Fans of all things rockety and coastery can guarantee their place on Thorpe Park’s latest and greatest, Stealth, any day this season in exchange for some cold hard cash.
It appears the days of free Fastrack tickets are well and truly over.
The Rialto booking system is now offering an adult 1 day ticket and a paid-for-queue-jumping ticket to (near to) the front of the Stealth queue (once during the day, at a time of their choosing no doubt) for the bargain basement price of just �26.00.
When you see the day ticket price on the website this year is �19.95, you realise the incredible value. Only �6.05 for something which would have been free a couple of years ago.
But wait, there’s more value to be had! Fastrack tickets are also available in two packages - Adrenalin (Rush, Slammer, Samurai and Vortex) or Extreme (Colossus, Nemesis Inferno, X:\ No Way Out and a choice of Logger’s Leap or Tidal Wave) - for the even better value �8.05.
I’m not sure whether this is more a testament to Tussauds’ financial greed or the Great British Public’s stupidity. You pay almost �20 to get into a theme park where your admission ticket entitles you to ride the attractions for free all day but then you pay AGAIN for the exact same attactions, albeit with a shorter waiting time assuming lack of breakdowns. And people WILL pay. Twice, for the same thing. Interesting social phenomeon.
Generations of school children in South East England have experienced the rite of passage seeing one of the shows at the London Planetarium.
According to an article in today’s Independent, that’s all to change.
No longer will you be able to journey into deep space at the attraction alongside Madame Tussauds. Apparently star shows aren’t popular anymore. People would rather journey “around the worlds of fame and celebrity” instead.
I’ll tell you why nobody bothers to visit the Planetarium anymore: because the shows are rubbish. Audiences are spoken down to, as if they didn’t know what a planet or the Sun actually were. Bring back a bit more content and the visitors will return.
To be honest, this has been on the cards for sometime. Ever since Tussauds dumped the world famous star projector in the middle of Alton Towers as a bit of ride scenery, it was obvious the days of the serious Planetarium were numbered.
According to this article on Silicon.com, Tussauds are looking at integrating more high-tech gadgets into their attractions in an effort to encourage the GBP to get off their arses and go outside.
While surfing the net and watching DVDs is fun, there’s equal or more fun to be had outside, but it seems if it doesn’t involve a remote control it’s just not worth the hastle.
Playing the couch-potatoes at their own game, Tussauds is looking toward multimedia, touchscreens and image morphing bells and whistles to encourage punters out of their front doors.
Adding more technology into the parks seems like a good idea, but Tussauds aren’t being particularly inventive. I don’t see the point in watching a TV at Alton Towers rather than at home, and I can give all my friends big ears and tiny mouths in Photoshop.
Go ahead and make the place high-tech, but make it bleeding-edge and exciting rather than a re-creation of my front room.
Thorpe Park is one of my local theme parks that, under the command of the Tussauds Group, has been transformed in the last five or so years.
It has come a long way from the water park opened in 1979 on the site of a former gravel pit (see a great history of the park here).
Every now and then, a few pictures pop up on the web of those early days. Its interesting to see the attractions that used to lay on the site of today’s coasters and other rides.
I hope I’ve gone one better than a few more pictures: I’ve just acquired some 8mm film footage of the park in the very early years of operation.
I don’t know much about the history of the film. I know that it was filmed by an amateur cameraman who was apparently a member of a Surrey film club between the 50s and 70s. The film turned up at a house clearance auction along with a lot of others a while ago, and was in turn sold to me.It was suggested that it was filmed in 1975, although this doesn’t sound very plausible since the park didn’t open until 1979. It has also been mentioned though that this may have been filmed while the park was still being constructed - some kind of preview event? On the off chance that anybody knows anything/can identify something in the film which can help date it, please let me know or post a comment.
I know a few people who will be interested to see it, so I’ve done my best to make it available online as quickly as possible. Thus, so far its only been transferred into a digital format via an old analogue camcorder. The quality isn’t too bad, but of course nothing like that of the film itself.Since film and video have different framerates, there’s some noticeable flicker unfortunately. The next step will be to get this properly (professionally) transferred, before the notorious Super 8 colour fade sets in.
Hopefully this will prove interesting - but
please respect my bandwidth by downloading (right click, Save Target As…) the file rather than streaming it from the web server. I know there are a few problems with the conversion into Real Video - I’m aware of these and might put a better version online when I get the proper transfer done.You can download the film from
my videos page.
Edit: The video is now available in both Real and Windows Media versions