Slick

As reported in the GCB, John Longhurst has passed away, aged 90. Most folks will remember John as the founder (and builder) of Dreamworld, responsible for literally carving out the rivers and buildings that exist today. John was a visionary and will be missed. If you'd like to learn more about his legacy, I interviewed him a few years back and turned our chats into a three-part series which is, as far as I can find, still the best source online about how he built Dreamworld.

Cheers for the shoutout @Rivals - here’s the photos in higher quality.

Cheers for posting that mate. Enjoyed reading the perspective of someone who hasn’t been in a long while. Out of curiosity, was there a period of era of Dreamworld you identify with the most? (E.g. Early 2000’s) And based off that, how do you rate Dreamworld today? Was it better or worse?

I think that's why it's perfect for Sea World. If you're the tween/teen/adult family member being dragged to a day at Sea World, there's at least one ride that caters to satiate the thrill tickbox for guests. It's low capacity and thus matches exactly the kind of demand it would attract, and placing next to Jet Rescue means it leverages nearby guest flow and existing amenities to ensure it's used. Let's remember that Sea World was an anaemic park in the way of attractions for many years because they skewed too family and that the whole reason why Atlantis is being built is to try and undo that skew.

With respect @AheadMatthewawsome I don't think you need to report everything you hear to guest services - they've probably got enough on their plate as is being short-staffed during a pandemic. The general public love a good crazy story about rides going wrong - the amount of times i've heard people say they got stuck upside down on (insert ride here) would be enough to think every ride in the country is doomed to fail. These rides are built and marketed on the illusion that they're scary and dangerous, when in reality they're anything but. Some great life advice for both this situation and anti-vaxxers is to let people be people and don't get too worked up about stuff that's clearly nonsense. 🍻

I'd move it to Sea World. Seems like a slam dunk next to Jet Rescue. I would rather they'd moved Surfrider instead of buy Vortex, tbh.

Between myself and another mate we've been a half dozen times between when Steel Taipan opened to now and I've yet to see the park bustling the same way Movie World is. At its busiest i've yet to wait more than 15 minutes for Steel Taipan and i've also yet to see it hit the switchback or the entrance sign.

The big question - is it a family suspended coaster or a half decent proper suspended coaster?

Simplicity of design also means a greater reliance for the fundamental parts to operate correctly 100% the time, and when they're not looked after, the opportunity for them to go really bad happens really quickly. Dreamworld's Giant Drop has had its own issues, namely with the cable holders, which landed them in the news in the early 2000's when a cable holder was yanked, resulting in Dreamworld installing those steel meshes above the gondolas.

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?