Cedar Fair Sydney?

[A.H]

(Sorry if this post seems a little dumb.)

Taft Broadcasting Parks was an investor (and owner) in both Canada's Wonderland, Australia's Wonderland and other US theme parks. 

In 1992 Taft sold off all their theme parks (except Sydney) to Paramount, which Paramount then later sold to Cedar Fair. 

Taft broadcasting didn't sell Wonderland Sydney because they had a smaller stake in the park. If they had a larger stake and/or sold the park to Paramount Parks (Which then Cedar fair then bought) Would we have a Cedar Fair park in Sydney operating to this day?

[khadro]

Would Cedar Fair have been able to weather:

" September 11 attacks, the 2002 Bali bombings, the collapse of HIH Insurance, the SARS virus, the bird flu virus, "consistent losses" on the Asian financial crisis, the collapse of Ansett Australia, the Iraq War and the 2003 bushfires"

from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonderland_Sydney#Closure

I mean, just because most other businesses could, it was clearly too much for Wonderland 😐

[jjuttp]

12 hours ago, khadro said:

" September 11 attacks, the 2002 Bali bombings, the collapse of HIH Insurance, the SARS virus, the bird flu virus, "consistent losses" on the Asian financial crisis, the collapse of Ansett Australia, the Iraq War and the 2003 bushfires"

Because that's what totally closed the park.

[Baconjack]

On 27/03/2020 at 3:23 PM, A.H said:

(Sorry if this post seems a little dumb.)

Taft Broadcasting Parks was an investor (and owner) in both Canada's Wonderland, Australia's Wonderland and other US theme parks. 

In 1992 Taft sold off all their theme parks (except Sydney) to Paramount, which Paramount then later sold to Cedar Fair. 

Taft broadcasting didn't sell Wonderland Sydney because they had a smaller stake in the park. If they had a larger stake and/or sold the park to Paramount Parks (Which then Cedar fair then bought) Would we have a Cedar Fair park in Sydney operating to this day?

If I recall correctly, Taft offered Wonderland to Paramount with all their other parks, but Paramount wasn't interested in buying out Wonderland so the deal was made without the park hence the investment group bought it which then went onto Sunway.

Even then, at the time Taft wasn't investing all that much into Wonderland apart from the water park. Other than that, pretty much every ride they got was second hand from one of the american parks (see the Zodiac which originally ran at Kings Island). And while their American parks were all getting brand spanking new big rides, Wonderland got the Titan second hand from the Expo.

But let's say Paramount somehow were interested (I mean, they did pass on Wonderland then say they wanted to spend half a billion dollars to build a theme park from the ground up in Melbourne only a few years later). Anything could happen here.

Given Paramount relatively evenly spread its capex across the parks to make sure no park wasn't too neglected. I'd guess they would also do that for Wonderland, so you'd have a good number of new rides and attractions added and maybe some of the older rides axed. Nothing too spectacular but given Paramount invested heavily in prototypes in all their parks there could have been a world's first kind of attraction in the mix.

Now if Wonderland did somehow fall under Cedar Fair ownership (which I highly doubt would have occurred and will explain later), it wouldn't be an invitation for one to get hyped out of their mind. There would be no big B&M hyper. I would argue that Wonderland would be on the low end of the chain in terms of how much capex they were prepared to spend, around about the scale of where Worlds of Fun or Valleyfair is if you want a reference. A low catchment area of only around 5-6 million people (compared to the American parks which have catchment areas of tens of millions of people) and very little in terms of local competition outside of LPS (which is effectively a landlocked park with its hands tied in planning rules preventing expansion and/or ride replacement) essentially could allow Cedar Fair to build maybe a few flat rides but nothing huge. I simply wouldn't see Cedar Fair bet big on tourists and put massive ambitious projects in to draw them in but I definitely could be wrong.

Bear in mind the Cedar Fair scenario is dependent on if Wonderland ended up making it financially to that stage. Post 2006 the park would have been much more likely to fall into the hands of a local company. Whether this would be Village (that were looking to invest in Sydney a few years later) or someone who was more interested in the land the park was built on is anyone's guess and this could result in a multitude of scenarios I don't have the time or energy to explain out.

Edited March 29, 2020 by Baconjack

[DaptoFunlandGuy]

On 27/03/2020 at 2:23 PM, A.H said:

Taft broadcasting didn't sell Wonderland Sydney because they had a smaller stake in the park

Actually, Taft offered their stake in all parks to Paramount as part of the sale. Paramount cherrypicked and elected not to take on Australia's Wonderland because of the distance and difficulty in managing the park remotely. It was nothing to do with whether they had a minority stake or otherwise - they could still have sold that stake.

19 hours ago, jjuttp said:

Because that's what totally closed the park.

14 hours ago, Baconjack said:

If I recall correctly,

I'm impressed! Yes, you're pretty much right. I'm not 100% on whether Demon was a Taft project or a paramount one - although i'm leaning towards it being Taft due to the lead time.

As for investment into the park, and the second-hand nature of many of the parks attractions, I think we'd have seen Paramount \ Cedar rotate some rides around (Six Flags style) and we'd have seen some newer attractions move around a bit. I think if Paramount had been willing to take the park on, it would still be standing today, most likely under the cedar fair brand..