/r/themeparks
Welcome to r/themeparks, a Subreddit for all things related to theme parks, such as news, construction updates, rumors, concept art, and much more!
/r/themeparks
Does anyone know what theme park used the song Vacation by the Gogos back in the day? I’ve been trying to figure this out for so long!!
I'll probably upload something when I get home tonight.
Hello I’ve been a thoosie for around 2 years and I would really like to make friends and learn more about coasters does annyone know about anny forums ,servers I could join
Hello out there! I just started a theme park Youtube channel (despite this being the last thing on the planet anyone needs or wants) and I recently hit 100 subscribers. To celebrate, I'm giving away $150 that you can use towards a season pass (hopefully, but let's be honest, I'd have no way of knowing) at a park near you!
If you want to enter:
Subscribe to the channel (I can't verify this, I trust you though) here:
https://www.youtube.com/@KevKageNeedsALife
Tell a friend to subscribe to this channel (Also honor system)
Send an email to kevkageneedsalife@gmail.com with the subject line Sweepstakes Entry!
You have until 11:59pm ET on 7/4/24 to enter.
Winner will be drawn probably a day or two after that.
I literally have one entry right now, so I'd say your chances are pretty good all things considered.
Good luck and please know I will forever be grateful for your sub.
Thanks friends and hope you get to hit the parks this summer!
Imagine what theme parks would be like in 2100. MORE PARKS, TALLER COASTERS, LARGER RIDES, REBUILD EVERYTHING! MORE! EVERYTHING WE DO IS AMAZING!
Maybe it's that, or something much more immersive. The idea i have is:
A series of immersive worlds with no rides, roaming actors who are meant to be citizens of each world, and also traffic in each world was well. It will all be contained inside a dome so it can operate all year round. The traffic in each world can vary, such as in cities, the normal city traffic, in an old world, there will be old cars, and in a medieval world, there will be horse-drawn wagons. Just imagine the Black Country living museum, but on a much larger scale. That is essentially what i'm talking i'm about. Although this sounds like an amazing idea, it's highly unlikely to happen, and there's no demand for it, but who knows, we'll probably have to wait until 2100 to find out
r/WaltDisneyWorld would not let me post my travel thoughts, so posting here for others.
Firstly I want to say that I've been visiting Disney world since regularly for 40 years and I know all the parks and the history very well. In the early 2000's I lived in Windermere directly behind the Magic Kingdom and was a annual passholder. I'm also a Disney stock holder, so I follow the financials of the company and am aware of most if not all of the management decisions that have been made regarding the revenue of the parks and cost of running them. My hope is that this channel is monitored by Disney management personnel and some of my observations from an experience standpoint will fall on (mouse) ears.
I now live in Texas and have not been to any of the Disney parks for many years, so I was eager to take my 9 year old for her birthday to see the new attractions that everyone has been talking about this week (5/28 - 5/31). I had some old park hopper tickets that I was able to update to the new card system, which I immediately found complicated and arbitrary. I received several plastic cards to replace the paper tickets I had, but I could only determine what each of the cards had remaining on them by looking up each cards serial number using the Disney "Experiences" app. Now if you use Genie+ or Lighting Lane pass, every ride you go on requires you scan either your card, phone, or as I later discovered my iWatch if I paired it with the "Experience App". This required me to constantly pull out my card which quickly grew tiresome. My daughter saw everyone with a LED mickey wristband, which I learned was called a Magicband. I found out that it could be used to scan her into the rides and had an added benefit of playing a little audio clip on gold character statues around the park, and vibrated during fireworks, so I bought the cheapest one @ $35. A smart move by Disney to solve a problem with another upsell that they created in the first place.
I'm a software developer, so most technology does not usually confuse me, but the design of the "Experiences" app is pretty bad. It's very hard to get the information you need, the features are categorized poorly, not explained well, and navigation is redundant and unintuitive. I really don't know how the average family makes heads or tails of it. I think that the feature that I utilized the most was the Cast Member Chat, because they were the only one that could make any sense of the extensive rules and restrictions that have been added to all the parks and access. I leaned on the Disney ticket agent who was a 26 year Disney employee veteran to help setup which parks my daughter and I were interested in. I had to purchase an additional child's single day ticket ($5 off the $179 adult ticket) so I had the ticket agent set that up as well. The ticketing process is so confusing that even the 26 year Disney employee had a problem with the setup that I'll explain later.
The first day we went to Epcot for the Guardians Coaster, Ratatouille, and the Frozen ride what I had not seen before. I was told that to reserve the Guardians ride, I needed to get on the "Experiences" app at 7am to reserve a virtual queue in line. I loaded the app at 6:55am and kept refreshing until at 7 the screen switched to "Press to enter the Virtual Queue" button appeared. In the 4 seconds it took me to read the text on the page, the app told me that the virtual queue was already full and I would now have to wait until 1pm to try again or buy a lighting lane pass for $36 for the 2 of us. I wanted to park hop to Magic Kingdom and you are required to be in the park at 1pm to try the queue again so I simply bought the lighting pass to get it over with rather than spend my vacation pulling out my phone out and checking my watch and queue status all day.
Just as a FYI, I was successful queueing the next day for Tron, by using the same technique but hitting the "Press to enter the Virtual Queue" immediately, a process that I estimate took me 2 total seconds. Doing so I received a queue group of 72 which resulted in our group being called at 2:45pm in the afternoon. Needless to say I was left with a very bad taste in my mouth as I had to be on my phone at 7am every morning with mixed success and then even when I was successful I constantly had to check my phone to see where I was in the queue to avoid missing our place. Even my 9 year old was so annoyed by my phone obsession and eventually suggested that we only check the phone after we get off a ride.
We had to scan our fingers on the initial check in, which I'd heard about to lock our tickets to us. As a privacy advocate I'm not super excited about this, nor the idea that I cannot easily swap users of the card to another family member at my choosing, but I'm sure that others have expressed these concerns so I won't elaborate further. We were staying at a Disney Resort, so we arrived at the Epcot back entrance exactly at 8:30am to rope drop Ratatouille. Apparently that was everyone else's idea because the outdoor line queue for Ratatouille was already at 35 minutes when we arrived. When we did get on the ride, I was very underwhelmed with the presentation and felt that the quality of what I had known Disney to produce had severely dropped. I had to wear 3D glasses on a practical dark ride that moved in parts from 3D projection screens to small room breaks that had no characters or effects which required my to constantly remove and again put on the glasses to see anything clearly. As far as I could see there were no animatronics or real characters within the practical scenes and the 3D screens were dark, poorly aligned when attempting to create false parallax, and frequently distorted. Overall it reminded me of a rip-off of the Spiderman ride at Universal that was made about 10 years ago.
I bought 2 Genie+ passes in addition to the $36 Guardians Lighting Lane passes, so that added another $100 to our park tickets. As soon as we got in the park I made a Genie+ reservation for the Frozen ride, but the first available slot was 1:45pm, so I guess that's a popular one too. Since we had some time to wait for our 11:15am Guardians Lighting Lane reserve, we walked around world showcase, which was pretty much how I remember it and walk over to the new Moana water thing. I've probably been to Epcot about 200 times so I thought I knew my way around pretty well, but when I got the old communicore fountain area I got completely lost by the labyrinth of narrow paths and hidden turns. It seems Disney's original rule of designing a park to lead the patron to the next focal point has not been adopted by the current designers. The moana experience was wedged in between the restrooms between The Land and Living Seas pavilions, which was an odd choice when it seems they could have put it where the old communicore fountain was to both add tropical beauty to that previously dull area as well as implement an impressive water feature. As it is installed now, the experience is hidden, cramped, and overall does not really communicate the naturalist messaging that the numerous signs in the pathway claimed to resemble.
There was also a new choke point that was introduced between Spaceship Earth and the Land where the only path on that side of the park was about 12 feet wide. A great idea now that every other family either has a double wide stroller or electric scooter taking up even more of the pathway than they used to. I also noticed this at Hollywood Studios in the new Galaxy Edge area. Not sure why the current Disney design team thinks the paths in the parks should narrower than they were before, but my assumption is that it's a cost saving measure.
We made it on the new Guardians coaster with our lighting pass, and I appreciate that we did not have to wait in the regular queue and got on the preshow portion of the ride in 5 minutes. I thought the ride was ok, not great with heavy use of video projection in both the preshow and ride. The extent of practical effects was a giant planet that you rotate around which seems flat and unrealistic. For a ride that is supposed to be the new high standard of Disney Imagineering, it seems that a nearly completely reliance on some projection screens in a dark coaster seems cheap and uninspired. Does anyone remember the giant glowing future city at the end of World of Motion? How did we go from that to this?
We finished Epcot at the Frozen ride, which was lackluster with no story, cheap animatronic character that had disturbing glowing projection faces with dead stares. Not that the Norway ride was that great, but it at least and some interesting scenery, a troll with fiber optics and a drop with the Miniature practical Storm and Oil Rig which were slightly memorable. To replace it with a bunch of flat, black light painted wood panels to recreate one of the highest grossing animated modern era Disney films seems uninspired and unimaginative. I mean they couldn't even design an interesting mirror/crystal room for Elsa's Ice Palace that would make you feel like your are in a much bigger and impressive space?
The next day we went to Hollywood Studios and I paid another $44 for both of us to go on Rise of Resistance and $70 for 2 more Genie+ passes, so another $114 in addition to the cost of the park tickets. We did Tower of Terror first which thankfully has not been redesigned and still holds up over the years, even though I think the drops have been reduced and shortened, a change I'm sure my 9 year old did not have any objection with.
We made our way over to the new Pixar area which I found to be very garish and infantile, more like if McDonalds designed a theme park, not Disney or Pixar. The wait for Slinks coaster was already 90 minutes at 10:30am and even though we had the Genie+ pass, it was not available so we skipped it. On another note it was already 94 degrees and there is no shade in most areas of the new areas of this park other than some haphazardly placed umbrellas on the sides of the path that guests huddle underneath. It's like the park designers have never visited Florida in summer or simply don't care if anyone bakes in the sun.
We made it to the Star Wars area and I found it very confusing and mazelike. I never knew where I was, as the other areas I mentioned there were multiple choke points in the paths in a area that proved to be the most crowded in the park. The detailing of the buildings and nature features seemed cheapy executed and fake. They didn't really remind me much of the Star Wars universe and would barely hold up in an episode of the Mandalorian. My favorite experience by far was the Millennium Falcon ride where my daughter and I got to pilot the ship which was a dream experience. Even the queue area of this ride is amazing with the level of detail and nostalgia that I would expect from a E-Ticket Disney Ride.
Rise of the Resistance was fine, not worth $44, containing more of the poorly executed fake projection screens effects and motion vehicles traveling though cheaply constructed Empire/Order hallways. I'm also 95% sure that the Kylo Ren animatronic at the end is the recycled from the Wicked Witch from Great Movie Ride. I feel like the animation was even recycled.
Last day we went to Magic Kingdom with the intention of riding Tron and Snow White Mine Train. I bought Lighting Lane passes for both rides adding another $66 ($26 for SN and $40 for Tron) to the tickets. I again got up at 7am to enter the virtual raffle for the Tron queue, and discovered that I could now add my daughter to the queue group. I immediately contacted a Disney chat agent who discovered that the helpful Disney ticket agent who I purchased a single day ticket to Magic Kingdom had put in the wrong date for our visit. By doing so, it effectively made my daughter ticket ineligible for virtual queues (and may have not granted her access to the park for the day I paid for). Thankfully the online agent was able to change to date so I could actually use the $175 single park ticket that I bought the night before I intended to use it.
Snow White was well done and fun, sort of a combination or Matterhorn and Barnstormer. I did notice that it also contained the cheap animatronic characters that had disturbing glowing projection faces like the Frozen ride. Is it that really that hard to maintain facial articulation on audioanimatronics? Disney did it since Carousel of Progress and the projection faces seem like a huge step backward.
Tron was what I was most excited about being envious of the Tokyo version. The building that houses Tron is impressive and clearly designed to be a key feature to draw guests in with an extended walkway and LED effects on the scaffolding. I was able to reserve a virtual queue for the day, so I reserved a 10:00pm Lighting Lane pass. I preferred the night ride, as there was more constant immersion with indoor/outdoor areas of the coaster. I thought the reclined ride cars were unique and well done if not a bit uncomfortable. They are slightly constrictive how they hold you in and I noticed that a child in the car in front of me was restrained to tightly and started to have trouble breathing screaming for help from her parents by the end of the ride, which was unsettling, so consider asking for the last car that does not have this type of restraint for little ones. The ride again was plagued with projection screens inside the ride in lieu of practical effects and reminded me or Guardians. We also bought a Diecast Tron lightbike with LEDs in the giftshop and upon getting home the bike was made in China, was broken and did not illuminate.
After all the travel, tacked on cost of all the addons, special ride passes, and the inconvenience of the highly restrictive and expensive park tickets and the cheaper quality of the rides, I don't feel like Disney offers a good value or exceptional experience anymore. I actually felt bad for families with several kids that clearly were spending thousands of dollars for a vacation that honestly felt more like a job most of the time. I also noticed cast members that were either rude, impatient, or audibly complaining about their job position, shift, the heat, or anything else that an average worker would complain about. I understand that Disney employees are regular people and not robots, but previously I always felt that Disney employees were extremely proud to be working at Disney World and it reflected in how they treated guests and it added to the magic. Now I just felt like I'm was six flags and everyone was just counting the minutes until they could go home. I'm glad that I could take my daughter and have the experience with her, but I will not be returning to Disney World any time soon as it seems that the company and how they value the guest experience has diminished significantly from what I remember.
hi
just asking for some ideas and suggestions, Canadian, wife and 2 kids 4+6 going to california for these days
Wednesday - April 24 - travel To Santa Ana (might stay at family)
Thursday - April 25 – San Diego zoo
Friday - April 26 – Sea World – maybe lego land hotel
Saturday – April 27 – Lego Land, maybe lego land hotel
Sunday – April 28 – hang out in Santa Ana
Monday – April 29 - Universal
Tuesday – April 30 – Hang out in Santa Ana
Wednesday – May 01 – Disneyland
Thursday – May 02 - Travel to home
questions I have,
cost passes, I heard you can get the "Best" deals from costco
-do I need to buy them ahead of time to any of these places? or just buy at gate?
-super nintendo world in universal studios, just buy the basic universal studio pass and go to the nintendo world area? or is it extra/different cost?
what sort of lines are there, worth it for fast/lightning passes?
I got a child that is diagnosed as high level austistic, I heard you can apply for exemption for a fast pass with this? anyone know how this works or ever heard of it?
I created a walkthrough on Astra Lumina at Anakeesta in Gatlinburg. Figured I'd post it here. It's worth going to if you've already shelled out for Anakeesta (which is pricey but also worth it IMO).
I've been to both Disney World and Universal studios Orlando when I was a kid and teen. And I enjoyed both parks. But I was wondering which one you all prefer in terms of enjoyment and if it's worth the money?
Hello Friends! My daughter and I made a video about our experience at Tokyo DisneySea! I would love some feedback if you get the chance! We are just getting started with our YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxdxxWWDoR4
All day park hopping has returned to Walt Disney World and we are taking on the 4 park one day challenge! We'll do 1 Ride, 1 Snack, and 1 Character in each park. We'll talk about park hopping with Disney transportation. PLUS I'll explain how this and the upcoming “Good to Go Days” affects the Virtual Queue Boarding Groups for Tron and Cosmic Rewind!
Me and some friends are heading to SFFT on the 27th. Is after Christmas busy or calm since everyone travels home?
For me personally, it's the movie Speed. There is a ton of potential there.
So I noticed that Six Flags Magic Mountain's Twisted Colossus ride is closed today. The app says its closed. But the website doesn't say its down for a refurb or anything. This is my favorite ride in the park and I would be very mad if they are going to leave it closed for months like SFMM always does when they need to refurbish a ride. SFMM is usually extremely lazy when it comes to maintenance. Sometimes it takes forever for a good reason. Like Apocalypse was closed for a while earlier this year because of a retracking. But usually one something just needs a little bit of maintenance they take months!! Sometimes not like earlier this year Full Throttle was closed only for a few days. But TC is my fav and if they are going to be lazy with it and leave it closed for months I am going to lose my mind!
Is there any possible way to overturn or somehow forgive your "permanent ban"?
For legal reasons I can't disclose what the offense was, however I believe I've been framed.
I've heard of some other people appealing the company and somehow getting their pass reinstated. Does anyone know how this is possible?
🎄Guide to Universal Orlando Holidays! How long did I wait to meet The Grinch? I’m showing you all of it, all the entertainment like Grinchmas and the Macy Parade. The characters like Earl the Squirrel and The Grinch, Holiday Snacks and more!