Amusement park rides you really miss.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Upon proofreading this post, I noticed that the links do not go directly to the pictures. The host site does not allow it, so go here, scroll down to the appropriate photos, and open them instead of the following links.
It was the coolest ride ever. At least at AstroWorld, now Six Flags Houston. The Alpine Sleigh ride.
The mountain the track winded thriogh was a marvel of tacky Eurokitch. A miniature Matterhorn of merriment. The ride started with your rail car winding around the ground, so you could appreciate the wonderful view. As the previous picture shows, dusk was truly the best time to ride. After going by a beautiful fake waterfall (that may or may not have been working at that exact time), you went into a cave. Emerging around the back of the mountain, you went into another cave.

This was Echo Cave. At this cave you screamed and hollered to your lungs desire. Coming out of that cave, you came again by the waterfall, only higher up. Yes, you are ascending the mountain, but the bizarre fun gets better. You go into another cave, and you hear the echo. Yes, they recorded all your screams and hollers from the previous cave and are playing it back to delight or embarrass you.

As you exit this cave all of a sudden your car speeds up. You are going downhill around a bend. You see another cave, but there is a warning above. ACHTUNG, it says. You are going into an active mine. They are blasting. Strobe lights flash in a faux explosion as you descend into the deepest, darkest cave. You also notice that it is very cold. They have very cold AC units blasting air down on you. The absolute perfect place to be after baking in the hot, humid, Houston summer. You wind into a funky cave with sparkles all around. Then you go into another room. The abominal snowmans room. Look out! Hes trying to grab you. Then you exit the cave and return to the start.

And what did Six Flags get rid of this ride for? Some stupid kiddy enchanted kingdom with Bugs, Daffy, and Yosemete Sam. How fucked up! Sorry, I had to rant.

It is now where Batman, the Escape roller coaster is. Part of the mountain remains. You wait in line about an hour going through what remains until you get on the ride.

The last time I went to Six Flags, the original, in 1982, there was a cool boat ride called Spelunkers cave. I bet it is some shitty Warner Brothers cartoon kiddy ride now.

Share your experiences.

2

I miss three rides that used to be at Cedar Point when I was a kiddie.
The first was taken out a few years ago. It was the Earthquake. A silly ride in a slow car tour through a crumbling San Fransisco. it rocked because it was a great break from fast rides and the thing was air-conditioned.(always a bonus on a 95* day in July) No matter how many times I’d been on the thing, I still got a chill down my spine when the car went through parts of an opening wall, for the milisecond before the wall opend you’d swear we were going to crash. The old cement building echoed something fierce, and it was amusing to yell up a storm trying to scare the little kids in the car behind you.
The Pirate ride, which is similar was still there the last time I went and is also a good break from the heat, but no where near as fun.
The second didn’t last very long, but it was a tobaggan type coaster. I liked it because the cars were not attached to a track, but ran inside a semi-open tube. It beat you around, it twisted upsidedown rather slowly, and you’d think you were going to fall out of the thing. It was a rough wonderfull thing. I believe it got removed for one of thier super-duper-biannual-mega-coasters.
The third was the Jumbo Jet. I was just tall enough to ride it the year it was removed so my memory is rather vague. It whipped you around hairpin curves,and it slammed you into short straight aways. Everything that was great about early steel coasters was great about that ride.
I also miss thier fun house. The upsidedown room gave me vertigo as a child. I still have nightmares of a cat laying on the ceiling.

3

The Teacups at Disneyland. I always laughed like a maniacal idiot on those no matter how old I was.

4

Sadly. I miss them all. After years of rollercoasters and other thrill rides… I have lost the ability to tolerate the motion. I first noticed this when my daughter was about three and we would go to the park so she could play on the swings. Sometimes when I was swinging beside her I’d get a bit woozy.

Fast forward six years and the kids and I are at one of those carnivals that travels around with the usual assortment of easily transported rides (graviton, ferris wheel, octopus etc…) and my daughter and I have passes to all the rides. We ride them all, but my stomach is NOT happy. It’s giving fairly urgent warning that all is not well.

I’m a tad bit too stubborn to let a bit of nausea stop me though, so the whole family decides to tackle the tilt-a-wirl before we leave (it’s free even without the pass and at the top end of my son’s extreme ride scale). It is just the happenstance of being a parent and wanting the kids on the inside, that I am sitting at the outside edge of the half-shell pod that is typical of the tilt-a-wirl ride. This made it possible for me to throw up out of the car onto the ride platform instead of into the car with my family.

My daughter now calls it the “hurl-a-whirl” while my son has chose the “tilt-and-hurl” in exactly the fashion you would expect kids to pointedly remember to mock their dad after a public embarrasment.

Later in the year I discovered that I can’t read while riding in the car. Hello, my name is DJ. I’m 37 and carnival rides are too much for me. A gravol makes them almost rideable but gives me a oddly disconcerting buzz. But 20 years ago… the Fair was my oyster.

shuffles off to the merry-go-round and giant slide while glancing whistfully towards the Hellavator

:wink:

5

I liked the Rotor at King’s Island in King’s Mills, OH.

6

The orignal version of Epcot’s Journey into Imagination.

7

All of Roseland park. Torn up/down for an upscale housing develepment. Good-bye childhood.

8

I was too young to ever go (it was torn down when I was two.), but I grew up hearing about the Bobs at Riverview Park in Chicago from my older siblings.

9

My folks have fond memories of the Airplane Coaster at Rye Beach Playland in NY. It was a huge wooden coaster that was torn down before I was born.

Actually, a visit to Rye Playland, the only government-owned amusement parks in the country, is like a trip back to an Art Deco wonderland. It has many old rides, including seven built before 1930: The Whip, The Derby Racer, the Old Mill (like the OP was talking about), the Carousel, the layour of Kiddyland and the famous 128-foot-high Dragon Coaster. The Derby Racer’s my favorite.

10

Willow Grove Park near Philadelphia, PA was a wonderful amusement park until the mid-sixties when it went downhill (so to speak) and eventually closed. There’s a mall called Willow Grove Park on the site now.

The Scenic Railway was a low wooden coaster of the out-and-back variety. It didn’t go very high but it went nice a fast and had some nice drops (we didn’t know to call it “airtime” back then). On the way back there were a series of drops that gave you the illusion that you were headed straight for a crossbar that appeared to be blocking the track, only to drop under it and then back up in a series of three drops that never failed to thrill.

The Alps had a nice big fake mountain resembling an alpine peak. This was a coaster that just about anyone could ride as it had brakemen at the back of each car who kept the ride from going too fast.

The Thunderbolt was the true coming-of-age test for aspiring teenagers. Once you got up the courage to ride this giant wooden coaster with a first drop that almost looked vertical, you proved that you were no longer a little kid.

The Fun House was a classic of the genre, a walk-through with undulating floors, a giant rolling cylinder to walk through, crazy mirrors, all ending up on a collapsing seat that dropped you onto a conveyor belt to the exit.

In the late sixties the maintenace was let go, and the park got seedy and sometimes violent and the later lame attempts to turn it into a theme park are best left forgotten.

11

I miss Monsanto’s Journey Through Inner Space. It used to be in Tomorrowland in Disneyland. It was the first place I ever smelled pot.
You would be shrunk down and injected into a snowflake, encountering molecules, then as you shrank further, orbiting electrons…whew

12

I miss Disneyland’s Skyway.

13

Horizons at Epcot.

It was essentially a look at the future and since it was pretty outdated, a lot of it fell into the comical category. But, three things made this one of my favorite rides.

  1. The Choose Your Own Adventure ending. It was a neat twist to pick whether you wanted to end by going through space, underwater, the desert.
  2. The giant star screen. Sort of like an extended IMAX portion of the ride. Something about the size of it was really cool.
  3. The orange grove. I loved that smell.

Thankfully, as a person who could go to Disney whenever I chose to do so I got to ride it to my heart’s content once I heard it was being closed.

14

I miss bumper cars. I know they still exist but now as a grownup they don’t seem to go as fast or hit as hard. I don’t know if it is because I’m bigger or if the cars are slowed down for insurance reasons.
I never got to but I’ve seen pictures of my sibs on the mule train ride at Disneyland. That looked like it would have been cool.

15

My favorite was always the bumper cars, too. When I was about 5, I busted my nose on a roller coaster and never had the desire to go on another one. I’m always the boring person who is waiting on the bench for my husband and son to come back…

It’s not a ride, but as a kid, I LOVED the merry-go-round in playgrounds. There was nothing like running as fast as you could to get the speed up. Then, you’d hold on for dear life at arms’ length while you went round and round, as fast as the wind! (Or, at least it felt like “fast as the wind” at the time). :slight_smile:

16

Now I don’t feel so bad for throwing up on that carnival worker’s shoes when I was eleven:).

And my motion sickness has started to worsen as I age, too. I’m only 28, but while I could once ride any kind of roller coaster, I have to limit myself to up and down wooden ones now. Anything else makes me sick to my stomach, especially looping and twisting metal coasters.

As far as what rides we miss…Kings Dominion in Virginia used to have a ride called Mount Kilamajaro. It was like a carnival ride as it went around and around and around, and it often made me sick to my stomach, but it was a blast.

Ava

17

Well, it’s for the best, I suppose, what with classic Central Florida sinkholes opening up under the foundation of a buiding that was already less then stable due to it’s exotic architecture, it would have only been a matter of time before tragety struck.

18

Are you sure this was at Cedar Point? I’ve gone there every summer for the past 20+ years and it doesn’t sound familiar at all.

Alas, this is gone. They leveled it to put in yet another oh-so-essential mini-arcade and goody stand. I Loved the Pirate Ride, the giant orange octopus always gave me the heebie jeebies

That was Avalance Run. It’s actually still there, they just built a giant wharehouse around it and renamed it Disaster Transport. It runs in pitch darkness now, with glowing bits of space trash and whatnot floating in. It’s great because it’s an air conditioned building, which is a nice break on a hot day.

They also used to have a Rotor, which was basically a big spinning drum. You’d stand against the wall and the floor would drop, with just the centripedal force holding you up. Barftastic!

Not really a ride, but what I miss the most from Cedar Point was just removed a couple seasons ago. It was a game called Fascination, which consisted of rolling balls into a grid of holes and trying to make a tic-tac-toe. There were at least forty or fifty tables, so you played against other people and if you made a complete row first, you won a ticket that could be saved or redeemed for prizes. And once you had a good number of tickets there were some great prizes–mini-TV’s, cordless phones and the like–not just the normal crap they try to pawn off on you in a regular arcade.

19

The Flying Saucers at Disneyland. They were located about where Space Mountain stands today and were only there for about three years. I hear they were a bitch to maintain and were canned with the 1967 remodel.

But, oh, what a concept. Bumper cars that hover on air without any power in them! I miss those things dearly…
Not to mention Enchanted Land at Belmont Park in Mission Beach, San Diego. It was just the usual assortment of mirrors and mazes common to any beach-side amusement park but a wonderland to a seven year old kid.

20

Many years ago, there was an amusement park in Newton, MA, called “Norumbega Park”. This park burned down ca. 1962, and a huge Marriot Hotel was built on the site. The old amusement park had a ride called “Davy Crockett’s NightmareTunnel”-I remember being scared out of my wits on this ride (as a young child). Anyway, I know that as these small parks went bankrupt, the rides were frequently carted off and sold toother amusement parks-anybody know the fate of this ride?
Another question: is the Nautilus “submarine ride” at Disneland/Orlando permanently closed now?