Gurnee, Illinois – Sunday, September 6th, 2009
I had been burned too many times before. Despite being a struggling company that was forced to enter bankruptcy protection earlier this year, every single time I’ve been to a Six Flags park I was under the impression that they had more crowds than they could handle. Just last year we encountered such miserably large crowds on an early June weekday with the temps approaching 100F at Six Flags Great Adventure, that we had to form an escape plan to get out of a second day trapped in the park. The worst scenario was back in August 2005 when we visited Six Flags Great America on a Saturday… upon leaving the park we asked a supervisor if the park had reached capacity (there was no way the midways couldn’t have been a fire hazard as they were) and he simply laughed and told us this was easy compared to several days they had in previous years.
Sunday of Labor Day weekend didn’t seem like it would be too crowded, but this time I wasn’t taking any chances. We’d be getting a Flash Pass. Prices at Six Flags Great America were lower than at other large parks in the chain; I remember considering getting one back at Great Adventure but we’d have had to shell out over $60 for barely an 8-hour day. Here, they were more reasonably priced at about $39 for a two person unit, about the same as a single-day admission ticket (checking their website just now apparently they’ve bumped up the prices to $65 for two).
There does seem to be a slight ethical question behind these virtual queuing systems. Ride throughput will be the same regardless in a single day, so the park doesn’t give anything up by allowing Flash Pass users to ride without waiting. Instead, the burden is supported by the rest of the park visitors using the regular queue; every seat that goes to a Flash Pass user is one ‘revoked’ from a regular user. So the ‘cost’ of this service is paid for by regular park visitors (reflected in longer lines and lower average ticket value) while the park receives the profits despite giving up nothing of value to them (besides provide the system overhead). That’s called profiteering.
To that I say: screw ethics. I loved my Flash Pass. I’ll be willing to justify its ethical use by claiming the added enjoyment experienced by me through its use far outweighed the aggregate loss experienced by everyone that didn’t have it, and if the park is making more money off people impatient to stand in line that hopefully can be used in ways that will improve the experience for all guests such as increased capital expansions or better staffed attractions.
First I had to pick up our Flash Pass so I could start programming attractions in right away. I thought the building would be right within the carousel entry plaza (the voucher said it was on the right after entering the park), but I couldn’t find it. Asking a supervisor I found out it was way back inside the park near the Whizzer, in the complete opposite direction I wanted to go to start the day. I made sure to hurry as soon as the chains dropped, and found when I got there that somehow a large group of people had gotten there before me. The park didn’t appear that busy, and picking it up was a relatively painless process.
The one catch was you had to leave your driver’s license (or some other important form of identification) behind at their offices the entire day until you returned it. Okay, I understand the need for some collateral when renting this stuff out but this felt more than a little uncomfortable to me; isn’t simply having your credit card number on account more than sufficient?
As I programmed Batman: The Ride as the first attraction on my Flash Pass, my mom and I made our way back around half of the park to do the Ragin’ Cajun, which was the only other coaster beside American Eagle not on the Flash Pass system so I wanted to get there before the lines got too long. I had heard that due to blocking problems this was incapable or running more than three cars at a time for a number of years. I don’t have a way of verifying this (other than this 2004 RCDb photo showing just one car on the main circuit and a very long line; anyone out there know?) but it seems like it was corrected, as there were at least five or six cars on the track, and the twenty or so people ahead of us were moved through in just a couple minutes.
These always make for fun rides, and I appreciate that the dual switchback sections help make for a longer ride time while not sacrificing any fun. There’s still something a bit odd about having such a low-end production model ride, usually sold to small parks or carnival operators, in a large regional Six Flags park. There’s a nice façade and it fits with the Mardi Gras theme (although they also have two “Raging” coasters in their park), and now that the capacity has been boosted I think it fits well with the likes of Whizzer for a family friendly but still interesting-for-everyone type of coaster.
After that we were off to do Batman: The Ride. We had to do a bit of searching to find the Flash Pass entry, it was tucked around the back side past the exit. I found out that A): the merge point with the regular line was way back on the lower level queue area, not exactly what I call front of the line access. However, B): no one was there yet, so we probably would have had a faster time just using the regular queue because it was walk-on for all seats but the front at that time of day anyway. The review of the ride itself is in its own article, but I’d like to point out that both trains had one of the front row seats taped off so everyone in line that was in a group of two or four (read: everyone in line, period.) ended up riding between two trains instead of fitting onto one. Later in the day, when we were pulling the restraints down for a front seat ride, all of them stopped functioning, so we had to wait for train two while the rest of the front row were roped off for the rest of the day. Five of eight front row seats closed off, that’s not indicative of good maintenance.
Next I programmed in V2: Vertical Velocity. It told me to come back in 15 minutes, so I had to spend a couple moments hanging around Batman grabbing some pictures. I got there and found it still had a couple walk-on seats available anyway. Where was this Six Flags back in 2005 when we didn’t have Flash Passes and I remember waiting two hours for this thing? My mom isn’t a fan of Wicked Twister at Cedar Point and there was
no real reason she’d like V2 any better so she stayed off it. I picked out a seat three from the back row that was still empty. I had my camera with me so I could get some shots from the station, and thankfully the park has abandoned their ludicrously zealous “every loose item must go in a locker policy” as most coasters had a small grid-like shelf with cubbies just large enough to fit sandals, sunglasses or, in my case, a camera. Problem #1: being that it covers such a small area in one side of the station, it was a bit of a mess with everyone trying to get their things, and probably slowed load times more than just having the standard, full-sized cubbies along the entire station. Problem #2: when I finally got my camera stowed and made my way back to the rear of the train, I found that two homeboys had taken residence in my seat. “Umm, excuse me, I was sitting there, I just needed to put my camera away…” Since the gates had already closed, one of them just had to get off to the exit platform, while I got to ride with someone who probably
wasn’t thrilled the person sitting next to him wasn’t Steve.
I’ve never cared much for these Impulse coasters and I’m glad Intamin quit making them after enough had been produced by 2004. They feel more like a flat ride than a coaster. Going up the front tower we just barely made it into the twist, which didn’t do anything except bang my ears a bit. The back is alright as a straight tower, it’s basically just a less-exciting drop ride. They didn’t have the magnetic brake on, which might have been a good thing since falling forward into the restraints isn’t really comfortable, although it’s the main difference between this and Wicked Twister’s spiraling back tower, so I was mildly looking forward to a new change.
We hit Iron and American Eagle next, and before getting an early lunch I made a quick stop at Looney Tunes National Park so I could get a quick ride on the Spacely’s Sprocket Rockets, one of three coasters at the park I had never been on (others being Ragin’ Cajun and Dark Knight). If this hadn’t been an extremely light year for me in terms of new coasters tried (I only just visited a park I never had been to before the previous day at the soon-to-close Kiddieland), I probably wouldn’t have bothered, but I felt like I needed every new coaster I could get. This is the basic small model of Roller Skaters from Vekoma, the same as the Shake, Rattle ‘n’ Roller Coaster at the former Hard Rock Park, and as far as Junior coasters go they’re not too bad, but I think given their short ride time they ought to allow for two circuits.
We ate at the Moose Burger Lodge; I’m not sure if the themeing of this place is supposed to recall a non-licensed Rocky and Bullwinkle, or perhaps NL Vacation’s Wally World, but inside I found probably the best Six Flags food offerings I ever had. The beef brisket sandwich: get it. Okay, it wasn’t anything special if you’ve been to a real smokehouse, but it actually tasted like real food (you know, with flavor and everything), a surprise for a Six Flags park. And while the price wasn’t a steal of a lifetime, the full meal it included made it particularly reasonable, especially considering it filled me up so well I wasn’t able to finish it all. The moral of the story is… not much, besides if you’re at Six Flags Great America, I hope you like barbeque, since Moose Burger Lodge is probably your best bet for a meal. On the whole, food at amusement parks is still mostly cardboard and ketchup, but they seem to be figuring out how to do barbeque well (basically they use a lot of barbeque sauce to cover it up), and just as long as I’m not doing a trip that has five Six Flags parks in a row I should be fine with just that as a culinary option.
While we were eating I reserved a ride on The Dark Knight, which I noticed had a wait time listed for 50 minutes. Finally, my Flash Pass was getting some use. The version at Great Adventure wasn’t that great, and I must say, neither was Great America’s. There were some minor differences; Great America’s is better integrated, being right next to Superman it makes a neat little superhero corner, and with the box back behind Superman only the entry structure is visible which doesn’t make it an eyesore for the park. The queue was also all indoors (not that we needed to use it, we got to cut right into being the first into the pre-show room),
but then the indoor section of the queue after the preshow was a bit more barren of themeing. It’s bad designing having a preshow that’s supposed to get everyone excited, only to have another ten minute wait before they actually board the cars.
The coaster itself, well, I have a hard time rating it. There was a bit more themeing on the interior than I remembered (actually they might have added more over the 08/09 off-season), but overall it was still much too bright in there, and a strobe light flashing on a 4-foot tall Batman figurine isn’t going to get more cool with time. One added effect that did get me was there was some sort of special effect that sprayed us with a few cold drops of water I wasn’t anticipating. And for a wild mouse, this is a pretty good attraction. Most mice hit their turns really hard but this one had some sort of shock system that let us glide through the curves without the hard entry and exit, and the brakes were mostly all off that meant a pretty fast ride. Still, the self-importance found along the edges of the ride makes me want to downgrade it compared to if it had just been a standard Wild Mouse. If you don’t have a Flash Pass, I might recommend Ragin’ Cajun before this one.
Since Superman was right next door I wanted to book that one next, but that one also had a 50-minute wait so we spent the time looking around the gift shops, and also hit both the Condor and the Sky Tower. Condors are always welcome in an amusement park, and like their namesake they seem to becoming a rarity these days. The Sky Tower was basically just a photo session. In fact, for me, so was the Condor, although do not expect to get any halfway decent shots of Superman when you’re spinning at 20 RPM. I also want to mention, although I didn’t go on it, there was an impressively detailed bumper car building next door called Rue Le Dodge. Easily the nicest and most sophisticated I’ve ever seen for a bumper car, and at a Six Flags park, surprisingly.
That’s not fair. While it’s always fun to make jokes about the concrete qualities found at Six Flags parks, I’ve found that they’ve started to become an bit of enthusiast dogma that has less truth to it than it used to. Considering how dense the park is and the fact it was built on a vacant plot of land next to a highway back in the 1970’s, Six Flags Great America is positively one of the greenest parks that isn’t Busch Gardens in the country. Just look at the area surrounding Whizzer. When it was built, it looked like this. Even the Iron Wolf, a compact Beemer, is practically a terrain coaster in places. Huge thickets of vegetation grow between the rides, and there are plenty of efforts to landscape along the midways as well. Even the themeing is above-average.
Rue Le Dodge, as I already mentioned, plus the newer Mardi Gras corner, and the Southwest Territory is extremely impressive. However, I think most of these attributes in the park came before the Premier takeover in 1998, Raging Bull being a transitional ride between the two
management styles. The reason Six Flags Great America might come off as a more pleasant park than some of its contemporaries is the fact that Premier Parks didn’t do much with it after Raging Bull… just the inverted duo back in 2001 (one of which is now removed and the other has a small footprint fitted neatly into a corner of the park), and Superman, which took the place of another parking lot coaster anyway. Originally it was supposed to be built in the Whizzer’s spot until there was a huge public outcry against dismantling the crowd favorite. I can’t imagine how much worse off the park would be today if they had gone through with that, and not just for the loss of the Whizzer, but for the loss of all the scenery that’s grown up around it and gives the park a peaceful “heart” of sorts.
They did retheme one area of the park into the Mardi Gras area in 2004, which was a bit of a surprise for them (and actually predicted a surprise slew of well-themed, well-integrated attractions in their last two years, including Kingda Ka, Tatsu and El Toro.) The new Six Flags management has made some attempts at themeing, although most of these are less about evoking a time and place and more about evoking certain licensing opportunities. As long as they think the Wiggles are a good thing that should be made a staple of all their parks, I will forever regard the new management’s capital decisions with one raised eyebrow. I also have to question the extravagant levels of advertising throughout the park. I understand their need to get out of debt by signing with as many brand partners as possible, but some of this stuff is becoming rampant, in-your-face commercialism. Miracle Whip ads were everywhere
(on the Space Shuttle, as full banners covering the Iron Wolf station…) and a newly added LED screen above the railroad overhead crossing turned what had been a pleasant walkway between sections of the park into an obnoxious ad-fest. Going back that way at night, the LEDs were so bright in contrast with the darkness around the park it hurt to look at it. Hopefully once they come out of bankruptcy they’ll tone some of this stuff down a little, although unless guests start complaining I don’t think there’d be much motivation to do so. Some people apparently don’t mind this stuff; I do. They’re not just tacky, they set the wrong tone for what a day at a theme park is supposed to be. They tell me I am nothing but a consumer to them, equally susceptible to dazzle in the forms of brightly colored rides or brightly colored advertisements. I am in the hands of profit-motivated firms only
interested in my own wellbeing to the extent that it motivates me to spend more. That isn’t even really true; technically, all businesses are that way, and if asking any of the managers or executives personally I’m sure they would have a genuine personal interest in making families happy, but as a parkgoer this sort of stuff always rubs me the wrong way. Honestly, if I had to choose between only visiting Cedar Fair parks and only visiting Six Flags parks, my decision would have been a close one but the strong consumerist flavor found all over Great America rubbed me the wrong way and I rather longed to get back to the generic vanilla look of Kings Island, where even if the rides are given the most off-the-shelf names and color schemes, at least they don’t have Listerine logos everywhere.
Crowds picked up to just the perfect level later in the day; I was able to use my Flash Pass so I was constantly moving from one ride to another, and in the few cases where I did have a bit of a wait between attractions, there was always a flat ride nearby I could quickly hop on. Some of the other rides sampled included King Chaos (HUSS Top Spin), the Orbit (Schwarzkopf Enterprise), Giant Drop (Intamin 2nd Gen. Freefall Tower) and the Yankee Clipper (Arrow Flume ride). King Chaos started with some promising, delivering a very dizzying five front flips in a row, but then that was it, the rest was just some pointless noodling around with the program. The Orbit is great fun, these have always been some of my favorite rides. The display of centripetal force is great here, being taken around a 360 degree vertical loop
without any sort of restraints in the cars. Giant Drop was competent enough drop tower. Not particularly thrilling anymore compared to the 200-300 ft. creations that sprung up several years after this one was built, but with six faces to the tower it has a decent capacity, and the queue and surrounding area is brilliantly done, taking place throughout an intricately constructed sandstone (aka, painted cement) canyon. It’s almost enough to forgive the name, which is still better than what Cedar Fair could come up with. The small footprint tucked in the corner of the Southwest Territory next to Raging Bull keep it humble, like it’s just another flat ride, but it’s very good for a better than average thrill, especially if you’re looking to kill ten minutes before your Flash Pass signals it’s your time for Raging Bull. We did the Yankee Clipper later in the day as I was waiting for a second Superman time to come up, and in retrospect that probably wasn’t the best idea given the chilly weather. It’s just a log flume, how wet can we get? After going over the big plunge, I saw at the bottom of the drop there was something kicking up a huge amount of the fast moving water, which our boat blasted through. I was sitting in front and made a last-second decision to duck, which had most of
the water fly right over my head and land right on my mother, who spent the rest of the evening cold and miserable, but trying not to show it too much as she didn’t want to spoil my fun. I love my mom.
It was probably a good thing we didn’t try their new for 2009 attraction, Buccaneer Battle. It’s another surprisingly competent attempt at themeing an attraction, although
I’m not certain it matches well with surrounding area (was this intended for the water park?) Regardless, from what I saw the kids seemed to really love it, and this was on a cool, overcast September evening. However, I’m not sure if I respect these “River Battle” attractions as rides. For one, they’re very flat, so while the themeing might be nice, unless you’re standing right next to it, it’s hard to notice and adds very little to the park’s ambiance. Furthermore, the boats are very slow-moving, and there’s really nothing they do except pass by fountains and other water devices. With the compact footprint that makes it less derivative of a rapids style water ride and more closely related to an interactive water fountain you have to wait in line for. As long as it’s high capacity and keeps the crowds satisfied on hot days I won’t begrudge the park too much for replacing the low-capacity Déjà Vu with it, but as a water ride, it’s rather ineffectual.
In total, I got thirty-five rides in on eighteen different attractions, by far a record for me at any Six Flags park. Part of it was the Flash Pass, part of it was the lower crowds over the cool Labor Day weekend, part of it was sheer determination to do as much as I could after a full summer with extremely few visits to parks I had not already been to within the last year or so. It was easily the best visit to a Six Flags park I’ve ever had, and am more optimistic about the next time I might visit another one in their chain. Just as long as they don’t get arrogant with their Flash Pass pricing.
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