The
LOOP
Volume
1, No. 4. March 23, 2001
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In this issue:
Mir scatters its legacy across the industry and Holiday World auctions its stuff across cyberspace.
Ocean Park embraces America’s haunting holiday, and Philadelphia Zoo braces for Easter’s dire effects.
Callaway Gardens blossoms on the Web, and Dutch Wonderland drags us back in time.
We get thrust onto a new coaster, take a ride with Scooby Doo, and make Tracks to an indoor waterpark.
By Eric Minton
Further evidence that Halloween's popularity is attaining international proportions was the presence of Hong Kong's Ocean Park theme park and zoo at the TransWorld Halloween, Costume and Party Show in Chicago, Illinois, this month. Lisa Tsang, entertainment manager, and Raymond Lin, production manager, were shopping for props and equipment for Ocean Park's debut as a Halloween venue in October.
"We're determined to be a one-of-a-kind theme park event," Tsang said; "something that will distinguish us from Halloween events at the clubs and discos." The holiday has already made in-roads in the Chinese city. People pay $500 to $1,000 Hong Kong (US$64 to US$128) to get into a costume party and show at a hotel or club. "We think there's a market there, mainly for teen-agers and young adults," Tsang said.
Tsang had already done much of her homework before reaching Chicago. Nevertheless, the training seminars she attended the first day were "an information boom," she said. When she hit the trade show floor, she firmed up her ideas, and by day three she was ready to talk contracts with vendors
For Tsang, face-to-face discussions were key. "We want to get the message through that what we want is something different." Gory props would not do well, she said. Instead, she’s making a 3-D maze the attraction’s centerpiece. She also needs to infuse Asian cultural elements into the American holiday. For example, in the Chinese interpretation of Hell, cow- and horse-headed guards grab people and take them to the king of the underworld. Such figures would have the same impact on Chinese teens as a ghoulish undertaker would on American youths. She’s also looking to tap into The Ring, a Japanese horror movie that became Hong Kong's most popular film in 1999.
Staging a Halloween event is part of Ocean Park's urgent strategy to beef up its product before local competition heats up: i.e., Disney. "It's healthy because it gets us to thinking about how we can run with the competition," Tsang said. "We are determined to keep the edge."
Lisa Tsang and Raymond Lin get into the Halloween spirit with Ohio actor Rex B. Hamilton (who wants to further share his holiday’s cheer–see his entry in the Bulletin Board). Photo by Eric Minton.
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A Mir image
Sometime today, the now-venerable Russian space station Mir is scheduled to end its existence with a fiery fall through the Earth’s atmosphere and into the Pacific Ocean. While it may be the end of that 15-year-old traveler of the heavens, it is not the end of the Mir space station.
The then Soviet Union built three of the labs. Europa-Park purchased one of those, a full-scale training simulator, from the Russian government in 1996. The Rust, Germany, theme park uses the Mir as part of the queue for the Euro-Mir roller coaster in the Russian-themed section of the park. Unlike its space-traveling cousin, Europa-Park’s Mir has hosted some 18 million visitors since its installation.
Europa-Park has asked the last cosmonauts who served on Mir to attend the park’s season-opening ceremony April 5. They have not yet replied, said park spokeswoman Martina Evers.
Meanwhile, MOSI, the Museum of Science and Industry in Tampa, Florida, is taking advantage of Mir’s eventful demise by extending the run of a film it happens to be showing at its IMAX theater: "Mission to Mir." The 45-minute movie opened at the domed theater in September and since has attracted more than 50,000 people. At the beginning of March the museum hosted an aerospace summit for 1,300 children, with "Mission to Mir" screened as part of the event.
The movie will now continue for one showing daily through the end of this month. Then it will probably go into the museum’s library, said Beverly Littlejohn, MOSI’s public relations manager.
Thanks to Europa-Park and MOSI, Mir’s fall to earth is not a fall from the face of the earth.
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A bid for less clutter
They say you can get buy just about anything on eBay. Holiday World and Splashin’ Safari in Santa Claus, Indiana, turned that notion around: you can sell just about anything on eBay, too.
After watching the on-line auction house develop as a significant market for Santa Claus Land memorabilia, Holiday World decided to see how well amusement park memorabilia would move, starting with its 1967 Barbieri bumper cars, which Holiday World is replacing with themed Bertazzon models this year.
"We listed one of them on eBay and opened it up for bidding," said General Manager Will Koch. It sold for $610. After donating one car to the American Coaster Enthusiasts, the park offered the remaining eight to other eBay bidders at the $610 price tag. "We sold every one of them, and could have sold four more," Koch said.
eBay has since become Koch’s favorite forum for selling a warehouse full of retired equipment and memorabilia, including the original ride photo system on The Raven roller coaster. "We found a buyer for one of those at a pretty good price," Koch said. He was even more surprised at the sale of a vinyl record album, "Sing Our Songs America," from a stage production at the park in the 1970s. "We still have several cases of those sitting around. We couldn’t sell them for $6 apiece when they were new. One record went for $13.95 on eBay."
While the park often staged auctions locally, eBay reaches an international market at much less effort. "We feel like it’s a heck of a good way to get rid of stuff cluttering up the place, stuff you don’t need but still has some good value," Koch said. But don’t look for eBay to replace the role of the ride broker, Koch said. "If it was a ride with a lot of value to an amusement park operator, I’d never consider eBay."
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Callaway’s azaleas are showing their colors today. Photo from www.callawaygardens.com
A marketing plan blossoms
It's nature's own fireworks display, the bursting purples, reds, and yellows of blooming azaleas. And in relative terms of the season cycle the blossoming display seems as brief as a fireworks show: just a couple of weeks at its peak. How do you market something so fleeting and given to Mother Nature's finicky ways when you are a botanical showplace boasting the largest azalea garden in the world? Callaway Gardens in Pine Mountain, Georgia, uses its Web site to let the azalea bushes market themselves.
With "Azalea Watch," Callaway Gardens posts daily photographs of a specially chosen mid-season blooming hybrid azalea from among the 5,000 bushes in the 40-acre Callaway Brothers Azalea Bowl. For the park located 60 miles southeast of Atlanta, Azalea Watch allows visitors to gauge the daily progress of blooms and choose when to visit the gardens. "Mother Nature is the one directing the show," said Rachel Crumbley, the park's public relations manager.
The park has not yet measured how much traffic the Azalea Watch, in its second year, has generated for Callaway Gardens, Crumbley said, but she is sure the feature has driven Internet traffic to the park's Web site through publicity and customer calls inquiring about the azaleas' status. "We were able to share the Web address with people who were then able to monitor the blooms themselves," Crumbley said. That, in turn, took pressure off the staff, housed in another section of the 14,000-acre Gardens, who don't see the bushes daily, and even if they did wouldn't be able to relate their relative brilliance over the phone.
While the azaleas blossom and exfoliate quickly, the park opted for posting daily pictures rather than setting up a Web cam because, Crumbley said, "they are bushes. They just sit there." Check out their show at www.callawaygardens.com and click on "Azalea Watch."
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Hoppy trails
It’s also that time of year when many people need a fix —the furry and downy kind. Easter approaches, when many baby bunnies and chicks become precious gifts for children across North America and abused and abandoned pets within weeks.
The Philadelphia Zoo in Pennsylvania has teamed up with the local chapter of the House Rabbit Society (HRS) to build Bunny Village, an exhibit that both extols the virtues of abstaining from such short-sighted largess and provides an opportunity for families to get their Easter fur fix.
Ten rabbits on loan from HRS live in the 300-square-foot model town, hopping down streets lined with scale houses and feeding on pellets stored in barn-like silos. Around the exhibit, signs in storybook form tell the tale of Wylie, a country bunny, and his city cousin Lydia, describing the differences between wild rabbits and pet rabbits. The exhibit concludes with a $5 photo op where guests can pet a couple of dwarf-breed Jersey Wooly rabbits from the zoo’s own collection.
This is the second year for Bunny Village, which opened the first week of March and runs through April 29. Last year, as Children’s Zoo Director Marina Haynes was researching how to stock the temporary exhibit, a friend told her of HRS, a rescue group for unwanted and abandoned rabbits. "I hadn’t heard of them," Haynes admitted. "What they were doing as an organization seemed to support what we wanted to do with the exhibit."
Using HRS rabbits also proved practical because all the society’s bunnies are spayed and neutered. "In order to get a group of rabbits to live together nicely, they have to be neutered," Haynes said.
Haynes feels the exhibit’s educational message is getting across— last year half of the town’s population ended up being adopted. "At least we’re satisfying people’s rabbit urge so that hopefully they won’t go out and buy one. They’ve had that experience at the zoo," which is part of the strategy behind the photo op with one of the furriest and most exotic of rabbit breeds.
The rabbits, on the other foot, don’t seem all that wild about their digs. Rather than romping through houses that "are fancier than my house, that’s for sure," Haynes said, the bunnies spend most of their time in their litter boxes.
To learn more about the House Rabbit Society, go to their web site at www.rabbit.org.
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Lair, lair, mountain on fire
Dutch Wonderland in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, started with its founder, Earl Clark, literally dreaming of a castle. The castle he built in 1963, a classic turreted and towered medieval fairy castle fronting U.S. Highway 30, became the focal point of the family park as well as its main entrance and gift shop.
However, the rest of Dutch Wonderland reflected more the surrounding Amish countryside than some distant Grimms "wonderland," especially the scaled-down Dutch-style windmill erected by a pond next to the castle several years later. That addition initially drew the ire of local residents who felt it commercialized the local look, but it became a landmark in itself for television weather broadcasts and travel shows.
That landmark is now gone, replaced with a mountain that will house an animatronic dragon by Sally Corporation. The park’s long-standing log boat ride will now traverse the mountain, which measures 80 feet long, 40 feet wide, and 28 feet high and include a 20-foot tall waterfall.
"We were looking for a new look at the front of the park," said General Manager Gary Chubb. "The windmill had lived its life. We needed something to excite people driving by on Route 30, something that would say, ‘Hey, Dutch Wonderland is making changes.’" The mountain is part of $500,000 worth of new theming and other cosmetic changes around the park, in addition to another $500,000 in infrastructure upgrades.
The new dragon’s lair continues a recent trend of medievalization at the park, which included creating a mascot named Duke the Dragon that has become a popular plush toy prize in the midway games, and installation two years ago of The Joust kiddie coaster by Chance Rides. Though Dutch Wonderland seems increasingly intent on highlighting the second half of its name, Chubb said it is more a natural progression than a concerted strategy: "There’s not a gigantic master plan out there," he said. "We’re just changing from one whimsical look to another."
In fact, there was some concern with Chubb and his boss, owner and Earl’s son Murl Clark, that taking down the windmill would cause an outcry. "We haven’t heard anything," Chubb said. Will the Dragon’s mountain become another popular landmark and backdrop to local weather reports and travel shows? Chubb wouldn’t predict, but he did say it is more singular to the area than the windmill was. "There are no other mountains around, not until you go out of town a ways and get the real deal."
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©2001, Minton Enterprises LLC
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