By now you’ve probably heard the news… for the first time in many, many years, a major theme park in the United States is going to be wiped off the map.
The future of California’s Great America has always been in doubt. Located in the country’s hottest real estate market (California’s Bay Area) and inconveniently sharing a parking lot with a local football stadium who’d like very much to expand, Great America has found itself between a rock and a hard place quite a few times. Especially given that none of the park’s operators – from Marriott to KECO to Paramount Parks to Cedar Fair – actually owned the incredibly valuable land the park sits on. But in 2019, on-again off-again rumors about the park’s potential closure were briefly quieted when the park’s current owner and operator – Ohio-based Cedar Fair – announced that they had officially purchased the land the park resides on, seemingly cementing its future.
If you’ve been following the news on Theme Park Tourist, you know that that didn’t last. In 2022, Cedar Fair announced that they had agreed to sell the land to a new buyer, beginning a six year countdown (with an optional five year extension) to the park’s closure. And just like that, a major theme park with several significant rides (and nine roller coasters) will disappear. The good news is that Cedar Fair has gone through this before. (The tragic tale of Geauga Lake saw the ride’s roller coasters reassembled across Cedar Fair parks.) So even as we prepare to mourn Great America, the obvious question becomes… what will happen to this doomed park’s roller coasters? Here are our ideas for where in the Cedar Fair chain we think Great America’s coasters would find great new homes…
1. Demon
Lest we forget, it was 1976 (America’s Bicentennial) that hotelier Marriott decided to get into the theme park game with its two amusement parks meant to celebrate all things Americana. Both Great Americas (near Chicago and San Jose) opened with classic Arrow double-corkscrew coasters called Turn of the Century – a fitting installation for the quasi-historical parks. In 1980, though, both got a thrilling upgrade when double loops were added to their layouts, they were painted black, and they both became “Demon.” Even now that the two Great Americas are fully separated (Cedar Fair owns California’s, and Six Flags owns Illinois’), the two Demons remain one of their shared traits!
Arrow multi-loopers are becoming rarer and rarer. That makes sense since these coasters – largely from the ’70s – are definitely “throwbacks” in terms of their comfort, design, and experience. Especially into the ’80s, when Arrows got bigger, meaner, and more radical (right before B&M and Intamin smoothed out and modernized what roller coasters could do),
SEND IT TO: Kings Island
Busch Gardens Williamsburg recently announced that for 2024, its Arrow multi-looper, Loch Ness Monster, will be getting a major overhaul, proving that these historic icons aren’t necessarily doomed to be scrapped. So looking across Cedar Fair’s chain, an interesting option arises in Kings Island, who just closed its over-built ’80s multi-looper, Vortex. That makes it weird to consider adding another Arrow, but Demon has some things going for it… it has a very narrow, slender footprint making it much easier to fit into an existing park. It also would fit perfectly in Kings Island’s Action Zone, which already features two “creepy”-themed rides, The Bat and Banshee. Bringing a historic Arrow back to this park could be a very cool win-win!
2. Flight Deck
Cedar Fair acquired five theme parks at once in 2007 when it purchased the existing Paramount Parks chain – including Great America. That meant “de-theming” several rides named after films. Case in point – TOP GUN: The Jet Coaster becoming the hilariously-generic “Flight Deck.” Four of the five Paramount Parks ended up with “Top Guns,” but Great America is lucky that its version is a top-tier B&M inverted coaster.
Great America’s Flight Deck isn’t a record breaker – it’s got “only” a 91 foot drop, and passes through “only” three inversions. But it’s a good roller coaster by a good manufacturer, and includes a flourish you won’t find on many inverts: a finale helix over a lagoon. It seems highly unlikely that Flight Deck would be scrapped, leading to the inevitable question of which Cedar Fair park would lay claim to it… Because it’s not a huge ride, it might make sense to send it a park that’s also not huge. At Worlds of Fun or Michigan’s Adventure, it would feel like a headliner. But Worlds of Fun already has a (bigger) B&M invert, and Michigan’s Adventure has a Vekoma SLC that fills the same kind of gap in the park’s lineup. So we’ll get controversial…’
SEND IT TO: Valleyfair
It’s easy to forget about Minnesota’s Valleyfair, one of Cedar Fair’s “legacy” (that is, pre-Paramount Parks) properties. Valleyfair is definitely a smaller seasonal, regional park – not a destination one. And certainly, it’s a second (or third) tier park in Cedar Fair’s 11-park portfolio. Its newest major coaster was a GCI woodie in 2007 – over 15 years ago. Valleyfair feels like a park where a B&M (even a “Used” one) would make a very big impact, so we’d love to see Flight Deck rebuilt there.
3. Gold Striker
Disassembling, moving, and re-assembling a wooden coaster isn’t exactly easy to do. Rather, it’s a laborious process that frankly feels more ceremonial than anything. (Ship-of-Theseus wise, if a wooden roller coaster is disassembled into planks and shipped across the country to be rebuilt, is it even still the same roller coaster? At that point, why not just source new wood and build a fresh version of the ride?) But for a moment, let’s just think Blue Sky about what could happen to this relatively new (2013) CGI gem.
SEND IT TO: Cedar Point
Very rarely would we bother to suggest adding another roller coaster to the already-stuffed Cedar Point. But the one-time “Roller Coaster Capital of the World” has run into an unusual situation… Of its record-breaking and much-celebrated 16-coaster collection, just one is wooden – 1964’s classic Blue Streak. (The park’s only other contemporary wooden coaster, Mean Streak, was “RMC’ed” into Steel Vengeance in 2018.) It’s a little wild that a park so renowned for its coaster collection is missing such an essential ingredient as a modern woodie, and a fantastic GCI terrain-hugging coaster like Gold Striker weaving and bobbling along the boardwalk would be a welcome way to remedy that.
But on the next page, we’ll get to some of the park’s biggest thrills…
4. Patriot
Famously, only one B&M roller coaster has ever permanently closed and sent to the scrap heap: Universal’s Dueling Dragons. But if we’re being honest, it’s probably time for Patriot to bite the dust. The 1991 ride was actually the second B&M ever (coincidentally, the first opened at estranged sister park Six Flags Great America in 1990) and like the other Great America’s Iron Wolf, it was a stand-up. The seven stand-up coasters B&M produced are largely known as outliers from the manufacturer’s normal tradition of smooth, delightful rides, and Great America’s – originally called Vortex – was no exception.
In 2017, Vortex benefitted from an initiative across several parks that saw B&M stand-ups have their standing trains swapped for raised, floorless, seated trains. It’s fine, and it helps, but there’s no question that one of the problems with B&M’s stand-up line is the physical layout itself. For whatever reason, B&M stand-ups contain layouts of seemingly random track sections and inversions stapled together like a wayward Roller Coaster Tycoon design.
SEND IT TO: The scrap pile
Sure, it’s nice that the rebranded Patriot isn’t a stand-up. But it’s also still not a stand-out. And given that the cost of relocating and reinstalling it would likely surpass the initial price of the ride in 1991, it might be time to hang up the hat on this B&M.
5. Psycho Mouse
Though Great America’s ups the ante from wild to psycho, the fact is that Wild Mouse coasters are an absolute staple of amusement parks. Low-capacity as they may be, these off-the-shelf rides serve as nice step-ups from kiddie coasters to big thrills, meaning they can easily bolster a park’s coaster count, balance its offerings, and generally become nicely-engrained rides with small footprints not worth the cost to demolish.
Psycho Mouse happens to be Arrow’s take on the genre – the same model that Valley Fair and Michigan’s Adventure already offer (both under the name “Mad Mouse”). And that’s not all. In fact, nearly every Cedar Fair park already has a wild mouse-style roller coaster. At Canada’s Wonderland, it’s The Fly; at Carowinds, Ricochet; at Dorney Park, Wild Mouse; at Kings Dominion, Apple Zapple; at Knott’s, Coast Rider; and at Worlds of Fun, Spinning Dragons. Even Cedar Point opened a new Wild Mouse in 2023! Process of elimination suggests there’s just one Cedar Fair park without a wild mouse. Have you figured out which…?
SEND IT TO: Kings Island
Yep, technically, Kings Island is the only one of Cedar Fair’s eleven parks without a Wild Mouse. Does it need one? Eh, not necessarily. But online discussion boards have long “Blue Sky”ed the idea of putting a wild mouse inside the giant, empty soundstage that once housed the Lost Legend: TOMB RAIDER – The Ride (even though that would take significant expansion of the building). At least that would allow Kings Island to incorporate a family ride like Psycho Mouse in a compelling, interesting way.
6. RailBlazer
Now we arrive at the pièce de résistance… Clearly, Cedar Fair didn’t expect that they’d be selling the land Great America sits on when they opened RailBlazer in 2018. Positioned right at the cutting edge of the coaster industry, this single-rail RMC prototype ride is a doozy. Like all RMC single rails, it is lightning fast and absolutely relentless as it dives and twists through an ultra-compact layout of fluid maneuvers and wild elements.
It’s a great ride. But like all RMC single rails, it’s also got a fairly limited capacity. (On this rides, guests ride in single-file, inline seating with their legs literally straddling the track, facilitating only eight riders at a time.) That means that this ride needs to go to one of Cedar Fair’s more major parks, but not one where its capacity could be overwhelmed. Our vote?
SEND IT TO: Kings Dominion
Located in Doswell, Virginia (where it draws from both Richmond and Washington, D.C.), Kings Dominion is Kings Island’s little sister. Though the two parks share some DNA (for example, Eiffel Towers at their centers), they have diverged in very different ways over their half-centuries of life. Kings Dominion is definitely a major park, but it’s not one of Cedar Fair’s flagships.
More to the point, a ride like RailBlazer seems like it could fit perfectly into the park’s forested location. We could easily see it sliding into the park’s newest themed “land” – Jungle X-pedition – which we recently celebrated in a feature here on Theme Park Tourist. Especially themed as the trial of a serpent temple (opposite the zany, swinging, monkey-themed S&S Free Spin, Tumbili), the ride would seem like a great fit… and an important step toward replacing the Lost Legend: VOLCANO with an equally-personality-filled prototype ride…
What do you think? Did we “misplace” any of Great America’s thrills? Is there a Cedar Fair park that needs one of these soon-to-be-parkless rides more than the ones we listed? Do you think Cedar Fair might sell some of these rides rather than relocate them within their own chain? Or more to the point, will they end up in the scrap heap? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!
