If
this doesn’t get you excited about going to amusement parks, nothing will.
This
is my favorite of the Discovery Channel’s Extreme Rides/Wild Rides series. It’s
the one I always come back to when I want to get excited about the upcoming
summer season. Back in the late-1990s/early-2000s, Discovery Channel (and its
Travel Channel and TLC counterparts) became obsessed with amusement parks and
roller coasters. Every Memorial Day there would be a “Thrills, Chills, and
Spills” marathon, where there would be several new roller coaster and amusement
parks shows. There was always a new “Top 10 Coasters” type show, which would
mostly be touting the newer coasters that debuted the previous year (funny how
the list of Top 10 coasters seemed to move around every year. I remember The
Beast would jump in and out of the Top 10 on an alternate basis…was turnover
for Discovery Channel writers really that high?). There would also be a new
highlighted theme or amusement park. You’ve already seen our entries (listed on
the bottom of this column) for Disneyland Paris, Magic Mountain, and Busch
Gardens, but there are quite a few more that will be upcoming.
But
my favorite ongoing series was always the Extreme Rides series. This series
would feature the most cutting-edge rides from the past year, with interviews
with the ride designers and the ride’s biggest fans. This would of course
follow (most of the time) with an on-ride POV. There would be stories of the
park the ride’s featured in and the background of how the introduction of the
ride came to be. And of course, at the end of the show, there would be a
preview of the extreme rides of the upcoming year.
Extreme
Rides 2000 is the “Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan” of the series. The features are
fun, the interviews are great (with some special guest stars), it runs the
gamut from coasters to amusement rides to themed rides. If the Discovery Channel
just made an Extreme Rides show every year, that’s all I would ask of them. I
wouldn’t need anything else.
And
Extreme Rides 2000 came at such an interesting time in the amusement park
timeline. B&M had just exhausted its creativity throughout the 1990s with
inverted and stand-up coasters, eventually culminating with the debut of Alpengeist
and Riddler’s Revenge, respectively. So, they decided to branch out again and
start innovating with floorless coasters (Medusa, featured) and hyper coasters (Raging
Bull and Apollo’s Chariot). And as B&M and others began to go into the
hyper-space, Magic Mountain and Cedar Point decided to test the limits of how
high coasters can go with Goliath and Millennium Force, respectively. What we
forget that’s mind-blowing is Goliath and Millennium Force both set coaster height records, and they opened within three months of each other.
Along
with B&M’s forays, there were other coaster design companies that decided
to really test how extreme coaster
vehicles can get. Featured in the coming attractions portion of the video is
the dawn of the flying coaster (which, we must remember, in the era of the
Vekoma models, were originally called “lay-down coasters”), which is so new the
preview is shown in CGI, and Stan Checketts’ bat-crazy
what-the-hell-just-happened Thrust Air 2000, which in a few years would become
Hypersonic XLC at Kings Dominion, and then a few years later, nothing. In this
era, coasters were becoming bigger, faster, and stranger every year (those were
the days).
This
was when wooden coasters were suddenly making a comeback. After the Dinn
Corporation made a few behemoths in the early-1990s (Texas Giant, Mean Streak,
etc.), wooden coasters became smaller and more unique, thanks to Great Coasters
(GCI) and Custom Coasters (CCI). When CCI designed The Raven for Holiday World
in 1995, they sent a clear message that not only were wooden coasters on their
way back, but they didn’t have to be 200 feet tall to pack a real punch. A real
renaissance for wooden coasters ensued, and featured in this video is one of
the weirdest of the bunch (and that’s an understatement): the ultra
out-and-back that is Shivering Timbers at Michigan’s Adventure. At the time it
was built, it opened a lot of eyes as to just how weird wooden coasters can
get.
As
I stated in my last article feature, the launched coaster really changed the
game in the theme park world. No longer restricted by space constraints (the
bigger the lift hill, the more land is needed), now coasters could go 70+ miles
an hour without the need of a single lift hill. Space Mountain at Disneyland
Paris begat Flight of Fear here in the U.S., which begat the incredible 100
mph/400 foot tall Superman: The Escape (hard to believe something like that was
created as far back as 1996. Remember when they had to literally rewrite the
coaster height record rules so Superman would be its own separate category, and
not included in the “continuous” coaster records?). Superman begat Batman and
Robin: The Chiller, which eventually begat Volcano: the world’s first inverted launched coaster. And its
weirdness, in my opinion, has never been matched. With two distinct launches,
and the second sending you upwards through a fiery volcano? That takes some
creativity.
And
finally, there are quite a few non-coaster features in this video. The first is
the Katanga Skyscraper in Orlando, the extreme amusement flat ride from the
makers of every bungee-jumping Sky Coaster and catapult-flinging monstrosity
you see in amusement parks these days. Themed rides are featured here too. Journey
to Atlantis from SeaWorld Orlando is here. It was inevitable that Splash Mountain’s
infamous double-dip would lead to the firing of a hundred imaginations about
what else a standard log flume track
could do. The next logical step was to combine the log flume with a coaster
track, giving the flume the ability to turn
and even rise back up in the middle
of a splashdown hill. And looking at the video, it’s admirable how SeaWorld was
able to theme this ride while Disney’s popularity was booming. SeaWorld (back
then) obviously was determined to try to bridge the gap between it and Disney
in any way it could.
And
speaking of bridging the gap, what ride encapsulated that concept better than
Spider-Man? That’s right, Spider-Man’s here too. IOA had just opened the year
before, and Discovery Channel wasn’t going to let that go without highlighting
the most mind-blowing ride at the park. And also, think about how commendable that
was. In a park with Dueling Dragons, Hulk, and Jurassic Park, on a show called
Extreme Rides 2000 Discovery Channel thought best to showcase the hell out of
Spider-Man. Damn good work, that. Jolly good show.
This
time in amusement park history was very similar to what we saw with Hollywood
movies also. Since Star Wars was
released in 1977, and then once Terminator
2 and Jurassic Park introduced CGI
to the masses, the race was on every year to make bigger, better, more
expensive, and more sophisticated movies every summer. It was expected that
each summer’s movies would be bigger than the last. That’s exactly what was
going on with amusement parks. Can we honestly say there was more innovation in
the amusement park space in any decade more than the 1990s? With the amount of
coasters created, with the creativity of each, and the ingenuity?
Certainly
the ride designers would tell you the 1990s were a golden age of amusement park
designer creativity. Luckily, Extreme Rides 2000 has an all-star lineup of
quality guest stars from all spokes of the park industry wheel. Starting with
the usual Discovery Channel rolodex interviews with Steve Urbanowicz, Allen
Ambrosini, and Paul Ruben, Extreme Rides 2000 also has quite a few white whales
as guest stars: at 5:10 Walter Bolliger (of B&M…yeah, that Bolliger)
discusses B&M’s thought process in transitioning from inverted to floorless
coasters, at 10:10 and 11:12 Peter Kockelman of Gravity Works (of Sky Coaster
fame) talks about creating the Katanga Skyscraper after their Ejection Seat
model, at 17:32 Denise Dinn-Larrick (President of CCI) discusses the impetus
behind Shivering Timbers, at 27:40 Sandor Kernacs (President of Intamin)
explains how difficult it was to translate the LSM technology to inverted
coasters, and at 31:42 Stan Checketts explains just how crazy he is. Oh, and
don’t forget the Spider-Man behind-the-scenes walkthrough with Scott Trowbridge
starting at 36:25.
So
I dare you to watch this and not immediately run to your car and drive to your
local park. In fact, I’ve been typing this whole article while driving at the
same time. Okay, not really. Also, I’m pretty sure the seasonal parks aren’t
open until Friday this week. But it’s
still exciting, darn it. By the end of the show, we’re also promised the
following future ideas:
1.
An S&S that goes 100 mph and rises up 350
feet (this was 4 years before Dragster)
2.
Log flumes that do loops
3.
Wooden coasters that go underwater
More,
please. Now excuse me, I need to go to my car immediately. I love extreme rides!
Our Last 10 YouTube Tuesday Features:
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