Would you like a free subscription to
THE LOOP?
Click here
to receive your direct link to every newly published newsletter

If you have a comment
or question contact Eric Minton
703-567-0532
eric@gettheloop.com

©2003, Minton Enterprises LLC
All rights reserved

THE LOOP is a member of

In this issue:
(To go directly to a story, click on a blue keyword below):

Six Flags' brain injury studies tackle media sensationalism head-on;

S&S Power's Stan Checketts plans his own amusement park;

Caribbean waterpark veteran lands in icy Elmwood Park Zoo;

Postal workers get carried away at Knott's Berry Farm;

Universal Orlando gets close for comfort with 10/5 rule;

Young spokesman becomes a star at the South Carolina Aquarium;

Football star is an understandable no-show at Legoland's Super Bowl party;

We welcome three themed classrooms to Brevard Zoo, a simulated Mars voyage to the Cradle of Aviation Museum, a Broadway-class musical to Disney's California Adventure, and the first non-U.S. Nickelodeon Central themed area to Dreamworld in Australia;

Minton goes to work for Germany's Leisure Professional, and THE LOOP presents its annual circulation figures.

For back issues of THE LOOP,
click here

For a printable version of this column,
click here

For more information on the facilities and organizations featured in this newsletter, visit our Connections Page.
click here

A no-brainer
It is fascinating reading. Eating bacon, sneezing and sexual activity are listed in the same sentence. There are pillow fights and pogo sticks, swing sets and lounge chairs. There’s a character named “Hoot,” there’s a Challenger’s challenger, and there’s an underlying Story.

The plot line is not the least bit suspenseful, however: roller coasters are safe.

All of this is contained in the two studies on brain injuries and roller coasters commissioned by Six Flags, Inc., the results of which were presented at a Washington, D.C., press conference Tuesday. The American Association of Neurological Surgeons investigated links between roller coaster riding and brain injuries, and Exponent Failure Analysis Associates studied whether g-forces on coasters are exceeding safe limits (see Extra! Extra! for a summary). On hand for the presentation was a panel of physicians and engineers, along with astronaut couple Rhea Seddon (medical officer and three-time Shuttle traveler) and Robert L. “Hoot” Gibson (U.S. Navy fighter pilot and five-time Shuttle traveler). Six Flags President and COO Gary Story gave a statement as did IAAPA President J. Clark Robinson.

“I thought it was great,” Robinson said of the press conference, which drew national television network and wire service coverage and, via satellite feed, placement on local TV news and newspapers across the country. “These studies that have been done were really remarkable. They leave no doubt in my mind that this is definitive.”

Remarkable, yes; definitive, not necessarily so. The AANS study, while finding no viable link between coasters and brain injuries, recommended further monitoring, and IAAPA is doing just that. At Tuesday’s press conference, Robinson made public the association’s reporting program begun last year. That news, along with the results of the two studies, “had a good response from the (Capitol) Hill,” Robinson said. Furthermore, Story announced that Six Flags is teaming with AANS’ Neuro-Knowledge program to publicly monitor incidents at its parks.

The studies did not sway critics— including U.S. Representative Edward Markey, the most vocal proponent of federal oversight—from continuing their assaults on the industry’s safety record. Unable to question the content of such exhaustive research, doubters questioned the funding: $200,000 from Six Flags. Story and the panelists said the contracts stipulated independence for the researchers, a stipulation insisted upon by both sides. “We in this industry have a responsibility to assure the public with truth and science,” Story said at the press conference. “I can tell you that Six Flags and my colleagues in this industry have been relying on sound biomedical, biomechanical and aerodynamic research and science for decades, long before Congressman Markey ever thought about amusement parks.”

“Frankly, in my business I sometimes have to deliver news to clients that they may not want to hear,” said Lee V. Dickinson, principal engineer at Exponent. “Our credibility means a lot more to us than any single contract.” Any doubters should know that the name “Exponent” still brings a shudder to some people in the U.S. government, thanks to the company’s no-quarter-given review of the space shuttle Challenger explosion, a probe that led to a complete overhaul of the space agency that commissioned their investigation.

While the two studies may not stop the attacks, Tuesday looks like it could be a watershed day for the industry on this issue. “I don’t think we’ve ever had anything in the industry with this much coverage, and about 95 percent of it was positive,” Robinson said of the press conference. Now, at least, the media has a viable and visible tool countering the sensational but unqualified testimony that hitherto dominated the discussion.

Both studies independently determined that the Consumer Product Safety Commission numbers are flawed, that g-forces are not increasing even as coasters get bigger and faster, and that even if g-forces were increasing numerous aeronautical studies over the decades have shown that g-forces do not lead to subdural hematomas. The AANS, meanwhile, debunked most of the case studies touted by Rep. Markey, who, notably, now says that brain injuries are not the issue, though that was his key focus before Tuesday.

For much of the positive coverage the industry needs to thank not only the researchers but also “Hoot” Gibson. The former Top Gun pilot was the media darling of the day, thanks to his 30-year career flying high-performance jets, his shuttle experience, his professed love of coasters and the charisma and bluntness that seem to come so naturally to fighter pilots. “I want to address some of the rather bizarre comments I’ve read that compare roller coaster g-forces to a ride on the space shuttle or to a fighter jet,” he told the press conference. “Let me say that this is runaway sensationalism and total hogwash.”

To review the studies, go to www.emerson-associates.com/safety. Statements by the participants and PDF versions of the studies are available at the bottom of the page.

For further commentary on the studies’ impact, see Eric’s Turn below.

Print this article

Comment on this article

Back to top

S&S Rides like SkySwatter would have a better environment if Checketts succeeds in building his own park. Photo by Eric Minton.

Stan’s plan
For all the forlorn expressions on the people of Logan, Utah. For all the film footage of high-thrill rides amid parking lots and industrial landscapes. For himself.

For these reasons and more, Stan Checketts, founder and owner of S&S Power, Inc., is planning to build a small family amusement park on some of his property. “I can leave a legacy in the valley,” he said of his hometown. “That would be a nice thing for S&S to do.”

S&S already has established quite a legacy in Logan, no matter what Checketts will tell you. But that legacy is a fleeting one. He builds his rides there—towers, thrust air coasters, bungee-genre rides and a new generation of family thrill rides—to test and show to industry operators, then the rides disappear from the Logan landscape, heading for distant parks in far-off lands. Most of his hometown population—excepting those few employee relations and friends who get to ride the prototypes—have to travel hundreds of miles to ride S&S's most famous products.

Checketts wants to build a typical family entertainment center with a go-kart track, batting cage, miniature golf course, bumper boats and arcade. He also would put in an infiltration course, a children's obstacle course of the kind that is gaining popularity at Japanese venues. He would then supplement these permanent attractions with some of his high-thrill prototypes.

Not only would the rides then be available to the locals, even if for a short while, it would serve S&S as a proving ground for new products and provide a bona fide park atmosphere for sales calls and videos. “Every time I design some new wild ride, I’d put it there rather than set it in some parking lot, and get reports from real people who would pay to do it," Checketts said. "We’d get some really good reports and videos and better numbers to give park owners on how the rides were received.”

Checketts already has 28 acres (11.3 hectares) of land set aside for the project, but he wants to get it annexed by the city before proceeding. Then he could get city water and sewage to the site and have it zoned to fit his needs, with no height restrictions. “I don’t like limits,” said the man who is developing a 350-foot-tall (106-meter) freefall drop tower and a drag racer that will go from 0 to 115 mph (185 kph) in less than 2 seconds. The process for getting annexation and zoning could take several months depending on how much opposition he gets from what some residents in Logan call the “CAVE people” (Citizens Against Virtually Everything).

Once he gets the green light, Checketts said he would proceed cautiously. Though ancillary to his current manufacturing operation, he wants the new park to be economically viable. “This valley hasn’t got anything like that, but we’re not large enough. We’ve only got 100,000 people here, but we’d draw out of Wyoming and Idaho.” And he’d be sure to get a lot of repeat visits from locals.

Print this article

Comment on this article

Back to top

From lifeguards to alpacas, Suarez has nurtured his career in all types of climates. Photo by Jeff Garrett, Elmwood Park Zoo.

Fish out of water
He is a native of Puerto Rico. He spent his entire career at waterparks in his native land, in the Philippines and in Florida. So forgive Rafael Suarez his confusion one morning last autumn when he got up to head for his new job as operations director of the Elmwood Park Zoo in Norristown, Pennsylvania.

“I get dressed, putting all these layers on like you’re supposed to do, I walk out and get this shock of cold air, and I see something white on the windshield,” he said. “The first thing I thought was that it was mist, like you get in the tropics. I turn the wipers on, and nothing happens. I go, ‘Whoa! what’s going on here?’ I touch it, and, ‘Whoa! this is ice!’ I didn’t have one of those scrapers, so I got one of my credit cards and scraped the whole thing with that.”

Suarez has several such experiences of his first winter north of 80 degrees mean temperature. Like the time he decided to clean his dirty windshield with wiper fluid while driving down the highway. “Whoa! it turns to ice. I had to stop. By then I had a scraper.” He has also already built four snowmen. “Every time it snows, we have to go out,” he said of he and his two boys, ages 4 and 1 (and 37). While the current cold snap keeping even Vermonters indoors has settled over the northeast United States, Suarez said he is adapting just fine. “I adjust easily. It’s like the tropics, you get used to it. I’ve been there, and now I’m in another extreme.”

Moving from the Tropic of Cancer to the Northeast Corridor isn’t the only extreme move Suarez made upon transplanting himself to Norristown. Rafael Suarez, a fixture at waterpark trade meetings, is running a zoo.

This is a man who entered the amusement business as a lifeguard at Plaza Aquatica in Puerto Rico where, by default, he helped manage the crews finishing up construction on the park. He quickly became a lifeguard supervisor and over the course of seven years he rose through the ranks to become operations manager. He was then hired to help develop Splash Island in the Philippines, eventually becoming director of the park. After five years there, he moved to Orlando, Florida, to become a waterpark consultant, handling several accounts in Mexico, but meanwhile looking for steady employment.

He came across a listing for Elmwood Park Zoo and submitted his résumé. Executive Director Steven Marks liked the common thread he saw running through Suarez’s career path: developing operations from scratch, just the kind of talent Marks wanted to help grow his 16 acre, 150-animal zoo. Suarez had never worked at a zoo before, but his educational background was in science and biology. “You send a résumé and you figure, ‘Oh well, we’ll see.’ They called me for an interview and I said, ‘From what?’ From where?!’”

Just as he’s adapted to the cold, he said he’s adapting just fine to his new role in the zoo industry. “Operations is operations,” he said. He notes two primary differences: animal management, which waterparks don’t have, and revenue dependent more on donations than admissions and retail. “But the rest of the operations are basically the same. The maintenance is the same. You are dealing with what the guests see, cleanliness, proper signage and guest services. Our safety standards in the waterpark industry are really high, and I had to implement higher standards for safety here.”

Suarez’s mission is to shape up operations as Elmwood Park Zoo launches on a major 20 year master plan that will expand the collection’s focus from North America to the whole Western Hemisphere. “We have to try to establish procedures and plans and operations so we can grow,” he said. “We want a state-of-the-art zoo. If we fix everything we have now, then when we grow it will be easier.”

In that light, Suarez brought a key aspect of his tropical waterpark training to his new northern zoo job. “We’re non-profit, but we have to operate like we want to make a profit. I’m turning that mentality here.” It’s a mentality that can weather just about any storm.

Print this article

Comment on this article

Back to top

Express service
Pity the poor postal and package carriers. Knott’s Berry Farm does.

In honor of the men and women at the U.S. Postal Service, Federal Express, Airborne Express and other package delivery companies who pounded the pavements with extra loads over the Christmas holidays, the Buena Park, California, theme park is offering a post-holiday discounted admission for the month of January. With valid photo ID, the carriers can purchase up to six adult admission tickets for just $12.95, almost a 50 percent savings over the discounted residents fare.

The promotion is in its third year and continues a tradition at the park of pushing highly targeted, vertical market promotions. “Our challenge every year is bringing in attendance in our off months, January and February specifically,” said Susan Tierney, Knott’s director of public relations. Knott’s Berry Farm works closely with the U.S. Postal Service, Airborne Express and Federal Express to get flyers distributed throughout the company. Carriers at other services, such as UPS, are eligible to use the discount, but Knott’s has not established a promotional relationship with those other companies.

Knott’s has a history of tying its promotions to public expressions of appreciation. In May the park hosts local elementary and middle school classes with its School Spectacular Program, during which the teachers serving as chaperons generally remain in one location on the park grading papers while the kids occasionally check in. “The poor teachers come to Knott’s with a hundred kids during the week and don’t get to enjoy the park,” Tierney said. “So we give them the opportunity to do it on weekends,” via a deep discount.

The park began a now-annual military appreciation discount in the wake of 1991’s Gulf War, and a continuing appreciation discount for fire and law enforcement officials began after the Malibu and Laguna Beach firestorm of 1993. “It was almost difficult to do those again after 9/11 because we didn’t want people to think we were capitalizing on it,” Tierney said, but Knott's opted to continue both discounts.

As for their current discounting, “Postal Service and Fed Ex workers coming out of the holidays is a perfect promotion,” Tierney said. “You’re talking people who have had eight weeks of an extremely hectic schedule.” And the response has been great, she said. She wouldn’t give numbers, but “Every year when we plan our calendar, usually in August, we look at every promotion we do and reevaluate them to decide whether we want to put them on the calendar again,” she said. Those that work they carry on.

Print this article

Comment on this article

Back to top

Working 10-to-5
Close counts only in horseshoes, they say. It also counts in hospitality.

At Universal Orlando in Florida, 10 feet is close enough to score points in customer service, thanks to the park’s “10/5 Rule” for employees. “It’s a basic hospitality concept that we’ve been reinforcing in the past year,” said Jim Camfield, vice president of corporate communications. “Reinforcing and emphasizing.”

The rule is detailed in the park’s employee handbook. When approaching a guest, at 10 feet away the team member should nonverbally acknowledge the guest with eye contact, a head nod or smile. At five feet, the team member should extend a verbal greeting.

The rule applies not only to encounters with guests, but also with fellow team members: 10 feet cue the acknowledgment, five feet extend a greeting. For team member-to-team member encounters, the rule has a third prong: “When greeting, assisting, or providing service to fellow team members, identify yourself and use their names.”

Mathematically speaking, it’s obvious that 10/5 can produce two times the results in customer satisfaction.

Print this article

Comment on this article

Back to top

Marty Liner takes command with the endorsements of Charleston Mayor Joseph Riley and TV anchor Nina Sossamon. Photo courtesy of the South Carolina Aquarium.

Fish star
What the South Carolina Aquarium in Charleston needed was a better way to get children interested in the attraction. The aquarium already had six mascots. Instead, Angel Passailaigue, public relations manager, wanted someone who could think like a kid, talk like a kid, relate to kids and be approachable for kids.

Obviously, what she needed was a kid.

So, Passailaigue came up with the Aquarium’s Sea Star, a statewide contest to choose a boy or girl between the ages of 8 and 11 who would become the aquarium’s official spokesperson for one year. Introduced last week as the first-ever Sea Star was Marty Liner, a 9-year-old from Summerville, South Carolina, who decorates his bedroom as a boat cabin, builds model ships, lists 20,000 Leagues Beneath The Sea as his favorite movie, counts the Living Sea as his favorite Walt Disney World attraction and loves to wear a white captain’s hat.

“He was so energetic and hyper,” Passailaigue said of their first meeting. “It’s four in the afternoon and I’m going, ‘Ohmygosh, this is exhausting.’ And his parents are so wonderful. I feel like I married into a great family.”

She needs to feel that way for the amount of time she’ll be spending with Marty. In fact, before the aquarium signed on Marty his parents had to sign a memorandum of understanding pledging both their support of their son’s role at the aquarium and promising that neither they nor Marty would inflate their egos and turn the gig into a celebrity stint. “We had professional actors apply,” Passailaigue said. “That was a turn-off because we weren’t looking for an actor. We were looking for real kids who could relate with other kids and had an interest in marine life and aquatic activities.”

Passailaigue dreamed up the program in October. “I just love kids. I’m a kid at heart,” she said. “My whole office is filled with toys. I love Toys R Us, I love Nickelodeon.” A week later she and her volunteer staff had finished the application form and sent it to schools across the state, with only a press release to market the program. She received 200 applicants with their 250-word essays and teacher’s letter of recommendation. The responses came from every region of the state.

The staff culled the group down to five finalists who visited the aquarium with their parents to meet a panel of six judges and audition via a mock television interview with Nina Sossamon, anchor for the local NBC affiliate.

Ironically, Marty was not one of the finalists. When one student had to bow out because of illness in the family the day before the audition, Marty was chosen as the alternate. “He had 24 hours to prepare,” Passailaigue said. “We were just blown away by his ability to jump in. He seemed natural and comfortable.”

Those were important traits for a child who has a number of television, radio and newspaper interviews lined up. He will be judging the Aquarium’s national drawing contest on its web site, soliciting e-mails from other children with suggestions and questions for the aquarium, providing input on exhibits, programs and signage, and assisting in the opening of a new exhibit this summer and other special events. Being a Sea Star is not all work and no play. Marty is entitled to four behind-the-scenes tours with a staff member of his choice, and he will coordinate a free trip to the aquarium for his third grade class at Pinewood Preparatory School.

As polished and professional as Marty seemed in his audition, he is in many ways a typical 9-year-old. That comes across in his quote that Passailaigue put in her press release announcing Marty’s selection. “I just LOVE going to the Aquarium and really enjoy telling other kids about the experiences I have had while visiting,” she wrote Marty stated. “I hope to get more kids to come see it for themselves, especially programs like the dive show—it is so COOL.”

Print this article

Comment on this article

Back to top

Bowled over
You really have to question somebody who commits to being the star attraction at an amusement park event but truly, deep down prefers to be somewhere else. And so, Tim Brown, All-Pro National Football League receiver, was a no-show Thursday at Legoland California’s Family Huddle Super Bowl party.

Brown and pop singer Jessica Simpson were the announced co-hosts for the pre-Super Bowl shindig at the Carlsbad, California, theme park near San Diego, where the NFL Championship Game is scheduled to be played Sunday. The party featuring an 8-foot, 30,000 LEGO brick replica of the Lombardi Trophy awarded to the Super Bowl winner, had a guest list that included several Hollywood stars and famous football players past and present. But something came up at the last minute that kept Brown from attending.

That something was the Super Bowl.

Brown plays for the Oakland Raiders who, by virtue of their defeat of the Tennessee Titans last Sunday, advanced to the Super Bowl against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

“We just figured he’s a little busy,” said Courtney Simmons, Legoland’s manager of media relations and government affairs. “(Thursday) is practice day (for the teams). We knew all along that if the Raiders made it, he wouldn’t be able to come. That was understood from the beginning.”

You do have to wonder why Brown committed to the Legoland party in the first place. Did he really think his team wouldn’t make it to the big game? Or, perhaps, he’d truly rather be in Legoland.

Print this article

Comment on this article

Back to top

LOOP Classifieds

FOR SALE—Classified ads in THE LOOP, just $20 per month (two issues) for up to 30 words, $1 per additional word. We accept cash, check, VISA and MasterCard. E-mail Lynne@gettheloop.com.

New Arrivals

Brevard County fifth graders get to use a treehouse with a lot of class. Photo courtesy of the Brevard Zoo.

It’s triplet classrooms!
The Brevard Zoo in Melbourne, Florida, announces the arrival of the Zoo School Annex, January 17, 2003. Measurements for each of three classrooms: 900 square feet each (84 square meters), capable of holding about 40 students each (though new state legislation limits school classroom size to 30 students), one sink, one toilet, three computer spaces, a refrigerator space and cubbyholes for the students’ jackets and books. Delivered by Roger Naumann of Naumann Naturescapes.

You have to be attending fifth grade to use one of the coolest complexes among zoos anywhere.

In 1996 the Brevard Zoo became an annex for nearby Sherwood Elementary as fifth graders began spending one of their nine-week quarters attending full-day classes at the zoo. The students simply moved their typical lessons to a classroom located in a trailer on the zoo grounds and used zoo staff, environment and operations to enhance those lessons. The curriculum on decimals, for example, used the price tags in the zoo’s gift shop.

Sherwood has a high number of “at-risk” students, identified by the number of children enrolled in the school district’s free and reduced lunch program. After the partnership with the zoo started, truancy among Sherwood’s students dropped, and standardize test scores improved, a trend that followed the students into high school. Based on those successes, the school district expanded the program to two more schools with large numbers of at-risk students, and the Eckerd Family Foundation donated $500,000 to build three new classrooms.

Moving the classes from a trailer to a permanent structure was not enough for the zoo’s Executive Director Margo McKnight. She designed three distinct themed environments which were subsequently carried out by Naumann Naturescapes. One classroom is a cave with stalactites and stalagmites, more than 300 fossils embedded in the walls and the computer stations carved out of the faux rock. Another classroom is a treehouse that sits atop two concrete trees with the attention to theming so rich the trunks look like they are covered in moss. The third classroom, McKnight’s favorite, resembles a swamp house, the kind of clapboard shack on pilings one would find in Florida’s wetlands.

For last week’s opening events, about 200 invited guests, including some of the original Sherwood Elementary Zoo School students, showed up under chilly skies for a vine-cutting ceremony of the classrooms. That evening about 150 people attended a gala to help raise funds for a full-time position overseeing the at-risk educational program at the zoo and for equipment in the classrooms. In keeping with the event’s theme of helping students, the $50 per person dinner was catered by students from two high school culinary arts programs while the Brevard Symphony Youth Orchestra and Florida Institute of Technology String Quartet performed.

The annex is the first part of a larger education center scheduled to open in 2004. The new center will house the zoo’s reptile collection, interactive exhibits, office space for the zoo’s education department, two more classrooms and a science resource library for area educators replacing a similar center that closed 15 years ago.

Print this article

Comment on this article

Back to top

It’s a simulation!
The Cradle of Aviation Museum in Garden City, New York, announces the arrival of Mars Virtual Voyage, January 18, 2003. Measurements: a 2,500-square-foot (232-square meter) theater with a queuing gallery, a mission briefing room and a 30-seat motion platform showing a 5-minute simulator ride. Delivered by SimEx ! Iwerks.

Klingons are not from Mars, though nobody can contest the notion that they may, even now, have a colony there. Nevertheless, Klingons were the characters of choice for the grand opening of the Cradle of Aviation Museum’s first major expansion since opening last May. A volunteer dressed as a Klingon greeted the 25 fourth and fifth graders chosen to be Mars Virtual Voyage’s first official guests during a press preview last Thursday. For the public opening on Saturday a dozen “professional Klingons” mingled among the guests, said Tom Gwynne, vice president for external relations.

“They were very colorful, they were exciting, they did everything we could ask of them,” Gwynne said of the aliens, which was, primarily, to add local color. For the children at the press event, the Klingon didn’t make much of an impression. “The kids took that in stride,” Gwynne said. “They were like, ‘Well, there’s a Klingon,’ and they marched right on.” Not to worry: the children came out of the simulator experience raving. “I think ‘Cool’ was the word I heard several times,” Gwynne said about eavesdropping on the press interviews. “That’s one measure of success.”

Another measure is hard numbers. On Saturday the museum saw 1,100 visitors “which is a good day for us,” Gwynne said. The number was 1,200 on Sunday, and for Monday, the third day of the three-day weekend, 1,300 people went through the museum’s doors. “The simulator was the main draw,” Gwynne said.

The whole complex is designed by SimEx ! Iwerks and starts with a gallery recounting the history of space travel from Jules Verne’s ideas to the current shuttle launches. Guests move into a briefing theater where they learn of a human colony on Mars in danger of being lost after a meteor storm destroyed one of its power plants. The guests then join two astronauts aboard a shuttle that, braving the meteor shower, delivers a new generator to the colony. The whole experience, from queue to completed mission, is 15 minutes.

Despite its science fiction topic and the motion simulator, the museum specifically sought a simulation that relied more on realism and story line than thrill ride. “I’ve been on a lot of these different rides, and a lot of them go into roller coaster-type rides fairly quickly, and it gets repetitive,” Gwynne said. “This one stays on target with going to Mars and the Mars mission. And it works very well in our environment because we have a hundred years of Long Island’s aerospace heritage. For kids, those old planes are exciting and fun, but it begs the question: all those old guys got to do that, what do we look forward to? This is a way to introduce that subject.” And by being more of a true simulation than just a wild ride, Mars Virtual Voyage sparks the children’s imaginations about their own future aerospace adventures, he said. “That’s exactly the intent. And it’s working. I think you can see that in the enthusiasm of the kids coming off.”

Print this article

Comment on this article

Back to top

Disney's Aladdin stepped out of the typical amusement park fare and into something a tad more theatrical. Photo courtesy of Disneyland Resort.

It’s a theatrical show!
Disney’s California Adventure in Anaheim, California, announces the arrival of “Disney’s Aladdin—A Musical Spectacular,” January 16, 2003. Measurements: 40-minute show on a 120-foot wide by 55-foot-deep (36.5 by 17 meters) stage in a 1,899-seat theater, 50 performers in the company, 29 cast members per day singing five songs, four stage managers per show, 17 technicians per show, 11 dressers per show, three hair stylists per show, one makeup specialist, 250 costumes, 17 computers to run the scenery for 18 scene changes using 48 pieces of scenery, two lighting computers directing 600 conventional fixtures and 90 moving lights, and four audio computers running 44 audio tracks and 40 wireless microphones. Delivered by Disney Entertainment Productions Prop Shop, Fischer Technical Services, Michael Curry Designs, Parsons-Meares, Scenic Technologies and Tom Talmon Productions.

Disneyland Resort officials didn’t want your typical amusement park press preview. They didn’t invite the travel writers, they didn’t invite regional television feature journalists. They didn’t invite us. No oversight on their part; it was integral to the purpose of the gala opening night for California Adventure’s new stage show at its Hyperion Theater, which Disney is positioning more as a theatrical experience than a theme park stage show. And so, they invited theater critics.

This production is more Broadway-like than midway-type. It was directed by Francesca Zambello, renowned musical theater and opera director who came to this project after a gig at the Paris Opera. Broadway choreographer Lynne Tailor-Corbett did the dances, and Tony Award winner Peter J. Davison designed the sets. While using songs and music from the original Alan Menken-Howard Ashman-Tim Rice scored film, Menken wrote a new song for the park production.

For the invitation-only gala opening night, the Walt Disney Co. CEO Michael Eisner hosted such luminaries as Menken, Rob Schneider, Art Linkletter, Andy Garcia and Placido Domingo in a true Hollywood-style blow-out. The company pitched a large sultan’s tent in the parking lot behind the Hyperion Theater and treated the invited dignitaries and critics to belly dancers, costumed palace guards, fortune tellers and snake charmers.

And what are the critics saying? Reviews were mixed, which you would expect from our hard-to-please colleagues. Besides, the real magic of this show is that patrons get a full-fledged, "Lion King"-type stage show without paying a cent. Admission to California Adventure for just 40 minutes suddenly became—Abracadabra!—one of the best deals in the amusement business AND in theater.

Print this article

Comment on this article

Back to top

Tony Braxton-Smith, left, felt blessed to be slimed, while the Queensland Premier, right, enjoyed the chance to buck the usual ribbon-cutting ceremony. Photo courtesy of Dreamworld.

It’s a tweener area!
Dreamworld in Gold Coast, Australia, announces the arrival of Nickelodeon Central, December 26, 2002. Measurements: 2.5 hectares (6 acres), 16 attractions including a new roller coaster (18 meters/59 feet high, 35 kph/22 mph), an interactive foam ball factory (20,000 foam balls, 28 vacuums and air cannons) and live show (using 10 liters/10.5 quarts of slime). Delivered by Prominent Technology, SCS Interactive and Vekoma.

For the opening of anything Nickelodeon, slime is usually involved. When you are opening the first-ever Nickelodeon Central area outside the United States, you reserve your sliming for the truly special players.

“Being slimed is an honor,” said Dreamworld CEO Tony Braxton-Smith, who got a dousing at a special opening event December 21 while the Queensland Premier Peter Beattie slimed an 11-year-old Nickelodeon fan. Considering that no less celebrities than Tom Cruise and Pink have been slimed in the past, Braxton-Smith felt he was on the right side of the bucket. “Without being disrespectful, it’s like being baptized,” he said. “You have to wash it off you, but, yeah, it’s a refreshing experience.”

But, then, so is his park’s new family-themed area. It features a new Vekoma Runaway Reptar junior suspended roller coaster, new SCS Foam Factory, new “Slime Bowl” theater and several old rides re-themed, like the Red Baron planes becoming Dora the Explorer Seaplanes and the Himalaya located inside a 20-meter-high (66-foot) mountain transforming into the Angry Beavers Spooty Spin (“Spooty means ‘hip’ in Beaver language,” Braxton-Smith explained). The new section is intended to turn the tide of families gravitating to cartoon-themed kiddie areas in other Gold Coast theme parks, and in its first weeks of operation, Nickelodeon Central has done just that, Braxton-Smith said.

“We’ve had a strong and positive response from the family market,” he said. He also was amazed to see how the new area has increased capacity of the park, which reached 8,500 one day, about 2,000 over what had always been considered capacity. “Six and a half thousand used to be tough,” Braxton-Smith said. “When we had 8 1/2 thousand, it was busy but wasn’t that tight. We went from being a four-cylinder park to a six-cylinder.”

He got a preview taste of how well his new section might do when his park hosted the Rug Rats for an Easter event last spring. “The effect on our gate was quite dramatic.” Equally so was the effect on the gate the day after Christmas when, after some preview operations, Dreamworld allowed the general public into Nick Central for the first time. About 300 people were waiting for the park’s gates to open that morning, and they made a beeline to Nick Central, Braxton-Smith said.

“It changed the traffic pattern in the park, really has changed the way the park works, taking weight off the ride queues,” he said. “The whole park is now working a lot better.”

Print this article

Comment on this article

Back to top

Correction
Our report on the New Arrival of the Rainforest Cafe and River Adventure Ride in Galveston, Texas (THE LOOP, January 10, 2003) had incomplete information in the measurements at the time we posted the article. We have since updated that information and wanted to alert you to the changes.

Eric's Turn

Photo courtesy of Exponent Failure Analysis Associates.

Hogwash
I have been thinking a lot this week about plastic cutting boards.

I don’t have any (we have wood cutting boards in our kitchen), but that’s not the point. A few years ago I remember reading of a study about germs on cutting boards. You see, the manufacturers of plastic cutting boards touted not only the price and convenience of their boards, but their sanitary quality. It was obvious to anybody that germs were more likely to thrive on wood than plastic, but the manufacturers still commissioned a lab to reach that conclusion scientifically. The lab discovered the opposite: bacteria thrived on plastic, but died on wood. The manufacturers released the results.

So, to anybody who doubts the validity of the two studies financed by Six Flags, I say, to quote Robert “Hoot” Gibson, “Hogwash.” Six Flags took a risk no other company was willing to take publicly in going to sources outside the industry for such a study. No matter the results, it was a wise move. To be fair, other operators just didn’t see the point of such studies, even in the face of increasing public and media pressure. One hundred years of experience and an incredible safety record that comes only with the degree of scientific and medical research the industry already undertakes seemed incontestable. As J. Clark Robinson, president of IAAPA, put it so succinctly after Tuesday’s press conference releasing the results of the two Six Flags studies: “You have a death at your park, you have a huge economic impact it takes years to recover from.”

Well, that’s obvious. Yet the whole nature of this how-safe-are-we argument is all about stating the obvious, for both sides of the issue. At its very core, this is a debate in which people look at 200-foot-high coasters on which riders in nothing more than go-karts are whipped about on relatively thin rails and those people ask the obvious: “How can it be safe?” Builders and operators of those coasters endure tests and checks and redundancies and then watch thousands of passengers take hundreds of cycles and state the obvious: “How can it not be safe?”

One precious plastic-cutting-board moment in Tuesday’s press conference came when a reporter asked Robert Harbaugh of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons to comment on Representative Ed Markey’s seemingly commonsense assertion that today’s bigger, faster coasters must create more g-forces and therefore be unsafe: “For every common question, there is a simple, compelling answer that’s wrong,” Harbaugh replied. Both his association’s study and that by the engineers at Exponent had discovered that despite coasters getting higher and faster, their g-forces are not increasing.

I can’t help wondering if the researchers often asked, “Why are we here?” The Exponent engineers appeared to be having at least a little fun smacking each other with pillows (above), and for the first time we have some real scientific data on the physics of longstanding coasters. But the neurologists had to sift through libraries of medical case studies—particularly the oft-cited 20 possible cases of brain injuries occurring among, by conservative count, 60 billion coaster cycles over 20 years—to determine whether the United States was facing a public health crisis. Twenty in 60 billion is a public health crisis? The neurologists determined only nine cases were plausibly connected to coasters, meaning they may or may not have been related.

The medical community looks at nine in 60 billion (even 20 in 60 billion) and sees no cause for alarm. The media looks at one in hundreds of billions and sees news.

Therein lies the danger of this ongoing debate, pointing to what is truly the greater public health risk and why the results of the Six Flags study could have an important impact far beyond our own industry. Harbaugh described how he recently treated a young man with a two-week history of headaches. The man had a subdural hematoma. Upon asking the patient if he had experienced any recent trauma, the man cited riding a roller coaster four months earlier. “He was convinced that this was the cause of his subdural hematoma as he had read about the risks of riding a roller coaster,” Harbaugh said. “If the statement that roller coasters frequently cause neurological injuries is repeated often enough, even if not true, the reported incidence of ‘roller coaster related neurological injuries’ will increase because more patients and physicians will inaccurately assign a causal relationship between riding a roller coaster and a subsequent neurological event.”

That’s not just bad science, that’s bad medicine.

Print this article

Comment on this article

Back to top

Going Deutsch
We are pleased to announce another “connection” in our coverage of the amusement industry.

I have reached an agreement with Petra Probst, editor-in-chief of Freizeit Professional (Leisure Professional), a monthly trade magazine based in Germany, to contribute a regular column covering the North American amusement scene. Called “Voice of America,” the column will begin running in the March issue. My work for Leisure Professional, which also will include an occasional feature article, is in addition to my regular contributions to Amusement Today and part of the freelance writing arm of Minton Enterprises, LLC.

It’s an honor to be a part of Petra’s team. She has a long, respected history among European amusement parks and suppliers. Just a year since its debut issue, Leisure Professional already has established a reputation for thorough and entertaining coverage of the industry, and though it’s coverage runs the gamut of leisure facilities, Leisure Professional in the fall was named the official publication of the European Waterpark Association.

To Petra, danke schön for the opportunity.
For more information on the magazine visit www.FLProfessional.de.

Numbers crunched
In the tradition of magazines who publish their circulation figures, this is the 2002 "circulation report" for THE LOOP.

THE LOOP is a biweekly newsletter posted on the Internet at www.gettheloop.com. It is a free site and available to anyone with access to the World Wide Web. Additionally, upon a newsletter's posting, we e-mail notifications containing a direct link to that issue of the newsletter. Consequently, we have two distinct forms of circulation: the number of visits to our site, as reported by our domain host, LexiConn (www.lexiconn.com), and our e-mail notification database.

For 2002, our second year of operation, www.gettheloop.com had a total of 94,778 visits, an increase of 62 percent over the total visits of 2001. We broke these down according to visits-per-LOOP issue, calculating the total number of visits from the day a newsletter was posted and the notifications e-mailed to the day before the posting of the following issue. Our average visitation for the year was 4,308 per issue of THE LOOP, a 77 percent increase over the 2001 average. The average number of visits rose to 5,446 in the fourth quarter of the year. Our lowest 2002 draw was 2,714 with the March 8 issue. We reached a high of 7,122 visits with our last issue of 2002, December 13, our most-visited issue ever.

Our database currently contains 8,430 e-mail addresses to which we send linked notifications. We built this database from industry association directories, Minton Enterprises' sources and new subscriptions. About 1,200 e-mail notifications "bounce back" undelivered for a variety of reasons, ranging from full mailboxes to discarded addresses and disconnected hosts. We continuously work to decrease the number of bouncebacks by culling and, in some cases correcting, the invalid addresses. Currently, 7,200 notifications are reaching their targeted recipients, though we suspect a percentage of these are not getting through for various technical reasons. We also know from anecdotal reports that many readers who are not in our database are having THE LOOP link forwarded to them by other recipients.

If you currently are not receiving THE LOOP notifications directly, if you are forwarding THE LOOP on to someone, or if you know of someone who might enjoy or benefit from reading THE LOOP, please click here to add the e-mail address to our database.

It is the policy of Minton Enterprises and THE LOOP to keep our database secure. We have taken measures to withstand viruses and worms, and we will not lend or sell the database to any entity.

THE LOOP's mission statement: To keep the amusement and attractions business connected by presenting information and personalities that encourage and enable the industry's growth and influence.

To share your news, e-mail Eric Minton (eric@gettheloop.com) or call, toll-free, 888-902-LOOP (outside North America call 520-514-2254).

To advertise in THE LOOP, e-mail Lynne Mosman (lynne@gettheloop.com), or call her toll-free at 866-902-LOOP (outside North America dial 1-937-296-9796).

Well wishes
Congratulations to good friend and semi-colleague Ron Gustafson, the director of public relations and educational programs at Quassy Amusement Park in Middlebury, Connecticut. Between his current position at Quassy and a similar job at Midway Park in Maple Springs, New York, Ron was managing editor of the Sanford Herald newspaper in Sanford, North Carolina. Thursday Ron was given the 2002 North Carolina Press Association award for business writing. Fittingly, his award-winning story was a profile of the amusement park industry.

Best wishes to Dave Bruschi as he retires from the World Waterpark Association, an organization he co-founded with the late Al Turner. Dave's was always a warm and welcoming presence that burned at the heart of the WWA trade shows, and we're sure he will carry that special glow to whatever he undertakes in the future.

Both of these stories are in Extra! Extra!

Print this article

Comment on this article

Back to top