Amusement Park Ride Photos

The Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden held their HallZOOween celebration last month. And, even though they didn’t come up with any custom digital frames or borders for the event, that doesn’t mean gate photos weren’t being taken.  In fact, Who Dey, the Cincinnati Bengals mascot even stopped by to pose with some of the munchkins.  There was also at least one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in attendance as evidenced by the photo below.

Of course, our focus here is on the souvenir photos available, but the zoo also had a special Haunted Lighthouse film in their Special FX 4-D Theater as well as a special Halloween show, Theater of Illusion by magician/illusionist Phil Dalton. The kids weren’t the only ones celebrating Halloween, though. The animals got into the act with pumpkin hunts for the gorillas and snow monkeys, a polar bear pumpkin bob and the elephants’ pumpkin smash.

Six Flags may not be able to match Knott’s Berry Farm for overall theming of the park for Halloween, but when it comes to souvenir photos and custom digital frames/borders, they wipe the map with Cedar Fair.  The only step they missed was not having special Fright Fest photo folders like those available at the Knott’s Scary Farm Halloween Haunt.

Zaira and I visited along with her friend Hannah and managed to bring home more than half a dozen new photos for our collection.  Before I start detailing the photos, though, there have been a few changes to the way pictures are handled at Six Flags Discovery Kingdom…

First, we did not receive a My Six Flags Photos card from the gate photographer as we usually do.  Frankly, I forgot about it until we were home, so it is possible they had them available, but our gate photographer gave us the standard paper slip instead.

Second (and more importantly, IMO), Six Flags now offers $5.oo Kodak photo vouchers on their website.  If you’re a fan of theme park photos and are buying your tickets online anyway then this is a great deal!  Not only do you need to use your cash in the park as they’re prepaid, but it’s a great deal as well since these are normally a minimum of $12.99.  The only problem is that Six Flags has also instituted a $5.00 per order ‘delivery’ fee for etickets and vouchers that you print at home.  I realize they’re trying desperately to avoid bankruptcy, but this is an absolutely ridiculous fee.  Even at $5.00 it verges on gouging, particularly since we have season passes so the only reason we need to use their online ticketing system is to buy these Kodak photo vouchers.

Back to the topic at hand, check out the digital frames on those two gate photos.  Not only did they make separate horizontal and vertical borders, but both are awesome!  Although the vertical is more fitting with the theme of Fright Fest, I just love the way that Gossamer the Hair Monster looms over us.
But that’s not the end of Fright Fest Photo goodness. The picture on the right was taken while I was chowing down on super worms from the Wheel of Fright. Although it’s not a very good photo, IMO, I love the Halloween cuteness of the digital frame.  This would be even better for pics of kids in costumes, perhaps with a character or two.

Speaking of characters… The only one we managed to get a photo with was Sylvester The (Cat) Vampire. but there were plenty of others out and about as well: Bugs (Bunny) Vampire, Tweety (Bird) Baseball Player, Franken-Foghorn Leghorn-stein’s Monster, and Daffy (Duck) The Pirate. We didn’t see the Tasmanian Devil, but I’m sure he was out and about somewhere.  I am considering returning next Saturday (November 1st) for the primary purpose of hunting down photo opps with Lonney Tunes characters dressed up in Halloween.

The great thing about collecting Six Flags ride photos is that they make special holiday frames for all of their on ride photos.  In fact, for their most popular roller coaster, Medusa, they not only made a special Fright Fest frame, but it’s an entirely different look then the either the standard Medusa ride photo, last year’s Fright Fest frame, or last year’s Holiday in the Park ride photo.  We actually bought three Medusaphotos on this trip-

Medusa isn’t the only coaster with a ride photo of course. Somehow we missed out on the Fright Fest frame for Cobra last year, so I have no comparison photo for y’all, but we were pleased to get our grubby mitts on this one. The ride itself is amusing, but the fogged up ride photo is top notch.

Of course, no trip to Six Flags Discovery Kingdom is complete without a ride on their wooden roller coaster, Roar. Unfortunately, the ride photo equipment was having problems and didn’t grab our picture on our first ride. We returned later in the evening, checked in at the photo booth to ensure it was operating, and headed through the exit with our flash passes to ride again. Still no photo. It literally broke down again on the ride before ours :(. The folks at the booth were very understanding, however. They offered me another flash pass ride, but instead I asked for (and received) a copy of someone else’s Roar ride photo. After all, not getting our photo was unfortunate, but missing this cool fright Fest frame would have been a tragedy.

Zaira and I have visited Knott’s Berry Farm four times now. And we finally managed to get our picture taken with Snoopy. But it wasn’t easy. In fact, we had to wait for the Camp Snoopy kids area to be transformed into Camp Spooky before we could finally find America’s favorite beagle.  Not only that, but we still had to hunt him down.  In fact, we found his staff photographer before Snoopy arrived and had a picture taken in front of his ‘house’ thinking that was the best we were going to to do.

Fortunately, for us, just after the picture above was taken we saw Snoopy (and his handler/escort, of course) enter the ‘on stage’ area (if that’s what Cedar Fair calls it) from a door tucked away in the corner.  Snoopy was one of the most gracious characters we’ve met on our park visits, even waving to us and encouraging us to wait just a few more minutes while his escort fixed his boots and straightened his pirate costume.  We waited patiently until he came over, gave Zaira a big beagle-y hug, and then posed along with us for the pic on the right. Snoopy wasn’t the only character haunting Camp Spooky on that lovely Sunday morning, though. WWe also found the folowing critters wandering about-

These have got to be some of the weirdest ‘monsters’ I’ve ever had the pleasure of encountering, but I guess they’re less frightening to the little kiddies when they’re this goofy. There was reportedly a Witch of some wort out and about on that day as well, but we kept missing her, so will have to wait until the 37th edition of Knott’s Scary Farm’s Halloween Haunt to immortalize her in our collection.  Of course, if you managed to grab a shot with her we’d love to post it up here.  BTW, I added the Haunt digital border myself after pulling it from the official photos we had taken yesterday.

Aside from our extended ‘Snoopy hunt’ we also kept managing to miss riding the Timber Mountain Log Ride on our previous visits. Well actually, we only missed it on the first two visits. Last night we did ride the Pyromaniax version of the ride, adding the re-themed photo to our collection.  Today, between monster hunts in Camp Spooky we also rode the ’standard’ version of one of the oldest log flumes in America and picked up the picture to the right.  The dad behind us was teasing his two boys throughout the ride about how “spooky’ it was.  But they got the last laugh when they bought this photo’cause who’s the one who ends up looking the most nervous?

Knott’s Berry Farm literally invented the concept of the haunted amusement park thirty seven years ago. Now there’s hardly a theme park in the world that doesn’t do some level of revamp for Halloween. But Knott’s Scary Farm is still, by far, the best.  I hadn’t been to the Knott’s Halloween Haunt since 1996 and Zaira had never been so we were pretty excited to be able to attend opening weekend this year.  As always, Knott’s came through with flying colors, despite their takeover by Cedar Fair.

The top left photo is the cardboard frame created specifically for Halloween Haunt.  Oddly it was only available with the set photo pictured on the right. We came across this photo opp pretty quickly and Z jumped at the chance to have her picture taken in a coffin. As a father I’ve got to say this did creep me out just a bit and her mother is horrified by this picture. But Z’s all about vampires at the moment thanks to Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight books.

As always, Knott’s went all out with their theming and created a wonderfully spooky custom digital frame for Halloween haunt this year. In addition to using it for the gate photos (left), they also had photographers throughout the park to capture ‘monster attacks’ and other set photos near the scare zones.  The one to the right was taken in front of Xcaliber in the CarnEvil zone.

But it’s not just haunted mazes and scare zones that transforms Knott’s Berry Farm into Knott’s Scary Farm!  They are also the masters at re-theming rides.  The Timber Mountain Log Ride has regularly been converted to Pyromaniax for several years now - adding fire effects, “live” monsters, and other goodies to its usually tranquil setting. As excited as I always am to find new holiday digital frames I must say I’m a bit disappointed in the Knott’s team on this one count. The Halloween frame for Pyromanix is pretty cool, but it doesn’t seem to fit the “toxic fire” theme set by Pyromaniax. In fact it would much better match the Camp GonnaGetcha retheming of Logger’s Run at California’s Great America (which didn’t have a holiday frame at all).  The top half of the frame has definitely creepi-fied the old saw mill building, but the burbling blood and dismembered arms, while suitably Halloween themed, don’t seem to go with this ride’s theme.

Zaira and I had the pleasure of attending the opening night (aka Media Event) of the first-ever Halloween Haunt event at California’s Great America. The park has had Halloween events in the past, but nothing of this scale and not for many years.  Cedar Fair is to be applauded for tapping the crew from Knott’s Scary Farm to create Halloween Haunt at Great America as well.

Unfortunately, they barely scratched the surface of the custom, Halloween-themed digital frame.  The only one they had available was for the gate photos which you can see above.  They did go to quite a bit of effort to completely re-theme their Loggers Run log flume ride as Camp GonnaGetcha, but then dropped the ball by only having the standard digital frame available.  Luckily, for Z and I, we still needed to add the official California’s Great America digital frame to our collection.

Still, when it comes to Holiday ride photos, they’ve got a lot to learn from their older brother to the south: Knott’s Scary Farm.  You can read my full review of the event at my primary blog, Philaahzophy.

While wandering the web I came across a great blog post at Brent’s Online Journal. It seems his family visited Dollywood in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee earlier this year where he got the awesome picture shown here. That’s him with his six year old daughter Jillian on Dollywood’s latest coaster, Mystery Mine.

Mystery Mine is a two and a half minute roller coaster ride with a 95-degree, 85-foot vertical drop, a weightless inversion known as a “heart-line roll” and […] Continue Reading…