Rick
TS Member
- Favourite Ride
- Crux
I've seen and have spoken to a few people from various parks and related companies over the Christmas break and everyone seems to be on a real downer, which is sad, but completely understandable given some of the things that have happened, or are happening.
Safety still seems to loom large in the thoughts of my immediate family and friends with whom I brave a cringey theme park conversation. I saw some old friends who I went to school with over Christmas who I regularly visited Alton with way into our twenties. They asked about Wicker Man and I was puzzled that they hadn't ridden it, but said they hadn't been back to the park since the Smiler incident and had no interest in doing so.
Theme parks seem to have dropped a little out of our culture and DNA, I'm not sure if that's related to the above, or just a continuation of the trends we saw develop 20 years ago, with Sunday shopping and different forms of entertainment looming large in the ever increasing number of alternative activities. Friends with families seem to be more interested in doing short duration activities, like Go Ape, trampoline parks etc than full days at a park. We've offered to take friend's sprogs with us to parks, because we know they won't get the opportunity to go otherwise, unless there's a school trip and they invariably suck.
Some enthusiasts will point to a lack of new attractions that would really 'grab' the public mood, but it feels increasingly difficult to do that, somehow. Plus, a lot of what is happening is a calculated response, rather than the cause of it. Wicker Man perhaps got closer to that than most things, but some real significant investments in the 2010s really haven't shaken things up as much as those who paid for them had wished them to.
Scanning in tons of brochures, maps and the like from the 80s and 90s - things being in the ascendency was very exciting, but it was never going to be like that forever - but just recently it feels we have transitioned from a winded down version of that, to something quite different and perhaps a little less exciting.
There are some grounds for optimism, with stuff in the works for various parks in 2020 and beyond. Flamingo Land's ten-looper and Paultons new land will be hits, no doubt.
The mood seems low - not only in some enthusiast circles, but much more widely than that. How do you feel about it?
Safety still seems to loom large in the thoughts of my immediate family and friends with whom I brave a cringey theme park conversation. I saw some old friends who I went to school with over Christmas who I regularly visited Alton with way into our twenties. They asked about Wicker Man and I was puzzled that they hadn't ridden it, but said they hadn't been back to the park since the Smiler incident and had no interest in doing so.
Theme parks seem to have dropped a little out of our culture and DNA, I'm not sure if that's related to the above, or just a continuation of the trends we saw develop 20 years ago, with Sunday shopping and different forms of entertainment looming large in the ever increasing number of alternative activities. Friends with families seem to be more interested in doing short duration activities, like Go Ape, trampoline parks etc than full days at a park. We've offered to take friend's sprogs with us to parks, because we know they won't get the opportunity to go otherwise, unless there's a school trip and they invariably suck.
Some enthusiasts will point to a lack of new attractions that would really 'grab' the public mood, but it feels increasingly difficult to do that, somehow. Plus, a lot of what is happening is a calculated response, rather than the cause of it. Wicker Man perhaps got closer to that than most things, but some real significant investments in the 2010s really haven't shaken things up as much as those who paid for them had wished them to.
Scanning in tons of brochures, maps and the like from the 80s and 90s - things being in the ascendency was very exciting, but it was never going to be like that forever - but just recently it feels we have transitioned from a winded down version of that, to something quite different and perhaps a little less exciting.
There are some grounds for optimism, with stuff in the works for various parks in 2020 and beyond. Flamingo Land's ten-looper and Paultons new land will be hits, no doubt.
The mood seems low - not only in some enthusiast circles, but much more widely than that. How do you feel about it?