The Fifty Coasters That Doomed Six Flags — 47
Titan — Six Flags Over Texas
50 — The Boss — Six Flags St. Louis
49 — Superman: Ride of Steel — Six Flags New England
It’s 1964, you’re Angus G. Wynne, and you’re probably at some too-huge oak desk or something while you’re opening a letter. Probably, not really, but for narrative effect.
You’re no doubt using some ornate silver letter opener, probably inscribed with your initials. I’m guessing, but your type isn’t mysterious. You were born into a wealthy family and intend to die with one.
You’ve already been successful enough in your real estate and oil endeavors to convince the Texas government to fund a spot for you the 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, New York. There they counted on you to take the Great Lone Star state and show those Yankees how its done in the land where everything is bigger.
Surely they and everyone else had reason to believe in you. You’re Texas personified. You’re so Texas, you spent $10m opening a theme park called “Six Flags Over Texas.” Why else would they have put their money behind you?
The “Six Flags” stand for each of the flags flown over the great land.
Oh, your culture didn’t have flags? Tough. You don’t get a themed section.
In order of appearance:
Spain
France
Mexico
The Republic of Texas
The United States of America
The Confederate States of America
The New York Times itself seemed to await your arrival with bated breath:
18 January 64
Upon opening, further details about the attraction would be printed in the official Wold’s Fair Guide:
SUDDEN FUN. Surprise is a feature of the entire area. A young man suddenly stands up and breaks into song. A girl walking along a path bullwhips a cigarette from the mouth of a friend. Two arguing waiters bring their feud to a head in a burst of gunfire."TO BROADWAY WITH LOVE." This is the title of the 90-minute musical spectacular in The Music Hall. Presented by producer George Schaefer, who produced Teahouse of the August Moon, and Morton Da Costa, who directed The Music Man, the new show is an anthology packed with the moods and music of the American theater from The Black Crook of 1864 to recent hits. The show, which cost $1,250,000 to stage, has imaginative costumes and effects; it was cheered by every Broadway critic when it opened.BITS OF TEXAS. Among the side attractions are:
Life on the range. Symbolizing the luxurious care given to modern livestock, a real bull is sumptuously stabled in an elegant French bedroom.
Art in Texas. An exhibit of home-state paintings is on view in the Music Hall.
RESTAURANTS. Wildest and wooliest of the numerous dining areas is the Frontier Palace, where the air is filled with the aroma of chuckwagon beef, and girls dance the cancan. There are also Mexico, Tourism and New Texas snack bars, snacks with the beer in the Beer Garden, and a Shrimp Bar.
That New York Times gush piece was printed only back in January, but the pride you felt feels years removed now that it’s September. As you unfold the letter, the header “ORANGE JULIUS OF AMERICA” gives your heart a start.
This won’t be good. It’s forwarded from the Head of Concessions at the World’s Fair, where your second major foray into entertainment has now effectively run its inaugural, and final, season.
We wish to discontinue operation of the Orange Julius stand near the Music Hall in the Amusement Area.
At the present time we find ourselves unable to operate profitably at this location due to three principal factors:
a. An almost total lack of Fair visitors in the area around the former Texas Music Hall due to a complete lack of activity there. Our Orange Julius stand was intended to be a service facility, not a drawing attraction.
b. Smaller crowds at the fair in general these past few weeks.
c. Cooler weather recently, which affects adversely the sale of our drink.
To demonstrate this, the average daily volume at the Music Hall stand has been only $31.00 during the past 2 weeks.
Come 1965, there will will still be a New York World’s Fair, but there will be no Texas Pavilion.
You know that Mr. Disney? He had a whole revolving stage around machines that moved and spoke as real as you or I. How were your dancing girls supposed to compete with that?
That Disney fella really seems to have something going on over there. Everybody said his theme park would fail and here it’s been almost a decade, that place can’t squeeze enough people in and he is the darling of the Fair as you prepare to leave with your tail between your legs.
Maybe that’s why his Disneyland is doing so much better than your Six Flags Over Texas. By 1965, he’ll have established a “permanent world’s fair” at Disneyland, and his audio-animatronics will make millions gawk in awe.
But it’s not yet 1965. It’s still 1964, you’re Angus Wynne, and there’s an ace up your sleeve. You can just forget about this whole World’s Fair thing because now you’re working with someone bigger than the Texas government. Bigger than the government representing that fifth flag, the United States.
Disney may have his ‘audio-animatronics,’ but where are those gonna take him? How long are they going to last? No, the partner you’ve taken on is a proven winner, a winner of historic proportions.
For a guy born with a silver spoon you’re about to start working with the equivalent of what would’ve been a normal kid’s favorite baseball player. But no kid in Oak Hill could admire a Ranger the way the wealthy can appreciate money and power.
The Pennsylvania Railroad is the only company to ever pay dividends to stockholders for a century straight.
The Pennsylvania Railroad is the only company in history to have had a larger annual budget than the United States Government.
The Pennsylvania Railroad has just bought a majority stake in your company.
You can feel your place in history securing itself, and you’re not even wrong. You and the greatest company on earth will take Six Flags into the largest bankruptcy in the history of the country.
In a series of articles focusing solely on Six Flags that will stretch fifty-plus installments and probably over 100,000 words I only get one chance to talk about the original Six Flags.
Why? Because Six Flags Over Texas was basically the La Ronde of the Premier era, the forgotten child. There’s not anything to talk about.
During the years Premier owned Six Flags, Six Flags Over Texas received two coasters of any kind: Titan, and Wile E. Coyote’s Grand Canyon Blaster.
Yeah.
But then again, if I were the company that started at Frontier City, why would I invest in Six Flags Over Texas? Oklahoma City and Arlington are nearby each other, at least so far as distances go in that part of the country. When Six Flags Over Texas opened its doors for 1961, Frontier City already had three season of operation under its belt of suspiciously familiar entertainment offerings, right down to the bank robberies and shootouts. In fact, by the time Frontier City opened the land for Six Flags Over Texas hadn’t even been purchased.
One year later, pieces would begin to fall into place for the Texan version.
“Texas Under Six Flags” was already a popular phrase referring to the history of Texas from French territory to present day United State. The transformation was no small affair, and the people parting with the real estate were conflicted in their sentimentality:
The next summer, more details would be announced regarding the park’s planned offerings.
If I wanted to make this clickbait, I’d title it something like “Six Flags Over Texas is Not the First Six Flags,” because, honestly? The more I think about it? I’m pretty sure they just stole the whole concept from Frontier City.
But that doesn’t mean they weren’t the first Six Flags, just means they’re not half as important as you might think. Anyway, this is just a way of apologizing that this article about Titan, the Giovanola hyper coaster at Six Flags Over Texas, begins with a long conversation of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company.
Coaster history always seems to have a way of starting off in Pennsylvania.
The Pennsylvania Railroad was founded in 1846 with a stretch of rail between Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh. It quickly grew well past that, becoming one of the largest companies in history around the turn of the century.
We all know that’s not really the case today, because we either have or have never have heard of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Whichever it happens to be for you still gets the point across. It doesn’t matter. It’s gone. It’s long gone.
The 1956 Federal Aid Highway Act creating the Eisenhower Interstate System eliminated the railroad companies’ oligopoly on intercity and freight travel. By the early 1960’s the Pennsylvania Railroad was already looking into diversification to transition into something else if it was going to survive at all.
Not that they were alone, they weren’t the only railroad, but they were The Pennsylvania Railroad. They had an awful lot of assets to diversify, and their reputation might have been the most unwieldy. There isn’t exactly a natural next step to dominating a country’s transportation infrastructure. Not when what supplants you is built by Uncle Sam.
What’s more, as some of the smaller railways met their fates it was only natural for Pennsylvania Railroad to acquire them. The need to diversify aggressively only got greater as each of their cohorts went belly-up around them and were absorbed into the Pennsy’s massive orbit.
The Greater Southwest Company, Angus G. Wynne’s company founded in the late 50’s that built and operated Six Flags Over Texas, was not a theme park company any more than the Pennsylvania Railroad was. Its goal was not to build a successful theme park, though that was certainly a step within the plan. Like many theme park developers of the time, Wynne’s business was in something ancillary: in his case, real estate.
Wynne pioneered new ways to increase the value of land once he owned it. One way he promoted high property values in his communities may have given inspiration to his idea of separate themed lands at his theme parks: segregation. ‘Redlining’ wasn’t a word at the time, but Wynne would sure help make it one.
Wynne had to make his money somewhere, because it sure wasn’t in operating a theme park. The popular myth that Six Flags Over Texas was immediately successful is just that: popular, but a myth. Six Flags Over Texas was a flop.
After extreme cost overruns in his government-funded World’s Fair failure, it was revealed Wynne was $7m in debt. This was 1964, the same year Pennsylvania Railroad took majority control of Greater Southwest Company and by extension Six Flags Over Texas.
It wasn’t exactly a new model. The process was established and simple: You own some property. You build an amusement park on that property. Amusement park brings people to the property. The reality of people on your property encourages business for things people need wherever they may be at that moment. Business raises your property’s value.
You sure don’t want it to, but the theme park can lose money if it has to. The park is what economists might call a “loss leader.” Which is one of way of saying it’s not about the theme park, it’s about the land underneath.
Once you’re happy with the value you’ve created, you’re perfectly welcome to cash out and move on. It doesn’t matter if your theme park is $100m in debt if you sell it for $200m, and all the land around it for hundred millions more.
In this play you have to be a good showman, but in the end it’s not about the show. It’s only about the bottom line.
It’s a concept so central to amusement parks there’s a term for it: trolley park. Although these are becoming rarer, in the early 20th century there were thousands. The operator of a trolley line would build an amusement park at its terminus to encourage more people to ride the trolley at more times.
Owning the land the trolley is on generally encompasses owning land surrounding the trolley. As people ride your uncomfortably full trolleys to your uncomfortably full amusement park, they get bit with the American Dream and demand to buy some of it to take a slice of the pie for themselves.
It seemed to be working well enough for other people, why shouldn’t the Pennsylvania Railroad do it?
The popular myth of Six Flags Over Texas’ success extends to Six Flags Over Georgia and Six Flags Mid-America. If the original was not successful, why was take the show on the road? Why try to lose more money in more markets? Did Mr. Dallas Angus Wynne have little parts of his heart in the Peach and Show-Me States?
By the time Six Flags Over Georgia opened in 1967, Great Southwest Corporation was almost three-quarters owned by the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, and the locations of the two parks seem to speak to their motivations. There is no indication Wynne would have ever sought to build parks in places where he didn’t own land- he had proved to be a miserable showman, and any park he opened would certainly not many money on its own.
St. Louis and Georgia, though usually grouped with Over Texas, as an ‘Original Three,’ represent a distinct change in direction. Or at the least, a distinct change in benefactor. Rather that Great Southwest Company building a park to draw attention to the real estate of Angus Wynne, it would build parks to attract the same attention for the massive yet depreciating assets of the Pennsylvania Railroad. The country’s last and greatest end-of-the-line trolley parks.
Atlanta had been formed by an act of the Georgia government as a railroad terminus. Practically all its existence can be owed to the railroads and their need to interconnect. During the Civil War, General Sherman would be sent to Atlanta to capture and destroy the city’s rail infrastructure, before turning his sights to the sea.
God, I love taking a moment to celebrate my heritage as a Pennsylvanian absolutely crushing the rebellion under our heels. Feels so good. Imagine trying to do that, but for the racists who got swept into the dustbin of history. Ha.
Anyway, the largest railway in the world and getting bigger, the Pennsylvania Railroad naturally owned a chunk of land in Georgia.
Six Flags Over Georgia is directly next to a main line railroad.
St. Louis was a natural choice, as well. In the early twentieth century, with the concept of ‘flyover country’ still decades away, St. Louis may as well have been your last stop in civilization. Just getting from Oklahoma to California was a journey. Published in 1939, The Grapes of Wrath had dramatized the travails of migrants making their way from Oklahoma to California. For a lot of people, St. Louis may as well have been the edge of the world.
And there are numbers to back it up: Situated so perfectly in the middle of the country, no city was able to claim more service by Class 1 Railroads than St. Louis. People might stop at St. Louis, but commerce didn’t. Trains poured in and out of the city like nowhere else in the country. For as long as rail travel was making people millions, St. Louis was the hub around which the rest of the network spun.
Six Flags St. Louis is right next to a main line, too.
These would be the only parks designed and built by the Pennsylvania Railroad.
The Pennsylvania Railroad acquired its longtime competitor, the New York Central Railroad, and became Penn Central in 1968. Two years later, it would be turned down by the federal government for $200m in emergency loans and become the largest bankruptcy in US history until Enron.
Penn Central survived the bankruptcy, and maintained ownership of Six Flags through it. To this day, the Pennsylvania Railroad is the company to have maintained the longest majority ownership of Six Flags’ history.
And it was after bankruptcy that the company went on to acquire many of the parks it is best associated with today. First in 1975 would be AstroWorld in Houston, then Great Adventure and Magic Mountain in 1977 and 1979.
The Pennsylvania Railroad didn’t break the bank on rides, but weren’t overly cheap, either. The most familiar rides commissioned by Pennsylvania Railroad Company-era Six Flags would be Lightnin Loops and Rolling Thunder at Six Flags Great Adventure, Texas Cyclone and Greezed Lightnin at AstroWorld, Great American Scream Machine and Mind Bender at Six Flags Over Georgia, as well as Shock Wave and Judge Roy Scream at Six Flags Over Texas.
All of them Pennsylvania Railroad products. Six Flags, a Pennsylvania Railroad company. No parent company has owned the brand for a longer time, since they acquired majority interest in 1964 and finally sold it all away in 1982. Six Flags, a subsidiary of the largest company in the world at one time, whose name has entered the annals of history like our Great Value version of a East India Company.
In 1982, Penn Central finally parted ways with Six Flags to Bally, most famous for pinball but having just graduated to more advanced machines focusing on casinos.
Five years later, the company would be subjected to a leveraged buyout by Wesray Capital Corp. for $600m. $250m of the proceeds went to pay debt.
In 1990, the company Premier would purchase Six Flags from started to take control: Time Warner. Completing their majority share purchase in 1992, they would own the company until selling it to Premier in 1998.
Despite the reputation the Premier era has, it would be the first time the brand was owned by a company interested in nothing more than creating the best possible theme parks they could. A real, and only, theme park company.
From the beginning, Wynne and Great Southwest Company intended Six Flags Over Texas to be an engine to raise property values. The Pennsylvania Railroad took the company on and leveraged it in a desperate plea to retain value in their own land. Bally wanted to sell its machines to itself, and Wesray was looking for a quick buck like everyone else in the 80’s. Time Warner wanted to reinforce their branding with park experiences just like every other large media company of the time was.
Now Premier had the reigns of the very first Six Flags. What would they give the original, the place where it all started?
Turned out, not much.
Only one coaster at Six Flags Over Texas met the qualification for inclusion on this list: Titan.
An appropriate name for a ride in a park built by the largest corporation in the world. And appropriate for at least two more reasons. The first being the star attraction it overshadowed: Texas Giant. Everything is always bigger in Texas, and what’s bigger than a Giant? Well, a Titan, of course.
Secondly was of course its massize size, whatever park it may have been in. It’s sister coaster, Magic Mountain’s Goliath, erected the previous year, had spent a few weeks as the tallest roller coaster in the world. No fooling. Six Flags Over Texas got a version of its own, with most the design costs already taken care of.
Premier had enacted a similar plan with Intamin and their hypers, financing two-for-one deals to the benefits of Six Flags America and Six Flags Darien Lake. Whereas The Supermen were mirror images of each other, Titan would add a helix to give itself just a little more length in the stats.
Coming so soon and seeming to have so many similarities, I can’t help but wonder if Giovanola and Intamin weren’t essentially competing against each other for the right to make Six Flags big boy coasters for the 2000s. Intamin went on to make more than a few coasters for Six Flags. Giovanola did not. Nowadays, Giovanola doesn’t build coasters at all.
Giovanola is interesting itself. Although they had been in business doing various types of manufacturing for years, and had worked with Intamin for decades designing and building attractions, the company had never built coasters for themselves up until 1999.
That same year, the two designers responsible for the box spine track were using it to cornerstone Universal’s new Islands of Adventure, arguably one of the single largest contracts ever received by a single company for a single park. But they weren’t doing it for Giovanola: they had done so under their own names, Bolliger & Mabillard.
The pedestal that B&M leaped from to achieve this was undoubtedly their inverted coaster model. Its debut installation, Batman: The Ride at Six Flags Great America in Gurnee, Illinois, had by that time already been cloned numerous times to the point that B&M could not find enough time and space to satisfy all the orders for their coasters.
Six Flags Over Texas had one of their own, even.
When Giovanola finally built a roller coaster in 1999, the box spine would be extremely familiar. As would the layout to anybody that would have ridden any of the Batman clones. It opened at Gold Reef City in Joannehsburg, South Africa, as Anaconda.
Only two years later, another roller coaster would appear at Golf Reef City with the familiar box spine track: Tower of Terror. Featuring the most G-Force on a roller coaster anywhere, and a clearance envelope so tight it required the restraints to be developed to prevent people from reaching out, Giovanola insists they had nothing to do with it, the only case I’m aware of where a manufacturer has totally declaimed responsibility for a coaster.
Giovanola finished 2001 in bankruptcy.
But if the company was built on sand and destined to fail, it wasn’t apparent at the start. Goliath had been a big hit.
Titan would be an immediate hit with guests, as well, with its opening year culminating in a #21 spot in the Golden Ticket’s rankings of the best steel coasters in the world .
Of all the steel coasters built by Six Flags in the Premier era, only a dozen had the distinction of making the esteemed list. By 2005, not only was Titan still prominent on that list- it was still a possession of Six Flags. Which helps.
When Titan opened, the park’s star attraction, the Texas Giant, had begun to show its age. What had been the tallest coaster of its kind in the world was quickly becoming just another rough woodie. Early in the Premier tenure, though not immediately as in other cases, the park was given its showstopping headliner.
And then nothing more. It was a hit, at least good enough of one, and they moved on. Good enough for forty-seventh in my book.
A decade later, another ownership group would take another stab at the Texas Giant problem, with much more success. The New Texas Giant, a conversion by Rocky Mountain Construction, took away the breath of enthusiasts like its forebear once had when it was the tallest and best woodie in the world.
Today they still share the same section of the park, icons of stories that couldn’t be more opposite: One that truly embodies the spirit of Texas, a true biggest and best in the world, which clawed back from near destruction to not only stake a brand new claim in coaster history but to launch the most popular new coaster manufacturer in the process.
The other, its New York World’s Fair doppelganger, passing off old vaudeville and dancing girls as what the pioneers experienced. But immediately determined as a fake, a copy. Angus Wynne might have been as Texan as they came, bu the Texas Pavilion in Flushing Meadows was not. Like Texas, but not Texas. Like the biggest in the world, but not. Like the most successful of its time to be mistaken for a product of it, but in reality, a final stop on a road to failure. A twee little recreation, but still a paper Titan.