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In the future, everyone will be an enthusiast for 15 minutes

Sam

Sam

TS Member
I noticed the strangest thing when I was at EP last week.

Everyone is an enthusiast now. Rollercoaster enthusiasm (which despite @EuroSatch's protestations has a more degrading, lyrical ring to it than "theme park enthusiast") has well and truly gone mainstream.

When I first became an 'enthusiast', twenty years ago at the age of 13 (by the way, did anyone ever find that mock-up of the cross-valley woody I remember seeing on the forum in 2006?!) it was a deeply embarrassing, anoraky thing – like trainspotting, non-league football or following The Fall around.

Although up to 50 people would attend a TTF meet on a good day, you could count the number of other enthusiasts you saw while walking around Alton Towers on the fingers of one hand. It was a niche pursuit.

But since then something strange has happened. Vast numbers of what we used to (shamefully) call 'the GP' have become enthusiasts – or quasi-enthusiasts. They're not on a forum but they know who Intamin are. They've not had exclusive ERT on Helix but they're au fait with John Wardley.

I realised this about six months ago, when I was with some friends from my queer hiking club in the pub, and they asked me what I (as a known 'proper enthusiast') thought about the new ride at Drayton Manor. I, being out of the loop in multiple senses of the phrase, had no idea what they were talking about.

Fast-forward to last week, and I was in the queue for Voltron a few days after opening. Whereas in the past you might see one or two theme park t-shirts over an hour long wait, I saw literally hundreds. Mostly Voltron ones, but also (as far as I recall) Steel Vengeance, Maverick, Loch Ness Monster, Flucht von Novgorod and Colossos. That was more enthusiasts in the queue than you'd see in an entire year a decade ago.

I wondered who was responsible for this? Then I looked up, and about to walk past me in the cattlepen was Shawn Sanbrooke. I really like Shawn and used to know him a little back in the day, so thought about saying hello. Until I saw two different groups of people ask him for a photo and an autograph, and decided not to come across as yet another fawning fan. I just couldn't take the hit to my self-esteem if he didn't remember me.

This man is about as close as you can get to being single-handedly responsible for taking enthusiasm out of its dimly-lit basement and into the cultural mainstream. Somehow, his charisma, production values and boundless enthusiasm has made millions of casual YouTube passers-by care about the new Vekoma megacoaster restraints, or Flamingoland's five-year F&B investment plan. Good on Shawn.

Is everyone an enthusiast now? Has it gone truly mainstream, or is this just a passing fad – to be replaced by mass followings for bubble tea shops or burger restaurants in east London? One things for sure: if I could speak to 13-year-old me, up all night on RCDB looking at the latest additions in Six Flags over God-Knows-Where, I'd have told him not to worry. "In the future lad, everyone will be an enthusiast for 15 minutes."
 
i'd class it as a boom in the ability to seek out whatever interests you online in the form of social media.

prior to this you had to actively have an interest in something and seek out places in which to meet like-minded people. video-streaming, vlogs, reels didn't exist. but you could post on forums and arrange meet ups. nowadays you can bring up tiktok and instragram and see an advert, vlog, stream, viral video for a rollercoaster and suddenly have a trip to gothenburg booked with liseberg on your doorstep within 30 minutes.

trust me. it's how i remembered how much i loved nemesis as a kid and have since been across all of europe in 3 years mopping up all these amazing coasters and having the time of my 38 year old life. and i credit shawn with a lot of that having stumbled across his channel hungover and found myself swept up in his enthusiasm.

i see the same thing happen for all manner of niche interests. and more power to anyone who finds their way in to things this way, as long as they continue to expand their horizons. how lucky we are to live in these times.
 
OtherBen said:
i'd class it as a boom in the ability to seek out whatever interests you online in the form of social media.

prior to this you had to actively have an interest in something and seek out places in which to meet like-minded people. video-streaming, vlogs, reels didn't exist. but you could post on forums and arrange meet ups. nowadays you can bring up tiktok and instragram and see an advert, vlog, stream, viral video for a rollercoaster and suddenly have a trip to gothenburg booked with liseberg on your doorstep within 30 minutes.

trust me. it's how i remembered how much i loved nemesis as a kid and have since been across all of europe in 3 years mopping up all these amazing coasters and having the time of my 38 year old life. and i credit shawn with a lot of that having stumbled across his channel hungover and found myself swept up in his enthusiasm.

i see the same thing happen for all manner of niche interests. and more power to anyone who finds their way in to things this way, as long as they continue to expand their horizons. how lucky we are to live in these times.
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I agree, as some one who has recently joined the community (about the past year or 2), this is the case for me. I recall being facinated by the rides, how they worked what everything was etc from a young age whenever I went to a theme park and really enjoyed games like RCT3, I even recall watching some of the videos on rides like documentrys on the great american scream machine etc, it wasn't untill recently that I realised that the communities exist.
 
When I was a kid you'd be lucky to get the odd documentary about theme parks on the discovery channel or travel channels. Had the vague knowledge of Disney parks but that was it really.

You look back at the likes of the RCCGB doing US trips in the 90s and think how much planning and hard work that would've entailed contacting parks and finding hotels etc.

The dawn of the Internet has been a great leveller for growing knowledge about parks and the industry. The ease of being able to book flights and accommodation, and sites like rcdb and coast2coaster.

Vlogging and fan channels has definitely had an impact, you can imagine people who may have had that big Disney or Universal every couple of years watching something like tpww for videos about those parks and then suddenly going down the rabbit hole and finding european parks they never knew existed.
 
Funny, had been thinking of making a post like this but wasn't sure what the angle would be, as something of a born again enthusiast, it's something I've been thinking about.

I've been online since like 2007 or 2008, was an infamous meet-dodger and only really became active within the community irl in 2015, but after a few years, a combination of burn out, money, the pandemic, more burn out, less money, and a missing Nemesis meant I dropped out quite a bit for a few years - I didn't even know about Curse until like a week before this year's opening day meet. I've resolved to get right back in and it's struck me how much has changed and how popular our hobby seems to have become - at a time when it seems theme parks take up less amount of the wider cultural zeitgeist than they have in decades.

We've come a long way from how I started, reading the CF, the Old Place, RCDB, blurry TPR youtube POVs. I mean no disrespect to them but I'm not into the vlogs and influencers, it isn't for me. But they're definitely a big part of it. Probably provide a better introduction to a park than Rob Alvey for my generation. Watching from a distance as Sean went from literally filming in his parents' box room to being this huge quasi-celebrity has been crazy.

It's cool that we're cool now.

I don't think I like where it's leading though. I was raised on the forums and I still think they're the best platform for what we do - projects are measured in years, there's usually quite a few of them on at a time, and when something opens we can't all get on it straight away or ever like with a new album or something. Maybe it's just me but I don't think it's as easy to keep up and keep track any other way. I don't like the dynamic either where you have your chosen youtuber/s who you watch give out sermons and you're relegated to the comments. Having been The Annoying Poster in the past, I shudder to think how I'd have turned out if we only had youtube in my day. Forums will always have their cliques and things, and there'll always be some sort of meritocricy where members who are better posters and have more experience rise to the top, but broadly speaking it's much more democratic and equal. Or maybe one day we'll see some of our lot signing autographs too.

Plus the sense of belonging and community you get. Maybe I'm presuming, but I don't think it's the same if you're just a fan of someone else. I think this scattering is how we've ended up with the paid Nemesis VIP event. I went, I loved it, but I can't help remember that we got almost the same experience from Liseberg in 2016 for free - just by emailing them.

I don't want to sound like a grump - I'm not! I love it! I even enjoyed Towers this year! I am not a grump!
 
DiogoJ42 said:
People who walk around the park wearing their MAP on a lanyard look like freaks. The rest of us just enjoy roller coasters while trying to avoid them.
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I've never understood this... you need the pass once to get in the park, and then whenever you buy anything to get the discount. Why would you want it hanging round your neck like a staff ID for the entire day?
The only exception to this I suppose would be the RAP ID card, if you have to show that at every ride.
 
Yeah, it's definitely the rise of the internet and the ease of information and sharing at the end of everyone's fingertips. I can remember Shawn transitioning from his original Sanbrooke channel to starting ThemeParkWorldwide and offering people the chance to win a free pen on Facebook if they liked and subscribed to his channel (it was all the rage back then for a time). Not been a fan since that cynical marketing tactic from many many years ago, but I do have a habit of remembering such things.
 
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This trend is definitely not unique to Theme Park Enthusiasts. All aspects of 'nerd' culture'* (video games, comics, D&D) have gone mainstream. Just look at shows like The Big Bang Theory. That very much started by making fun of nerds, until they realised that was their audience.

* Even typing in the term nerd my spellchecker tried autocorrecting it. That shows how much things have changed.

The simple answer is the Internet let people discover interests they never knew they had. No disrespect to Shawn (TPWW) but I don't think he caused this trend. He just happened to position himself in the right place, at the right time, to catch the attention of a changing culture. That's still a massive achievement, but in a parallel universe in which TPWW didn't exist I think we would have seen this same trend. Actually, you only need to look at other non-English speaking communities to see this trend playing out with their own versions of TPWW.

Culturally it's just become acceptable to enjoy niche interests. And collectively we've discovered they aren't as unique as we thought.

Having said all that, I work in the world of Theme Parks and spend all day with other fans of them. Yet the number of people I'd count as traditional enthusiasts hasn't changed. There's still only a few of us that I'd go deep into a conversation about ride specs and throughput calculations with. But it's nice that everyone else is happy to sit in on the conversation.
 
Tim said:
Culturally it's just become acceptable to enjoy niche interests. And collectively we've discovered they aren't as unique as we thought.
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You say that, but I still get mocked by some workmates for being a geek... In an industry full of geeks. Not for coaster geeking though. That is something they can all be down with, even if they "don't do rides".
(I just wish I could convince a certain person that "sorry mate, I can't go for a pint after work, I've got a D&D game tonight". Does not mean "I'm going to dress up as Gandalf and run around the woods"! But that's another topic...)
 
Things have changed a lot since trawling through rcdb, Coaster Kingdom and Rideas as the main sources of theme park action.

YouTubers as a whole are held up often far higher than they should be. But is it different from certain forum or club personalities? Not really.
 
Delved into a few 'fandoms' of things I like. It doesn't take long for a website or video to start talking about things that you have no idea about. The hardcore geeks are still there, it's just that now they can reach a wider audience due to this new fangled internet thing.

I thought I was the only one who knew what SABRE was until @rob666 proved me wrong.

All use intentionally over complicated and completely unnecessary acronyms to try and sound clever, superior, and generally intimidating to newbies. PMBO doesn't refer to a smelly Prime Minister not wearing deodorant, but The Big One at Blackpool apparently. HST doesn't refer to Canadian VAT, but a High Speed Train built in Derby in the late 1970's. A TOTSO isn't a toddler magazine, but a junction where you have to take a turn off the road to stay on the main route allegedly.
 
When I went to Thorpe Park in March, there were a lot of people with theme park tops from different theme parks. There are definitely more theme park geeks now than there were even 5 years ago.
 
I don't think any fandom uses acronyms to sound clever, more that it's assumed the people you are talking to will know what you mean. In Lego terms I could talk about AFOLs, MOCs, STAMPs, BURPs, or SNOT. Not to exclude people, but just because fellow Lego geeks are familiar with the abreviations.
Adult Fan Of Lego, My Own Creation, Sticker Across Multiple Parts, Big Ugly Rock Piece, Studs Not On Top.
 
It’s the way the internet works these days. You might have a passing interest in Alton Towers for example, watch one YouTube video and then you’re getting recommended every other theme park video from all manner of content creators. Same on Twitter, TikTok and the like. It’s never been easier to fall down rabbit holes.
 
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