Great Adventures Never End
AJ leads us through Bugs Bunny National Park, the typical Six Flags/Looney Tunes kiddie area. (Always a waste of a good IP.) I suspect maybe AJ has another Wacky Worm credit he needs, but instead it’s simply a shortcut. We’re headed towards
The Joker.
This is an S&S Worldwide “Free Spin” coaster, a commonly-cloned model found in 4 Six Flags parks to date. (It’s this generation’s Boomerang, only I do not hate it.) The ride is a crazed zig zag of track stacked vertically, ride vehicle arms held out horizontally. Riders spin uncontrollably at random, based on their own weight distribution. It is out-of-control engineered chaos, hard to describe with words.
I’ll admit I was somewhat dreading this ride. Feared it’d be painful and disorienting. Instead it was pleasant while still insane. The sight of Josh in front of us suddenly twisting head-over-heels, his scraggly long hair covering his horrified face as he plummets upside down out-of-sight…it has me giggling right now. At the time I was cackling hysterically for literally one whole straight minute, very much like a Joker Smilex victim. This is certainly an aptly-named ride.
Please pardon the occasional stock images. My phone was in a locker for much of this day,
Joker scared me due to a similar ride at Magic Mountain – Green Lantern – which I still refuse to do. Its reputation for pain is unmatched. Great Adventure has a
Green Lantern too, only this one is a B&M stand-up coaster. Time is speedily running out on our locker rental, and we’re racing against time trying to cram this in first.
Stand-up coasters…pretty self explanatory. You ride in a standing position. Magic Mountain has supposedly the world’s best stand-up, Riddler’s Revenge, and it’s simply average. Not a particularly fun type of coaster. Just an excuse for more standard B&M inversions over acreage, plus gimmicky seating.
It takes them eons to load up Green Lantern, roughly 5 minutes per train. Blame the strange seating, which many guests cannot figure out. They try sitting down, guaranteeing their groins a pummeling mid-loop. The queue behind us (unthemed, unshaded, switchbacks) is filling fast. We do the ride, which was fine. Unremarkable but at least painless, which is the best a stand-up can hope for really.
Superman: Ultimate Flight nearby (a B&M flying coaster, a common Six Flags clone) would remain closed all day. Too bad. Kingda Ka also remains closed, taunting us.
We return to the locker with a single minute remaining. (Had we been late, there’d be a $2 additional charge I think – grr!) We collect our worldly possessions.
SFGA is filled with Mars Candy branding, presumably as a middle finger to Hersheypark.
So I mentioned that Great Adventure is laid out in a “T.” We’ve done all the working coasters on the left side. Happily, to reach the right side you can take the
Sky Ride gondolas, a very helpful transportation ride which leave from the fort near Runaway Mine Train. These provide great views of the rides and of the great big lake just beyond Joker.
The Sky Ride lets off near
Skull Mountain, an enclosed Intamin coaster which is best described as “Space Mountain on a Six Flags budget.” The exterior is a cool skull-shaped mountain with a waterfall, and despite the boxy show building this is still a good bit of regional place-making. Too bad the park’s wonky layout means we approached Skull Mountain from the side and the skull never served its function as weenie.
The ride has a basic adventure serial theme. At least in the queue. The ride section is simply total darkness – penetrated by mechanical readouts and sunlight peering in from cracks. There’s a big crystal skull at the end, the last remainder of onetime fuller theming. No more music or strobe lights now. As a coaster, Skull Mountain is…totally forgettable.
Nitro is anything but forgettable. This is the best B&M hypercoaster I’ve done yet. It begins very similarly to Diamondback, with a big drop (212’) followed by a series of hills. As a B&M, it’s buttery smooth and gentler than an Intamin like El Toro. Given that, Nitro is surprisingly exciting – just a well-executed version of a known ride type. It boasts a return-trip helix which nearly caused me to grey-out. Little pink goblins with pitchforks danced before my eyes.
We go to the Movie Town area – and let it stand that Great America is altogether unthemed, with standard contemporary buildings and basic landscaping. Standing in for a theme, this area confusingly has two unrelated Batman rides – Tim Burton’s
Batman: The Ride, and Christopher Nolan’s
The Dark Knight Coaster.
We start with The Dark Knight because AJ wants a break from B&Ms. This is an enclosed Mack Wild Mouse. These coasters top out at “meh,” and this one even enters the realm of painful. I straight-up enunciated “
Ouch” on it. Not a good ride.
But then there’s the
Dark Knight theming. For Six Flags, they go all-out. There’s a pre-show video complete with Aaron Eckhart’s Harvey Dent. The video is too long, with a lower hourly capacity than the ride itself. There’s on-ride theming too, like static figures of Batman and Joker, and seedy Gotham alleyways. Apparently I missed a lot of specific sights. A Wild Mouse is a poor format for a dark ride, methinks.
Then there’s the wide disparity between the D-ticket ride type and the blockbuster it’s repeating. You inevitably enter with expectations the ride cannot match. I have to agree with the general consensus that Dark Knight is a poor coaster in all regards. “
I actively hate it” I declared upon unloading, echoing Josh’s dumb opinion of El Toro.
Batman: The Ride is the original B&M invert, one which has been cloned across numerous Six Flags parks (including my local Magic Mountain). This one is the second.
AJ is lukewarm on these Batman inverts, which tend to be very short and incredibly forceful. Do you like long periods of sustained positive Gs? I like Batman: The Ride fine. It doesn’t bother me, it doesn’t stand out, it’s a perfectly middle tier ride.
That queue, however, I loathe. Six Flags often futzes up when they attempt theming! The outside Gotham Park area is inoffensive. The inside, though, simulates a boiling-hot metal tin pipe…by placing you in exactly that. The temps today are nearing 100 as it is, and now the park is actively overheating and dehydrating everyone just before a super forceful roller coaster. Great Adventure should really change this.
Lunchtime! All three of us know better than to eat Six Flags food. Happily there are always in-park chain restaurants as a fallback. AJ does Johnny Rocket’s while Josh and I do Panda Express. Acceptable within the context.
AJ wanted to try a new Cyborg flat ride next, but it’s down for the day.
Let’s do one more Batman ride based on a totally unrelated DC property –
Justice League: Battle for Metropolis. This one’s a Sally Corp. shooter dark ride, a model that Six Flags has cloned across nearly all their parks in the last few years. You could call the ride almost Universal in quality, though the cloning waters it down a lot. In a DisneyVersal park this thing would get long lines, but in a dark ride desert like Great America it’s sparsely attended.
Justice League is a good ride, interactive and fun and thrilling in the way Uni’s Spider-Man is thrilling. Still it’s a ride which which try as I might I just cannot love. It’s a modern dark ride with budget and tech behind it, about a popular IP, and it all feels slightly hollow.
For contrast we check out an archaic period dark ride,
Houdini’s Great Escape. There’s nothing on the mansion’s exterior to suggest what it is – I guess it’ll be a Vekoma Mad House. It has long load cycles, meaning we’re sweating under the hot Six Flags sun for epochs. Entering the mansion, there’s an exposition-heavy pre-show about conjuring Houdini’s spirit, followed by the ride itself…
A Vekoma Mad House. Nailed it!! Only one I’ve done, so I’m stoked. These are odd ducks. You sit in rotating seats in a seemingly solid room. Actually you’re inside a gigantic kaleidoscope. The seats and the room rotate in synch, creating ghostly gravity effects. Then the rotations diverge, and for several dizzifying minutes the barriers of reality break down like in
Inception or
Doctor Strange.
Houdini’s Great Escape would be a great ride
IF it were staffed properly. You cannot bring loose articles onto the ride, which no one mentions until we’re all seated. Then every guest with a souvenir drink bottle or a carnival plush must exit the séance room – crossing the row straight past us seated riders – and then return. And
still other guests do not get the hint, and cling to their gear. Eventually they’re found out, repeating the cycle. It takes 5 minutes to get started. All this could be fixed with simple Velcro pouches by the ride seats (like in European Mad Houses).
With most of the park’s big rides done, let’s return to the one that got away. Could there still be a chance of riding Kingda Ka?
Up next: Reaching new heights
