupid things - all done in an unmodified Police Academy set (unless you call the"Tactical Response Unit" painted khaki a modification). Let's just all hope that this seemingly crappy show doesn't ever grace our park.

The lasers were turned off that day, which was a bummer. Sometimes the computer system or PLC that controls the laser movement dies, and the lasers shutdown mid-ride, which is interesting. However, on this particular day, they were off all day. Cost-cutting or what I don't know (this was back in about March). The lasers are picked up quite well by the camera, as you see with the single laser that was on, before the brakerun.

If you do watch Topp Twins, you'll see that I wasn't exactly serious about that comment. And while you're on ABC, be sure to tune in at 10:25 tonight, for The Glass House - in my opinion one of the funniest shows on TV at the moment (though the new Shaun Micallef show, though not quite holding up to his old show, comes close).

Actually, we were both wrong. The original figure was I believe $15m, this was well before even the name was known - just that it was to be Scooby Doo themed. The actual cost was $13m. I believe around $2m was spent on lasers.