![]() They’re designed to dominate their surroundings and call as much attention to themselves as they can, in nearly the exact same way a carnival ride is designed by its manufacturers to stand out wherever it happens to be placed along a generic midway filled with other rides also competing for your attention. The Cedar Fair philosophy of park layout planning and design seems to have big investments especially like Behemoth and Diamondback (although many other new coasters such as most of the Geauga Lake relocations, WoF’s Patriot and Knott’s Silver Bullet) appeal to guest as a very expensive, high-end carnival ride, essentially. (Looking at satellite imagery, it would have fit PERFECTLY in the Action Zone where the go-karts and part of King Cobra used to fit, WHY didn’t it go there? Now we’ve got Diamondback filling in the other half of that peaceful centerpiece and the park is now completely homogenized to meld with the Action Zone area) For the most part Paramount tried it’s best to retain that feeling of grandeur to their parks except perhaps their last few years when Italian Job was plopped down in the middle of what had formally been the beautifully landscaped heart of the park. Duell’s work, but Taft seemed to be following the same philosophy when it was first designed and the park fits in that same strand of theme park history. Rides, shows and buildings compete for your attention as totally compartmentalized structures threaded together by a midway, rather than try to coalesce into a complete and complementary mise-en-scène as it had been during the Duell years of amusement park design during the 1960’s and 70’s. But Cedar Fair seems to be adopting an attitude that is turning the parks into expensive corporatized carnivals. (If it wasn’t a flat-out bad decision it was still a relatively conservative investment compared to what the rest of the industry was doing Son of Beast was the chain’s last real attention-grabbing installation and look how well it turned out after a few years… more on that one later). That’s not to say that I wish the former Paramount management back into their parks, since they did display a general incompetence in choosing their ride systems. After experiencing the park that day it became clear to me that Cedar Fair has totally and wholly become the new Premier Parks/Six Flags. With the additions of all these high-profile new attractions from respected designers to the former Paramount Parks a lot of people are saying that Cedar Fair is the best thing to ever happen to Kings Island. Okay, now that I’ve got all those requisite-of-every-amusement-park-trip-report anterior ramblings out of the way it’s time to get to the meat of the story. After two rides there we went over to the Beast, which I again will not elaborate here since that can all be found in my Beast 30th Anniversary Analysis. Every detail about that ride can be found in my Diamondback Analysis. Inside the park we went straight to start out the season with a front row ride on Diamondback. The time it took to find the processing center (it’s just off to the left of the main gates) easily outweighed the time it took to get it processed. I was fearful of what the wait for season pass processing would be like and was quite pleased to find that not only did the process now take less than a minute, there consequently was no line. ![]() Not much of a problem since the crowds were still fairly light that morning. ![]() The parking setup they have is somewhat confusing, since I presented my voucher for a Platinum Kings Island pass which is supposed to get us into the closer premium lot, but instead we somehow still got shuttled into the regular lot. The weather wasn’t supposed to be great but when we arrived it was clear if not very humid. Departing from Lansing early that morning we arrived to Kings Island shortly after its 10:00am opening time planning for a full day at the park.
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