I was at the grocery store the other day, buying two cases of soda and a can of Pringles potato chips. When I got to the counter a guy came up behind me with his food, which included oatmeal and generic orange juice. He looked to be about forty-five years old, his hair was slicked back, and he had thick-rimmed glasses. In general, I started feeling sorry for him for some reason and thought to myself, I hope that's not me twenty years from now. (Side note: twenty years from now I will be older than forty-five, but work with me on this one.)

So, I paid my money and left the store, thinking about what I wanted to get done at home that night. The cashier had only given me one bag, which she put the chips inside of. So that meant that I had to carry a case of soda under each arm while trying to hold on to the bag with my right hand.

To get back to my car, I had to walk out of the store, down a sidewalk, through a small indoor mall, past a back alley and then to the parking lot I had parked in. (Side note 2: Yes, I could have parked closer to the store, but I'm not that smart.)

Anyway, by the time I had gotten inside the mall I was losing my grip on one of the sodas. I set everything down on the bench to try to get a better grip. As I did, the guy that was behind me in the grocery store walked past me. I wondered to myself why he would have parked all the way on the other side of the mall and began to chuckle when I realized that I had done the same thing` and he seemed to be making out with his food better than I was. It was at this point that I did not need to worry about being this guy twenty years from now...I was this guy now.

I regrouped by coming up with the brilliant idea of putting one of the sodas inside of the bag with the Pringles. Now, being the genius that I am, I still put the bag with the Pringles and soda in it under one arm, while carrying the other case with the other arm. I got about fifty feet before the Pringles fell out of the bag and the case began slipping out of my arm.

I got to another bench, set everything down again and tried to come up with another way to carry the three items that I had purchased. I decided to gamble and try keeping the Pringles and one soda in a bag, but to carry the bag by the handle this time. I expected it to break (darn recycled bags just can't hold up), but at this point I just wanted to get to my car.

I had another one of my great ideas. I figured it would save me time if I got my keys out of my pocket now instead of getting to my car and then having to fight for them. So I took the keys out of my pocket and noticed that one was missing. The key to my office was not there. I had leant it to another employee for the prior night and left it in the office that day.

It was bad enough that I couldn't figure out how to carry three items at one time, but now I had to worry about I was going to open the office the next morning at 6:00 am. Well, it turns out I couldn't open the office, as I was unable to track down anybody else from the office to get a key and security in my building would not help. Instead, I had to sit outside the door to our suite for more than an hour the next morning before the first person with a key showed up.

That's my story about how something simple like buying three items at a grocery store turned into an hour and a half adventure. And how a forty-five year old, single, oatmeal eating, hair slicked back, plaid wearing guy that I had pity for became the guy I envied because he figured out how to carry groceries and had all of his keys.

It's not exactly an exciting story, but it's all I've got. Now on to more important things...

The Hype Machine

We have almost all been guilty of it. A new attraction is announced at one of our favorite parks. The park itself is promoting at least one feature of the ride as being the biggest, first, fastest, or most unique of its kind. We begin to imagine what the ride is going to be like before ground has been broken. Comparisons begin to fly with other attractions of its kind, and the hype has begun.

Then, several months later, the attraction opens. For some, it means a sleepless night, a lot of travel, and then an arrival at the park well before it opens just so we can be one of the first to ride. Then comes the ride itself and it hasn't lived up to the hype that has been built over the last few months. The disappointment is immediate, and thanks in part to the internet, begins to spread around the enthusiast community. By the time the average enthusiast even rides, their opinion is warped by the reviews of the critics who have ridden ahead of them.

The above situation happens just about every year. It often happens to several attractions each year. It will continue to happen long into the future. The question before us today is: Whose fault is it? Do the parks over-market their new attractions or do enthusiasts built up hype amongst themselves that is impossible for the parks to live up to?

It is hard to blame the parks alone. After all, a park isn't supposed to build a new ride and then promote by saying that it "will be ok". It is the job of the park's marketing department to get the park goer excited about what is to come next year. This could be accomplished by highlighting key stats, or the uniqueness of the ride, or any other feature that the park thinks is easily marketed.

That part is easy, and that part is something that we should all expect from the parks. But it is at this point where a separation comes between enthusiasts and the average park goer. There is a debate whether the truth is that the average visitor just doesn't care as much about the stats or uniqueness to take the marketing as seriously as the enthusiast does or if the average visitor doesn't know any better than to know when the park is stretching the truth or using other means of "clever marketing". I suppose the answer is somewhere in the middle.

Now, to switch the focus to the enthusiast, the marketing doesn't end here. First, there is the internet. This is where I would suggest that sixty percent of the marketing for any park takes place. The majority of that comes from the various unofficial websites and message boards. It is here that park fans (or fan-boys, or shills, or whatever you want to call them) picks up the ball that the parks began rolling and hypes the ride to a point that is sometimes downright disgusting.

But the blame isn't all with the enthusiast community. Case in point is Paramount's Kings Island's Tomb Raider: The Ride. While it is easy to blame the number of PKI shills around the internet who teased and hyped the uniqueness of this new attraction, they weren't the ones who went to No Coaster or EastCoaster with videos announcing a totally immersive dark ride adventure (I'm close anyway). They also weren't the ones who sent out a number of emails offering pictures of the construction, yet not revealing what the ride itself was.

Don't get me wrong; I love when a park is so kind as to share their pictures and updates to the ride. However, they should know that this means that each email or press release adds to the hype and excitement around the ride. And when a park wants to not only not reveal what the ride itself is, but continually tease us by pretending they will let us know or remind us that we don't know, only to have the ride turn out to be extremely similar to rides around the country, then they are asking for some of the more critical of our community to get disappointed or upset.

So, what's the point? The "blame" has to be widespread, but it is very interesting that only the enthusiast community is complaining. I have yet to hear a park raise concern that they are overhyping attractions. They don't seem to be upset with enthusiast reaction to their rides if they don't live up to the hype. I'm sure they are privately concerned, but the risk of disappointing a few is something that every business encounters.

For every enthusiast disappointed in Tomb Raider, or Millennium Force, or Test Track, or V2, there are dozens who feel that these and other "overhyped" attractions did indeed live up to the hype. More importantly, for every disappointed there are hundreds or thousands of average visitors who either don't care that the attraction didn't quite live up to the hype that the park built on the internet or didn't even know that the park was hyping it on the internet. For this reason, the parks will continue to market their rides as they are now. Only few will stop going to Cedar Point because Wicked Twister didn't live up to their expectations. Many more will be more likely to come back, in part, because of the newest and unique attraction. The parks may overhype at times, but it is working.

This all raises one more set of questions that I will leave open-ended for now. Why do parks concentrate as much of an effort as they do on the internet or the enthusiast community in general? Without having details, I can't imagine that many non-enthusiasts were on PKI's (or any other park's) mailing list during the off-season to get updates on Tomb Raider's construction. I also know from first-hand experience that there weren't many non-enthusiasts and EastCoaster.

I think its safe to say that the huge majority of visitors to a park in a given year saw less than half of the marketing efforts that the park made in hyping their newest attraction. To them, the hype machine barely exists. Yet, they are the ones on whom the hype machine would best work.

TV Review: PCN Tours Waldameer Park

The Pennsylvania Cable Network has begun a series of PCN Tours of Pennsylvania's amusement parks. The series will run on PCN each Sunday night at 8:00 pm until Labor Day. First up was Waldameer Park and Water World in Erie.

The tour was provided by the park's General Manager Steve Gorman and began with a history of the park, dating back to its days as a trolley park starting in 1896. From there, the show had some great views of the park and the area from the top of the Chance ferris wheel and the sky ride.

One of the park's existing picnic shelters, Lakeview Grove, was actually the station house for the Ravine Flyer, the wooden coaster that was torn down in the late 1930's. Another shelter, not named, was the carousel building for some time. The park's Monkey Island attraction from the 1950's was removed from the park because the monkeys were needed to be part of the US space program.

The oldest attraction in the park is believed to be one of the kiddie rides, but the park has lost much of the paperwork and historical information. Gorman estimates that two of the rides are at least sixty years old.

Gorman was obviously proud of the awards that both of their dark rides, Whacky Shack and Pirate's Cove, received from DAFE earlier this year. The tour was filmed less than a week after DAFE visited in June.

Thunder River, the flume ride, was the park's largest single expansion at $2.5 million. Gorman pointed out that the queue wove under and around the ride to get to the station, a feature that I personally liked about the ride. Gorman did not mention the water bombs that non-riders can activate, a feature I did not necessarily enjoy. Gorman further noted that Thunder River is the most popular ride in the park, with daily capacity of about 8,000 people. He hoped that they could add a large wooden coaster soon so that Thunder River would become the second most popular attraction.

The larger coaster is something that Mr. Gorman mentioned on several occasions, as it obviously is something that the park is still looking forward to. As am I.

The park also has expansion plans for the Water World park, including multi-person slides (five-to-six per raft) and a wave pool, which Gorman said they would use the existing parking lot to make room for.

Gorman noted that it is hard to get an exact figure on attendance due to the fact that they are a free admission park (something he noted on several occasions during the tour). However, the park estimates attendance at about 400,000 people annually.

As somebody who doesn't know much about water parks, I found what he had to say about Water World to be particularly fascinating. Gorman said that the water is mostly kept at the same temperature as Lake Erie. He said that they originally heated the water at the end of the water slides, but stopped doing that because they found that visitors would spend too much time in the water after their slide was done. Now with cooler temperatures, the riders get out of the water quicker and they can send the next slider down the slide more quickly. He said they do get complaints about the cooler temperature of the water, but it is still to their advantage to operate that way. Pretty cool stuff that I never thought about.

The production quality of PCN Tours is not world class, but that isn't the point. Instead, we get to see the parks (and other Pennsylvania businesses) from a behind the scenes perspective. If future parks are as interesting as Waldameer's presentation, it should be a good summer for PA television viewers.

Up next for PCN is Sesame Place on July 14, and Del Grosso's Amusement Park on July 21.

Coaster 3:16 Takes To The Airwaves

On an off note, I wanted to let those readers in the Philadelphia airwave that I am now on the radio every weekend. I am doing a Weekend Business Report for KYW Newsradio, am 1060, in Philadelphia. The reports are one minute in length and are played three times each Sunday. My focus is on oil and gasoline prices and developments in that industry. Unfortunately, I don't know the exact times ahead of time, but KYW plays the business reports from various analysts every :25 and :55 past the hour all day on Sunday. I go under my business name of "Jeff Mokychic", so if you are in the area check it out.

I've started going to my home park, Dorney Park, more regularly now that I've fallen in love with Talon. That is a highly underrated ride in my opinion. But the thing that is really drawing me back this year is the Dance To The Music show. Yes, seriously.

Dorney's entertainment has gone from a group of kids doing karaoke to a fourteen-piece orchestra and some extremely talented singers and dancers. Dance To The Music could be the best park show I have personally seen. With the new Center Stage at the park, DTTM is worth at least stopping by a seeing a part of. Kudos to Dorney for yet another improvement.

Well, that should do it for now. In two weeks I'll be back with more, including thoughts from Six Flags Worlds of Adventure and preparations for a trip to Dollywood. Also, I'll have two more PCN Tour tv reviews for your enjoyment. Until then, take care and please take a back seat ride once for me...

                                                                                 Coaster 3:16

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You can reach him at:  Coaster_316@yahoo.com