Play-and-Stay Blog

I thought I would share with you something unrelated to both LEGO® and ‘Project Dylan’ today. Working on this blog have given me the opportunity to experience some pretty extreme roller coasters but nothing has ever come close to my personal favourite, the best rollercoaster I have ever experienced in my lifetime. I would say ‘the best rollercoaster I have ever ridden’ but the word ‘ridden’ implys some kind of control and I most certainly had no control over my dizzying flight around this particular track.

I suppose it’s about time I gave a few details of my favourite coaster to see if you can guess what or where it is. First clue, it’s green….very green. Second clue, it’s the only launched rollercoaster produced by Bolliger & Mabillard. Third clue, it’s in Marvel Super Hero Island at Universal Studios. Let the guessing begin!

Yup! It’s The Hulk. A two minute fifteen second experience that I’ll never forget. That amazing contraption reaches top speeds of almost 70mph and mercilessly flings it’s passengers through loops, helixes, misty tunnels and ridiculously fast banked turns, in short, I love it.

The only downside is that The Hulk is in America and going to American theme parks is seldom cheap. I’m (hopefully) going back to the US for the opening of The Wizarding World of Harry Potter so I’ll get to ride The Hulk again in 2010, I won’t even mind the two hour queue and I might even get that hat back that I lost last time I rode.

For those of you who have not yet had the pleasure of riding The Hulk, here’s a video. Enjoy!

Everyone’s favourite bushy tailed little tree-dweller has been at it again. Stealthy squirrel has been keeping a very close eye on the builders working on Thorpe Park’s new ride. His latest update on ‘Project Dylan’ is that the beyond vertical drop is now complete. He is working on getting us some pictures but his tiny squirrel fingers don’t work so well with people-sized cameras.

The track is progressing rapidly, only serving to further fuel the massive amounts of online rumour-mongering regarding the new coaster. Some bloggers and forum-lovers are even claiming the coaster will have a ’surprise opening’ on the 13th. Allow me to set the record straight on this. It’s not going to happen.

Until Thorpe Park’s announcement on the 13th October there aren’t many new exciting facts to share with you so here are two of the more interesting maybes.

1) The ride will have some kind of age restriction as well as the usual height restriction due to its horror theme.  Some websites have suggested the restriction will be 15+ which is distinctly possible. Alton Towers’ Halloween chase event ‘Terror of the Towers’ has a 14+ age limit.

2) Samurai will be re-themed in the style of Canada Creek in time for the opening of ‘Project Dylan’. Again, defiantly plausible. They rides are going to be quite close to each other and Samurai’s spinny scariness certainly would match Project Dylan nicely if it was re-themed a bit.

That’s it for now folks, keep checking back for regular updates.

We’ve been focussing so hard on ‘Project Dylan’ recently that I feel I have been neglecting the LEGOphiles among my readership. I feel I owe it to you to do a good, old-fashioned LEGO® themed blog. So here it is, this week’s Tenuous LEGOLAND® based blog of the week.

As readers of this blog will know my three great (non-human) loves are; LEGO, comics and video games. Pretty geeky loves I know, but I came to terms with my geekdom long long ago (in a galaxy far far away). My great loves have recently been united in what can only be called a holy trinity of wonderfulness. LEGO and video games have been partners for quite some time but only recently have developers added the magic ingredient, comics.

Some of you might have played the LEGO video games that have been available for quite some time, LEGO Star Wars has been out for ages and is pretty fun. LEGO Indiana Jones is also good, not as good as LEGO Star Wars but that was always going to be the case. It’s not either of those games I want to talk about today though, it’s the upcoming one, LEGO Batman.

The trailer for this game looks undeniably fun but you know what? I’m not going to buy it. This is not to say that it’s not going to be good, providing it follows the model for the other LEGO games I’m sure it will do very well indeed. The problem is not with the game itself per-se, it’s with Batman. You see ladies and gents, I have quite strong feelings about Batman. My main issue with the dark knight is that HE IS NOT A SUPERHERO. He is just a regular hero, albeit a very rich and technologically advanced one.

He, to me at least, comes under the same category as Iron Man. I don’t like either, they annoy me with their lack of actual powers and their excessive ‘edgy brooding’. Personally, I’m waiting and praying to the comic gods that the people who make the LEGO games make LEGO X-Men. Alas, people these days seem to prefer Batman (despite his lack of superpowers). Maybe there are more people like me, people who think the X-men are more deserving of LEGOfication than Batman. Of course there might not be, I might be alone in this one, just like the time I thought the world needed hexagonal bread.

Here’s the trailer for LEGO Batman so you can make your own minds up. After watching it if you, like me, think Batman does not deserve the honour of being immortalised in LEGO please let me know.

Our Thorpe Park insider, Agent Stealthy Squirrel, has sent a communiqué by carrier pigeon to the Play and Stay® offices this afternoon. Written in biro on the back of an acorn it simply said,

“Second inversion nearly finished, big frame going up. Send more nibbles.”

Not being above bribing woodland critters to carry out my espionage dirty-work, I promptly sent back some twiglets and got a’blogging. After investigating Agent Stealthy Squirrel’s claims it would seem that the second of Project Dylan’s three proposed inversions is indeed pretty much done. Not content with just building a roller-coaster really really fast, those busy builders have also constructed the beginnings of the frame that will become the scary sawmill.

The fact that the coaster’s track is being built so quickly suggests to me that Thorpe Park will be putting a great deal of effort into the area surrounding the coaster.  Surely this means that Thorpe Park have big plans for the sawmill and its super-scary inhabitants. Interesting…….very interesting.

Ok chaps, I’ve done some maths to try and work out roughly how fast ‘Project Dylan’ will be. When I say roughly I mean ROUGHLY. My maths is notoriously poor and I’m working with little more than guesstimates here so please, bear with me.

The nearest comparable coaster to Project Dylan is (in my opinion) Dollywood’s Mystery Mine which has 1811 feet of track with a ride duration of 2 minutes and 30 seconds. This equates to 12.07 feet per second average speed. Project Dylan has 2362 feet of track with a ride duration of just one minute forty seconds which is around 23.62 feet per second.

From this we can very clearly see that Thorpe Park’s new ride’s average speed will be almost double that of Mystery Mine. Unfortunately looking at the average speed of the ride does not reveal too much, the slow lift hills and the rapid vertical drops obviously affect the average quite a bit.

To put these highly ambiguous figures into some kind of perspective here is a list of a few of my favourite coasters and their respective feet per second counts.

• Nemesis: 29 fps
• Rita: Queen of Speed: 43 fps
• Stealth: 50 fps
• Project Dylan: 23.62 fps

So, from that we can see that Project Dylan is unlikely to break any records for speed, the drop remains the main draw of the attraction. At 97 degrees it will be one of the steepest the UK has to offer. All things considered I think it is fair to assume that Project Dylan will have a similar overall pace to Nemesis (which just so happens to be our very favourite coaster here at Play and Stay®). These numbers taken into account I’m expecting top speeds of between 50 and 60 mph and I’m pretty confidant that I’m right.

This last bit is purely conjecture, nothing more than my humble opinion on this thrilling new ride at Thorpe Park. I have a bit of a theory, Project Dylan is going to lean even more heavily on the horror theme that I originally anticipated. I predict that Thorpe Park’s new ride will be as much a grown up ghost train as a roller coaster. It will be heavily themed, there will be sections inside the planned sawmill that will probably employ animatronics or even just convincing models to give passengers a fright on their way to the beyond vertical drop. In short, this ride is going to be A for amazing.

I have a confession to make ladies and gentleman. I have never seen a Back to the Future film and I have never watched The Godfather or any of its sequels. Perhaps due to a lack of testosterone, or perhaps because I like my films to have nuns or monsters in them, I have no interest in Scarface or the gangster film genre as a whole. In short, I’m no authority on “the classics” (except Sister Act). Due to this social handicap I miss out on a fair few pop culture references, any “flux capacitor” or “say hello to my little friend” based jokes are lost on me.

Despite my second-rate film trivia knowledge there are a few famous scenes that even I can identify and one of those scenes is the Indiana Jones “big scary boulder” scene. There is something incredibly frightening about the threat of being crushed by a large rolly thing. I know that primal fear only too well, this weekend I popped into Primark for some cut-price socks. I quickly found myself running for my life after a lady (who was no stranger to cakes) fell down the stairs right behind me!. Fortunately, I managed to use a pair of affordable tights to swing to safety before I was squished in the Margate temple of doom.

Some people somewhere in America have combined the natural human fear of crushing with the natural human love of LEGO. They’ve even thrown a bit of Indiana Jones into the mix for good measure. Submitted for your approval this week ladies and gents, a five million brick LEGO boulder “chasing” a man dressed loosely in the style of Indiana Jones down a hill.

Now you’ve enjoyed that wonderful video, time for the bad news. The boulder was apparently polystyrene in the middle so nobody was in any real danger. Good news though, some chap was wearing an absolutely charming fez. Perhaps the fez is making a comeback!?

Here at Play and Stay® we know how excited you all are about Thorpe Park’s new ride. We have done our best to gather any and all information we can from the deepest, darkest bowels of the interwebs and so far I think we’ve done okay. Just to make sure we are keeping you up to date with the very latest Project Dylan/ Thorpe Park new ride news we will be doing a weekly feature on it until the glorious day we meet you in the queue for the first go.

Just like Scooby-Doo, we will jump in our mystery machine (comfy office chairs) and do some investigating (google like mentalists). We might even unmask a villain and/or be referred to as “damn meddling kids”, something which just so happens to be a lifelong dream of mine. We are going to scour the internet, pester Thorpe Park and speculate wildly all in the name of blogging.

Firstly, we (I) seem to have overlooked a pretty huge piece of potential news. Thorpe Park have a youtube channel. I’m not entirely sure how I missed it to be honest ladies and gents, but I’ve found it now. One of the videos on Thorpe Park’s channel is a ’statement’ from the park regarding the disappearance of plans for the new coaster and something about a spooky lunchbox with a key and a photo inside.

The statement came from Peter Ronchetti, Thorpe Park’s general manager (pictured below). This in itself is not particularly interesting but there are a few things in this little video that really need investigating. The most important of these is the obvious repetition of the number 13. The haunted lunchbox has the number scratched on the front (pictured below) and at the end of the video the date 13th October 2008 comes up. This is the start of Thorpe Park’s Fright Nights so I imagine some kind of big unveiling or announcement is happening then. The ride won’t be opening, it’s not finished until 2009 by all accounts.

The box that was ‘discovered’ seems to have some significance. Ronchetti mentions a key and a photograph were found inside and we are treated to a very brief glimpse of both items. Being the wonderful person I am and having more than my fair share of free time this morning, I took the liberty of grabbing screen shots of both the photo and the key and had a fiddle on photoshop to see if any sneaky clues can be found.

Personally, I can’t make much out of the photo except a lot of blood and what I assume are a person’s legs. Excitingly, I may have a picture showing whose legs they are for you coming up in a moment. The key was a little more forthcoming than the photo; Once I mirror-flipped the picture, fiddled with some buttons (none of which I truly understood) and squinted quite a bit, I was able to make out the a few words on the paperwork. I have marked and labelled them for you, not much is revealed really, a few meaningless numbers and what could possibly be the word “Dylan”. Obviously this ties in with the new ride’s codename, ‘Project Dylan’. Who this mysterious Dylan is, if he/she is anyone at all, really isn’t obvious right now. If anyone has any ideas use the comment box and let us know.

The most interesting parts of the video are the shortest, around the 19 second mark something flashed on screen for a split second. It is unclear what it is until you spend half an hour trying to pause on the correct frame and then grab a screenshot. Thank heavens for my dedication eh? where would you be without me?!….you’d probably just do the pausing yourself, it’s not particularly hard. Anyway, at the end of the video there is a clearer but still very short shot of an open door in a spooky disused room. Here’s the screenshots of both for you to take a peek at.

The creepy chap that pops up for the most infuriatingly tiny amount of time seems to have a pretty serious neck wound. Zombie lumberjack perhaps? Vampire infested woodland theme? I really have no idea even after researching Thorpe Park’s new ride for the best part of the day. What is abundantly clear however, is just how hard Thorpe Park is planning on pushing the horror theme. This ride is going to be “ahhhh I’m going upside-down” scary and “$£*@ there’s a monster over there” scary. Personally I’m looking forward to it an almost indecent amount. I also really want to know who the hell Dylan is.

To summarise ladies and gents, in this installment of “Scooby-and-Stay” as I’m now calling it we have discovered the following.

• Peter Ronchetti cannot (in my personal opinion) act.
• Lunchboxes found buried on building sites are occasionally really haunted/contain spooky stuff.
• Something regarding this new ride is happening on October 13th.
• Thorpe Park has a youtube channel.
• The new ride is going to lean heavily on the horror and gore themes.
• Thorpe Park is including titbits within their promo videos for the hardcore fans (the spooky room and the creepy chap).
• So far our ‘clues’ consist of a key, a photo, a scary man, a lunchbox, the number 13 and a spooky room.
• The opening of Fright Nights is going to be extra special this year, whatever they are announcing I can bet it’s going to be exciting.
• ‘Dylan’ may be somehow tied into the new ride’s mythology.
• The ride’s plans are ‘missing’. How Thorpe Park intend to tie this into the rides theme is anyone’s guess.

Do you visit church on Sunday? Do you own a copy of the Bible which you read religiously? Do you know the ten commandments?

If you answered “no” to any of the above questions then I have news of the perfect theme park for you; Southport’s very own £3.5m Christian theme park.

A spokesman for the park stated “The Christian theme park is being built for the 97 per cent of the people in this country who do not attend church, or who were taught the theory of evolution in a school where the Bible is banned.

The theme park will be using advanced technology to give all visitors an experience they will cherish and it has been designed to entertain everyone of all nations, including Muslims, Jews, Christians, Evolutionists and Atheists.”

So basically, if you don’t believe in Christ, they will happily educate you for a small entrance fee.

The AH Trust has been searching for sometime for the promised land in which to build the park, and Southport has been earmarked as a possible location to house the 20 acre site.

The trust believe that the park would cost around £3.5m to build, will bring in up to £4.8m a year and will be run by volunteers.

Inspired by the Holy Land Experience in Florida whose main draw is an enactment of a bloodied Jesus forced to haul his cross by Roman soldiers(?!?!?!!), this (as yet) unnamed park hopes to match the popularity of its older brother across the water.

Attractions at the park will include advanced cinematic hologram technology, three exhibition centres, two interactive cinemas, six shops, a cafeteria and a 5,000 capacity film recording studio.

I’m not entirely sure whether the above attractions are enough to warrant calling this place a theme park though, which set me to thinking of what I would do if I owned a Christian theme park:

• Noah’s Ark: A water coaster.
• Away in a Manger: The kid’s ride.
• The Saviour Spinner: You spin around a bit.
• The Garden of Eden: Jesus’s answer to the Towers and Gardens.
• Heaven: An excessively pleasant roller coaster which gently guides you through the sky.
• Hell: A devilishly harsh and horrible thrill ride which takes you miles beneath the ground surrounded by molten lava and burning fires. Pins on the front two seats only. (Scarier than the new ride at Thorpe Park?)

Alton Towers it’s not, but watch this space for more news on the UK’s first religious theme park.

Have you ever suspected that Victoria Beckham and that woman who’s related to Kylie who does the X-factor are made of plastic? Well just for today, they are. LEGO® are celebrating 30 years of their trademark “minifigs” with a gallery of the world’s biggest celebs transformed into the LEGOmen that are so familiar to us all.

Among the privileged celebs to be immortalised in LEGO form are The Beckhams, Brangelina, Alan Titchmarsh, the X-factor judges and Madonna. Don’t get too excited, you won’t be able to buy a LEGO Madonna to live on your bathtime LEGO pirate ship. These figures are strictly concept only.

In addition to Jonathan Dudley’s recent post entitled Project Dylan - Thorpe Park’s New Ride. I don’t have much to add, other than this tantalising video of the new ride at Thorpe Park.