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Blackpool Pleasure Beach: General Discussion

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ScottPBE said:
You would end up with lunatics breaking into the park and chaining themselves to it if an announcement was made beforehand. There's been threats of people hanging themselves over it, an announcement before its closure wasn't worth the problems it would have caused.
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I presumed the hanging threat was a joke. Protests can be well mannered too. I attended the Southport Cyclone protest and one man did scale the coaster but everyone else was well behaved. I'm glad I partook as I really wanted it to be saved, but of course it was to no avail. Yes I see why they wouldn't want the hassle, but if people had protested it would have been because they are passionate about the ride and just wanted to show it
 
How many parks have we seen close classic rides with advance notice?

Generally with a ride of repute a park will announce with a reasonable notice that a ride will close. Often to be replaced by another.

A closing event will be held, generally without any hangings, and enthusiasts will feel a little better about the whole situation. Indeed said event might even make the park some additional revenue.

All taken into account, the park gets a little publicity, enthusiasts feel a little better and everyone’s a little happier.
 
venny said:
How many parks have we seen close classic rides with advance notice?

Generally with a ride of repute a park will announce with a reasonable notice that a ride will close. Often to be replaced by another.

A closing event will be held, generally without any hangings, and enthusiasts will feel a little better about the whole situation. Indeed said event might even make the park some additional revenue.

All taken into account, the park gets a little publicity, enthusiasts feel a little better and everyone’s a little happier.
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The Wild Mouse closed in August for maintenance, the decision to remove it was made several weeks after the park closed for annual maintenance and whilst nobody was there to make any sort of announcement, what type of event could they do exactly?
 
I appreciate the heated discussion but would be good if we could refrain from petty insults! Obviously this is a very divisive topic and different people have different interpretations of the situation - but if we could keep the talk to those interpretations and not resort to attacking the person behind the opinions that would be fantastic :)
 
I am aware that in this case, there are other circumstances that meant Wild Mouse could not get a proper send off, but it only seems to be UK parks that remove rides without prior warning. Alton Towers did it in 2015, when Ripsaw was in pieces in the car park and they said "Oh don't worry. It's just part of normal maintenance!" They also did it with the Flume, Submission, CATCF; the list goes on. Thorpe did it with Slammer, although Slammer also had circumstances preventing a proper send off.
EDIT: Just realised this news has taken up 7 pages of discussion!
 
Matt N said:
I am aware that in this case, there are other circumstances that meant Wild Mouse could not get a proper send off, but it only seems to be UK parks that remove rides without prior warning. Alton Towers did it in 2015, when Ripsaw was in pieces in the car park and they said "Oh don't worry. It's just part of normal maintenance!" They also did it with the Flume, Submission, CATCF; the list goes on. Thorpe did it with Slammer, although Slammer also had circumstances preventing a proper send off.
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In all of the above cases (except perhaps, The Flume, although it was well known in advance that The Flume would be closing when it did anyway), the rides were not historic nor irreplaceable. The situation here is that they have bulldozed a ride that CAN NEVER be be recreated or built new - the spirit of it was in the slightly haphazard and shabby way in which it was built and the insane ride experience it created because of that. To use a football analogy, building a modern Wild Mouse in its place would be rather like how Arsenal moved to the Emirates from Highbury. The result would be a soulless entity which would never compete atmospherically nor nostalgically with the original.
 
ScottPBE said:
The Wild Mouse closed in August for maintenance, the decision to remove it was made several weeks after the park closed for annual maintenance and whilst nobody was there to make any sort of announcement, what type of event could they do exactly?
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Assuming the reports of insurance are correct, meaning they couldn’t run the ride, I would expect that a tour of the ride itself would be very much appreciated. Perhaps some limited entrance to around the fountain area or a small talk on its history. There are so many possibilities even without putting riders on the Mouse itself.

I think for the most part we’re generally a sensible lot, so we can understand that if as a business the park can no longer run the ride then they must close it.

However one last chance to see the ride and explore its history would have been so well received by so many people, I think this is one of the reasons that the sudden and unannounced demolition has been met with such an outcry.
 
I don't understand the notion whereby the park has developed and evolved for 120 years yet now is the time where that evolution should stop everything is sacred, that doesn't make any sense to me. Nickelodeon Streak only exists because the Velvet Coaster was demolished. Grand National only exists because Scenic Railway was demolished. Stuff changes.

You can have debates about the way it was done, the sensitivities of the situation etc, but what is done is done. If you remove all the hyperbole from the situation it's just the way it goes and has always gone.

Alastair said:
To use a football analogy, building a modern Wild Mouse in its place would be rather like how Arsenal moved to the Emirates from Highbury. The result would be a soulless entity which would never compete atmospherically nor nostalgically with the original.
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To expand on that analogy - imagine if Highbury was deemed to be unsafe and not fit for EPL and the insurers said "You can play your games here but you can't have a crowd" - you'd move to Emirates because you couldn't survive as a club without revenue from tickets. Begrudgingly you'd move on and do what was right for the future of the club, its supporters and its players, because practicalities have to trump sentimentalities.
 
Alastair said:
To use a football analogy, building a modern Wild Mouse in its place would be rather like how Arsenal moved to the Emirates from Highbury. The result would be a soulless entity which would never compete atmospherically nor nostalgically with the original.
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Nah it'd be more like when Coventry moved from Highfield Road to the Ricoh or god forbid West Ham moving from Upton Park to the Olympic Stadium...
 
At the end of the day, I'm not happy about it closing but as a business, to the general public wild mouse isn't the iconic crowd puller, and it's costing more money than it's going to make, has done for years. It's not even the most popular wooden coaster. I can see why people would be upset and I'll be annoyed if there isn't a decent replacement, but to the business it was becoming a liability.
 
Spin-Ride-Lover said:
I'm not, and likey never will be again.






I won't! ,this will be my last ever season visiting PB and theme parks in general.
I will just go to traveling fairs instead after this year!
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A bit extreme Doug! As much as I loved the Mouse, there are countless rides I still enjoy that make up my favourite park. Whilst we're on the subject of football, my Liverpool supporting son is gutted today because Coutinho is leaving the club. I had to remind him that the club should never be about one player, and that they've had plenty of good results without him anyway. In the same way I tried on the days last season when Mouse was shut to forget about it and just enjoy the other rides. But I can't escape the fact that it will be very strange and upsetting to not see the ride there at all. I will enjoy Icon but this season will be bittersweet without Mouse
 
Ryan B said:
It's not even the most popular wooden coaster
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Really? It always had a queue. On a busy day it would have a 45 minute plus queue like Nash or Dipper. Fair enough, if they were on two train operation those queues would move quicker, but Mouse was always popular from what I saw. In fact the poor throughput is about the only negative thing I have to say about the Mouse. But then I was lucky enough to visit on weekdays and walk straight back onto it. Any weekend / school hol / night riding visit I did always featured long Mouse queues.

If you weigh up the at times slow moving Mouse queue, against the atrocious one train operation on Streak and the slow dispatch on Nash, I'd say Mouse was very popular indeed and in fact it was such a damn good ride that people didn't mind waiting anyway. We'd give anything for a one hour Mouse queue now it's gone. Hell, some people even think Big Dipper is a boring woodie (I'm not one). At least Nash & Dipper aren't going anywhere, but sadly for Mouse it is TOO LATE
 
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Fair point, but nearly everyone of my non enthusiast friends and family prefer Nash which I do myself. On another note I really don't like big dipper. But when the general public hears pleasure Beach they'll think 'big one' 'big dipper' straight away. It may be popular but it's certainly not the ride which draws many in.
 
Rick said:
I don't understand the notion whereby the park has developed and evolved for 120 years yet now is the time where that evolution should stop everything is sacred, that doesn't make any sense to me.
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I don't think anyone's said that the park shouldn't move forward (as it's doing with Icon), or that everything is sacred. Take Grand Prix for instance; that's got a fair few decades behind it, has it not? It's generally seen on here as taking up plenty of space that could be better used for redevelopment, and I doubt many tears would be shed if it were to go in this manner. The difference is that Wild Mouse was held in a regard that perhaps made it as close to sacred as a Pleasure Beach ride can get. It was a product of its time, and offered a totally different experience to anything built today. That's gone forever; as has been said, you couldn't build a replica without losing much of the appeal and taming the experience.

For some time it hadn't taken a stretch of the imagination to think that it might not last too much longer. The comments in earlier posts about the rate of addition to the incident book, litigation threats and refusal of insurance cover seem believable to me, whether or not they're correct. However, the work it had for the start of last season and that heritage plaque it carried seemed to imply that the park would respect the ride and its fan following enough to give some advance notice when the time came, and if not before the queue closed for good, then at least before the structure started coming down. Alas, like everybody else, I'm at least as disappointed in how this has been done as I am with the fact that the ride's going at all.

On a more general note, and while being mindful of the fact that a massive range of factors must affect what can be kept even in parks less restricted for space than the Pleasure Beach, over my 7 or so years of visiting BPB I've found some of their other decisions on what should stay pretty odd. I know the ride system was able to be partially reused, but why did it have to be Goldmine that got binned to make Thrill-O-Matic when I found it greatly superior to both Alice and the arguably-historic-yet-woeful Ghost Train? Moving away from rides, why is the cheap, nasty and out of place looking mess that is Bowl-a-drome still there when the park generally tries to present a shiny, stylish, fountains and champagne bars aesthetic? As a once or twice a year visitor, the thought pattern seems a bit bemusing!
 
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