Hello everyone and welcome back to another edition of RCPro: Blogged! If you haven’t already heard, the Amusement Today Golden Ticket winners have been announced, and once again, we should all be able to recite who won what pretty much word for word from last year (and the year before that, and the year before that, and the year before…I think you get the idea). Thankfully though, the Golden Tickets aren’t the only talking point for this blog because otherwise I would just stop writing now. Last week Cedar Point finally announced their plans for 2010 and disappointed every coaster enthusiast who was adamant on it being a roller coaster because of the “hype” surrounding the mystery. There’s also another slightly heartwarming story out of Cedar Point from two weeks ago as well, a charity event for Give Kids the World. So let’s jump into it with the Golden Tickets.

If you can’t at least tell me who won Best Amusement Park and Best Water Park already then you are obviously new to the coaster world. Cedar Point and Schlitterbahn (New Braunfels, TX) took the title for their respective category for the twelfth year in a row (that’s how long the Golden Tickets have been going on as well). Running down the rest of the Best Of list there are not really many surprises. Dudley Do-Right won best water ride, Voyage once again took the honors for best wooden coaster, the newly renovated Bizarro at SFNE took best steel coaster (that’s two years in a row the ride has beaten Millennium Force, which was second once again), and so on and so forth down the list. But wait! Wasn’t Holiday World the reigning champ in both Friendliest Staff and Cleanest Park? Yes they were, but in what appears to be the only real surprise this year, Silver Dollar City took the Friendliest Staff award (HW still got Cleanest Park)!

The Golden Tickets, despite their worth to the marketing departments of the parks, are quickly becoming a long running and annual joke among a majority of enthusiasts. I personally am waiting for Cedar Point to get knocked from its spot at the top, though something tells me I will be waiting for a long time. What are your thoughts on the Golden Tickets? Is almost everyone to the point where these are simply annual press releases for the park, or do some of you still place merit on these results? I would really like to hear the opinions of the community on this topic. If you want to view the full results of this year’s Golden Tickets, you can click here.

Moving on to our next topic, Cedar Point’s 2010 announcement we find an extremely mixed bag of responses. Obviously a lot of people were hoping for a shiny new coaster, which has resulted in some major disappointment for some. Others had their minds in the right place and were thinking along the lines of a water ride. On Thursday September 3rd Cedar Point announced Shoot the Rapids, a new water ride (I won’t call it a log flume, as the vehicles are far from the log boats of a flume). For many the perceived level of hype created by the teasing and hints was considered a direct insult with the lack of a coaster. I simply say the enthusiasts created the hype and got their hopes way too high. Of course I also knew a bit about what was coming, but the lesson still stands; don’t set your expectations too high leading up to a ride announcement (something we also learned with Kings Dominion’s Intimidator 305).

As for the actual ride, it definitely looks more like a traditional flume ride in terms of the layout, although it does appear from the animations that there are quite a few possible soak points. The vehicles are the same as on Pilgrims Plunge at Holiday World, with the over the head lap bars (note, these are NOT OTSRs). That also makes me wonder if – like Pilgrims Plunge – this will have a moving loading style where the boats do not actually stop in the station. There is also the very glaring issue of the as of yet unconfirmed height requirement. The park is already pushing this as a family ride, but the height requirement will play a big role in how accessible the ride is to the entire family. White Water Landing, which this is supposedly a replacement for, had a minimum height of 46” unless accompanied by an adult, which allowed for everyone except hand-held infants to ride. Shoot the Rapids, however, has individual restraints, which obviously is a big limitation to who can ride. Pilgrims Plunge has a minimum height of 48”, and I would not be surprised if that is what gets put in place on Shoot the Rapids. Unfortunately that 48” height requirement really makes the ride a very poor replacement for White Water Landing as it extensively limits the “family” aspect of the ride (i.e. the whole family can ride it together). That is to say nothing of the possibility of getting soaked instead of just getting a little splash like on White Water Landing or other flumes, which is another possible detriment to being considered a family ride. Overall, the ride has the possibility to fill an existing gap at the park, but it could also fail rather miserably at that goal if the height requirement and soak factor are wrong. I like the look of the attraction and certainly hope it can succeed at filling the family water ride gap.

On August 26th, there was a great charity event that took place at Cedar Point for a wonderful charity, Give Kids the World. A group of enthusiasts (mostly from CoasterBuzz, as that was the organizing website) marathoned Gemini from 7am until 5pm, raising almost $8,000! You may have noticed a Facebook and Twitter message the week before the event happened alerting you to a CoasterBuzz event and were probably wondering why we were mentioning it. In my opinion things like what website is sponsoring an event doesn’t matter when it comes to a charity, especially one directly related to our industry. If you missed out on donating before the event you can still give to the charity, and I’ll put the links in the discussion for this in the forums once I have them. For those that aren’t familiar with Give Kids the World I encourage you to get to know them a little better. You can be sure that I will be keeping my eyes and ears open for the next GKTW event so that you know and can help out.

That about does it for this edition of RCPro: Blogged! As always thanks for reading and please join the discussions over in our forums to let us know what you think!