Play-and-Stay Blog

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.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 19th, 2008 at 3:29 pm and is filed under Theme Parks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.