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Can't wait for sex education the experience xx

I love Black Mirror so intrigued to see what they do here, looking forward to it!

If it were The Goblin King, Sarah, Hoggle, Ludo and Sir Didimus I'd have been interested.

HYPERspring B&M hyper or RMC hyper-hybrid confirmed!! It's happening folks!!!

Well I never, it’s... it’s.... a WoRld fIrSt!

Thorpe is officially the worst Merlin park. Confirmed.

-How many ways can they dress up the idea of 'ride our 6 best rides and get a pop badge'? -"Random roller coaster replays"? Are they suggesting you'll get multiple laps on a roller coaster? Sounds like a silly idea? -"Detonation delays"? You mean, like how Detonator always runs? -SuperCharged Summer sounds...naff? -Food stuff sounds alright though. Hopefully their efforts for this year have gone into improving the park. Because these events sound like they've been knocked up in 5 minutes by someone who's never visited a theme park before...

Wait has Slammer actually been removed?

Didn’t they also publicly state DBGT was the future of theme parks...

I doubt Thorpe Park even know that themselves yet, considering that all of a sudden at 9am it was "announcement coming at 10am" from nowhere, with no cohesion to any of the previous tHoRpePaRk posts. My prediction is incedibly long queues due to low throughput, and guests coming off afterwards saying was that it/it's not worth the queue/head straight to guestservices and complain for some fastpasses. Good to see Thorpe going back to their favourite theme of dark and apocalyptic though.

Goodness me. Hyper Ride Roulette sounds like an outlandish excuse for ride downtime to me.... Another season I’ll pass on, I think.

Think the idea here is to add more of a thrill and an idea of suspense to the rides, for example sending Colossus around for a second go every 6th ride say, or a more intense Samurai cycle, well before it breaks anyway. Good idea but perhaps an operation nightmare.

Yeah, what the hell are they talking about.

Unfortunately not, just wishful thinking with a hint of sarcasm!

Black Mirror is an odd one IP wise, in not having a set structure or regular characters. It could mean anything so surely is just a name above the door? If this had had any creative input from Charlie Brooker, which in reality is the only real consistent which makes Black Mirror Black Mirror, they would clearly have been shouting about it from the off as it would be actually meaningful to the marketing.

Opens end of March - they must have been working on this for some time then, since Living Nightmare would assumingly need total removal with there being no theming in there that I can think of that would be reusable into this kind of futuristic style attraction.

I was a bit less subtle and just typed Black Mirror in a post instead. Hope it doesn't have live actors in as year round attractions with live actors have an amazing track history. And yes - socials have confirmed entrance will be behind Colossus so therefore must be the Living Nightmare space. Look out for that yellow schoolbus in the new attraction.

In the last ten years, Phantasialand has only seen six new rides, two if which are "off the shelf" family rides. They've only seen 1 retheme too, Thorpe have seen many. Quantity means nothing.

I guess the issue with steps / stools is that the point is you need to be able to get in / out of the seat in case of an emergency. If there's a time sensitive reason to get people out the ride, they don't want to have the additional responsibility of getting a step to get someone out.

Or maybe they are, I don't know, working really hard to put the park back together in time? Filming scaffolding being put around a ride is at the bottom of their to do list, when they have 4 months to inspect every attraction at the park, go figure...

@Hethetheth makes a fantastic point about why Phantasialand are able to invest in greater depths compared to Merlin parks. But even then, it's not just Phantasialand that are able to do this: look at the likes of Liseberg, Hansa Park, etc - independent parks that are able to invest in large amounts on a regular basis. (I'm ignoring Europa and Efteling because of their other means of incoming). A better question to specifically ask is simply how are Phantasialand able to invest ridiculous amounts of money? Klugheim was said to cost something in the region of €60-70m. Rookburgh is rumoured to be a larger investment. Maus au Chocolat (2011) and Chiapas (2014 but should've been 2013) cost another €60m between them. The Deep in Africa land (2006) was another €30-40m. That's insane, and beyond anything that most companies could invest in several parks, let alone one company in one park. How they manage it is still mysterious. The park is owned by the Löffelhardt family, who co-started the park originally. Clever entrepreneurship meant they were able to continue to invest. They also bought Mirabilandia in Italy (they were in charge at the time the park added key rides like Katun), before selling it in 2006 (which no doubt was a big helping hand) in the future. From there, it's simply a case of having ownership that knows how to do business and how to cleverly invest in the park. There's a lot of passion within too which is great. In some ways, I guess their situation could be likened to what we're seeing at Energylandia. They're owned by someone who is wealthy and already has a great deal of experience in running a business, but also someone who is deeply passionate and wants something they can be proud of. The difference there is they very openly receive EU grants and the like to help accelerate their development, and are going for size and quantity over details and quality (of theming). The amount the park have invested on new rides between 2018-2020 probably could have seen them invest in something of similar depth and quality to any of Phantasialand's investments if they wanted to. Let's not pretend that the UK are the only place that is thrifty. Everywhere in the world is. The trouble is, Merlin have dug themselves into a hole. They set high prices and then give out a ton of promos. So of course people in the UK are then going to dig for the best deal. They'll naturally end up complaining that something doesn't represent a good enough value because, simply put, they've be trained to think they can always get something for next-to nothing. Merlin give tickets away because they chose to. Now they do it because they have to. This is a very common tactic. Have a low entrance cost and hit visitors with high secondary spends. Look at Vue cinemas - many of them have decreased their standard price significantly (my local one is £5 for any film). But then they can hit you with upgraded seats, high costs of drinks and snacks, etc. And people are more willing to do that because they feel they've 'saved' money for their ticket to watch the film, even if they haven't. Heck, even Phantasialand do this over their winter event. They usually have strong price integrity, so their pre-book online price is only a couple of euros cheaper than buying on the gate, and have very few promotions (and their entrance price is high, around €50). But over Winteraum, especially later in the event, they sell tickets online for €24. Why? Because during the event, they have lots of pop up stalls serving various food and drink (almost like a mini Christmas market), which are extremely popular. People spend a lot of money there and the park recoup any losses they may make from reducing the entrance price. I'd hardly call any of those parks competition. Drayton is dying. Blackpool ticks along, but when they invest in a brand new coaster, don't market it and then don't see suitable increases, you have to wonder how big a threat they are. And the Yorkshire parks are hardly competition when they barely invest (bar this year). Towers sees the most investment because Merlin know it's their crowning jewel. It's the UK's biggest park. It's the park that can easily get the highest attendance. It's well known abroad. It has hugely popular and well-known rides like Nemesis and Smiler. Plenty of legitimate world records / firsts that people are actually intrigued by. Towers receives the most investment because it's the safest bet to get a return. I don't get how you can laugh at Paulton's as being a competitor? They have made very wise investments and continue to do so. They're improving and growing constantly. They're a very legitimate threat to Chessington, whether Merlin admit that or not. Thorpe is different because of its target market. But it's clear to see that its numbers have been falling and popularity has decreased. It and Chessington benefit from location of being so close to London. But Thorpe needs to really push the boat to remain in a profitable state, because they're really sliding. It's a similar situation to where Chessington were 5-6 years, except Chessington were at least slowly retheming rides to bring them to standard.

Went to Phantasialand this weekend and just, damn, I always forget how incredible this place is. Firstly, Rookburgh: no photos from me. However from the outside there's little to be seen since the last update. The glimpses are saw though are exciting. Next, Crazy Bats - the VR experience that at one point Phantasialand said they'd never get. It's a weird one: the VR headsets are good, and comfy - the first VR coaster I've ridden where I haven't needed to hold onto the headset. And the film itself is good. It's humour-filled, well done, has some nice tricks and fun to watch. But I did come off feeling a bit queasy (something VR hasn't done to me before), as did everyone else in my group. I think that's at least in part down to the sheet length of the film. The other issue, unsurprisingly, is the throughput. It's completely destroyed. A ride that could easily churn out 3-4 trains without stacking now just manages to send 2 with no stacking (which for a 4 minute + ride isn't good). And the first and last car were out of use throughout the duration of the visit (I don't know if that's a permanent thing or not, but that takes out 8 people a ride). And the clever conveyor belt cleaning system they had seems to no longer be used either, which is sad. The really surprising thing, though, is the popularity of Crazy Bats. The public were lapping it up. It regularly had the longest or second longest queue on park. People were willing to wait over 2 hours to ride this. Now 2 hour waiting times aren't uncommon for UK rides, sure, but in Germany you rarely see those sort of waits, except on exceptionally busy days. It's crazy. So clearly this has worked for the park. And that brings me onto the next point: the park was hugely busy this weekend. I've visited this weekend in January for the past couple of years, and whilst it's been busy, it's never felt mad. This year, however, it was heaving. The park coped very well and queues were all manageable. But it was a massive shock to the system to see how busy this tiny park gets, whilst still managing to deliver incredible experiences. People were queueing to get into the viewing area of the park's finale show (which, tbh, is a bit naff) an hour before it started! But yeah, despite the busy-ness, the park was brilliant. I can't recommend their winter event enough.

Who remembers this image? I agree with this, Galactica was re-themed in 2016, and this image was released I believe in summer 2017, so thorpe potentially had something technological themed in the works at the time seeing what Merlin did with Galactica. That bridge does look like a hyper coaster, and they're still using that blue/tech theme this season. I'm probably over-speculating and over-hyping this all but I'm hoping theres definitely still something bigger in the works.

Could it not be argued that this a good movie for the park, becoming more of a TV / Shows themed attractions park.