Losantiville Mining Co.

Ooh that looks fun! I personally think the layout might be a bit much due to how many trees would need to be removed for it, but it's fun nonetheless. I've also noticed that I'm becoming less and less accepting of having a true front gate coaster (like GateKeeper or Fury 325) because I think it would cement the park into strictly feeling like an amusement park rather than a theme park: so do with that what you will. Great work!

I'll also post this image I found of a Carowinds' 2005 Winterfest map to show what that looked like. Photo: CarowindsFansOnly on Facebook.

I think closing off more of the park during Winterfest would be much better than getting rid of it entirely. As much as I'd miss those December rides on the antique cars it might be worth whatever money it'd save to close off the back of Coney Mall, past the entrance to Area 72; the back half of Rivertown, past the KI&MV RR station; and all of Action Zone. Frankly, I'd think they could go as far as closing off all of Coney Mall provided Mystic Timbers stays operating for the event. They could move any of the displaced shows up to the front of the park and put them in the other locations as well. Some of you may remember that Winterfest 2.0 in 2005 only used International Street, Oktoberfest, Hanna-Barbera Land, and Rivertown. I'll post the 2005 map from KIC below as a visual. Does anyone know where I can find any of the maps from Winterfest 1.0? Getting rid of the ice skating would leave a gaping hole at the front of the park. I doubt they'd find a good way to replace the revenue it generates, nor would they be able to make the Royal Fountain look good without the rink in it. They'd have to turn it into the world's largest holiday themed seating area for it to not just sit dormant. I believe Carowinds cutting/shifting their Winterfest hours could just be a (bad) one-year test from Six Flags. There's also all of the people from SFOG and Kings Dominion that Six Flags is trying to find out how far they'll travel for a holiday event. I doubt many families will make the trek out of state. Fiesta Texas is apparently getting some new decorations for their Holiday in the Park this year: I wonder which park's cancelled event those are coming from.

I have to say I wasn't as happy with the quality of Kings Dominion's 50th show, but I'm willing to believe that part of the issue they had this year was the fact that they haven't done many of this kind of show recently. I'm also very used to Kings Island's higher quality productions. The song from Fun, Fireworks, and Fifty was also much better than "Right Here, Right Now" IMO. Yes, it was a longer song, but it used the "Wonderful World of Fun" tagline from the original 1971-ish billboards and I really enjoyed that. Here's what I think a full-size Kings Dominion 50th Anniversary could have looked like. It has large-scale KI 50 style things mixed in with some real things that have happened at Kings Dominion for 2025. Re-use more of the 50th decorations from Kings Island, including the golden spirals and entrance I.D. sign. Replace the "Kings Island" with "Kings Dominion" on the sign. Keep the Eiffel Tower and "50". "50 Years of Fun Street Party": a full-size parade with multiple stops. Re-uses most of the floats and items from the KI version. "Volcano: The Blast Musical": a new show debuting in the Kings Dominion Theater. A comedic musical revue, similar to "Phantom Theater Encore" at Kings Island. Follows a group as they experience the 'storyline' of Volcano: The Blast Coaster with other connections to Jungle Xpedition. "Club KD": A decades show with better production value than it's 2025 KD counterpart. Features a new song written just for this celebration. Other songs include those seen and heard at Kings Dominion since 1975. Moments from the Spring, Summer, Halloween, and holiday seasons are included throughout. "Light the Night": a new 10 PM light show to end each night of the main celebration. This show takes advantage of the park's foliage without requiring vast sightlines like Kings Island has. Uses new lights all over International Street instead of fireworks. Rapterra, a new B&M launched wing coaster. Replacement for Volcano: The Blast Coaster. Panther 305, a retheme for the giga coaster F.K.A. Intimidator 305. Literally just Pantherian but with a better name. Specialty 50th food offerings available everywhere. A full Carousel restoration, including a complete rebuild of its carousel organ. On my visit I found out that this beautiful 1917 PTC carousel was in desperate need of a restoration and repaint. I also found out that it is apparently not called the "Grand Carousel". Maybe it could be "Grand" if it looked to be in better condition. A full Racer 75 re-paint. Maybe it could also include a re-working of the queue line and a new entrance building. I feel like Kings Island got this amount of work (minus Rapterra, obviously), and it would have been nice to see KD get even half of these much-needed investments.

I really enjoyed the in-house live productions in the Kings Island Theater and hope they can make a comeback soon enough! It would also be nice to have a smaller show in there for the Halloween season, like Wake the Dead! at Carowinds, Cedar Point, and now Great America as well. The venue itself is really nice, which is why I'm surprised it doesn't see more use. Kings Island could use more shows that last the entire season, and this is the place to have them. I had an idea that they could put on a show, called Coney Celebrations, that would celebrate the history of the now-closed Coney Island in Cincinnati. It could be a simple show or something more complex, but as a historical show half of the work is already done, Whoever puts it together would just need to figure out what parts to include and how to make it flow.

Does anyone know what building the Kings Island Theater (formerly the American Heritage Music Hall and The Paramount Theater) might have been designed to resemble? For the longest time I thought it might have just been one of the somewhat generic American styles, but now I'm wondering if it was designed to look like a building at Coney Island. There's one next to the Moonlite Gardens building that has the same general characteristics and made me wonder. They both have the brick detail with a black shingle Mansard-ish roof and a cupola clock tower on top in the center. Much appreciation for any answers you all can provide!

If the timing of this ride closure is so they can start working then I'd hope it would be done by Opening Day. I think the current setup of the ride also lends itself better to being Phantom Theater or another spooky dark ride. If it becomes a Justice League dark ride then it will need a lot of work beyond just adding the screens and reprofiling the castle (which I assume is what would happen with a conversion to PT). For a company trying to save money, it may be easier to convert Boo Blasters into a new Phantom Theater. Kings Island may be more of a regional park than a destination park, but I think it deserves something better than a ride most of the big Legacy Six Flags parks got years ago.

I wonder if, as the Fall events season rolls around, we'll see new maps come out for the Legacy Six Flags parks. This is about the time (also during Winterfest) that the newer maps started to make their way out at the Legacy Cedar Fair parks. They could save the rollout for 2026 and reuse the 2025 maps for Fall/Winterfest, but some like the SFOT and Magic Mountain maps, haven't even been updated from 2024's versions. The new seasons combined with the past-due release of the new park websites and mobile app(s) makes me wonder if anything else will change in the coming month. The Fright Fest event website looks terrible and is as if it were thrown together because the planned replacement wasn't ready. I'm hoping we'll see everything new begin to be released with the 2026 announcements that may be coming throughout September.

Six Flags Over Texas will reveal their 2026 addition on September 25th. I think the giga dive will have a bull theme, since the teaser the park released had a Running of the Bulls vibe. They're also been completing a lot of improvements around SFOT including a renovation of their Palace Theater. I've been watching some of the progress that SFOT Source has been showing and the transformation has been super stunning to say the least. The two slides that will be removed at Fiesta Texas do look like they'd be a good spot for a hyper coaster. They also announced the removal of Bubba's Cafe / Bubba's Burgers which is on the other side of Dr. Diabolical Cliffhanger, so I wonder what could be going there. Maybe another VIP Lounge or a new restaurant altogether. Schlitterbahn New Braunfels new attraction teaser was interesting since it only showed underwater bubbles and said something was coming. I wonder if everything else will be announced in September? Or maybe it will be a more staggered rollout of announcements. Hopefully we'll also see some good and fun announcement signage to build up hype throughout the Fall and Holiday seasons.

Today's big announcement being an announcement for an announcement timeline seems pretty on-par for Six Flags, especially considering the fact that one of the announcements was originally announced back in November. Six Flags Over Texas is going to have their 2026 giga dive announcement in September. Schlitterbahn New Braunfels is getting something major in 2026. Fiesta Texas is removing two slides, possibly for new ones in 2026. Could we see more of the 2026 additions announced in September, or will the company decide to go wild and announce things with no rhyme or reason? I'd assume they learned their lessons about needing to announce ride removals after the 2024 Ride Purge. Let's hope we don't have to wait too much longer to find out what will and will not be in the parks for 2026.

Any change to the seating/aisleways of the International Showplace would probably be to replace the ramps with stairs. The ADA seating is already at the top/back of the venue and more could be added if the need arose for it. It could be better suited for use during Winterfest if it had stairs, but then you'd still have to worry about icy steps and the cold metal benches. Wooden or plastic benches may be better for the colder months, but may require higher upkeep while being subject to vandalism. What Kings Island and the other Winterfest parks need is more indoor venues with HVAC and more areas that can be enclosed/heated during the colder months. It's part of the reason why I think KI should build a Moonlite Gardens look-alike building with a restaurant inside it. Then there are also the ideas on this website to expand the Festhaus just a little more and enclose the two wings of the Chicken Shack like Kings Dominion did for the Jungle Market Eatery. I'm very against the idea of paving the two front quarter planters of the Eiffel Tower. While it may help with seating, it would remove more landscaping from the park and may turn out looking worse than the new festival pavilion tent. If the park wants to improve the Bandstand viewing experience, they should put removable benches or tables/chairs on the pavers in front of it and leave the asphalt areas for walking. I can't decide if benches or tables/chairs would look better while contributing to the atmosphere, but they would help a ton.

Banshee as the original name for Mantis (now Rougarou) at Cedar Point. Mantis / Banshee Orion / Polaris Top Gun / Swoop Georgia Goldrusher / Georgia Surfer Fury 325 / Centurion

Guests won't see it as nickel-and-diming so much if the cost is actually baked into the tickets. Same goes for if the experiences they are paying extra for are actually worth paying for. Kings Island and Cedar Point could have probably gotten away better with the Haunted Attractions Pass if they got more than two new haunted attractions (Cedar Point actually only got The Conjuring, no new mazes). I bet even some simple maze re-naming would have helped the whole situation as well.

I'd rather see Phantom Theater contained to just Kings Island or to KI and one other theme park. Pushing it out to the other parks would make it less far less unique and would probably not work as well theming-wise. It definitely would not work with the Justice League dark rides without some major adjustments, especially in the parks where it's square in the middle of a DC-themed land. I think Scooby Doo and Boo Blasters worked as an addition for Canada's Wonderland, Carowinds, and Kings Dominion because it was a classic small interactive dark ride. It could work as a non-interactive dark ride, but I think it would lose something at those parks. On my 2019 trip to Elitch Gardens I was able to ride the Meow Wolf kaleidoscope dark ride after it had been converted from either Scooby Doo or Boo Blasters (almost a clone of the one at KD), and I don't recall it having the laser guns. The theme made up for it, but the lack of the interactive aspects made it a little worse in my book.

I actually kind of like the 25th Anniversary merch. It reminds me of the old FearFest website from 2005 and is a mix of the general mid-2000's to early-2010's aesthetic.

A show like Tinker's has actors, set pieces, and props all over the stage with most of them being used throughout the show. Yuletide Follies used the entire Bandstand stage with each of the tiers having either performers or set pieces that fill it out. I think the entire PTE stage is still there and most of it is used for Tinker's Toy Factory, it just looks different because it's covered in Christmas props. They might have added onto it more than that. Swingin' Into Christmas has the band on both tiers of the Festhaus stage, but they don't move during the show. There's only the 6 singer/dancers for that show as well who use the remaining open space of the stage. They would have too much space to work with on the KIT stage.

If Soak City made a hard shift to being its own separately-ticketed gate, I think it would be an opportunity to move everything between the KI&MV RR and the power lines over to the other side of the wave pools. Far too many things would need to move, but it'd solve the issue of having high-voltage power lines in the middle of the water park. Now I've gotten myself interested in a highly theoretical change...

Six Flags released a teaser today with a bunch of coasters going up their lift hills saying there is a "Big drop coming on National Coaster Day" (sic). I'm wondering if this could also be an announcement day for all 2026 additions. The teaser definitely makes me think that we'll see an announcement for SFOT's giga dive coaster and maybe one for another coaster allegedly coming for another park like Magic Mountain. This would also be a good time to announce all of the other 2026 additions, but who knows what that timeline looks like. It'd be a good time to do it as well since it would make another push for 2026 pass sales in the middle of the whole MVP sale. I'm a big proponent for "don't leave guests hanging" in terms of announce ride removal / run teaser campaign / announce new ride / maintain the hype. Waiting too long might leave guests hanging. I wasn't a fan of the botched rollout of the MVP sale, hopefully the 2026 announcements will be more consistent in their timing and groupings. I wonder, if the entrance remained in the same place, how much of the castle facade would remain unchanged. Keeping the castle would not reflect it being a version of Phantom Theater very well IMO. Re-doing it to be more similar to the theater facade would only add to it. As for the interior, I think they could keep some of the good/relevant props and replace the rest. As long as they get rid of the kooky castle walls and bring back the abandoned theater feeling I think it could shake out well. Even as a screen-based attraction I think they'd still need to have some well-placed curtains and props in every scene. They'd need to animate anything that would go on the screens either way. The paranormal investigator plot line would only really work in a Boo Blasters or Scooby Doo version of Phantom Theater IMO. I like "Phantom Theater: Revival" a lot more than the other options for the name precisely because it's a theatrical term like "Encore" was for the show. Switching the spelling of "Theater" to "Theatre" might not help since guests already mess up the spelling of the original and since it would feel more like a lazy oversight.

"Dear Ms. Parton, have you ever been to Ohio?" I heard on a recent GreenTagged podcast that some of the decisions Six Flags made in 2025 are consistent with a company that is "cash poor" and needs cash now [Call JG Wentworth, 877-CASHNOW]. Someone who understands the above point would probably be willing/able to rake in cash while steering the company in a direction like a Herschend executive would.

They have a streetcar that (I believe) they use for some of their parades, but I think they'd also use the Tricks and Treats Parade floats well. Shipping the floats and decorations around is probably better/cheaper than selling them to a place that can't use the Tricks and Treats name. I found it interesting that Magic Mountain and Discovery Kingdom both dropped the Six Flags name from their Tricks and Treats logos, just like how Great Adventure dropped the brand name from its Holiday in the Park last year (RIP) and from its Sweet Spot addition this year. Both Six Flags Over Texas and Fiesta Texas kept the brand name on their T&T logos. All four of the new Tricks and Treats logos also use the new style of logo where "Six Flags" and the park name are stacked directly on top of each other and are much closer in size. I'm salty that Kings Island will not be seeing our own version of Wake the Dead this Halloween season. The current setup of the stage in the Kings Island Theater would really just require the removal of the Gazillion Bubble Show decorations and the addition of the TV(s), casket, chairs, and maybe some extra props. The background could stay lowered (Cedar Point works with a smaller stage for the show) and the cast is limited. I think the only reasons KI doesn't have it is because Cedar Point has it (though we both had Country Crossroads this year) and because Kings Island was already supposed to receive three new things for the 2025 Haunt season.

Available advertisement space is what happened. I'd really like to see Phantom Theater return even if it's with the blaster aspect. Any current blasters/targets would probably get replaced with ones more like they did at Carowinds. Looking away from certain posts on social media (even though I trust their opinions and possible knowledge of plans), I could see BBoBH becoming either a different Sally Dark Rides attraction or being turned into an IP-based ride.

Now that I've read everyone's responses, I have to say that I agree with most of the points made. I do think Kings Island could become more of a theme park with thrills as it currently exists, even if its clientele doesn't change. My definition of a thrilling theme park probably does not translate well into my posts: there's a reason why I used to keep my writings short before I joined KIC . I'd really enjoy if the park focused more on the theming of each area and the quality of both attractions and sightlines. Think more of how the park was from 1972-1992 rather than it being a park like Dollywood or Silver Dollar City. I'd love for it to become more like Dollywood in terms of theming and vibes, but I can see how that may be incompatible with the park in some ways. Good, comprehensive theming is what I think would improve Kings Island and elevate it to the next level as a truly regional park. Some theming elements don't require much upkeep from year to year, such as area entrance signs, stationary props, and ride theming. More buildings (facades, even), trees and water would greatly help Rivertown just as a return to the festival atmosphere would make Oktoberfest feel like a real land again. Thanks to everyone for your opinions! Rajun Cajun (in Action Zone) or the SteamWhirler (in the Saltwater Circus plot or along Coney Mall) would be my picks for moving. The odds aren't terribly high IMO, but Carowinds just got their own NebulaZ in Aeronautica Landing so I think KI could handle it.

Maybe we'll get Richard Zimmerman for new Chairman of the Board and someone passionate about the parks like Jeffrey Siebert for CEO (just kidding!). Replacing both of them with an outsider and a former Cedar Fair-er (you choose who gets what) might help the company in the shorter-term a little as well. They'd still have to make some of the same terrible decisions as Zimmerman/Bassoul have, but I think we'd see the smarter choices being made each time. I'm still shocked (IDK why though) that we haven't seen anything in terms of the new websites/mobile apps that were supposed to come out in July. You'd think that would've been hired out to be completed on a schedule. The 2024 Cedar Fair app/map refreshes were done by an external company, and I'm sure the 2025 Great Adventure map was also done by that same company considering the fact that it looks exactly like the Cedar Fair ones. Playing into the "transformative journey of regional amusement/theme park industry" would probably do them some good, but I think we'd have to see them begin to deliver on their promises for the good to actually stay. They should start that journey by finding a new name for the company and by replacing the CEO and Chairman. Having the people who got Cedar Fair/Six Flags into this at the top is probably a smart thing to do for the transition between companies. Keeping them there is probably a bad idea considering they're the top hombres who got their former companies into this mess.

Yuletide Follies would work great in there if they can find a good way to use the set. I'd accept a lot of show ideas in there if they were able to use the set like Tinker's did. The outdoor shows that happen during Winterfest should either be kept smaller (in terms of the number of performers, like the Mistletones and Sounds of the Nativity), or should find a way to provide seating with some more heat lamps around them. A live-band show like Swingin' Into Christmas could also work in the KIT, but they'd need to find a way to fill that stage like they do the stage in the Festhaus.

I sure hope you're right about that! The sooner, the better. As for the topic, I think I'd rather have current Six Flags management based on where we sit now. I'd say it feels more like Kings Island is heading into a period of (still operating) hibernation, compared to the "we don't care" attitude I've heard the 2006 Paramount management had.