Thorpe Park’s first Saturday
It doesn’t seem very long ago that I was at Thorpe Park, but it was actually last October! Anyway, we had a fantastic day yesterday, in somewhat of a mini heatwave. According to Metcheck, the temperature hit 20�C by early afternoon.
There have been a few changes around the park since last year, most obviously of course the huge area cordoned off behind construction walls. Previously home to Model World, the Sunken Garden and the Flying Fish, the patch of land will next year be occupied by Thorpe’s new rocket coaster, currently codenamed Project Stealth. At the moment, however, its just a rather large patch of dirt, albeit possibly one of the most photographed patches of dirt in Surrey.
Another smaller construction site currently occupies the space vacated by Eclipse when it left the park and hotfooted it across the Chessington over the winter. This will become home to Rush when it eventually arrives in June (according to many of the posters stuck up around the park). Not much to see yet, apart from a few bits of concrete with pipes sticking up.
Slammer, Thorpe’s new Sky Swat, was testing but is not ready to ride yet. At least its conforming, meaning none of the new rides installed at Tussauds’ UK parks this year have opened for the start of the season, whether or not they were originally scheduled to.
There appeared to be staff training going on in the afternoon though, with Samurai being down for ages while staff seemed to be congregating in Slammer’s control box. The water dummies at least were certainly having a good time riding.
A retheme of X:\No Way Out has been a long standing rumour for the last couple of seasons. While this still hasn’t happened, there have been a few “improvements” over the winter. Along with a new bit of queueline, the coaster now has a soundtrack (well, boom boom bass noises anyway). Inside the pyramid itself is an extremely low budget light show. The lights clearly came from Maplin and can’t have cost more than a few hundred pounds. Mind you, thinking about the amount of money spent, this could well be the best value retheme ever. ![[:haha:]](images/smile/smile19.gif)
Unfortunately, Thorpe have missed a golden opportunity to reach out to their new target audience by renaming the ride, so I have decided to do it for them. From now on it will no longer be known as “X colon backslash no way out”, but will be shortened to “ex-colon-chav-slash”. All they need now is neon-blue lights underneath the trains!
Also new for 2005 is a replacement for the Spider-Man show in the arena (”la la la la - Diamonds - cool as ice - la la la la”). They have at last found something half-decent to follow on from the classic Dive Show: Stuntzmania. Rather than trying to come up with a half-arsed storyline, they’ve employed a professional stunt team to put on a half hour show filled with just that - stunts.
Even though we didn’t get to see the full show (they were still building the set mid-morning and the dive pool is not yet filled with water), its a major improvement and definitely something I’ll be making the effort to see again later in the year.
Although (with the exception of the stunt show) there was nothing new on offer at Thorpe yesterday, we had a fantastic day out. Staff were friendly as ever - we got jumped on by Burger King staff all overly-eager to serve us. There was a small amount of downtime here and there, but nothing too substantial. Although at the beginning of the day it was obvious Thorpe were not expecting so many guests (e.g. only running one train on Inferno), they managed to pull off much of the usual magic which makes it a unique park to visit.
If yesterday was an indication of the rest of the season then this will be an awesome year, with memories of disasterous 2004 with a dodgy secondhand ride and events cancellations swept well out of sight.
Gate Figure: ~6000
