Theme Park Outsider

BGTNation was one of the blogs present for the Social Media behind the scenes tour and posted this video from that day.

Orlando Attractions magazine has posted behind the scene construction photos from the Social Media day held recently at Busch Gardens, Tampa.  They also talk about it on the official Busch Gardens Tampa blog.

This ride is scheduled to open on May 27th, and I’m already looking for hotel rooms.

SeaWorld San Diego is planning a Manta coaster of their own.  While it will share a name with the B&M coaster in Orlando, it will be a different, smaller coaster.  It will share the same type of queue giving you an aquarium to look at as you wind back and forth, which is one of my favorite parts of the Orlando coaster.  More details are available on the Seaworld blog.

Seaworld has announced a new show to replace the current Believe! show they are doing as the current Shamu show.  It’s called One Ocean.

George Lucas himself visited Disneyland to give a thumbs up to the new Star Tours 2.0

No further information is available on it, but I am definitely looking forward to it.  The old one was getting dated. The early word is that the new ride will premiere at Disney Hollywood studios on May 20th, which is the opening day for Star Wars Weekends.

The Disney Blog has an update on the Tiki Room fire, which basically says the fire did more damage than was originally thought, so that show might be out of commission for a while.

I’m not a big fan of wooden coasters because they are generally rougher than I like, but next time I go to Busch Gardens Tampa, I’m going to make sure to take a spin on Gwazi because it’s getting new cars from GCI, the rides original designer.

The ripsaw falls ride at Universal’s Islands of Adventure park in Florida is closed indefinitely after fire destroyed one the buildings that houses the ride.  No one was injured in the fire which took firefighters about an hour to get under control.  No word yet on what caused the fire.

The website RollerCoaster Pro has updated photos of the Cheetah Hunt Construction to date. The more I see, the more I’m really looking forward to this ride. This tower with the figure 8 looks unlike anything else I’ve run across before.

I missed this when it came out in August, but thought it was worth a watching, so  I wanted to share it with everyone.

Busch Gardens tampa has released some photos of the construction going on for their new Cheetah Hunt roller coaster. Next year can’t get her quick enough.

The city of New Orleans has allowed a videographer access to the closed Six Flags New Orleans theme park, and a haunting video of what is left of the park is available on YouTube.

Six Flags Magic Mountain is looking to regain the most coaster crown by adding a new Green Lantern themed coaster and re-theming two of their existing coasters at their California park.

Legoland Florida has announced pricing information and revealed the park layout.  Also, it’s opening date is slated for October of 2011, so it’s only a year away.

The web site for the park has links to the park map, but so far they are broken.  I’ll post updated links as they become available.

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Knott’s Berry Farm reopened the Pony Express coaster after they finished their investigation into why the brakes failed to stop the two cars from colliding.  Turns out that the fin brakes had been painted, which allowed the train to slide through the braking mechanism.  The park was unaware that this was a problem because they didn’t test the coaster with a ‘short launch’, and only tested  a normal run.