No morning had ever come with as much fear for me on a trip. Not since being an adolescent and having crazy blow ups with my dad or something on some of our illfated journeys had I ever gotten up in the morning and been so quick to think about things that weren’t fun. There were plenty of stressors already in my life: I had a cat in vet boarding due to some sort of unexplained illness at home, work is generally pretty crazy due to fluctuations in staffing, etc. etc. other white people problems, as Louis CK would say. Meredith though was glad to inform me that she didn’t have any back pain or stomach issues and the nausea was gone. Phew. I was always going to be worried that she was understating it, but she was gonna get tested pretty hard with the plan we had in motion.
The first part of that plan was to go use the third day of our Disney tickets for early entry at Disneyland. Early entry is 7AM. Now, not everything is open at 7AM, but enough things that we had skipped were open that we were able to clean up most of the things left as mandatory stops on Meredith’s docket and mine quickly and easily. Small World, Mr. Toad, Pinocchio, Alice In Wonderland (which I missed in 2009 due to rehab), Mansion, and Peter Pan fell in about 90 minutes, as did a couple of muffins at the bakery on Main Street USA. We were out the door and back to the hotel for checkout before 9AM, and on the road within minutes of that headed to Valencia. We looked to be arriving just before opening at Six Flags until an overturned vehicle on I-5 caused a bunch of backup and forced our arrival time back to just shortly after opening.
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SIX FLAGS MAGIC MOUNTAIN
Meredith has been to Southern California numerous times, but never before to Six Flags. Finally, due to the scheduling of this trip, we determined that this would be an excellent time to go ahead and bang out the park once and for all, grabbing my wife a huge number of credits and for myself, getting some coasters that I’ve been lusting after for a long time. Most notably are the two adult “New for 2001” rides that I’ve somehow managed to miss on several trips to the park. Yes, I’ve never been on X2 or Deja Vu. In fact, I’d managed all these years to not ever ride a giant inverted boomerang. This is the sort of thing that happens when you basically don’t go to parks for half a decade. And there was more since my last visit in 2008 to look forward to: A new Superman The Escape! A new wood coaster! A new Zacspin!
We chose to guarantee us getting our credits by purchasing a Flashpass in advance of arrival. We also decided that we would get an X2 add on to ensure that no matter the wait, we got on. I was going to be damn sure that I got that ride after all the missed shots and opportunities I’ve had over the years. I also printed out the internet listing of Flashpass using rides to create a plan of action. We were going to be successful. I knew it. I felt it.
What I didn’t know coming in was the weather. I expected hot. It hit a high of 104 degrees. I don’t care if it is a “dry heat” on the west coast. That is unbearably, dangerously hot. And apparently we weren’t the only ones to agree, because it turned out that no one in Southern California thought it would be a good day to risk dying to and riding things. We were not only stupid enough to feel that it was a good day for such a venture, we thought we’d go about riding all 17 potential coaster credits at the park on this day (#18 is the Magic Flyer, which requires a child, which we don’t have or want).
Green Lantern (A#602/M#261): The first order of business was this. We had been on its clone at Grona Lund a year prior (http://tinyurl.com/3nef4jt) and we loved that ride. It didn’t feel like a coaster, but it was still lots and lots of fun. Green Lantern was not fun. While the station house features a pretty cool preshow movie thing that is sorta like Islands of Adventure Lite, the largely indoor queue isn’t air conditioned. It is painted black, and in the desert, but has no A/C. If this sounds like a terrible idea, it is. The ride also opened late and, as we expected, loads slow. But that has nothing to do with the ride.
Really, the problem with the ride is that we got weighed way off balance. We were practically vertical compared to the two tiny girls on the opposing side, which meant that as we circled the course, we were violently thrown around and ragdolled. It isn’t entirely the ride’s fault, but man, I don’t like needing to hope that the operators treat a modern coasters like its a Zipper as far as weighing vehicles so that I don’t get beaten silly. It was wild – too wild. Just not fun wild. Maintenance had to come out and help tilt the car back into position to get us in the station and off the stupid thing.
Deja Vu (A#603/M#262): We crossed across a very, very hot park to arrive here at Deja Vu, the park’s giant inverted boomerang. Why do that? Because the website print out didn’t list it as a Fastpass ride. But it is. Whatever. There was no queue line for it and we rode the damn thing anyways. Probably good that we did since it went down mechanical before 1PM and didn’t come back up the rest of the day.
The GIB was Vekoma’s brilliant idea of creating a new coaster out of the same tired ass design they had sold for years in the compact shuttle looping Boomerang coaster. Not only did they hang the train from under the track a la the Invertigos, they beat B&M and Intamin to weirdly shaped row recessed row seating where the two outside seats in the row of 4 are pushed back behind the center two. The coaster features cable driven vertical lift hills and does differ ever so slightly from the basic boomerang layout by crossing over itself on the cobra roll exit to the vertical loop. In theory, the ride should be fairly interesting.
The base problems with the giant inverted boomerang generally result in that the coaster was designed and built by Vekoma. The restraints were overbuilt in some areas and under designed in others: the ride needs a battery pack to unlock restraints if the power goes out, but didn’t properly prevent people from being able to reach up and grab the track. It just as easily could stall in the cobra roll as its standard brethren could, which was especially problematic since Vekoma sold it under the guise that such an event was not a possibility any more. And then there was the time the train at Georgia’s collided with the catch car during testing in such a way that it totaled a coaster train and would have killed a bunch of people had it been operating with humans that day.
Myriad problems such as those and the long periods of maintenance induced downtime involved in keeping the ride running have left but one such coaster in the Six Flags family with Georgia and Great America selling their’s. And that is the introduction to my short review of it. It wasn’t bad. Somewhat forceful. Definitely different. The entire ride feels overly mechanical, as if it were designed to do what it does in the 1970s or something. Like if I opened the coaster’s control system up, I’d find vacuum tubes or maybe just simple transistors barely powerful enough to operate a hand calculator.
It is clunky and awkward and sorta stupid. The idea of building huge versions of standard rides was big at the time. I remember Huss marketing the “Land of The Giants” at about the same time frame with monster versions of their standard flat rides like the Jump and Frisbee. None of those rides worked either. Retrospect being 20/20, yeah, of course this was gonna fail. These rides put Vekoma in financial dire straits, basically gave birth to ride firm Kumbak, and somehow I’d like to blame them for Golden Horse and their cheap Chinese knockoffs of already bad rides.
Following our ride on Deja Vu, we ascended and descended the mountain on our way to Guest Relations and our fastpass. While I was forced to watch the movie for the umpeenth time, Meredith enjoyed some free time in shade in one of the massaging chairs just outside. I bought the X scheduled ride and met up with Meredith holding my Q-Bot and watching some dude getting taken care of by EMTs after suffering heatstroke an hour into the operating day. This was gonna be harsh.
We made our way towards the kiddie sections of the park and immediately turned off for lunch at the Mooseburger Lodge rather than start riding. The Mooseburger has a veggie burger (which is good for Meredith), animatronic singing animals (which Meredith also liked), has waiters (which we both like), and most of all, air conditioning. We drank the hell out of some beverages and enjoyed the ambiance of one of the few themed and only not horrible eating area. One thing that bothered me is that the animals would randomly seem to break into shills during the songs with a loud popping noise, as if the soundtrack was set to cassette tapes and was switching heads. It probably was, who am I kidding?
Canyon Blaster (M#263): The true grand tour begins with the smallest coaster we’d ride. It is another Miler coaster and frankly it isn’t that bad a ride in its class. I like it more than Kozmo’s Kurves. THERE. I SAID IT.
Road Runner Express (M#264): I had the credit from my visit a million years ago now to poor ‘ol Jazzland. It is just like Gadget’s Go Coaster over in Anaheim, minus most of the more effective theming but with characters people actually know. It is OK, I suppose. Doesn’t hurt. Really weird aspect here in that the station is half finished. There are no gates for half the seats and rows for others. Apparently something went awry with installing air gates? It looks like hell.
Goliath (M#265): When I first rode Goliath back in 2000, a 17 year old version of me said that it was short, violent, and made you see stars. It was, as I said, like a Motorhead song. I would remove saying that it is “violent”. It still tracks very well. And in fact, I would now say that it doesn’t feel “short” at all. I reversed that opinion after riding the extra 700 feet of helix at Six Flags over Texas in the similar Titan coaster. It is a good ride that feels complete and is different from other hyper coasters in some positive ways, but I’m no longer of the class that says that long sustained positive G-force is likely an acceptable thing. There’s nothing more they really can do though. The ride came to a full stop for a couple seconds on the block brake and it still produces that sort of intensity.
Scream (M#266): I never really cared for this ride any and Meredith made the crack that it looks like it sets up off 12 trailers and will be headed to Arizona in a month. It is a B&M Floorless basically identical layout wise to the Bizarro coaster at Great Adventure but without any sort of theming, instead flying over a parking lot with the lines still clearly visible.
Colossus (M#267): We got stuck sitting over an axle, which wasn’t so bad. It isn’t very good either. Only one side of this huge, impressive looking racing wood coaster was operating. Not that it matters, since it has been neutered tremendously neutered since its debut back in the 70s.
Batman (M#268): One of seemingly a thousand Batman clones all identical to Great America’s. I wish I could sit here and tell you I cared about this to any great degree, but I didn’t.
Riddler’s Revenge (M#269): I remembered liking this standup coaster a lot in 2008 and that it wasn’t very powerful, which meant it didn’t suck. This time I thought it vibrated a ton and blew. So who knows. I can’t figure out how I want to sit on these stupid things and that is probably part of the problem. You don’t want locked knees but maybe vibration comes through that bicycle seat and does no positive things. I guess I’m good on riding this again.
Gold Rusher (M#270): Another ride I liked but at the point in which we rode this, we were overheating BADLY and desperate to find some shade. I barely remember the ride as a result.
After Gold Rusher, we found a table with an umbrella over it by the rough area of the “Famiglia Waterfront” and proceeded to spend somewhere between 30 and 45 minutes doing nothing but drinking ice water and pouring ice down our shirts. It was desperate and sad. But as we walked through the park, it was clear that there were no better options. There was but a single sit down restaurant at Six Flags. No large scale transportation rides. No large indoor seating areas for food. Not even an appreciably large covered one. And the only indoor venue for a show of any sort was closed.
I like Six Flags Magic Mountain in concept because it has some really unique and interesting roller coasters. Some great ones, actually. And in general, it isn’t terribly run from an operation standpoint as far as we are concerned. The problem with Magic Mountain is that it is filled with crumbling infrastructure that has been ignored in place of building new coasters and maintaining them. Forget creating another sit down restaurant, they have one already that is boarded up and abandoned. In my mind, it is ridiculous that somewhere this hot doesn’t have more than 2-3 places to escape heat aside from its diminutive water park. The average coaster enthusiast may not give a damn, but I wonder if the average enthusiast goes to the park in the heat of summer in peak season either.
Our spot at the “Waterfront” put us front and center for its decay. Directly in front of us was some sort of man made pond that was likely decorative at some point. Or maybe more than decorative. I found a park map from 1986 online and it shows the “Aqua Theater” (now the stunt theater) and a boat was drawn on the water there. Now it was filled with tepid, disgustingly green water water. All around were the decrepit remains of the Magic Mountain monorail, which surround the area and make the complaints about the remains of Rocket Rods seem downright quaint.
This is a problem throughout the park. Ascending near Ninja one sees an abandoned food area that has been weakly blocked off and shows signs of serious distress. A number of buildings in the Samurai Summit area are also showing various signs of distress in blown off roofing, discolored paint, and so on. The entire Samurai Summit area actually reminds me of watching Spirited Away. New asphalt here and there is fine, but my attitude is that the park has cancers that unless removed, it will never really find significant improvement.
This isn’t to say that Magic Mountain isn’t capable of removing things. It just makes interesting choices in this regard. Psyclone was deemed beyond fixing several years ago and the crappy wood coaster that it was got committed to the scrap heap. Deja Vu is leaving, meaning that individual corner is going to look radically different within the course of a few years. Stuntman’s Freefall got dropped too.
And I’ve heard rumors for some time now that Jet Stream is nearing to the end of its existence. It is the second flume opened at the park and is a very large old school Arrow Hydroflume. The ride looks a big beat up and doesn’t appear to have had any aesthetic upgrades in eons, but it has a really great fast section in on the mountain and a fun but not overtly soaking drop. I hope that doesn’t end up being the case, because it is a great, great ride in its genre. Its really one of the hidden gems of the park.
Apocalypse (A#604/M#271): The preshows make no sense because, uhh, there’s no real narrative background or anything, and the onboard audio wasn’t working (if it even does now), but the ride is really, really good. It might be my favorite of the limited GCIs I’ve been on and it is both my wife and I’s favorite ride in the park. Plus: A tunnel of mist in the flyby! Hallelujah.
Ninja (M#272): Somehow Meredith didn’t realize they had a Arrow suspended here. Well, now that Big Bad Wolf and Eagle’s Fortress have joined the great amusement park in the sky, perhaps Ninja is the best of the remaining rides. It is long, it is fast, though perhaps not as intense necessarily as Top Gun/Vortex. She really liked it. We also noticed that at this point the temperature was seeming to go down a little bit. Having split 3 Powerades before ascending the mountain didn’t hurt either.
Superman was down for something or other, so we went up to embrace some A/C in the only other cooled venue in the park at the time: Sky Tower. Remember how long this thing was closed for? Now the observation deck works as a museum for the park’s possibly more glorious past. I’ll say this: It is a welcome respite. Could use a few more benches too. Once back down on the ground, still no Superman, so we headed off to try and finish off the rest of the list.
Tatsu (M#273): The wife is not typically a fan of flying coasters because she finds the restraints to be somewhat uncomfortable. For whatever reason, there were no big problems on Tatsu. Add in that Tatsu has a fantastic layout and she really dug it. I love Tatsu. I make no apologies for thinking it is my favorite flying coaster. the altitude it gets and the visuals during the flying portion are tremendous, and the pretzel loop is super powerful.
Revolution (M#274): Just an uncomfortable, unfortunate experience that at this point should be something one can allay with new restraints. I mean, isn’t that half the Six Flags business plan post bankrupcy reorganization? Put on new restraints or trains and market old things as being new? I feel like this should be a no brainer, and yet?
X2 (A#605/M#275): I’ve deftly avoided this coaster somehow in my life through what seems like a million attempted shots. This ride, regardless of your feelings about it, is a ground breaking attraction. As the first and North America’s only full on 4D coaster, X or X2 is a historic ride. The massively wide trains. The wild head first plummet to earth. It is just such a thing even now, a decade after its opening.
Now, near disaster struck. Apparently when I paid my $15 per person to reserve a ride on X2, what wasn’t communicated to me in any way was that my super special reservation had a specific time and was on another screen on the Q-Bot. Nice of them to force you to watch a video that mentions nothing about this. Luckily, the park was so astonishingly dead that there was but a two train wait anyhow. And I was too hot to want to walk out and demand a refund, so we didn’t. I just wanted to ride it and get it over with and have my mind blown or something.
I think the biggest key to any ride is the comfort level of the experience. My immediate exclamation in riding X2 was that it “sucks so bad but its great!” The concept is awesome. The visuals are generally cool and the X2 additions don’t hurt it. The onboard audio was on pretty low, but again: Doesn’t hurt it. Only adds, IMO. The problem with X2 is that it is bouncy. I’m not the first to come to this conclusion in however many years since it opened, got new trains, got rehabbed, and so on. I know this. But I guess I can finally communicate now that I had my calves smashing into the ride vehicle as I was whirled around because the thing was bouncing like it was on bad springs.
While I like the idea a lot and I could probably even had gone around for a second ride, it wasn’t really necessary and I feel pretty comfortable with what I got. It isn’t a great elite super coaster. As stout as the concept is, honestly, the technology is probably still a bit off from making it work consistently and perfectly. The flipping felt a little jerky – maybe that was the bumpy ride we had? – and given that you’re being shaken about, it isn’t that wholly fantastic to me. I dunno. I think the Zacspin makes more sense technically because of the lack of turns. Apparently Intamin can’t make a ride with wingseats that doesn’t try to kill the occupants though, so that part seems to be quite the challenge.
Viper (M#276): Not Meredith’s favorite in the park, but I love this ride. It was the best of the Arrow supersized loopers all along and it still is a great ride. The best in class for the standard Arrow looping coaster type rides. Meredith found it semi-rough or at least not terribly comfortable.
As we got on Viper, the woosh of Superman was heard throughout the park. We directed the rarely used QBot for Supes and made our way over after finishing up. Rather than walk, we used the Orient Express inclined railway. It is a park original dating from 1971 and looks like sh*t, frankly. It will probably breakdown at some point, never be fixed, and then be left to decay. It is the only park based funicular I can think of in the US. Shame it is stuck here.
Superman: Escape From Krypton (M#277): Reverse the seats, get those magnets turbocharged, and let’er rip. Meredith refuses to ride Top Thrill Dragster or Kingda Ka, but rode this. Her opinion: “Not scary.” She also compared the upgraded launch to “being pushed down a long hallway backwards in an office chair. A long, long hallway.” I can’t think of a better description. We also had a nice discussion later about how it is a coaster and stuff like Devil’s Den at Conneaut or Intamin First Gen Freefalls aren’t. In short: NOTHING MAKES ANY SENSE.
That was it. 17 coasters, 3 other attractions, plus 6 dark rides at Disney and we were done by 6:30PM, our target time. We stopped in at Wendy’s for a quick snack and then headed to our final destination for the day – LAX.
OVERALL:
It isn’t a bad park. As a park, it isn’t good either. It is the preeminent “soulless collection of thrill rides” on the face of the earth, but when the thrill rides are as good as some of Magic Mountain’s are, that helps your standing. There is potential there for something much better, but I don’t think present, past, or future management are likely to see that potential and really go after it. And even if they do, they are unlikely to have the capital to make it happen, and the place will probably be a housing development by 2020. Is that a touch negative?
True story BTW: My Dad would often get into some of the millennial end of the world type things prior to Y2K, and so I was always a little flipped out when I was younger that the place would crumble in a huge earthquake. I was less worried about the people of LA than the stupid park. I know, I am terrible, et al. Point is, here I am being nearly 30 and I still see Magic Mountain as being under threat from some omnipotent boogieman. It just happens to have moved from the moving of tectonic plates to capitalism gone amok. There might be a deeper lesson in that. I’m not really sure.
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We dropped off the rental at Hertz but were told that they were super short staffed as far as people went to accept the cars, but that there were kiosks. Sure enough, there were, they worked, and it took us about 30 seconds to take care of the rental with one. Figures that they make sure they have a ton of working kiosks in the area that they generally never have an issue with as far as staffing, but in getting a car, they are completely useless almost universally regardless of location.
We took the shuttle to Terminal 2 and encountered a painfully slow security line on our way to gate 22. We sat for a couple hours and talked about the day leading up to then. My wife and I have been talking privately about doing the ECC trip to China in 2013, but the pace of our day in desert hell made her rethink that deeply. “I can’t do that again,” she simply said. I understood. I couldn’t either. Physically I might be able to, but I wouldn’t want to, and neither could she. I also knew for sure that the stomach aliments of the day before had to have passed. After that stretch anyone who was sick would have needed a week of hospitalization. Instead we were kicking back and waiting for boarding instructions. We had a long night ahead of us.
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