Seoul Land

Gwacheon, Gyeonggi-do, South Korea – Wednesday, June 8th, 2011

Despite its name, Seoul Land is not actually located within Seoul. It’s a relatively easy ride near a green hillside south of the city with its own dedicated metro station. The park opened in 1987 in advance of the ’88 Seoul Summer Olympics. Like many Asian parks from that time period, the landscaping is pleasant and the basic infrastructure is reasonably robust, but design is a confused mishmash of seemingly random parts, and the park hasn’t shown much evidence of major capital reinvestment in a decade or more.

For what it’s worth, I like Seoul Land. It’s a relaxed, easy-going park with a halfway decent collection of rides, including the most coasters within a single park in Korea. (A whopping five, two of which are kiddie coasters.) But with Lotte World much closer to downtown and Everland much larger, and with both of those parks much better financed and integrated into Korea’s “chaebol” system of mega-conglomerates, it’s hard not to look at Seoul Land as an amusement park without much purpose slowing crawling towards its end-date, whenever the property value of the land it sits on finally catches up to it.

Seoul Land is home to two fairly large steel looping coasters, but if there was one attraction that I absolutely could not miss, it was the Crazy Mouse.

Obviously this is no ordinary wild mouse. Look at this insanity: somebody took the track and trains of an Arrow/Vekoma looping coasters, cut it apart into single cars, and stuck a gigantic cartoon mouse head on the front of each.

Stare deep into its disquieting hatted visage.

Not only that, but the engineering of this track is, um, unique. Check out that advanced banking technique using the adjustable width and height of the cross ties.

I was not expecting this trip to be one filled with discoveries of minor masterpieces and hidden gems. By this point the real value was in finding and documenting the odd and unusual, to seek out the furthest fringe cases that laterally expand the definition an amusement park’s possibilities previously unimagined due to self-imposed mental restrictions dictating the assumed standards of responsible design and good taste. By this measure, Crazy Mouse was a rousing experience.

The ride itself wasn’t… bad. It wasn’t good, but it did what it set out to do and left no bruises or concussions along the way. I’d ride it a couple of times, including to get a POV video:

The Columbia Double Loop Coaster was my next target.

Sadly, I discovered the coaster would not be in operation today.

The Senyo Kogyo-built coaster looked as though it could have been a decent ride, with its densely forested hillside location incorporating a couple of tunnels. Not this visit, though.

Fortunately, the largest coaster in Seoul Land, Black Hole 2000, was up and running.

This large looping coaster opened two years after the park in 1990. The manufacturer is unknown, although some of the design characteristics would suggest the same supplier as the nearby Crazy Mouse.

The ride’s 113 foot tall lift appears quite dominant within the park. Yet despite its apparent scale it’s not really adequately categorized as a “mega-looper.”

The first 2/3 of the ride layout is more or less a standard corkscrew coaster layout (drop, arched turns, corkscrews, another flatter turn), except with the whole thing elevated an extra fifty or so feet above the ground for no explicable reason.

The twin elevated corkscrews with impressively over-built supports are by far the highest version of this basic element I’ve ever encountered.

Tt tacks on a brief out-and-back design tohwards the end of the layout, with several long, ramp-like drops and an elevated turn. This is the only part of the layout where the drops get close to reaching down to ground level.

Transitions are not particularly graceful. Oddly, the coaster was much shakier in the front seats than closer to the rear of the train.

Close-up examination of the rather loose tolerances of the chassis and wheel bogies.

I only had a tolerance for a couple of rides on Black Hole 2000, one of which I braved the front row for a video. (Seoul Land seemed very lax about on-ride videography.)

Seoul Land is also home to a number of other increasingly rare flat rides. It looks as if many originally may have been sourced from European or American fair circuits. Not exactly a mark of international theme park prestige, but overall it’s probably more fun.

Seoul Land takes a few design queues from Disneyland, such as having a loosely themed “Fantasy Land,” “Tomorrow Land,” or “Adventure Land,” in addition to the Epcot-styled “International Street” seen near the entrance. Their “Adventure Land” however incorporates more western theming like Frontierland.

Kiddy Coaster is a Wacky Worm styled ride by Interpark with a Speedy Gonzalez lead car, for now the second coaster with a mouse-faced car I’d ride today.

He wasn’t feeling too speedy today, as it took the operator a couple of attempts and some light shoving to get us out of the station.

Compared to some of the more elaborate designs I encountered in Taiwan, Seoul Land’s Flume Ride appeared cheaply made. But it still made an attempt at some scenic design, water effects, and had a decently long layout that ran through the nearby trees, so I can’t complain too much.

The main drop was a unique double-dip design with a fairly long straight section between drops.

King Viking (or “Pirata”) is a large swinging ship attraction that, based on the name in the lighting package, probably hails from an Italian or Spanish fair circuit.

It has a separate queue if you’d like a seat near the ends where the biggest airtime is found. While there were no crowds today, I appreciate this as it’s never as much fun to only be left taking a tame middle seat on these rides.

Adventure Land continues the Pirate theme with a Den of Lost Thieves dark ride by Sally.

I would have enjoyed this, but unfortunately it had a late opening scheduled at 1:30pm. I’d have to leave Seoul Land by 1:00pm to keep to my busy three-park schedule for today.