Sam
TS Member
...or at least, down to background level.
I'm convinced that the music in The Smiler's queue makes everybody's day slightly worse: enthusiasts, casuals, the lot.
Every element of that queue is an unpleasant experience. The claustrophobia, the cages, the concrete, and the proximity to the ride, which due to its operating pattern, is a constant source of aggravating noise. All of that makes queueing for the ride bad enough, but there's very little that the park can do about it. It's baked in through (deliberately?) poor design.
But on top of that, they choose to add insult to injury by playing horrible music over the top at deafening volume, which you'll inevitably be subjected to for over an hour. It's not a good piece of music for a ride, even on its own terms. It's a bad idea, badly executed, badly composed, badly played and badly recorded. Like the rest of the ride's aesthetic / theme, it's an incoherent mess.
Everybody hates it. You see it on people's faces – civilians even more so than enthusiasts – when you queue up for it. People grimace their way through that queue, or even, as I did on Saturday, put earphones in and listen to white noise to drown it out.
Why do they not just turn it off? One theory would be old-fashioned incompetence: the park don't know how much people hate it. But my guess is that management have one eye on how obsessively the ride's aesthetic is consumed by the 'half enthusiasts' who make up an increasing share of the park's customer base.
You see Smiler merch everywhere. It must be the most popular line of theme park merch worldwide, aside from the biggest players. On opening day, there were – mortifyingly – multiple people cosplaying as the ride itself. This popularity is baffling – as an overall package (concept, name, theme, graphics, music) it's aesthetically one of the ugliest rides ever built. Just compare it to Oblivion's ice-cube-cool late nineties moderne, or the enjoyably campy, H.P. Lovecraft VIBES of Nemesis.
Do the park think that if they turn the horrible music off, the ride will lose something of its commercial pull among the half enthusiasts, and that this lucrative merch-based revenue stream will dry up? This is the only other explanation I can think of. But for the sake of all of our sanity, I'd urge the park to try. Turn the music off for a week (or replace it with Eno's 'Music For Airports' if they must), and see what happens to the guest satisfaction scores. I reckon they'd go up.
I'm convinced that the music in The Smiler's queue makes everybody's day slightly worse: enthusiasts, casuals, the lot.
Every element of that queue is an unpleasant experience. The claustrophobia, the cages, the concrete, and the proximity to the ride, which due to its operating pattern, is a constant source of aggravating noise. All of that makes queueing for the ride bad enough, but there's very little that the park can do about it. It's baked in through (deliberately?) poor design.
But on top of that, they choose to add insult to injury by playing horrible music over the top at deafening volume, which you'll inevitably be subjected to for over an hour. It's not a good piece of music for a ride, even on its own terms. It's a bad idea, badly executed, badly composed, badly played and badly recorded. Like the rest of the ride's aesthetic / theme, it's an incoherent mess.
Everybody hates it. You see it on people's faces – civilians even more so than enthusiasts – when you queue up for it. People grimace their way through that queue, or even, as I did on Saturday, put earphones in and listen to white noise to drown it out.
Why do they not just turn it off? One theory would be old-fashioned incompetence: the park don't know how much people hate it. But my guess is that management have one eye on how obsessively the ride's aesthetic is consumed by the 'half enthusiasts' who make up an increasing share of the park's customer base.
You see Smiler merch everywhere. It must be the most popular line of theme park merch worldwide, aside from the biggest players. On opening day, there were – mortifyingly – multiple people cosplaying as the ride itself. This popularity is baffling – as an overall package (concept, name, theme, graphics, music) it's aesthetically one of the ugliest rides ever built. Just compare it to Oblivion's ice-cube-cool late nineties moderne, or the enjoyably campy, H.P. Lovecraft VIBES of Nemesis.
Do the park think that if they turn the horrible music off, the ride will lose something of its commercial pull among the half enthusiasts, and that this lucrative merch-based revenue stream will dry up? This is the only other explanation I can think of. But for the sake of all of our sanity, I'd urge the park to try. Turn the music off for a week (or replace it with Eno's 'Music For Airports' if they must), and see what happens to the guest satisfaction scores. I reckon they'd go up.
