Lost Legends… Rides so spectacular in scale and so incredible in their experience, their stories are shared through generations. Here at Theme Park Tourist, our Lost Legends series has spent years slowly collecting the inside stories of forgotten rides from around the globe: the Big Bad Wolf that huffed-and-puffed its way through Busch Gardens, the icy, forgotten Curse of DarKastle, the monstrous Son of Beast and dozens more.
Today’s tale is particularly raw for fans of Kings Dominion near Richmond, Virginia, where an entire mountain fell, taking with it one of the most extraordinary and extreme roller coasters ever made. VOLCANO: The Blast Coaster was sincerely one-of-a-kind, using prototype technology to launch guests vertically up and out of a flaming, steaming, rumbling peak.
How did Volcano come about? What was it like to take on nature’s greatest force? What happened to make this active peak go dormant? Dig in to the full story, then be sure to share your memories of this explosive coaster in the comments below.
The story’s start
As odd and it may sound, the story of one of the world’s most intense roller coasters begins with The Flintstones, The Jetsons, Yogi Bear, Scooby-Doo, and the Smurfs. That’s because in 1966, a Cincinnati, Ohio-based television company – Taft Broadcasting – purchased Hanna-Barbera, acquiring the rights to those characters and essentially owning Saturday morning cartoons for a generation. Taft suddenly owned an intellectual property catalogue that would make Disney jealous, and had an idea of how to use it.
In 1969, Taft purchased Cincinnati’s Coney Island – a small amusement park along the Ohio River – which had been devastated by a number of floods. Their plan was to relocate what they could of Coney Island to a new, custom-built park on newly acquired land northeast of Cincinnati. There, they’d leverage the layout and lessons learned from Disney’s own 1971 Magic Kingdom and their acquisition of the Hanna-Barbera library to create one of the first modern theme parks based off Disney’s tradition.
In 1972, Kings Island opened with all the standards you’d expect post-Magic-Kingdom: a grand entryway (International Street) leading up to a park icon (a 300-foot-tall Eiffel Tower) with “spoke” paths radiating out into themed lands like Rivertown (an old Ohio settlement), Oktoberfest, Coney Island (featuring the world-record-breaking twin white tracks of the Racer), and of course, the Happy Land of Hanna-Barbera.
Kings Island was a hit for Taft Broadcasting… So much so that they decided to do it again…
Kings Dominion
Following the success of Kings Island, Taft set out to expand into a new region of the country, settling on a 400-acre site in Dowell, Virginia (just north of Richmond). The heart of the Mid-Atlantic, this East Coast park would be an attractive option for both residents and tourists from Richmond, D.C. Baltimore, Raleigh, and Norfolk. Given that this new sister to Kings Island would become an icon of “The Old Dominion,” the Virginia park was named Kings Dominion.
When Kings Dominion opened in 1975, it had a lot in common with its sister park in Cincinnati: an International Street leading to an Eiffel Tower with branches off to the Happy Land of Hanna-Barbera, an Old Virginia mining town (opposite Kings Island’s Rivertown), and even a Coney Island with a dual racing wooden coaster.
But of particular interest today is a land Kings Island had not opened with: the Lion Country Safari.
The Lion Country Safari had actually opened before the rest of Kings Dominion. It was used in 1974 as a “preview” attraction, allowing guests to drive their own personal vehicles on a route through actual zoological exhibits stocked with big cats, elephants, lions, rhinos, antelopes, and giraffes.
When Kings Dominion officially opened in 1975, the roadway was replaced with ride. Now, guests would begin their journey in the Lion Country Safari land – a thatch-roofted adventurers outpost recalling African encampments – and board a monorail (yes, a monorail!) that would carry them through the 20-minute tour of animal habitats.
In 1979, the remote Lion Country Safari would gain an equally-adventurous neighbor in one of the largest expansions the park had ever seen… No, not a volcano. At least, not yet.
The Lost World
In 1979, the park debuted the Lost World. This craggily peak reigning 170-feet over the park (nearly as tall as Cinderella Castle) isn’t so different from the never-built Discovery Mountain once planned for Disneyland Paris in that the mountain itself would’ve concealed an entire sub-land with multiple rides and attractions of its own. Decades before Disney would attempt it, Kings Dominion did it.
The multi-ride complex quickly became the park’s signature attraction, its fantasy peak rising above the forests of Virginia – a scale few would’ve expected of a regional park.
In fact, the Lost World was an intertwined complex containing three attractions:
- On “ground level” was Journey to Atlantis, an Arrow Dynamics log flume ride through fairly simple dark ride scenes of skeletons, culminating in a lift and splash into the lagoon that surrounded the peak;
- On the second story, the unusual The Land of Dooz was a from-scratch dark ride deep into the Earth to meet a race of Hobbit-like people who apparently create the world we know (cranking gears to turn the planet, pushing up growing plants, dying the Red Sea, and more) in a substantial 7-minute trip;
- Finally, guests could hike through a claustrophobic cavern and emerge overlooking the Time Shaft, a cleverly-concealed a steampunk-stylized Chance Rotor (a spinning cylinder pinning guests to the wall with centripetal force, then dropping the floor from beneath them) accentuated by music and lighting effects – a sort of “Journey to the Center of the Earth” / “Time Machine” thrill.
While the scale of the Lost World was grand (in fact, the $20 million expansion was said to be the largest and most expensive theme park expansion project ever undertaken outside of Disney’s parks), the attractions inside weren’t entirely timeless.
As a matter of fact, both dark rides would undergo substantial rewrites within a few years, each elevated to their long-lasting and most recognizable forms.
In 1980 – the year after the Lost World’s debut – the Journey to Atlantis flume ride was redesigned as The Haunted River – a ride many Virginian natives will recall. From a black light “Piranha River” and gag-filled Ancient Egypt to a graveyard and Pirates-of-the-Caribbean-influenced shipwreck, the attraction was surprisingly robust for a regional, seasonal park, and as a re-theme nonetheless!
For a generation of locals, The Haunted River may have been a test of courage for young kids. But in 1984, its upstairs neighbor became a family’s best friend. In 1984, the Land of Dooz was recrafted around Hanna-Barbera’s popular Smurfs franchise. The ride (and indeed, the entire mountain complex) was renamed Smurf Mountain in honor of its newest inhabitants.
The musical Smurf Mountain might’ve seemed like just the kind of classic family dark ride that would be beloved even to today. You can almost imagine generations of guests meeting the Smurfs through an oddball dark ride at Kings Dominion, maybe even believing the characters to be original creations designed just for the attraction. However, that’s not what happened… Kings Dominion was about to be changed forever by a new owner who had big ambitious for the Lost World mountain… Read on…
Cinematic start
In 1989, the Disney-MGM Studios opened. It was quickly followed by 1990’s Universal Studios Florida.
Frankly, Disney had already signaled that theme parks could be a marketing tool used by filmmakers to connect families to their studios’ brands… but only the opening of those two Studio parks in Orlando showed that opening a theme park need not require the budget and design detail of Disneyland. Instead, theme parks could now offer mix-and-match intellectual properties, bare steel roller coasters merely bearing the name of a box office hit, and barren, beige “backlots” were an acceptable form of decoration. Like clockwork, the 1990s today are remembered as the “Age of the Studio Park,” where movie studios gobbled up or opened up theme parks of their own across the world.
In 1992, Kings Entertainment Company (the park-operating spin-off of Taft) sold its five theme parks to a studio eager to get a foothold: Paramount Communications.
Like its sister parks, when the Virginia park opened for the 1993 season, it was with a new prefix: Paramount’s Kings Dominion. In its first year under new ownership, the park received its first cinematic attraction: a motion simulator themed to Paramount’s Days of Thunder (a NASCAR action drama starring Tom Cruise) while construction ramped up on a whole land themed to Wayne’s World, anchored by the thrilling Hurler wooden roller coaster.
But in 1993, the Lion Country Safari ride was shuttered. The land was renamed Safari Village, and while the Lost World continued to loom over it, the mountain had lost one of its inhabitants, too. The Smurf Mountain dark ride was done for. Though both rides are remembered as heartbreaking losses for generations of locals (and none-too-pleasant a way to begin Paramount’s reign), it makes sense that Paramount would have little interest in running a zoological park or in operating a ride themed to Hanna-Barbera’s cartoons when they were poised to bring their own Nickelodeon brand into the park.
In 1993 and 1994, both the Haunted River and Time Shaft continued to operate deep within the Lost World mountain, but of course, their time was short. In 1995, the Lost World was lost forever… The mountain was sealed off, never to be entered again… or so it seemed…
The Outer LIMits
In 1996, Paramount’s Kings Dominion pulled out all the stops in debuting a spectacular new ride that was… well… two-of-a-kind. Co-premiering with an identical clone at Paramount’s Kings Island, The Outer Limits: Flight of Fear was a brand new kind of roller coaster.
Themed to the anthology television series The Outer Limits (a ‘90s Showtime take on The Twilight Zone with eerie, unsettling, sci-fi stories), guests would be invited into the Press Area of a mysterious government hangar run by the U.S. Bureau of Paranormal Affairs. Inside, they’d find something extraordinary: a UFO under government study. Stepping aboard, riders would unknowingly become part of a sinister experiment with alien invaders discovering “what happens when the human body is pushed to the Outer Limits.”
In reality, this incredible launched coaster accelerates guests down a straightaway and into a tangled “spaghetti bowl” of track – including three inversions – as it twists and turns in a convoluted and awe-inspiring layout. But the most exceptional thing about Flight of Fear wasn’t just its well-themed, Universal-caliber queue or even its intense and spectacular ride experience; it was its technology.
You have to imagine that, for most of history, if you wanted to “launch” a roller coaster, there were only a few ways to do it. You could build up stored, potential energy in a winch and release it in a burst, pulling a train down a track; you could drop a heavy counterweight, propelling a train; or you could place motor-controlled drive-tires in the track that would gradually accelerate it. All have an inherent flaw: friction. Whether it’s fraying wires or balding tires, any time something has to push against something else, things can go wrong.
But Flight of Fear was the first use of a new technology: LIM, or Linear Induction Motors – one of our “Seven Modern Wonders of the Theme Park World.” Rather than using contact forces like counterweights or tires, LIMs use electromagnetism. On LIM coasters, each train is equipped with a metal fin, perfectly-positioned to pass through a narrow slot on electric motors positioned down a stretch a track. When supplied with power, those motors generate electromagnetic fields, attracting-in then repelling-out the fins on the train, producing a continuous acceleration with no contact (and thus, no friction) involved.
Flight of Fear set a new standard for launched coasters. And with their next project in development, Paramount’s Kings Dominion would be the launched coaster capital of the world…
VOLCANO: A Lava Chase Adventure
In reality, Paramount had substantial plans for what to do with the old Lost World mountain, as evidenced by rare concept art revealed by Shane’s Amusement Attic. As the story goes, Paramount Creative had drafted out an ambitious attraction wherein guests would plunge through the mountain’s interior in a concealed roller coaster, joining the “Lava Chasers” – “a group of Gen-X volcano aficianados made up of young geologists, scientists, and researchers” – on the quest for the ultimate adventure.
This early concept would’ve seen guests trek up the side of the mountain to the Lava Chasers base camp, viewing video footage of past expeditions into the peak. Finally, guests would board floorless vehicles for their own descent.
To the mystic sounds of tribal drums, the coaster would’ve ducked into a volcanic lava tube and plunged into the heart of the mountain. Riders would speed behind a lava waterfall and past the remains of an ancient city, dodge bursts of flame, shaking rocks, and bubbling magma, and even “skate” over the surface of a lava pool before finally accelerating straight out of the mountain’s peak using LIMs. Yes, Paramount planned for a second LIM launch coaster right next to Flight of Fear… And though ultimately the design and ride system changed, the concept was strong enough to stick around…
Volcano Rises
On July 22, 1997, Paramount Parks announced that the Lost World would live again… but with an entirely new inhabitant. VOLCANO: The Blast Coaster would be the world’s first inverted LIM coaster (meaning, with trains suspended beneath the track rather than set atop), launching riders into and out of the Lost World mountain.
During the off-season between 1997 and 1998, major modifications were underway at the Lost World. First of all, the mountain was hollowed out. The intricate and interwoven attractions inside – the Haunted River, the Time Shaft, and the remains of Smurf Mountain – were entirely removed, revealing the substantial network of scaffolds, mesh, and concrete that formed the mountain itself.
To accommodate the roller coaster’s entry and exit points and its network of supports, multiple changes were made to the exterior of the mountain, including lopping off the mountain’s pointed peak to officially transform the mountain into a volcano. Still, the water basin at the volcano’s foot remained, even including the river channel of the Haunted River (see above).
From the very beginning, technical difficulties plagued Volcano. The elaborate prototype ride that was meant to be the centerpiece of the 1998 season didn’t open as expected in April. Or May. Or June. Or July. Allegedly, the ride had a major frustration: it couldn’t reliably crest the ride’s signature element: an upside-down roll-out of the volcano – the world’s highest inversion at 155 feet. Without enough speed to complete the maneuver, the tested train continuously “rolled back” (a perfectly safe and accounted-for procedure).
While ride manufacturer Intamin sought a permanent solution, the ride officially opened August 15, 1998 with a temporary fix: Volcano operated at half-capacity, seating guests in every other row to lessen the trains’ weight.
The eventual solution installed in the 1998-1999 off-season actually became one of the ride’s signatures: a second set of LIM motors [a rolling launch, or LIM boost] was positioned leading into the ride’s vertical ascent, giving the train the last burst it needed to erupt from the mountain at full speed, clearing the roll-out with ease.
Are you ready to face the fury of VOLCANO: The Blast Coaster? On the last page, we’ll take a trip into this fiery peak and see why this legend was lost…
Expedition: CONGO
When Volcano: The Blast Coaster debuted in 1997, it brought with it a change to Paramount’s Kings Dominion’s Safari Village. The adventurous, African-set land was renamed Congo (more than likely, an allusion to Paramount’s 1995 film Congo, an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton). It was a fitting name given the thatch-roofed remains of Safari Village, now “plussed” by pervasive theming owed to the newly-active volcano looming over the land.
In fact, we could jump forward in time to 2005 when the Congo area would go on to be largely overtaken by Paramount’s Tomb Raider film score.
That’s also when the remote jungle outpost would be joined by the sensational TOMB RAIDER: Firefall (an outdoor spin-off of Kings Island’s Lost Legend: TOMB RAIDER – The Ride) cast as an ancient altar where mist, fire, water cannons, and fountains synced up with a musical score.
But that expedition will have to wait… Because today, our destination is the 150-foot tall volcano itself. Passing through ancient stone arches, the sound of tribal drums grows stronger and stronger as we approach the expedition camp set up at the base of the volcano.
A perilous rocky trail weaves up the side of the mountain and into an open-air queue house with views across the forested Congo. Gazing upward, Volcano’s track look almost like archaeological scaffolds surrounding the peak, in a most unusual combination of burgandy and gold… Even here, gazing up at those long, stretched inversions a hundred feet above the park, it’s odd to imagine that in mere moments, we’ll be up there…
Then, the queue passes into the mountain and down a flight of stairs to the loading area inside the volcano’s chasm… It’s there that guests jump aboard the suspended trains and prepare for the ride of their lives…
Volcano: The Blast Coaster
Slowly, the trains advance out of the station and around a bend, rolling painstakingly toward a straightaway tunneling through the mountain’s side. Even as the first riders roll past the first LIM motors embedded in the track overhead, nothing happens… Gravity alone seems to be propelling the train as it inches forward – a gut-wrenching, nervewracking build-up…
Then, with an electronic hum, the LIM motors spring to life. The train’s wheels screech as the coaster is propelled forward like a catapult, racing through a cavern in the mountain’s side.
Spots of light stream in through mountain’s side and its network of supports, pierced with holes by the roller coaster’s footers.
We’ve been launched into Volcano’s first surprise: a massive, enormous banked helix hiden behind the mountain.
With no significant change in elevation, the train barrels out of the volcanic chasm and races headlong, hauling riders at its full speed: 70 miles per hour.
As the path forward ends, the track banks wildly, sweeping us into a massive, continuous curve with the trains suspended at nearly 90 degrees. Then, ahead, the path realigns with the tallest peak of the mountain… here we go.
The coaster rockets into the mountain’s core, gliding through still more LIMs. A second electronic hum boosts the already-speeding coaster just as it hits a curve ahead, sending the train vertical. Of course, this is the moment we’ve been waiting for – Volcano’s signature move.
The train races vertically up through the mountain, past fog and flamethrowers and bursts out of the peak, flipping us onto our heads as the train rolls out from the manuever. This high-speed explosion has literally seen us erupt from the volcano, heels-over-head. It’s the world’s tallest inversion – 155 feet over the park.
Now, Volcano changes. With much of the unstoppable momentum having burned off (pun intended) in the eruption, we now find ourselves gliding along the track… 150 feet high. The train arcs through a banked turn, then races forward. From here on out, our ride will take on the role of a lava flow, gradually and somehow beautifully carrying us down and around the mountain. The trick is in a coaster manuever called a heartline roll.
Unlike an in-line twist where the train is flung around a twisting track, in a heartline roll, the track twists around the train. By design, if you were to draw a line in space from the position of your heart while passing through this manuever, the line would stay at the same level. It’s a graceful, powerful, but comfortable inversion that somehow mimics the fluid flow of lava.
Volcano twists its way through the roll, which effortlessly leads into a banked turn back toward the mountain. Another clockwise heartline roll acts as a near-miss with the volcano’s peak, then another descending turn to a third roll.
In an inversion of the typical roller coaster formula, Volcano’s final manuever is its largest drop: an 80 foot descending banked plunge back into the mountain’s core, where our world class custom coaster expedition comes to a close. Short but fierce (and wiith more personality than most people), Volcano was a star.
Ready to take a ride? We always like to end our Lost Legend ride-throughs with a point-of-view video that perfectly captures the experience of a closed classic. Face the heat of Volcano here:
But don’t misunderstand – though our ride may be over, the story isn’t… Despite its more-or-less successful second opening in 1998, Volcano retained the temperamental and unpredictable nature of its namesake. Like many prototypes, the ride’s complexity sometimes overwhelmed its operations, and even as newer, faster, taller, and more popular coasters joined the park’s lineup, Volcano’s line grew. It wasn’t just that the ride was popular; it was also relatively low-capacity, hindered further by technical issues that eventually cause some real problems…
Dormant
On June 24, 2006, a launched train failed to crest the peak and rolled back (again – a normal occurance well within the ride’s operational design). However, it’s believed that the brakes designed to catch the returning train and reset it for a second launch faulted, bringing the ride to an abrupt stop, allegedly in a rain of sparks and debris. Riders were stuck on board for hours. Eventually, all 15 riders had to be evacuated by a cherry-picker, and one was hospitalized leading to a multi-week closure as the ride was inspected.
Six days later, the Paramount Parks were officially sold to Cedar Fair – Ohio-based operators of Cedar Point. Kings Dominion lost its cinematic ownership and movie licensing (renaming the Italian Job: Turbo Coaster to the Backlot Stunt Coaster, and TOMB RAIDER: Firefall as The Crypt). Still, Volcano erupted on, maintaining a piece of the park’s history as well as Paramount’s flair for the dramatic in one iconic coaster package perfect for the park’s new thrill-focused owners.
Just a few weeks into the 2018 season, the ride experienced technical difficulties that paused its performance. The ride remained closed for the remainder of the 2018 season. It’s not unusual for roller coasters to endure lengthy downtime as owners await, install, and test custom-manufactured replacement parks from European ride manufacturers, so fans lit up message boards with rumors about Volcano and when it would reopen. We may never know the answer…
On February 8, 2019, Kings Dominion’s spokesperson Maggie Sellers announced, “After thorough evaluation, the decision has been made to remove Volcano: The Blast Coaster. This wasn’t an easy decision for us, because we know that people love this one-of-a-kind coaster; however, over time it became nearly impossible to keep the ride up to our high standards of reliability and guest satisfaction, and for these reasons we had to make the tough call.”
In other words, Volcano had unknowingly given its last rides in Spring 2018 – a full year earlier. The ride would never re-open.
Demolished
In May 2019, both Volcano and the mountain it resided in were demolished. That winter, it was announced that The Crypt would also be retired, emptying out a large portion of the park’s nostalgically-renamed Safari Village for future development. No matter what that development ends up being, it’s unlikely to match the scale and scope of Volcano, a truly cutting-edge ride that could only have been born from a fusion of technology, thrills, history, and storytelling.
Volcano: The Blast Coaster was a stunning, spectacular, ultra-intense ride; an unusually poetic balance of both strength and style; powerful, but smooth; brawns and brains in one; a new-age classic. In its lifetime, this sensational ride became a must-see icon of Kings Dominion, and a test of bravery for a generation of young Virginians. A blend of thrills and theme, this explosive coaster may be gone, but we just can’t let it be forgotten.
That’s why it’s earned this in-depth expedition through its story, and why we need your help: take a moment to share your thoughts and memories of Kings Dominion’s Lost World and Volcano: The Blast Coaster to preserve this ride for the next generation of thrillseekers! Then, make the jump to our Legend Library to set course for another closed classic… See you on the next adventure!
