Let's start this week's Theme Park Nut News Update at home where Sea World on the Gold Coast yesterday opened Creatures of the Deep exhibit, the replacement for Dinosaur Island, spread across two locations towards the front of the park. From all reports, the animatronic creatures look impressive and the effects work as well as in the predecessor attraction. If you want to take a look, a number of local pages have been reporting on it including AusParks.com.au and Parkz.com.au. But the best coverage so far is in the following videos from thethemparkplace.com:
This week we've also seen the opening of the newest version of the Hollywood Stunt Driver 2 show at WB Movie World. This would be version 2.3 or 2.4 if this was an application. The show had to be severely cut earlier this year after a rather heavy accident occurred in that version of the show. This opening is really the re-birth of the show after that accident, and reviews of it have been relatively positive so far.
Let's go to somewhere we don't visit often on the theme park updates very often, Vietnam. We've seen the first real peak this week of the new Ocean Park that is under construction, which has imported a number of coaster directly from the infamous Hard Rock Park. If you don't know the story of Hard Rock Park, it is worth reading about as it is one of the great failures of the modern theme park industry. Most theme park fans have been interested to see where their wonderful and unique coasters were going to end up. It certainly sounds like they will have a good home in Vietnam, let's hope this new park has better luck than Hard Rock Park.
Staying in Asia, Screamscape this week posted two local news videos of the progress at Shanghai Disneyland. Worth a look, this park is going to be amazing.
This week also saw Tokyo Disneyland Resort hit by a large but not devastating earthquake. There was a few very interesting tweets by @tdrexplorer, including this amazing video as one of the shocks was happening. Thank goodness there was no significant damage or loss of life. This is. sadly, the risk for being in this part of the world.
Heading over to Orlando, Universal Orlando have announced their own long rumoured natural disaster, the Volcano Bay water park. It is exciting to have the details of this finally come out, and most exciting since we actually called the name of this new park back in March! The new water park will open south of Cabana Bay Beach Resort and is likely to well surpass the Universal owned Wet 'n Wild located nearby. Whether this is will be the death of Wet 'n Wild, only time will tell.
This week SeaWorld in Orlando announced that it will opening a new B&M hyper coaster, Mako in 2016. Named after the faster breed of Shark, the ride will be the tallest and faster coaster in the Orlando area. You can see a preview of the ride here.
Finally, two news stories on Walt Disney World to round out this update. Firstly, Hollywood Studios revealed changes to the Great Movie Ride this week, with the most notable change a reduction in the live spiel that is delivered as part of the ride. The jury is still out as to whether this has had a significant impact on the attraction.
Theme Park Insider this week posted a story following on from a tweet from @turkeylegjeff about a survey on burst pricing for Walt Disney World. In essence the proposed change would mean that each individual day at the resort would be prices differently. This would essential push up prices on busy days, with the hope of spreading demand more evenly. The drawback to this kind of system is that guests would have to purchase tickets for exactly the days they wish to enter the parks. This of course is only being investigated by Disney, and nothing is confirmed. It is still interesting to think about.
For more Theme Park coverage, follow me on Twitter @themeparknut. Until next week, Cheers!
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