The Fifty Coasters That Doomed Six Flags — 48
Roar — Adventure World
50 — The Boss — Six Flags St. Louis
49 — Superman: Ride of Steel — Six Flags New England
It’s May 3, 2019, and you’re the author of this series. It’s been weeks that you’ve been counting down to this day and now you stand in an awkward crowd on Six Flags America’s Main Street 1776.
Kids are holding science experiments which they’ll take to a science fair at the picnic pavilions toward the back, and others are just milling around eager to make a run for their favorite ride. A guard listens to his radio and steps aside to let the rush begins.
But only three of you are heading for Firebird.
You race through the familiar, empty queue and head straight for the front row, all alone in your excitement. A moment later, as the sparkling, empty floorless trains cycle through the course, two men join you.
By the time the gates open a few moments later for the inaugural run, you’re still the only three there. They’re obviously a couple, and that’s awesome. 100% of Firebird’s first train will be gay. That means Firebird is gay. You helped make Firebird gay.
You have an amazing ride, but when you get to the got shop the On-Ride Photos haven’t been turned on yet, you’re pissed. There isn’t a second first ride ever.
But you don’t let that spoil your mood. You just were on the first train of your home park’s new coaster. You, two strangers, and 21 empty seats.
It’s late in May, 1998, you’re Sam A. Marks, and you want this guy to shut the fuck up.
This is no small day for you. Or for any other local coaster fan. Adventure World is opening its biggest ride yet, its first totally unique coaster made and built just for them. Just for little old Adventure World in little old Largo, Maryland.
You’ve been riding Wild One since the park was Wild World, and have countless laps on the other two offerings: Python (brother of Diamondback at Frontier City, one half of Great Adventure’s former Lightning Loops) and the park’s showstopping Mind Eraser. Now Adventure World will have four coasters, and finally one commissioned and designed for its landscape. You couldn’t be more excited, you’re absolutely buzzing with energy.
And they’ve invited this City Paper dickhead to trail you for some publicity. He’s written about the park before, but it’s all vaguely racist bullshit invariably comparing it to the bigger parks down south. He’s not trying too hard to make friends with your Zombies.
When you read his article, it’ll be pretty clear how much he struggled to make a roller coaster interesting. To make Adventure World interesting, at least without some cheap racist dogwhistles about violence. He’ll take pot shot after pot shot at you and your coaster club and try to tie it up with a halfhearted about face at the end. He’ll barely even talk about the ride experience itself until the last page.
You’re not surprised the story turns out trash, the guy had the personality of a Sunshine State b-squad news anchor.
Well fuck him, anyway. Doesn’t matter. It’s 1998 and there isn’t a new wooden roller coaster enthusiasts are more excited to ride than the one in your backyard, your home park. Everybody wants to come to Largo, Maryland of all places to hear and feel the Roar.
There are a handful of coasters that didn’t make this list despite being critically important in the development of Premier Parks. I’ll try to get around to an “Honorable Mentions” at some point, but most of the coasters that got snubbed were simply too early in the company’s history to really factor into the scenario I’ve created here.
Silver Bullet and Wildcat at Frontier City were two early relocations that not only assured Frontier City’s turnaround but also proved a business model Premier would follow to the top.
Roar’s predecessor at Adventure World, the Vekoma SLC Mind Eraser, would be my pick not only for the ‘best’ roller coaster investments in Premier history, but as one of the most impactful coaster projects by any park, ever. The ride, apparently originally slated to be called Hangman, increased Adventure World attendance by a reported 25% and encouraged outside investors to take their first major stakes in the company. This enabled Premier to buy Funtime Parks, most notably Elitch Gardens and Geauaga Lake.
Oh, you’re still mad about Geauaga Lake? How much more mad are you now knowing that it’s all because of fucking Mind Eraser at fucking Six Flags of fucking America?
But I made a No SLCs rule and I’m not making an exception for Mind Eraser. Sorry, Mind Eraser.
Out of college, Mike Boodley found a job working for the Dinn family in their efforts to relocate and eventually build their own massive wooden roller coasters. Although I can’t find anything to prove it, the timeline fits that Boodley himself may have been on site at Wild World for the relocation of Wild One.
Dinn Corporation would not be the most successful or stable company and today is probably best known for Mean Streak, the future Steel Vengeance.
Which is to say they’re most famous for building a ride people hate. That’s never good.
The company built ten original coasters, but these days more of its relocations remain standing than its originals, such as the legendary Phoenix at Knoebels in Elysburg, PA or Skyliner at Lakemont in Altoona, PA.
When alleged internal drama led Dinn to break up, much of the existing staff would go on to form Gravity Group, opening their first coaster in 2005.
Boodley, however, must have seen the writing on the walls and left in the early nineties to make a name for himself. Boodley would take inspiration from the gargantuan twisting monstrosities of the first Golden Era of roller coasters, such as the Crystal Beach Cyclone. He worked with Custom Coasters International in 1993 on Outlaw at Adventureland in Altoona, Iowa, before taking the concept on the road for himself with a company he called Great Coaster Internation. Boodley designed and built Wildcat at Hersheypark, hardly an hour from the company’s Sunbury headquarters.
(Wildcat was my #1 coaster for years, including after having ridden Millennium Force in 2000. It’s a really good coaster.)
The coaster was a hit. By the time the company built Roar at Adventure World, Boodley and GCI were considered part and parcel with a wooden coaster renaissance. Popular Mechanics finished an article on the new generation of wooden roller coasters with this:
We are especially looking forward to our first ride on Roar, a convoluted twister (from the designer of Wildcat) that was under construction in Largo, Md., as we prepared this article. With a 90-ft lift hill and a 50-mph average speed, it promises nonstop action, with 20 crossovers, 12 curves, six reversals, and 12 drops over the course of its 3200-ft track.
In the nineties, Adventure World was as up-and-coming as a park gets. Its third year in operation under Premier, the park had won three straight “Most Improved” awards from Inside Track magazine, a forebear to Amusement Today and its Golden Tickets. But Roar would be a major step the company had not yet taken at any of its parks: the commissioning of a totally new, totally unique coaster all for themselves. Boodley would closely recreate the feeling of Wildcat and Outlaw at Adventure World.
Always meeting headwinds against Kings Dominion and Busch Gardens, Adventure World’s new ride created some definite buzz in the area. The Washington Post wrote in June of 1998:
The amusement park in Largo has added its second wooden roller coaster. But unlike the Wild One, an 80-year-old coaster that was moved from another park, Roar is brand new. The designers at Great Coasters International used computer engineering to blend elements of the past with today’s innovations.
But whether it’s the 1920s — the height of the wooden coaster craze — or the ’90s, a 90-foot drop from the front car is still a rush. The trip — 3,200 feet of track — is covered in 1 minute, 52 seconds, at speeds faster than 50 mph.
What makes Roar different from many wooden coasters is its tight design. Many older coasters are long and include one big drop and a few smaller hills. They take you out, turn around and come back. Roar has 12 steeply banked turns, 20 crisscrosses and 6 reversals in direction. The first 50-degree plunge goes into a 133-degree turn. That’s followed quickly by a 180-degree spiraling second drop — and plenty of screams.
The paper goes on to note a $10m cost for the project, as well as Wild One’s then placement among the Top 5 Wooden Coasters in ACE voting.
Adventure World had stiff competition in the area: not only were Busch Gardens and Kings Dominion established names, but Hersheypark, situated in already an established resort town, had not long ago seen its namesake company sell the park and its new owners began pumping money into it in a bid to establish position.
It’s difficult for younger or non-regional enthusiasts to imagine Hersheypark being a secondary attraction in Hershey, Pennsylvania, but before Wildcat kicked off an investment blitz the amusement park was a secondary attraction to the factory itself and chocolate-related treats. The investment blitz that would make Hersheypark itself the star attraction in the area was only just beginning with Wildcat.
Hersheypark and Adventure World took similar tracks in their approaches, just Hersheypark to a stronger degree: While the Pennsylvania coaster market is saturated in wooden coasters, to the point that customers in the area expect them at a park, Busch Garden and Kings Dominion had relatively weak offerings in that regard. Whereas, Adventure World had one of the best wooden coasters in history. Hersheypark’s Comet was no slouch, either.
What was probably an absolute necessity for Hersheypark was a shrewd move to follow by Premier. In my opinion, Adventure World’s pair of wooden coasters were alone able to discern itself not only from the parks down south, but from parks in Pennsylvania as well. The park found a niche and filled it well. In hindsight, it makes perfect sense for Adventure World to have made an attempt at a large scale wooden coaster. Premier doubled down on its classic woodie with a modern cousin that not only brought the small, improving park national notoriety but also gave the it a strong foothold against its overbuilt and upcoming competitors in the region.
When you look at the cost for the value it’s incredible what they achieved. After Roar became the diamond at Adventure World, Premier had invested a staggeringly small sum into a lineup of coasters that was beginning to garner some major attention.
Wild One was practically free, only the cost of refurbishments that come with your typical century-old woodie. It was owned by a company being forced to sell it as part of the fallout from the Savings & Loan Crisis, as reported in a 1992 Washington Post article titled FORMER OWNER OF WILD WORLD OWED $9.5 MILLION TO NBW.
As federal banking regulators began their investigation into the failed bank’s operations, they found that Mason, the supposed savior, was himself a delinquent borrower. According to bank records, Mason borrowed $9 million from NBW in April 1987 to finance his Wild World amusement park in Prince George’s County, a venture he undertook with fellow real estate developer and longtime friend Stuart A. Bernstein.
Both men guaranteed the loan, which was secured by 96 percent of the shares in the park. Mason, however, was the general partner of the venture and responsible for the debt. At the time of the government’s takeover of NBW, the bank had yet to receive a single principal or interest payment on the loan.
Bernstein settled with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. for an undisclosed amount. Terms of the settlement between Bernstein and the FDIC have not been disclosed
It’s almost generous to say Wild One was free. It was practically subsidized.
Python represented only half the cost of acquiring Lightning Loops from Six Flags Great Adventure, who were desperate to get the ride off their hands after it was involved in a horrific rider death. It had been the first inverting coaster in the state of New Jersey.
Vekoma SLCs proved such a tremendous cost/benefit payout that dozens have been installed at parks all around the world. All of these were tremendous values for their cost. It wasn’t just that they were going the cheap route, it’s that they were getting a lot of it.
Roar would be the first coaster project undertaken by Premier that met the scale and cost of its competitors’ investments- and still proved a shrewd move. It would also be the second creation of what is today considered by some the best wooden roller coaster company in the world.
You can’t know that then, but it can become apparent pretty quick afterwards. By 2005, GCI had also built Lightning Racer at Hersheypark and Thunderhead at Dollywood, debuting what would become a signature station fly-through element.
Roar’s success was a big part of that. Praise from that same hack in the same paper the next year would affirm the positive reception the ride received:
Screw Two-Face: The Flip Side and the Joker’s Jinx (pictured). When amusement park historians Arwen Mohun and Robert Friedel bring their “Inventing the Scream Machine” lecture to Six Flags America (previously Adventure World, previously Wild World), the pair of danger junkies will focus on these two new roller coasters, the latest entries in the worldwide mine-is-bigger-than-yours thrill-ride sprint. But before the money-stuffed suits at Six Flags took over the controls at the Largo, Md., theme park this year, the biggest and best coasters in the D.C. area were also two of the biggest and best (yet sadly underrated and underutilized) on the East Coast: Roar, a hellish wooden throwback with stomach-swirling turns, and the Mind Eraser, a menacing mess of twisted metal and constant corkscrews.
Funnily enough, I think this hack demonstrates something pretty well for me: Six Flags didn’t take over in 1999, the company had been in control of the park for almost 8 years at the time. But in many cases the fuzzy line between the different ownership eras creates a muddied picture of what actually happened. In reality, the same people that built Roar were planning Two Face, Joker’s Jinx, and others at the same time. They are really all one big era, one big project, a so-called five year plan.
The same summer that Premier opened Roar, they were featured in a gushing article in the New York Times that also sheds some insight on the popularity and success of the ride:
Premier prides itself on running family parks with rides for all ages. At its Adventure World in Largo, Md., for example, visitors may choose from a water park, 14 children’s rides and 34 adult rides, including Roar, a world-class wooden roller coaster.
Interviewed recently at the park, Selina Bankert was about to take her three sons home to Annapolis, Md., for their naps. She would be back many more times this summer, she said, because she was a second-year season ticket holder, and her 5-year-old son, John, and his 2-year-old twin brothers, Scott and Paul, loved the park.
‘’It’s a good value for us,’’ she said of her season ticket, which she bought for $44, ‘’because we come at least once a week for an hour or two.’’
Roar didn’t make the list of Top Woodies on the Golden Tickets until it expanded to 50 in 2003, but it came in at a respectable #38. For 2005, the year I’m supposed to be considering all of this, it’s still holding on at #48.
Premier would of course copy-paste a mirrored version of Roar into Six Flags Marine World, now Discovery Kingdom. Opening the next year in 1999, the ride would debut GCI’s own trains, called Millennium Flyers.
Roar, like Wildcat and Gwazi in Tampa Bay, was delivered with Philadelphia Toboggan Company trains. The Western Roar received complaints for how the Millennium Flyers tracked, as would Wildcat and Gwazi upon receiving them in later refurbishments.
Only Roar holds the distinction of a GCI coaster delivered with and still running PTC trains. As if it’s racing to catch up with the merits of its neighbor, itself staking the sole claim of having been touched by every President in the history of the famous Philadelphia Toboggan Company.
I especially love it, as the Millennium Flyers on Wildcat absolutely do not agree with the track. These days, riding Roar at Six Flags America feels a lot more like reconnecting with my childhood #1 than the actual coaster two hours north.
When I raced to Firebird in May of last year to be the first on the train, I have to admit I was disappointed. Yeah, it was a soft opening and intentionally limited- but I still wished it could have been more of an event. I can’t help but read that shitty article by the City Paper prick and still wish I was there, in a BYTE ME shirt and wishing I’d put on more deodorant, being internally dressed-down by some hack stranger but all the same among the first to hear and feel the Roar.