Phantasialand (Part 2)

Brühl, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany – November 22nd & 23rd, 2021

A lot of what makes a great attraction, or any good work of art for that matter, boils down to the concept of identity.

Do the parts all add up to a cohesive whole, and is the whole more than the sum of its parts? How strong is that flash of an image in your mind, or that feeling in your soul, when you’re made to think about the thing in question? Is there a strong core idea to it that you can grab and say “aha, this is an object (or experience) that’s worthy of my critical attention!”

This is a very broad, perhaps hopelessly vague answer, since identity can encompass so many things. It’s shape, color, sound, and mood. It’s the art direction and the graphics package. It’s the way the name rolls off the tongue. It’s the feeling you get when you first approach, then as you’re swept up into the maelstrom, and then as you walk away basking in the afterglow of the experience. With roller coasters, I often prioritize the identity that emerges from the choreography of force and movement. Some build a strong identity through minimalist repetition of elements, while others have an identity that emerges from contrast and variety. Weak identity, by contrast, usually comes from either simplistic genericism (“I’ve seen things like it so many times before I can’t recall anything that makes this one unique”), or from unfocused complexity (an attempt to be too many different things at once without them synthesizing together). Humans have limited brain power. It needs to be simple enough but also different enough for us to give it pride of placement in our neural pathways.

Taron is an attraction with a strong identity. It starts with the Klugheim themed land that the ride completely dominates: a vaguely Lord of the Rings-esque high fantasy realm, surrounded on all sides with craggy basalt column mountains. The thematic identity is simple but not generic, which makes it strong. You instantly get what this mystical world is, even if the particular details are such that you’ve never seen anything exactly like it before. In an age where theme parks often dwell on complex Story, Klugheim runs in the opposite direction, with the land all mood and atmosphere, and a narrative so minimalist that the few details that do hint at a larger backstory offer nothing other than one’s own imagination to fill it in.

One of my favorite such details: walking into the land’s eatery, Rutmor’s Taverne, look up in the vaulted foyer to discover an enormous stone troll hoisted above as if ready to be shipped out in crates. Comparisons to The Hobbit notwithstanding, the scene instantly teases so many questions of this fantasy world’s history, ecology, and politics: where did this troll come from; how did it turn to stone; who captured and brought it to this tavern, and for what purpose…? None of which any other details within the land ever attempt to answer, at least none that I could find over my two days at Phantasialand during their Wintertraum holiday event. But it’s one of those indelible details that enriches and strengthens the big picture without ever distracting from that core identity.

Taron, likewise, is a fantastic coaster with a simple yet strong identity. It’s the best ride in Phantasialand, and it’s not an especially close call even with the park’s several (also extremely good) runners-up. The track layout intertwines throughout Klugheim so that the ride zone and public area development are essentially one and the same. The seamless integration between ride and land also closes much of the cognitive dissonance between the excitement of “going on a fictional adventure in the mystical realm of Klugheim” and “going on a real adventure on one of Europe’s best Intamin LSM coasters” so that those two emotions are also perfectly in tune with one another.¹ This synchronicity further strengthens the attraction’s identity.

The queue is a bit of a labyrinth, as is often the case at Phantasialand, but once at the station there’s not much of a wait thanks to the efficient operations. Those ram head trains are among the best Intamin has ever crafted, especially with the elevated seating and easy pull-down lap bars. I’m not a fan of the recent trend of affixing a big goofy fiberglass figure to the front of many coaster trains, but Taron’s minimal yet highly textured train design does the job perfectly without going overboard, implying a battering ram with real animalistic fury.

Departing the station, a short but sweet musical flourish² anticipates the otherwise fairly unadorned first launch. This launch has decent but not crazy thrust, and an initial high-banked turn around a rock wall sets the standard for impressive visuals and exciting yet not intense maneuvers. Next is a decently strong airtime hump that, on the descent, flattens out into a seemingly underbanked left curve diving into a dark chasm; despite the extensive landscaping, this is the only fully enclosed tunnel on the layout. The unexpected mix of negative into lateral g-forces, paired with the sensory contrast between sky and darkness, makes this element perhaps the highlight of the first half of the layout.

After emerging from the tunnel, the layout settles into a more regular pattern of S-bends through the rocky terrain and medieval structures. The frenetic movement through the setting with seemingly tight clearances increases the thrill factor considerably, as there’s not much memorable from the track itself. This sequence continues for considerably longer than expected, and right when the train seems on the verge of losing its momentum, it dives into a partially covered trench for launch number two.

This second launch, a good 23 mph (37 kmh) faster than the first, terminates near a waterfall, which the train sharply banks upward and wraps around through the slot canyon before emerging at the ride’s highest point nearly 100 feet (30 meters) in the air. As incredible as this moment is in the daytime, at night with the fog and red lightning in the canyon giving away to the total darkness of the waterfall canyon is one of the best coastering experiences in all of Europe.³ The subsequent slalom descent provides the only sustained elevated vantage point during the layout, an effective complement to the intensity of the launch and an ideal interlude between the first and second halves of the layout.

This second half more or less follows the same pattern established by the first, albeit with more speed and more whip. None of these transitions are particularly extreme, although the high seating position and minimalist upper and lower body restraints probably accentuates the snap between transitions more than on comparable coasters with similar g-force profiles, making the ride both more comfortable and more thrilling at the same time.

Rather than give each individual element its own unique character, they all blend together into one continuous experience of fluidly maneuvering around the canyon and village. The theory seems to be that by giving the constituent parts a relatively weak individual identity, they can all bind together into a larger, stronger single identity. There are no inversions, big airtime moments, or other sensations that call special attention. At 4,330 feet of track (1,320 meters), it’s a very long ride given its footprint; it also features fifty-eight crossovers. It’s easy to get “lost” amid the experience, creating patterns of motion that recall an animal in flight.

If that’s the concept behind Taron, the ending is even more of a puzzle. After coming around one of the turns, the layout suddenly transitions into a pair of straight bunny hops. Apart from the launches and brakes, this is the only part of the layout that doesn’t feature any lateral movement. Of course, this new identity makes it instantly stand out compared to the rest of the layout. But not in a good way. A trim brake begins to slow the train, and there’s not enough speed for any airtime. It suggests the ride is coming to an end, but in a way that feels indecisive. It doesn’t even commit to this new pattern as a fully differentiated “finale,” as the second hill leads back into an S-bend and partial helix into the final brake run, briefly reverting back to its primary modus operandi at the last possible moment. For a coaster that mostly feels so forcefully determined, this last moment literally feels like it’s wavering over how to wrap things up.

It also perhaps reveals the weakness of Taron’s relatively minimalist approach. While I appreciate how the repetition helps me get lost amid its forceful flight, and I think the overall vision would suffer if it became the more typical lineup of differentiated elements moving through a determined sequence I could mentally keep track of, I still want a little bit more of a dramatic arc to the experience. The one-and-a-half bunny hop finale, weak as it is, still demonstrates a need for a finale of some sort. I wouldn’t have been opposed to an inversion or two as a surprise finale. Or double helix for an extended moment of sustained force and motion. Even the bunny hops might have worked if it had actually committed to the concept of a negative-G laced denouement.

Theming also might have helped. As visually stunning as Klugheim is, it can also get fairly repetitive. The basalt formations are a great concept, but they’re overused. Their appearance might have been more impactful if they were used more sparingly in one or two key areas, and allowed to contrast with other forms of geology and landscaping. How hard would it have been to have included a few more distinctive landmarks among the landscape?⁴

Minimalist repetition can be a powerful way to create identity, but it still needs variation. Klugheim seems inspired by one fantastic visual concept, just as Taron tried to commit to a singular, amazing kind of ride experience unlike anything we’ve quite seen at this scale before. But the range of possibilities within that initial vision then got defined too narrowly, all of it existing within the same narrow band of still very good stuff. After a couple minutes on Taron, or an hour within Klugheim, it all begins to blend together. It weakens an otherwise very strong identity.

While Taron and Klugheim are hard to separate from one another, there is more to this corner of the park than just the Intamin multi-launch LSM coaster. Also intertwined with the track is a Vekoma family boomerang coaster named Raik. The fact that Phantasialand was able to get two coasters from different manufacturers that are tightly interwoven within the same development is quite an accomplishment, if not just for spatial planning but also for project management.

It’s easy to forget that Raik is even there. It keeps a low profile in a corner of the land, ceding to Taron to dominate. Thematically Raik blends in with everything else in Klugheim, but there is a little variation if you look closely: while Taron’s battering ram trains speak to the aggressive wartime nature of this mythical Old Norse culture, and Rutmor’s Taverne perhaps highlights its mercantilist characteristics, Raik is more suggestive of the ancient science and culture of this realm, with its (sadly inert) sand pendulum in the queue, the inventive color-changing lanterns in the station, and the timepiece-like device at the front of the train.

I haven’t done too many family boomerang coasters, but I strongly suspect that Raik might be the best of the lot. While it’s not nearly as long of an experience as Taron, it does include a surprisingly vivacious trench run along its layout reminiscent of Taron’s second launch, only Raik does it along a curve where the visual effect of cruising through the tunnel of wooden frames is even more effective. And you get to do it backwards.

That said, one thing I’m not sure I care for Vekoma’s rendition of the family boomerang is the omission of any additional lifting mechanism on the far spike before starting the backward run. In theory it avoids breaking up the pacing and provides a moment of hangtime. But the hangtime doesn’t quite deliver, and when it’s time to reverse the run, it’s already lost a lot of momentum and seems underpowered as it heads backward to the station along a track profile designed for nearly twice the speed during the forward run. We kindly were offered a double lap, which saved valuable time by negating the obligation for a second ride later in my visit.

I had heard a lot of hype around Mystery Castle, and the giant phallic turret at the back corner of the park certainly has won many fans among the theme park and thrill ride communities for completely non-Freudian reasons. It’s ostensibly part of the “Mystery” zone that now also includes Klugheim, though like Colorado Adventure it requires a very roundabout way of accessing it. In both theme and location it feels like a different part of the park, as a 19th century gothic mad scientist’s lab doesn’t have much in common with Old Norse mythology (despite both being “old European stuff” to casual onlookers). While it opened in 1998 well before “modern Phantasialand” had fully come into force, the ride still holds up well, being to my knowledge completely unique as an enclosed, show-driven drop tower with a 200+ foot vertical movement differential.

A strange phenomena among drop tower attractions is that I find they’re far more vertigo-inducing when they’re placed indoors. Something about having the point of reference of a vertical surface directly in front of you makes the open chasm below seem much more nerve-wracking. Look down and the vanishing point convergence is much more pronounced than in open air.

Mystery Castle uses this to good effect, although as I recall from my single ride on it, the darkness and theatrical show lightning might have limited the full impact. I like how the overhead space is shrouded in darkness as you board, providing a tingling sensation as you realize from the echo and ambient air how much vertical space must extend above you. Well deserved of the Mystery Castle name. But the cycle is rather quick, and the sudden launch and bounce profile disperses some of the tension before it has a chance to build. A fake Tesla coil at the very top is more cheesy than chilling. The fundamentals are there, but I wouldn’t mind seeing Phantasialand give Mystery Castle a thematic refresh and make some adjustments to the ride and show programs to fully deliver on its potential and bring it up to the standards of modern lands such as Klugheim and Rookburgh. Speaking of Rookburgh…

Wow.

Just wow.

Rookburgh is an easy choice for one of the best themed environments ever crafted, just because that initial impression when you see F.L.Y. soaring amid this fully realized steampunk world⁵ is such a profound moment of awe that sticks clearly to memory. For that reason it’s an easy choice, although if I actually sat down and sorted through the list of most fully realized themed environments I suspect a more complicated picture might emerge. (Doesn’t it always?)

But as I said at the top of this essay, that quality alone already gives Rookburgh a claim to a very strong identity. A big part of that strength is how incredibly compact the land is. At just 75 meters by 100 meters across, everything is theoretically within viewing distance of each other, although it’s so dense that it still requires a bit of exploration to see things from the different angles and find all the hidden nooks and crannies. Within that space, just under two acres, they managed to fit a 4,000-foot long coaster (with a full dark ride portion), a 109 key hotel, a restaurant, pub, sandwich shop, and chocolate factory.⁶ High density leads to high energy, and the energy level whenever F.L.Y. soars overhead and the steam vents pop off is always infectious.

Rookburgh improves on many of Klugheim’s weaknesses; it feels as if it actually is possible to piece together a narrative backstory of this world based on the clues left in place, and while the entire steampunk city feels internally consistent, it always offers different textures and details, with several identifiable landmarks scattered throughout and avoiding the brown and gray repetition that characterizes Klugheim. It also helps that Rookburgh fictionally exists in an era when graphic design was possible, which both allows for greater environmental storytelling as well as simply providing stronger identity through typeface and visual form.

A lot of that worldbuilding happens in the queue for F.L.Y. Although we got front of the line passes for staying onsite, we were advised that we’d want to take the regular queue on our first ride, which winds throughout, above and below the entire land.⁷ Metal detectors screen for loose items to store in lockers before reaching the loading platform. To this date, four years after F.L.Y.’s debut, I still haven’t found any photos or videos from the loading platform and the initial dark ride section, so all I have from those parts of the ride are my memories.

The way F.L.Y. is designed to load upright before flipping into the flight position is so ingenious yet simple that I’m kind of floored that it took four iterations from three different manufacturers⁸ before Vekoma, on their second attempt, finally got it right. Instead of having the seats on a folding hinge, they’re mounted on a pivot point against the track. The track is tilted on its side so the seats roll in sideways, not unlike the loading for Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey robotic arm rides. To change to the flying position, the track simply twists an extra 90 degrees into the inverted position at the same time the seats pivot 90 degrees so they’re oriented forward along the track instead of sideways. It’s such a simple and clever trick of geometry that your mind can barely comprehend what’s happened in the moment that it happened. This procedure also has the benefit of allowing for an upright dark ride portion at the beginning as the track ramps up from the subterranean load area to the upper launch platform.

Unfortunately, a bit like Winjas, it’s a stunning piece of engineering that is let down by insufficient show quality. The dark ride section is great in theory, but it doesn’t add much to the story or experience, only offering a few scenes of worldbuilding for Rookburgh that feel redundant. After the first turn, there are several LED hologram fans advertising generic steampunk products; the hologram less effective due to the solid black background behind it, the advertising less effective being for a land that has no gift shop. Then you pass by a large screen showing an animated city view of Rookburgh. It’s impressive at first due to scale, but upon closer inspection the render quality is a little shoddy, and again it adds little that we don’t already know about this world; why use your one big media element for a skyline that’s already visible just outside? Then the rotation into the flight position happens in darkness with little additional fanfare, when this should have been one of the ride’s biggest emotional moments.

The rest of the ride layout is essentially Taron Redux, a lengthy yet minimalist evocation of flight, upping the ante with a reported 100 crossovers in the compact twisting layout. The two launches aren’t quite as fast as Taron’s likely due to the added weight of the advanced 10-car train, but as on Taron the second launch also serves as the highlight of F.L.Y.’s layout, reaching the highest point with a surprisingly good moment of weightlessness (especially near the front of the train) before spiraling back down to earth.

I would even count a few ways that F.L.Y. improves on its Intamin predecessor. For one, it mixes a little more variety into the layout than Taron, including two corkscrew inversions near the beginning and end. The variety of the Rookburgh environment also helps in this regard, with various moments of flying over and even under water features, steam vents, towering metal canyons, and other structures. Not so much that any one moment risks upstaging the others, but enough that the ride has more ebb and flow throughout its progression. On that note, while F.L.Y. lacks a noteworthy finale (other than saving one of its two inversions for near the end), it at least maintains its character all the way to the end, unlike Taron’s awkward almost-airtime hills, and the landing into the subterranean brake run includes runway lights and aircraft landing audio that honestly does more for the ride’s theme than anything the initial dark ride portion achieves.

That said, while in some ways F.L.Y. is the smarter, more ambitious design, Taron remains the superior coaster simply because flying coasters inherit some fundamental limitations. All flying coasters promise to capture the sensation of free flight, but in reality it’s not really flight as how our bodies dream of it. To fly, we imagine a sense of weightlessness allowing us to break free of gravity’s stranglehold, much as we experience when we’re dreaming. But on a flying coaster, the reality of gravity is very much still in effect when you’re strapped into that safety vest and hoisted into the prone position. You feel the weight of the world tugging against your chest and spine, legs held in place by a clamp, and you instinctively know you are not free. Even birds, I imagine, must deal with this fact, lifting their entire bodies against the hold of gravity only through the differential air pressure exerting force up against their wings. And their bodies are evolved to handle that pressure in a way that ours are not.

I admire that F.L.Y. is probably the most comprehensive and concerted effort to figure out the “flying coaster” formula to get that experience as close as possible to a dream state, even if it’s fundamentally always just out of grasp. The layout includes many small pockets of airtime that lift you up and give you that momentary tingle of freedom from gravity… but only momentarily, and by physical law the forces are longer and more sustained going in the other direction. A few more rollover maneuvers might have helped. And thankfully the rotating seat design means you’re not wasting any more time on your belly at the beginning and end of the ride than you absolutely have to. But it’s still a long ride, and can be a little bit of an endurance test if you’re not prepared. In fact, if I were to rank the world’s flying coasters, I’d probably put F.L.Y. at #2 after Six Flags Magic Mountain’s Tatsu, whose mountaintop setting with a 263 foot elevation differential that starts gracefully before hitting hard offers a much more concise flight choreography at a scale and dynamic range that F.L.Y. simply can’t match.

Still, F.L.Y. understands better than possibly any other roller coaster that the idea of flight can’t be captured just in physical sensations, but in imagining the way one’s body can dynamically move through the physical world. The way it navigates through the dense cityscape of Rookburgh is nothing less than a major global achievement of both engineering and artistry, one that it is hard to imagine being superseded anytime soon. Of course, following the evolution from Black Mamba to Taron to F.L.Y., if any park were up to the challenge of eclipsing F.L.Y’s lofty achievement, it would probably be found in a new neighbor at Phantasialand.

After a cold winter’s night riding Taron, Black Mamba, Colorado Adventure, and F.L.Y., it was time to retire to our capsule room at the Hotel Charles Lindbergh. I haven’t stayed at too many on-site theme park hotels, but being inside the footprint of Phantasialand’s star new coaster, I made sure to include at least one night’s accommodations. The steampunk capsule rooms are very unusual, but filled to the brim with charming details and up-close, after-hours views that will not disappoint either themed environment aficionados or roller coaster enthusiasts; all the better if you find yourself at the intersection of the two groups.

That seems to be the market that Phantasialand has ended up targeting. During my stay I’m not sure if I saw a single family with children, including during the dinner and breakfast sessions at the attached Restaurant Uhrwerk included in the package. With two snug single-person cot beds nestled along either side of a steel tube, there are quite a few groups and demographics for whom I would expect Hotel Charles Lindbergh’s accommodations to be a non-starter for. Especially in summer, as I do not believe the capsule units are equipped with air conditioning. You’ll know whether or not steampunk coaster sleepaway camp sounds appealing to you.

There’s also the awkwardness of being an American in Germany, sleeping at an establishment named after Charles “Racial Strength” Lindbergh, at one time an American advocate for the National Socialist cause. I know certain cultural expectations are different in Europe, but in this case… c’mon! Yet staying at one of the other two on-site hotels doesn’t get much better either, due to some cliched exoticism and Orientalism. Given Germany’s colonial legacy on the African continent, the Hotel Matamba may feel uncomfortably appropriative, although admittedly a number of other European parks have committed far worse offenses.

And I guess that summarizes my experience at Phantasialand. After getting lost yet again in an unmarked dead-end corridor in the dead of night at Hotel Charles Lindbergh and taking my best guess over a mismatch in the elevator buttons to retrace my steps, I took a moment to reflect that I probably had to take the good with the troublesome. Phantasialand’s willingness to go so big and ambitious for a comparatively tiny theme park means that some of the basics of wayfinding, sightlines, accessible walkways, or not naming your hospitality after a white supremacist, are going to go overlooked. I’d rather have flawed but interesting than safe but boring, and Phantasialand is proof positive of that ethos. But I also think it’s not too much to ask that I’d rather have my credit card statement reflecting a stay at the “Hotel Amelia Earhart” instead. (When given the choice, always always always choose the trailblazing woman over the racist fascist guy. Why the fuck do people still need to be reminded of this in the 2020s?)

Previous: Phantasialand (Part 1)