 Over the weekend we got to check out the first night of the amazing Holiday In The Park at Six Flags Magic Mountain. In just it's third year this event has easily turned into one of our favorite events of the year. Even if you don't care for the rides at Magic Mountain, experiencing the Holiday atmosphere in the park is worth the price of admission alone. Pictures by Matthew Nelson and Gregg Condon Written by Gregg Condon (click on any of the pictures below for a larger version) Let's start off with a few daytime pictures because the park looks incredibly festive by day and night.   An AMAZING A cappella group greets you as you enter the park.  The transformation from Fright Fest to Holiday In The Park happens so fast every year  New this year is the Gleampunk District, and it's amazing.  Some great original holiday characters
 Even Twisted Colossus gets decked out for the holidays this year
 As night sets the lights come out ... also new this year is Santa's Wild Sleigh Ride  On The New Revolution for the Holiday Season is "Santa's Wild Sleigh Ride". We got a chance to experience the ride and we all really did enjoy it. I hadn't personally ridden the VR Version of Revolution since Media Day earlier this year and while I'm still not a fan of VR on coasters and it's impact to capacity I have to say I did enjoy this more than the regular Revolution VR. And that pretty much was the consensus among everybody I talked to. So be sure you check it out.
 Heading into the Gleampunk District  All the lights in the area are blue and green to match Twisted Colossus  It's spectacular in person   Lots of fun things to see  Raise your hand if you they should keep these lights on Twisted Colossus up all year!!
 Also new this year is a new show in the Gearworks Theatre - Kwerkmas. It's a fun cirque type show with great acrobatics, dancers and a magician. We've put together a slideshow below to give you an idea of what the show is like.  Rockin Universe is always one of our favorite area's   The Winter Wonderland is back and is as always just fantastic. 
 So one of the things that really put Holiday In The Park on the Map when it started two years ago was the food. This was definitely a departure from the normal "Burger and Fries" that Magic Mountain had been known for. The first year they started kind of traditional, with a ham feast, tamales and other traditional type holiday foods. Which was awesome. And yes, for those of us who live in Southern California, tamales are most definitely traditional holiday food. But last year they started "experimenting" with a few different things. Some things were removed and in it's place came the Holiday Turkey Dog (Turkey dog with stuffing, cranberry sauce, mayo) which from it's description you wouldn't think would work. But it DOES. Other favorites from last year included the Mac n Cheese Burger, Chocolate Covered Caramel Pretzel, Funnel Cakes and more. And all of your favorites are back with a few new treats to enjoy. And as we did last year, we'll be sharing our top 5 lists so you can be sure to know what to try when you visit.    Aftermath of our first food stop of the night. Sorry, we ate too fast to get pictures. Plus we were having such a good time just enjoying the company.  Towards the end of the night they had a nice reception set up for us near Katie's Kettle. SFMM sure does spoil us.  Lots of amazing treats.  
We actually remembered to get a before pic ... kind of. ;)  Top 5 food picks
We had such an amazing time at Holiday In The Park. It truly is one of our favorite events each and every year, not just holiday events, but in general. The lights are fantastic, the atmosphere is phenomenal, everybody is just out to have a great time, it's stress free, no drama. Oh, and the food is amazing.  Thanks again to Magic Mountain for the amazing night, we can't wait to get back and experience more of Holiday In The Park. And we WILL be back. Related Updates:
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 Now that Halloween Season is done and we have a few weeks until Holiday Season events begin it's time to look at some 2017 attractions and see their progress. Can you believe we've never really had an update for Justice League since it was announced? Just our tour in September. So we'll check the progress of Magic Mountain's first dark ride as well as taking a look around the park. We'll also have some thoughts on the new VR Experience coming to the park for Holiday In The Park. Written by Gregg Condon It was a rare "rainy" morning in Southern California, but because it was the last weekend for Fright Fest the park was actually kind of busy even for a Friday morning. These are new'ish? Promoting The New Revolution and other things. Santa's going to be taking over The New Revolution for Holiday In The Park (more thoughts on that below).  Well, maybe not so busy first thing in the morning. ;)  It was also the last weekend for the Suicide Squad scare zone, all indications are that this was a 1-and-done deal and it won't be back for Fright Fest next year. However, with the new Metropolis area near Riddler's Revenge and Justice League they could conceivably keep Suicide Squad here and move the Sinister Circuit over to Metropolis. Will be interesting to see which way they go.  As we mentioned in our 2016 Haunt Wrap Up, while the scare zones at SFMM were again amazing, there was a lot of dead space at the back of the park. We think this is because the area around Riddler's was eventually supposed to be closed for FF but was kept open at the last minute.  Alright, let's move on to Metropolis where there have been some big ... ok, we can't lie. There's been nothing going on since our Tour in September.  As you can see through the fence (sorry about that, it's tough getting pics of this project) there has been some ground leveling, but that's really about it.  While the ride building in Georgia is completely built, here we got nothing.   Hopefully these bushes will get trimmed during construction, purely selfish reasons for that. ;)  In just a couple of weeks Santa will be back here.  And this area will be filled with Christmas lights.  A couple of thoughts on "Santa's Wild Sleigh Ride" coming to The New Revolution for Holiday In The Park: I don't think we've made any secret that we aren't a huge fan of the VR coasters. The experience is great but the negative impact on the rides they are on is difficult to handle for people who just want to ride the ride. So for Holiday In The Park 2014 when you'd ride Revolution at night one of the best experiences was flying through the trees of lights, even though at the time Revolution wasn't a fun coaster to ride. Obviously Revolution was closed in 2015.  So now for 2016 instead of being able to once again ride The New Revolution through the lights and trees they now have VR on it. Which is a shame although we do like the concept of different themes for different holidays. Our suggestion to the park, do the VR during the day and then have awesome non-VR night rides through the trees and all of the lights that will be near Rapids Camp and the front of the park. Most of the other parks that have VR do limited operating hours to allow people to just ride the coasters they are on. Given all the amazing work done to make The New Revolution great again it's a shame it hasn't been run with no VR to give people a chance to ride this amazing ride.  To make things worse, the Single Rider line has been removed from the ride, so if you do want to ride with No VR as a single rider you are no longer able to. (again, sorry about the picture quality here, not sure what happened)  Alright, that's going to wrap it up for this update. We'll be back at the park in, wow, just over 2 weeks for Holiday In The Park (which begins on November 19). Hopefully there will be another tour of Justice League soon once they start vertical construction. Related Updates:  Below is our collection of Mountain Madness 2.0 pictures. We apologize in advance for the delay in these, so we hope you enjoy them. Before we get to the pictures we want to send a huge heartfelt thank you to everybody who attended. The day started out kind of rough (more on that below) but I think by the end of the day everybody had an amazing time and for that we are thankful. So quick story about the morning. We had set up reverse POV's on Revolution which actually turned out AWESOME (you can look at an example of that here) and then were starting our morning ERT. Everybody had the option of using the VR or going without it. Those of us on the first train went out and had an amazing ride. Once the 2nd train left we pulled into the station and promptly got stopped half way through the station. And anybody who knows Revolution knows what that means. Safe to say we weren't very happy as we pride ourselves on giving an amazing event and we were a bit disappointed that the ride went down. Luckily everybody in attendance took it in stride and ended up having a great time. Hopefully we were able to hide our disappoint. The park did great and offered us all one front of the line pass for The New Revolution and one other front of the line pass for any other ride in the park. Luckily it wasn't a very busy day so we're pretty sure everybody got to ride everything they wanted. Thanks again to everybody who showed up.  Below we're just going to share some pictures from the day, click on any of the pictures to see a larger version. First set is from "The Coaster Whisperer The rest are of course from our own awesome CoasterMatt Thanks again to all who attended. We've already been asked about future events and right now we don't have anything in the works, that could change but there likely won't be anything for the remainder of 2016. Next week we'll have an all new feature video "Coaster Reviews with Gregg" where we'll be talking about Twisted Colossus at Magic Mountain and The Joker at Discovery Kingdom and why it's not so easy to compare them. Stay tuned for that. =) Related Updates: |
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