Richard

Well, not so much a single photo, as it is 2445 photos joined together, as well as accompanying sound, but I thought this was adequately interesting. They tell you to hold onto loose items, which is what I did - my finger just so happened to press record during the ride. Quality has been way bumped down so everyone can enjoy it. I took another one on Lethal Weapon (never again), and one on Wild West Falls, but maybe if the public outcry is great, I'll put them up too. There's not much to see, but it's all part of the ride.

It could be Deja Vu... Now of course, you're all confused.

I've never heard any sort of comments regarding Aussies and kangaroos - that's a first for me. Am I the only one who's noticing a distinct Freudian element in conversations here recently? I personally think that New Zealanders are treated unfairly by Australians. You really need to know more about them before you can swing insults their way. Which is why I propose you all watch The Topp Twins on ABC tonight at 11:30pm, which will give you greater and understanding of true NZers.

Yeah, the ride rabid is speaking of is the Setpoint ride I was talking about. They're certainly not the most costly things out there, and look like great family fun. I'd certainly love something like this - it'd give you more than just slides and pools, which can get a bit boring (minus of course the Super 8 Aqua Racer, which will never get boring). On a related note, I'll try and officially launch the Wet'n'Wild gallery over the weekend.

Well, BHP have done the steel for several coasters in Australia, and I'd wager that they do equal, if not better steelwork, than most European or US plants. I'd say the real reason that Australia isn't doing too well in the ride department is because of a lack of creativity, or the respective owners trying to milk them for everything they're worth. These days, there is very little difference in cost between the big manufacturers. You'll pay almost as much for a Batman inverted clone from B&M as you'll pay for a Vekoma SLC. As a rule of thumb, based on the past 10 years or so, a new "big" ride from conception to opening in Australia, is around $16m. •Lethal Weapon - $16m •Wild Wild West (WWF) - $16m •Tower of Terror - $16m •Scooby-Doo Spooky Coaster - $13m •Giant Drop - $12m (on top of the $16m for TOT) •Big Dipper - $8m •Cyclone - $5.5m (3 for ride, 2.5 for relocation/construction/"theming") The three biggest of those rides, the top three, as you see are each $16mil - a fair benchmark price for the bigger rides.

Hey, nissa, welcome to the party! What I've done, is I've moved your question into a new thread in the "Other Parks" forum where it fits best. The link is here: http://www.totalthrills.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=187

Yeah, by all means, upload them here. It'd also mean if your current location changes etc., the links won't go dead. I tell you, I'm going to get down there this year, and I'm going to get so many hundreds of photos from Wonderland, we'll have pictures of every toilet and bin in the park. It'll happen - honest. :oops: Well, it looks like we're going to have a nice steady start to the season this year - not like 2000, when almost overnight the ski season began with about 50cm of snow out of nowhere. Last year, it was a bit late, and we had a week of nice soft powder, but the associated non-stop blizzards, and wind-chill factor that brought it down to about -10º all week.

"Show" Xcelerator at Knott's was up in little over a month. Once Scooby-Doo's shed was up at Movie World, it took around three months to be completed. "Scream!%¿" at SFMM took around 3 months. September to December gives them three months at least. I wouldn't count too much out just yet. And let's not count out flat rides too. Though personally they're not my favourites (meaning: they all suck outright, and I'd gladly take a knocking-ball to one given the oportunite), I'm sure some people would be jumping for joy at the announcement of a shiny new Huss Rainbow headed to Wonderland (I don't expect too many to get that joke ).

I've not got a list or anything fancy like that, but if you check out RCDB's Australian coasters, of them there are two that I haven't ridden - the Melbourne Show's Wild Mouse and Adventure World's Turbo Mountain (which aren't the easiest credits to get). Currently I've only got Aussie rides, but I'm waging that it's the highest count of Australian-only coasters for any single person. I'm doing a California-Florida trip at the end of this year, and with careful planning, I'm able to get upwards of about 50 or more coasters (including all year-round CA parks, Vegas, SFOT if we're lucky, all FL year-round parks, and a trip up to Georgia for Wild Adventures - the kiddy coaster Capital of the World).

Hehe, cheers. As you may guess, I used a Sea World template for this gallery. In changing files and moving them everywhere (from computer to staging server, back to my computer, then to totalthrills.com), some of the correct files got switched etc. I'll fix it before the gallery goes live, which should be once my life gets a little quieter (permission has come from the park ).

It's not the prettiest thing, I'll admit - but what slide is? The purple and blue doesn't exactly do it for me. I'm guessing it doesn't actually need the top half of the funnel (especially seeing as its only wet in the bottom half), and I personally think it'd look better without, but it does have a very intimidating presence over the park.

As long as it's not a body slide I'm happy. Sorry, but unless you're willing to go for Wiegand's stainless steel slides (which by nature are very European looking, which I don't think is the look Wet'n'Wild is after), they hurt too much. A lot of the bigger waterparks are investing in these continuous circuit water slides. They combine everything from drops, rapids, and uphill water-jet powered sections. Schlitterbahn, in Texas has one that lasts upwards of an hour I believe (and I'll be there in December!), where guests can ride for the entire ride, or chose to get off at several stations (i.e. you can ride the exciting sections, leaving out slower parts). I'd love to see one of them, but I'd imagine that it'd really be out of the league of Wet'n'Wild for the near future.

Yeah, obviously, that ride will never happen. Not because of space though, it'd be the noise (which my solution tries to combat). A ride could very easily be designed to be largely "on top" of the park, with supports squeezed in in free spots (Intamin's triangular and box truss tracks require significantly less support). The park's taking a different style when it reopens, with emphasis on entertainment and culture rather than thrill rides as with the previous encarnation. We'll still have the wooden Wild Mouse, thankfully, which is identical to the Aussie World ride (both are the standard Schwarzkopf design), and I'll vouch is certainly a quality ride.

Holiday World is a family owned park, which explains the outstanding way the park has chosen to go with this incredible news. Your average corporate park would be up and running like nothing happened within 5 minutes of an ambulance leaving. Holiday World closed the park in respect, and chose to be so open about the whole incident. It's tragic news, and really does make you think twice about leaving the lapbar loose for the sake of airtime, and has cleared up the thought on some of the larger sites that enthusiast=invulnerable.

Well, there's always the option of staving and overworking the animals in the wilflife park. Eventually we'll have our own authentic (and quite thrilling/life-threatening) Animal Farm attraction. Not only is it fun, but it also teaches you the fundamental flaws in communism.

Well, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. That's always been my opinion regarding the replacement of The Young Einstein house with Harry Potter. Now, maybe it has something to do with the fact that Young Einstein is my favorite Australian movie ever, and the fact that I can recite every line of the movie. The fact that over the past 10+ years I've broken two tapes of the movie from overwatching. Or the fact that I contacted Movie World when they shut down Young Einstein (this is like 1999 we're talking), to see if I could get any memorabilia from the attraction. But really, it was a heck of a lot better, in overall quality, and interestingness, than Harry Potter ever was. Granted, the film is now 15 years old, Yahoo Serious turns 50 this year, and hasn't been known as Greg Pead for 23 years, but I think that certainly should have set the standards for Harry Potter, which it definitely didn't. I don't necessarily want Matrix to have a slanted floor and water running uphill, but if the quality and just plain differentness of Young Einstein should be the benchmark for any future attractions that take its place. And if Matrix doesn't work, the walk-through sex attraction sounds like a goer.

I didn't realise they were with a disposable camera - in that case, they're pretty good shots considering the weather. With me, it's as if the moment I pick up a disposable camera, my hands immediately turn shakey, and my thumbs grow enough to cover the lens. Well, I can't wait to see the next batch of shots. The photos here are taken with I think three different cameras. Two are digital, one is an SLR (all the pictures of the NSW/Vic attractions are SLR). It sure makes a difference as you slide up the spectrum of cameras (believe it or not - it's not all in the hands that take the picture...).

Realistically, I see Luna Park Melbourne as a dead end. The park is essentially a mess. The Scenic Railway rides worse than even Bush Beast. A pretty good feat considering its biggest drop is all of about 10 metres. "The bare minimum" by the park's current owners has allowed it to turn into a disgrace. The remaining rides are old carnival rides which look terrible and ride the same. The staff are arrogant and rude (i.e. they have a "no camera rule", so when dad sits down on Scenic Railway in the row in front of his kids to take their picture while still in the station, instead of the attendant kindly asking him to put the camera away, she yells at him and proceeds to start an argument). One thing I will give the park is their food (served from a temporary tent) - best chips I've had in a theme park, and any park that serves Pepsi on tap gets at least one point in my book. But my point is, there is a lot more wrong with this park than meets the eyes, and I'm all for making the most of what you've already got before going out for new things (of course that means binning all of their existing flat rides) - a lesson some certain Gold Coast parks could learn. As for Sydney, I doubt we'll ever see new rides there beyond the Wild Mouse and other flat rides that are to be included in the rebuilding. I think if they took another shot at it, they could get a decent coaster in the park - I've thought about this a lot, and believe it could work very well. An Intamin hyper-twister style ride (not necessarily 200ft, but the key elements of a twister), using the silent elevator lift to peak, and filling the supports with sand and use isolator pads (as on Xcelerator and California Screaming), and you've got a silent ride. A well signposted rule that you can't scream on the ride would be enough for 90% of people (presumable the other 10% are the same ones that enjoy engraving their intials into the air ducts in Cyclone's queue, or rip off the paint in Scooby Doo's queue). Make the ride circumnavigate the park, with station etc to the cliff side of the park, so that'd be the "slow sections", and undercover, so virtually silent. With the majority of drops, overbanks, and general excitements of the ride on the left side, screams would mostly occur over there. Make it two loops around the park, and have as much of the cliff-side in tunnels or with reflectors or something (as with GhostRider), and you've got a ride that is certainly quieter than the ferries going past that should be rerouted to stop waking the yuppies at 6AM (not that that sort of lifestyle up in those awesome units wouldn't appeal to me ). You'd have limited hours (10-5/6PM), maybe more leeway on weekends, and that in theory should work. Because of the nature of Intamin track and minimal supports, they could be spaced in and out of everything that they plan to build, with track going silently above. By the way, the track is white, as are the supports. Give it a cool name (how about Screaming Railway - that just came into my head then), and you've got a ride that is 100x better than Big Dipper, with theoretically none of the complaints (like that has ever happened in the history of mankind - the yuppies complained that Jesus' cross disrupted their view).

Wonderland Sydney (formerly Australia's Wonderland) was built in the mid-80's by Kings Entertainment (of Kings Island fame). This company was owned by at this stage Taft Entertainment, who owned Hanna-Babera (hence all the KE parks having HB theming). They sold the company to Paramount in the early 90's. Paramount owned it until around 1998, who then sold it to Sunway, a Malaysian company, who renamed the park for the Sydney Olympics. It is still owned by Sunway Corp. The park was never owned by any Australian company. If you're going to blame anyone for letting the park fall into disrepair, blame Paramount, who didn't really care (after all, it's a park that gets less than half the attendance any of their other parks get, and the Australian dollar further lowers the income). They added Space Probe (7) to keep the park in competition with Luna Park, came out on top there, and didn't need to do anything more to win the Sydney market. Sunway have turned the park around amazingly. Though it definitely has a long way to go. Between my visit in 1999, and my next visit in 2002, the park turned from being a dirty poorly kept park that was bottom of my list, to a great park, that is now my favourite for overall quality in Australia. As for popularity, the park is certainly up there in attendance figures with the Gold Coast parks, and I can't see it being any less profitable then them. Now... the factory. My opinion is I'll believe it when I see it. If, if, Wonderland were to sell off some of their land to build a factory, why would they sell their main carpark, or any carparks. Wonderland have a huge amount of land. If they wanted to sell off land, they'd use excess land at the far ends of the block, not the middle, essentially in the middle of the theme park. They could be resurfacing the carpark (which does need doing), they could even be building the confirmed Business Centre. A factory is a pretty general term. What sort of factory? This is a residential area, I can't see too many neighbours letting something like this go ahead.

Maybe that comment needed some smilies or something around it - but it was intended as a joke. 8) By the way, you'd be really quite interested to hear to backgrounds of some of Warner Village's top guys (as I've heard it). Granted, they're probably the best in Australia at what they do, but you certainly wouldn't pick it based on what they were doing many years ago.

Well, our good friend King Neptune posted at westcoaster.net saying that Matrix is looking to be a walk-through attraction to replace Harry Potter. There could still be a chance for something more thrilling. I don't need the "Movie World is a family park" line, because as far as I'm aware, The Matrix is a very "thrilling" concept - it's the exact opposite of something like Harry Potter or Scooby Doo. Well, if it is the case that it's only the walk-through, I must applaud Movie World on taking what are easily the biggest sci-fi films of the past 20 years (no giant Star Wars fans among us I hope ), and utilising what is presumably pretty close to 100% exclusivity, to opening something even better than the "stunt" show we were all dying for - a Harry Potter for the big people. I'm not going to complain bitterly (that's of course assuming that I'm not doing that at the moment). I'm not even going to give my utterly perfect opinion on what they should have done. In the end, I could really care less. Just one thing's for sure - I'm not going to spend my $112 on a season pass, and probably about $20/month like I used to do (no wonder I'm barely scraping together the money for my US trip ). But let's just hope this is just a warmup to the big Matrix coaster that's coming in Summer to coincide with Revolutions.

There's still some verification etc., that needs to go on with the park before I can make the gallery officially available. But there's a treat (if you'll call it that) the faithful Forumers can have a sneak peak. We'll call it beta testing, won't we... http://oldsite.totalthrills.com/wnwgallery.php Take it for a cruise. Be sure to check out Whirlpool!

And won't that teach people to live in harmony with nature...

That's a very nice saving. It would be nice to see more people in the park over winter, and repeat regional guests are the way to go - they mightn't spend as much there, but the once-off fee is better than nothing.

You mentioned once that Sea World rents Pirates from Iwerks. Perhaps these "tough times" are limiting their entertainment budget (let's face it, it wasn't exactly bloated to start with), so they've bought a 3rd party video film, which would obviously be cheaper in more than one way (presumably it's 3D, not 4D with the special effects). But hang on... I'm not really buying all this "tough times" stuff anyway.