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:
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.
As I’m sure you’re all aware, Thorpe Park is in the process of building a new roller-coaster. Facts are still a little thin on the ground but being the google super-sleuths that we are, Play and Stay® have managed to polish the various rumours, blogs and outright fibs into a few nuggets of almost-news gold for you. Of course nothing is official just yet so this “gold” really is just our best guess at what’s going on. There are some pretty convincing facts and figures to work with so I’m feeling confidant that our guesswork will turn out to be pretty accurate. Before we get to the newsy part of the blog I feel the need to point out what a superb job the builders of this new coaster have. Rather than putting up dreary tower blocks or trendy town centre flats, these guys get to play with what is essentially, giant mechano!
The prospect of such a fun day’s work is almost tempting to me. Unfortunately I’m not very good at the following: digging, lifting, sweating, wearing neon vests, operating machines more complicated than my X-box, wolf-whistling and reading The Sun. My list of handicaps does not make me a particularly attractive employee for a builder, so I blog.
Fortunately for me I get to blog about fun stuff; LEGO®, Halloween at theme parks (watch this space for a hyperblog all about me at Alton Towers’ Scarefest) and the new ride at Thorpe Park. I like not being a builder. Anyway, enough about my career choices, time to have a look at “Project Dylan” - Thorpe Park’s new coaster.
First things first, thankfully ‘Project Dylan’ is just a working title. For a little while I was worried that this very exciting new coaster may have been going down the same route as the terribly named but very fun “Rita: Queen of Speed” at Alton Towers. The name of the new coaster is still unknown, considering it is themed in the style of a disused sawmill with a strong horror element I’m expecting something like “Buzzsaw” or “Lumberjacks Revenge”.
We know that Project Dylan is being built by Gerslauer, the German company behind the Euro-Fighter design which commonly features greater than 90 degree drops. We also know that Gerstlauer have built quite a few coasters, most of them heavily themed. Having had a trawl through their previous work, one coaster stands out as particularly similar to what Thorpe Park have planned and it’s located in a very surprising place indeed. ‘Mystery Mine’ is a Euro-Fighter coaster with a 95 degree drop (Project Dylan will reportedly have a 100 degree drop) themed around a haunted mine. This thoroughly fun sounding coaster is in Dollywood, yes, Dolly Parton’s theme park. Here’s a video so you can get yourself aquatinted.
Just like Project Dylan, Mystery Mine has several dark sections, what seems to be the the promised low scenery to create the so-called “head chopper” effect and the Euro-Fighter’s trademark massive drop. The themes are obviously similar so I imagine Thorpe Park’s new coaster will be quite similar but according to the specs, considerably more hardcore. Project Dylan will have four inversions, Mystery Mine only has two. Mystery Mine has a track length of 1811 feet with a total ride time of two and a half minutes, Project Dylan has 2362 feet of track with a total ride time of one minute forty seconds. This obviously implies that Project Dylan will be considerably faster than Mystery Mine which has a respectable top speed of nearly 50mph. Obviously, these figures are largely based on online rumour so nothing is concrete yet but presuming at least some of these numbers are correct we are in for a real treat when Project Dylan opens.
For those of you who are simply desperate to see Project Dylan here is a collection of construction photos. See if you can spot something I missed and let us know!
All I can say for sure is that Thorpe Park’s new coaster will be located in Canada Creek, it’s brown/black, it opens in 2009 and it’s going to be scary. Thorpe Park are making no secret of Project Dylan’s horror theme. The ever questionable wikipedia even suggests that the coaster will have themes similar to excessive gore flick, Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Whatever it is that those lucky lucky builders are putting up over at Thorpe Park all I know is, I want a go.
As promised, here is yet another blog tenuously linked to LEGOLAND® because its about LEGO®. This particular installment is also about Radiohead, a band who I’m sure are big fans of LEGO, thus indisputably making this blog about LEGOLAND.
Recently, Radiohead released a rather progressive and potentially eye-damaging music video that was shot with lasers (or something along those lines) rather than cameras. This process was explained far more eloquently than I could ever manage by the production people behind the whole space agey affair.
“The Geometric Informatics scanning system employs structured light to capture detailed 3D images at close proximity, and was used to render the performances of Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, the female lead, and several partygoers. The Velodyne Lidar system uses multiple lasers to capture large environments in 3D, in this case 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute, capturing all of the exterior scenes and wide party shots.”
Still not making a great deal of sense? I had a nosebleed after reading that so don’t worry. It all becomes much more clear when you take a peek at the video for yourself, here you go. Radiohead’s House of Cards for your enjoyment.
I know what you’re thinking, this has literally NOTHING to do with LEGO. Bear with me, I’ve not let you down yet have I? No, no I have not. Sit tight ladies and gentlemen.
In their infinite wisdom Radiohead decided to make the data gathered by their lasers public. This allowed anyone and everyone to have a go at recreating the video however they saw fit. Ian McKinnon’s efforts resulted in…………LEGO RADIOHEAD! Behold ladies and gentlemen, one of the greatest bands of our time made out of LEGO.
Ok I admit it, I misled you slightly. Technically it’s just Thom York made of LEGO and it is a bit blurry. It’s still pretty cool though yeah?!
As ever, if you have any LEGO based news, pictures, videos please feel free to send them our way, and please feel free to comment. We like to hear from you.
I’m terribly sorry, I’m sure there are at least 3 people out there who were eagerly awaiting my tenuous LEGOLAND® based blog of the week and were left waiting. Unfortunately my computer and I got locked in a battle of wills and it has taken me two weeks to win, but win I did!
To make up for this atrocity I’m treating you, dear readers, to a particularly impressive LEGO based blog. You are, without doubt, the luckiest people on the interwebs today.
In this instalment of my favourite blog of the week I’m going to share a very good use of the LEGO Mindstorms system (which I really want, hint hint.) Behold Donkey Kong ® cleverly rendered in robotic LEGO.
Was’nt that fun! I desperately want a Mindstorms kit so I can use its super-cool robotic technology to make myself some kind of strength and speed enhancing Iron Man suit - made of LEGO! Ahhh one day……
