Tomb Blaster

[Kerfuffle]

4 minutes ago, ChessingtonSam said:

Tomb Blaster was done entirely by Tussauds, so blame them.

No it wasn't. Tomb Blaster was done by DIC Tussauds, who deemed it "too scary" and "politically incorrect" for the new family market. This bunch were oddly enough the same people who also dreamt up the "hilarity" of ducks and soap for Bubbleworks. 

[yeah]

49 minutes ago, imindetonator said:

 

Maybe a little badly phrased, but Tomb Blaster is a example of a dark ride practically falling apart.

Tomb Blaster basically had any type of story it had ripped away for the shooting element..

The DC Dark Rides don't look great, but they seem to make miles more sense than Tomb Blaster..

Ah yeah sorry, edited.

[Coaster]

I find the state of Tomb Blaster frustrating because it still has, in concept, the potential to be an amazing ride.  That building houses some of the most impressive theming elements in the UK, the ride has a decent soundtrack and the exterior is designed very well.  Due to the total lack of care for the ride experience it falls far short of the quality it should be at, effects are broken, the new lighting highlights the warehouse roof more than the scenes and the sound effects are either off or out of sync.  Looking at the exterior, the appearance is ruined by those awful metal bars.

 

Why is a ride that could be so much better left in this state?

[SteveJ]

Because, in their view, there's nothing wrong with it. The proper care of the show presentation, animations, audio, lighting, etc are all "nice to haves", in other parks the ride would be closed and an improvements scheme called. A proper one with professional show technicians and contact of its designers. Not getting one or two people to do menial improvements if they have the time, or a H&S refurbishment masquerading as a "transformation" with a few cheap alterations.

[Mark9]

15 hours ago, Kerfuffle said:

No it wasn't. Tomb Blaster was done by DIC Tussauds, who deemed it "too scary" and "politically incorrect" for the new family market. This bunch were oddly enough the same people who also dreamt up the "hilarity" of ducks and soap for Bubbleworks. 

 

I thought DIC bought the Tussauds group in 2005. Tomb Blaster was redone at the end of 2001 for the 2002 season.

[Matt 236]

DIC I get the impression salted the park's once great atmosphere and setting. Unfortunately, Merlin seems to have continued this downward spiral through neglect, improper care and refurbishments, crippled throughputs, removal and neglect of theming, poor fastrack distribution and overbearing brand images.

 

I regretibly missed the golden age of the park (not visiting until 2006), but have still noticed the park going downhill and mostly getting worse rather than better. There may have been some positive stuff like Wild Asia and Market Square, but the negatives outweigh I'm afraid. 

 

 

[SteveJ]

On 9/28/2016 at 7:51 AM, Mark9 said:

 

I thought DIC bought the Tussauds group in 2005. Tomb Blaster was redone at the end of 2001 for the 2002 season.

 

Yes DIC bought Tussauds in 2005 and took it from bad to worse, to a point where Chessington almost shut down in 2007. Before that the company had been sold to a different parent company Charterhouse, with a very different relationship to how they were with Pearson through the 80s and 90s. Pearson suddenly selling Tussauds to Charterhouse spelled the end of the UK parks best years in many ways, I believe it was because Pearson itself got a change of manegement who didnt have interest in continuing to invest in Tussauds. 

At this time Merlin went from a small, industry-disliked operator of tourist trap aqauriums, to then owning major parks and brands globally, by getting on so well with their own capital investment companies in order to be granted the funding. Merlin grew so quickly by selling off large percentages to their investors, in order to buyout well known existing brands like Legoland and the Tussauds parks, purely in a global quest to become the dominant and largest valued company in the industry. Using theme parks as their stepping stones in Nick Varney's 20 year quest to be important

[StevenVig]

13 hours ago, Archive said:

purely in a global quest to become the dominant and largest valued company in the industry. Using theme parks as their stepping stones in Nick Varney's 20 year quest to be important

 

Merlin is second. Disney says Hi

[yeah]

3 hours ago, StevenVig said:

 

Merlin is second. Disney says Hi

He said in a quest to become, etc.

[SteveJ]

4 hours ago, StevenVig said:

 

Merlin is second. Disney says Hi

 

You missed the point of my post

Interesting though the 'SECOND TO DISNEY' claim that they hit every single staff member with before you get through the door, is kind of meaningless. Merlin is more like 10th rate in terms of a good attraction operator, Disney and Universal would laugh at Merlin's always dysfunctional and contrived attractions and they are mostly a dead-end company to work with, as many former Merlin people will tell you.

 

However Merlin's core company values are based entirely around a massive will to surpass Disney as fast as possible, so they can claim they are "the biggest" by whichever way they choose to measure it. This was directly stated even to ground level staff numerous times in the last years, that their main efforts are currently to open up new prefab Legoland parks around the world until they can claim the top spot.

 

In their words, theyve turned the theme park industry from "a cinderella industry driven by showmen politics" to "serious business". To everyone else, theyve just used big capital ventures to exploit a once brilliant craft industry for profit gain, and putting branding before quality in order to create a lowest common denominator appeal for big international dominance.

 

Not a company worth caring for. Shame it had to be the likes of Chessington, Legoland, Thorpe Park, Alton Towers and historical attractions like Tussauds that got their souls sucked out for the Merlin empire, but then they had already been left in a state by Tussauds under DIC & Charterhouse. Independent parks are now infinitely more fun and better value.

[yeah]

Imo no park had the soul sucked out of it worse than LEGOLAND. It went from such a magical adventurous family park and brand (Heroes Wanted was the best when I was smaller) and is now a bland kiddie park made up of LEGO set IPs (Star Wars, Heartlake City)

[JoshuaA]

1 hour ago, ChessingtonSam said:

Imo no park had the soul sucked out of it worse than LEGOLAND. It went from such a magical adventurous family park and brand (Heroes Wanted was the best when I was smaller) and is now a bland kiddie park made up of LEGO set IPs (Star Wars, Heartlake City)

Off topic but I find Legoland to have more of a soul than the rest of the chain..

Obviously its not the best park as its for kids, but IMO Legoland is nowhere was bad as Chessington..

I think Chessington deserves the title for the most run down and soul sucked park in the chain.

They had rides like Professor Burps and Terror Tomb, which they completely drained any trace of fun off..

At least at Legoland they actually invest in refurbing old areas unlike Chessington..

 

[yeah]

33 minutes ago, imindetonator said:

Off topic but I find Legoland to have more of a soul than the rest of the chain..

Obviously its not the best park as its for kids, but IMO Legoland is nowhere was bad as Chessington..

I think Chessington deserves the title for the most run down and soul sucked park in the chain.

They had rides like Professor Burps and Terror Tomb, which they completely drained any trace of fun off..

At least at Legoland they actually invest in refurbing old areas unlike Chessington..

 

Yeah llw is the most well kept park, but it's branding is so bland. Its awful.

[Benin]

Has Lego really changed at all since Heroes Wanted? Like, stuff like Explorers Institute and Magic House went before those days, and those were the sorta stand out stuff in terms of attractions...

 

The park is only bland because of the multiple identikit parks of them popping up seemingly everywhere... All the same attractions bar like one or two slightly different ones (Polar XPlorer, the Jungle Splash at Germany) or slightly different variations on the same one... All a bit of a shame given the potential available to Lego...

[SteveJ]

Legoland Windsor has declined a lot it was built, but it's not so obvious perhaps. It's being run as a generic theme park with Lego IP themed areas, according to whichever toy sets sell the most, against its original intention to be another kind of park altogether. The 'Heroes Wanted' stuff was just flavour-of-the-day branding though, it wasn't the park's original ethos, and the Lego Group was in other difficulties at that time, hence the sale to Merlin.

 

The original Legoland parks are better funded & managed than the "resort theme parks" Thorpe, Chessington & Alton Towers, etc, because the Lego family have a large share in Merlin and some influence over how Lego attractions are run, the original & best Billund park is thankfully somewhat protected in that sense - the others not so much.

Anyway how Merlin operate the Legoland parks is a whole topic in itself and not relevant here

[Mark9]

11 hours ago, imindetonator said:

Off topic but I find Legoland to have more of a soul than the rest of the chain..

Obviously its not the best park as its for kids, but IMO Legoland is nowhere was bad as Chessington..

I think Chessington deserves the title for the most run down and soul sucked park in the chain.

They had rides like Professor Burps and Terror Tomb, which they completely drained any trace of fun off..

At least at Legoland they actually invest in refurbing old areas unlike Chessington..

 

 

That was a Tussauds decision, not Merlin. 

[HermanTheGerman]

14 hours ago, imindetonator said:

Off topic but I find Legoland to have more of a soul than the rest of the chain..

Obviously its not the best park as its for kids, but IMO Legoland is nowhere was bad as Chessington..

I think Chessington deserves the title for the most run down and soul sucked park in the chain.

They had rides like Professor Burps and Terror Tomb, which they completely drained any trace of fun off..

At least at Legoland they actually invest in refurbing old areas unlike Chessington..

 

Have you not been to Thorpe Park?

[JoshuaA]

29 minutes ago, HermanTheGerman said:

Have you not been to Thorpe Park?

Have you not been to Chessington?

[SteveJ]

16 hours ago, Mark9 said:

 

That was a Tussauds decision, not Merlin. 

There isn't nearly as much difference as people think between Tussauds and Merlin when it comes to such things.

 

Tussauds was merged into Merlin, not replaced. A huge amount of the significant people who are now decision makers within Merlin were directors at Tussauds during this time, the studio lead designers that directed the work for changing Prof Burp's and Terror Tomb as mentioned (and many more poor quality changes) are still heads in Merlin Magic Making now, even DIC owned 20% of Merlin until its floatation in recent years. The company is still funded much the same way Tussauds was by the end of its time, with huge influence of multiple private equity firms and shareholders.

 

The only significant difference is that Merlin uses more heavy branding and persuasion, both customer-facing and internally to shareholders/staff/industry, and more money than Tussauds did.

[Mark9]

I'm aware of that. I'm just pointing out that the two names have become interchangable and that 'Merlin' as a company did not replace Terror Tomb or Bubbleworks. The people still working there may have done, but Merlin didn't. 

[HermanTheGerman]

But it virtually was Merlin who changed it. Who cares if the name was different?

[Benin]

The final years under Tussauds were very different to the initial Merlin years though... Least that's how I see things, amount of stuff that was done at Chessie like new ents and replaced/repainted theming in 09/10 looked like it was going in the right direction...

 

Shame things went downhill from there...

[SteveJ]

5 hours ago, Mark9 said:

I'm aware of that. I'm just pointing out that the two names have become interchangable and that 'Merlin' as a company did not replace Terror Tomb or Bubbleworks. The people still working there may have done, but Merlin didn't. 

 

Yes, but just pointing out it wasn't as black and white as 'Merlin or Tussauds' for the sake of others. And its true that Merlin had an initial positive drive when they took over the seriously declining parks, and brought back standard 'themes' in its new attractions and things that had been massively cut like Entertainments.

 

However it never reached near the standards they had before, while they focussed on going public and expanding into Asia and the US in the following years instead, their attention increasingly moving away from their longer established parks which is a real shame. The parks are now run in very poor states 'under the hood' as it were and departments are being scaled back again.

The most uncomfortable thing is mostly how happy they are to treat their attractions as 'brands', and that so long as they superficially live up to TV adverts and PR, then everything's ok. Rather than being positive places of work and parts of the country's entertainments culture, Chessington, Alton Towers, Thorpe Park in its earlier years, longstanding & historical attractions like Madame Tussauds, Warwick Castle, the 50 year old Legoland Billund, have all become run as tourist traps driving for profit and whichever cliched brand suits them best, running off minimum salary staff, inexperience and no real enterprise.

 

And I believe it shows hugely in the decline of the guest experience, no matter how many facades they cheaply repaint or 'major innovative investments' they impress shareholders with.

 

Merlin would be perfect if it truly understood what themed entertainment is, if it kept its bottom line in check and knew how to properly manage parks and creative projects. It would be a diverse, big budget themed entertainment institute with some of Europe's best parks benefitting from its success.

 

Instead, it is a selfish company run by ex-marketing directors with little true background in theme parks, who do things according to marketing conventions (even when it proves ineffective time and again), it relies on good looking, good talking management and satisfying its capital venture parent companies, they shun the heritage of their attractions and only care about "where they are taking the industry", entirely ignorant of their mistakes and the much more entertaining, innovative UK projects of the past.

[Mark9]

7 hours ago, HermanTheGerman said:

But it virtually was Merlin who changed it. Who cares if the name was different?

 

I do for the sake of accuracy and pedantic ness.

[Mer]

From the Wikipedia article on Tomb Blaster, which mentions why they changed the lasers (assuming it's correct):

 

Quote

 

In August 2015, Tomb Blaster closed for a nine-month refurbishment carried out by Merlin Magic Making, the design & creative division of Merlin Entertainments. Amidst health & safety concerns about a lack of maintenance over the years, all the sets were retreated for fire retardancy and a new fire exit installed in the station. Several sets were also retouched with fluorescent paint in an attempt to give an ultraviolet makeover. The 2002 laser gun system was removed and replaced with new equipment, after the original laser company had liquidated. All lighting and audio equipment in the ride was removed, to be replaced by LED ultraviolet units and different sound stores.

The ride re-opened during the annual pass preview weekend of 2016 to highly negative reviews.^[4] General response from guests as well as fans of the ride criticized the "unprofessional" nature of the new ultra violet lighting and audio alterations, citing missing sound effects, many animations still broken, missing pieces of the sets and excessive light spillage that revealed the areas intended to be covered by darkness.^[5]

 

 

 

Love that last paragraph

I didn't follow any updates on it during the refurb so didn't realise H&S was worked on too. Good to know that the "4 minute rule" shouldn't apply anymore if there's a fire

 

Having ridden this atrocity again yesterday, I've realised that different targets score different points, depending on what colour they turn when you hit them. The ones that turn a white/yellow colour score 100, either the blue or red score 50, and the other scores either 50 or 25 (can't remember exactly). So this is why it's so hard to get a decent score now; only some of the targets that 100, you don't know which targets score 100 UNTIL you hit them, plus a lot of them need to be fired at several times before they register. Some of them yesterday did seem to be more responsive though, which was good. But I shouldn't be having to say that - it should be all or at least the majority that work with the first shot, not half of them!

Another thing I don't get is that they still have the old targets (with the single green dot) as well as the new ones - do the old ones still work or...? They need to get the queue line TVs back and make a new video which explains how it works with the different colours/number of points. Or at least put signs up/add it to the ride board at the front. I've also heard families/children on the ride, or coming off the ride, saying they were confused, or that the older targets were easier...

The effects were out of sync and the rattling dog cage thing doesn't go off until the train has passed! You don't stop in the snake pit for that long at all. The mummies at the end were completely broken, not moving or anything. The boulder was, of course, broken too. The Anubis scene was stupidly quiet, I'm not even sure any audio was playing  The UV is terrible and ruins the whole feel of the attraction. It doesn't even make sense considering you're supposed to be in a, erm, tomb. 

The audio around the ride in general was hit and miss, with it suddenly cutting in at one point between scenes. Reminds me of how they messed up the Bubbleworks audio when it changed to Imperial Leather  The station audio is a bit of a mess too. It has one TV which still shows the old video, but it's not that loud and the audio from it cuts out when the station announcements play. However I'm glad they have the old announcements back and no longer use that awful "It's dangerous out there!" thing. 

And am I the only one who's noticed the lack of smell effects since this "refurb?"

 

Ugh, I just find the whole ride frustrating and no fun at all now!  

Edited May 30, 2017 by Mermite
Re-worded the bit about targets :P