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Alton Towers Lost Media

Alsty said:
Thunder Rock Rally was just a playlist of various songs. Have a look at this one on Spotify.
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A great playlist, a shame I’ve never found an equivalent for the old Spinball Playlist

Whilst on the subject of lost media I know in the media topic there was the wiki of old media but Alton now have a huge media library wastfully condemned to history. Something I’ve never quite understood.

Major wish list for me would be:
Full HQ original towers street soundtrack
Extended original air themes
CATCF themes/media
 
The Euro Theme Park Archive guy has all of the original Hex audio I believe - I seem to remember him winning the auction when it was on eBay. The original preshow audio and an alternative version of the vault music was on his Soundcloud a few years ago but it only lasted for about 6 months. Wish I'd downloaded a copy.
 
A lot of this stuff might still exist. There's a room just to the right of the archive in the Towers (which used to serve as the cash office during the John Broome years) and up until I left Alton Towers in 2018, it was crammed wall to wall with VHS tapes of anything and everything. Until 2016 there was actually a part time archivist who helped to document stuff but when the Smiler redundancies happened (the first big wave) that was one of the roles that went
 
Alot of these documentaries must be subject to copyright?

Would towers as a company stop broadcasts and streaming rights because the brand has changed and moved on from that period?
 
Log Flume's Dennis said:
There's a room just to the right of the archive in the Towers (which used to serve as the cash office during the John Broome years) and up until I left Alton Towers in 2018, it was crammed wall to wall with VHS tapes of anything and everything.
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Kind of like a vault, sealed for 6 years!

And are the concept plans for the inverted Log Flume in there? I'd sell one of my children to be able to have unrestricted access to that room
 
ShadowTD said:
The Euro Theme Park Archive guy has all of the original Hex audio I believe - I seem to remember him winning the auction when it was on eBay. The original preshow audio and an alternative version of the vault music was on his Soundcloud a few years ago but it only lasted for about 6 months. Wish I'd downloaded a copy.
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Helloo, just to say I never won the auction or bidded, I reported the auction to Alton Towers who investigated how this material was stolen. I believe the police were involved and it was returned.

Later I was researching Hex with the original design team and was given some tracks and told I had permission to use as part of a complete mix (this was a long time ago before there was much way to verify), but it turned out the material was actually sourced from the person who stole the original CDs!

I removed the material immediately and again made the park aware.
 
Euro Theme Park Archive said:
Helloo, just to say I never won the auction or bidded, I reported the auction to Alton Towers who investigated how this material was stolen. I believe the police were involved and it was returned.

Later I was researching Hex with the original design team and was given some tracks and told I had permission to use as part of a complete mix (this was a long time ago before there was much way to verify), but it turned out the material was actually sourced from the person who stole the original CDs!

I removed the material immediately and again made the park aware.
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Thanks for popping on to clear that up, apologies for getting the wrong end of the stick and repeating it. Hopefully the stars will align to enable us to hear the audio again at some point in the future.
 
ShadowTD said:
Thanks for popping on to clear that up, apologies for getting the wrong end of the stick and repeating it. Hopefully the stars will align to enable us to hear the audio again at some point in the future.
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That’s all ok. I was glad it was returned and not leaked. It would be interesting if Alton Towers made a feature on Hex’s making with some of the original tracks in the future. Until then it’s best kept in the vaults !
 
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Towers have some absolutely fantastic history and the most we get is the stuff that's screwed to the wall of the RCR. A Europa-style exhibition would be very welcomed, potentially in one of the public spaces.
 
Given they have an empty historical building,
Perfect for temporary exhibitions stood in the middle it seems a real shame not to try and use it. It would be much better year round use than maybe a second/third maze.

I’m still waiting for one day the now original nemesis soundtrack CD to appear. I’d happily part with a substantial amount of money for one but despite hunting rate CD sites, eBay, forums, shops etc for well over a decade, I keep wondering if I’ll stumble upon it but never have.
 
It's weird really. Alton Towers has so much history but they choose not to showcase it. It's like they don't care, don't consider it important, or have a perception that people wouldn't find it interesting
 
Part of me always thinks it's weird that they don't have odd little bits of nostalgia about the gaff or an archive online. A little bit on the website like it has for the house and gardens.

Then again, I often wonder how much towers actually value enthusiasts like the fine folk of towersStreet and other sites like it. Every so often they will throw a bone or two out. But as a whole, do they see us as a group worthy of spending a bit brass building an archive for?

As a bloke approaching his 40s. I know people my age +10 are now getting high up positions in firms. I still think this generation still don't grasp you tube and the power and money it can bring in. I have no idea how monetisation on YouTube works, I still don't fully grasp how people who make videos on playing football manager can do that as a full time job on advertising revenue alone. Maybe @BarryZola could give us a hint.

Then again, with people like Nick Simm. And the bloke who wrote the little book on the construction on the haunted house. Do they really need to. All they need to do is throw a couple of bones out to them researching a project and ta da. It's all done for free. Although an official archive would be grand.

I could be very wrong on all this.
 
Slugjc said:
As a bloke approaching his 40s. I know people my age +10 are now getting high up positions in firms. I still think this generation still don't grasp you tube and the power and money it can bring in. I have no idea how monetisation on YouTube works, I still don't fully grasp how people who make videos on playing football manager can do that as a full time job on advertising revenue alone. Maybe @BarryZola could give us a hint.
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It's all just about consistently getting enough views after you've qualified for monetisation (1000 subs & 4000 watch hours). I only have 1 monetised channel and it's more of a hobby/side hustle alongside my regular job in retail. Basically the more people who watch your videos, and the longer they stay watching those videos, the more advertisers will give Google/Youtube money to place their adverts at the start and during your videos. Then Google pay you the advertising revenue at the end of the month (minus their cut). So you can imagine, a 45 minute video will be likely to get more advertising revenue than a 3 minute video if they have the same amount of views. More space for advertisers to get their adverts in during your video. The goal, I suppose, is to build up enough subscribers so that every time you release a video you get a base amount of people who will watch your video, and over time this in theory should only increase if you keep the quality of your videos up.

For an example of how much you can make (and it does depend on the demographic of your audience as adverts directed towards people traditionally with more money to spend will pay you more per advert placed) my latest video which is around 45 minutes long has gained almost 60 thousand views. This has made me approximately £390 at this point. I will say, that this is a bit of an outlier as I probably only have 3/4 videos that are over about 30,000 views. A lot come in just in the low thousands and then several more over 10,000 I think. But the thing is, they all add up and your older videos keep ticking along with a few views to add to the new ones that you release. I've only got around 2,000 subscribers so far but I'll just keep on enjoying what I'm doing and adding to the library of videos that are on the channel. I tend to only make 1 or 2 videos a month so you can see that I definitely have to carry on working! But the point is, if you're regularly putting out quite long videos and getting 50,000 views on each one, you can see how that could quickly add up, even if you only made 4/5 a month. This is why you get people just putting out videos as long as possible for no apparent reason (see the guy in a thread yesterday who strings a video out to about 8 minutes long just for about 8 seconds of drone footage). I mean, fair play, he's gone out and made the effort to get some footage, but he could have made that video about a minute long but he couldn't resist the urge to take the p**s out of viewers just to get a bit more view time from them.

Arguably more important than ad placement during videos however, is brand deals and other outside income once you've built up a big subscriber base and are REGULARLY getting vast amounts of views (something that's not even near being on my radar and probably never will be). Companies will actually come to you and offer you money to work with them in whatever way and you'll probably get freebies etc. You've also got Patreon and all those other things where people give you money for whatever and stuff where you send video messages to people and stuff like that. Then there's merchandise. We're talking ThemeParkWorldwide levels here. I would guess that his ad placement revenue is less than the total that he makes from all of the other bits he does (but I obviously don't know), but both will probably be pretty mega, especially when you think about his back catalogue of videos ticking along with views constantly.

Not sure exactly how Alton Towers would look at trying to make money just through Youtube. They most probably already do, but it does seem like they could do more. They would just have to employ someone solely to run the channel for them and be constantly making content. The massive viewer base is already there, all they need to do is keep putting interesting videos out. With special access to the whole site they could produce some amazing content. Hope this helps, even if you're just interested in the mechanics of Youtube ad revenue.
 
Slugjc said:
Cheers for that Barry. I could see why the big wigs would maybe avoid using YouTube.
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From a content marketing perspective, it doesn't make a lot of sense to avoid investing in a proper YouTube channel, aside from the hundreds of other YouTubers doing a decent job of covering the park, and its history, for free.

What Alton Towers could do is take a leaf from Thorpe Park's book, and partner with one or two select YouTubers to give them more access. This could take the form of site access, similar to Hyperia, or far more interestingly, let them into the archives.

I would suspect that any decent content producer, who wanted to make a series on Alton Towers, could approach the park to make a series on their archive. They would have to have a decent proposal and treatment to go to the park with though, and of course finance it themselves. A "I want to film the archives for some videos" email wouldn't quite cut it.
 
GooseOnTheLoose said:
What Alton Towers could do is take a leaf from Thorpe Park's book, and partner with one or two select YouTubers to give them more access. This could take the form of site access, similar to Hyperia, or far more interestingly, let them into the archives.
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I did this with the park for a video on the Haunted House last year but taking great professional care and only after lots years experience and direct involvement of people from the park’s past.

Really I think it would be a mess if this was given to most other channels even if well meaning, the YT format fuels clickbait and pumping out rushed videos to earn back just a couple quid when quality archive videos run up huge bills to make.

My channel included, I cringe at the stuff I put out for the first 5 ish years and it takes a lot of experience and dedication.

In an ideal world all parks would have their own archivist who’s been there decades and the material used for special occasions!
 
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