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GenePool
Humor
Dear Six Flags
To: Six Flags New England
From: Gene Doucette
RE: Our recent trip to your park
Dear Park Administrator Person:
My family and I recently visited your park, and I am pleased to report that we are now almost fully healed. The doctors say I will soon regain full range of motion in my neck, and my son is once again speaking in complete sentences.
While at Six Flags my wife commented several times that you seemed to be striving for a Disney-esque atmosphere, and I, for one, would like to commend you for your spectacuar effort in this regard. The four of us (my wife, myself, and our children, aged ten and eight) are veterans of Disney World, and we all felt that you would greatly benefit from the advice we have to offer regarding improvements you may wish to consider. Please take them in the spirit in which they were intended.
1: Your park is too far away from our home.
You may find this to be somewhat foolish advice insofar as we had to travel all the way to Orlando from Boston in order to visit Disney World, but we were staying in a hotel then, and the park was very conveniently located near that hotel. Six Flags New England, however, is located in Agawam, Massachusetts. We have driven through Agawam, and have no particular desire to obtain a hotel room there. I had to violate several laws, including at least one law of physics, in order to arrive in Agawam in under two hours. We recommend relocating the park somewhere near Boston.
2: Please stop trying to kill us.
In three different trips to Orlando, I can think of only one occasion in which Disney attempted to kill me, and that involved a misunderstanding with Goofy that has since been resolved. In contrast, at Six Flags you attempted to kill all four of us at least five or six times, to say nothing of maiming and mutilating. Please review the below list of near-death experiences.
--Nightwing. On this ride, one is supposed to lie down on one's stomach and look either forward or down while tightly sandwiched between two padded restraints. Then, when the ride starts to spin very quickly and invert ninety degrees, one is supposed to feel like one is flying, albeit in a tight circle perpendicular to the ground while trapped in a vice. I commend you on the overall tightness of your restraints, but I feel you perhaps went a bit overboard. The problem arose when your employees adjusted the restraints on my son, who, being rather young, is also rather thin. Evidently, it is impossible to adjust restraints individually, so by tightening his you tightened all of ours as well. Thus, when the vice-like devices were re-closed, you inadvertently relocated both of my kidneys and caused my genitals to temporarily recede into my chest cavity, which had precious little room for them at that time. Also, I believe my wife can no longer bear children. Furthermore, I found it nearly impossible to look up while the ride was spinning, and equally impossible to look down without redistributing my lunch. My best advice would be to remove this ride immediately.
--Mind Eraser. Let me begin by saying there are few truths in advertising these days, and I therefore commend you for labeling this ride so very accurately. It is my understanding that you were recently sued by a woman who went on this ride and actually suffered minor brain damage including memory loss. (For your defense I suggest asking her how she knows she actually went on the ride.) My concern is that you are trying a bit too hard to erase our minds. What one can only generously term "padding" on the sides of our heads turned out on impact to be hard rubber-- with grooves built into the surface, no less. So when your roller coaster began negotiating the manifold corkscrew turns, causing our heads to slap about from side to side uncontrollably, the grooved hard rubber effectively tenderized our ears and left us with some rather powerful headaches, which is what happens when your brain hits the inside of your skull. My wife is not currently speaking to me as it was my idea to go on this ride. However, it is possible that she just can't remember who I am.
Island Kingdom-- As you specifically state in many of your brochures, visitors are not allowed to wear bathing suits anywhere except in your water park. (Oddly, this was completely unenforced, and there were a tremendous number of occasions in which I observed women wearing bikini tops in lieu of shirts throughout the park. Three quarters of them had no business wearing only a bikini top, frankly, but do not consider this a complaint, as I am most grateful for the other one quarter.) With your dress code in mind, we had no choice but to use your changing rooms. If you have not personally visited the changing areas in the Island Kingdom, I highly recommend you stop in there some time soon. What you will discover is that it was a remarkably bad idea to neglect to install toilets of any kind. It should be obvious from the smell that, despite the lack of toilets, people are still peeing in there. We had many concerns when visiting Disney World, but picking up exotic diseases after standing barefoot in urine was never one of them.
3: Put up some signs.
Since you have gone through the trouble of labeling different sections of the park and then decorating those sections thematically, a small investment in signposts should be a fairly minor expense, especially since the rides only occasionally have anything to do with the theme. Providing us with little maps is only slightly useful, since while each attraction is labeled on the map with a number key, there are about two hundred numbers, and this diminishes the usefulness of the number key system significantly. We spent a lot of time holding the tiny map up and trying vainly to compare it to the area we were in just to figure out where the hell we were. In contrast, it was not possible to get lost in Disney World, even when we really wanted to.
4: The food.
The New England area has a large number of companies that are solely in the business of supplying food in bulk. I mention this because, based on what you charge for food in the park, your current supplier must be an overseas distributor of some sort. For example, our dinner consisted of: two plates of chicken strips with fries, barbequed chicken with corn on the cob, barbequed ribs with potato salad, two chocolate puddings and four sodas. It cost us over fifty dollars. I hope you will take seriously my recommendation to find a food producer locally so that you no longer have to pass on the cost to the customer. I also hope your supplier is not from a European nation, given the current problem over there with Mad Cow Disease.
5: Just because it's a secret doesn't mean it's interesting.
I am referring here to the ride called The Joker. All we knew for certain regarding this ride was that it was indoors. Hoping to find out more, we got in line and asked a few people waiting with us what kind of ride it was, but nobody knew. (The very fact that there were no repeat customer should have tipped us off.) After waiting for some time in front of a set of double doors, we were allowed in, where we found a corridor and a second set of double doors. We waited there for a while too. At one point someone asked an employee what the ride was. He said "I'm not allowed to tell you." Oooh. Then the second set of double doors opened, and, our pulses racing, we poured into the next room, which turned out to be a big, fairly well-lit warehouse. And in the middle of that warehouse, a wondrous thing to behold, a marvel of modern engineering, a ride beyond all mortal ken: a tilt-a-whirl. Yes! But not just any tilt-a-whirl, but a tilt-a-whirl painted green and purple with the Joker's face all over the place! And green lights! And so, with great trepidation, we climbed aboard, all the while asking, whatever will become of us? Lo and behold, we did tilt, and we did whirl. I personally yawned in terror several times.
6: Superman
I have only a few minor complaints about Superman, Ride of Steel, and none of them concern the ride itself, which is easily the greatest roller coaster I have ever experienced in my entire life, with the possible exception of the Rock 'N Roller Coaster at Disney World. My first problem is that the roller coaster itself is located in Boston, while the line for it begins in Agawam. As you review point number one (above) please consider the advantages of moving the park so that it is closer to this ride. Also, you may wish to use a sign (see point number three, above) to indicate when persons waiting for the ride have inadvertently gotten in the line for the first car. We did this the first time we rode Superman, which was not a problem for myself or my son, but my daughter and wife were hoping for seats closer to the back, and also perhaps on a different coaster. Furthermore, the staff on the ride does not comprehend what the phrase "we are experiencing technical difficulties" means. We were waiting near the front of the ride when we heard this, and were somewhat concerned, because a roller coaster that drops almost two hundred feet and approaches speeds of seventy-seven miles per hour should not be having technical difficulties while we are anywhere near it. Further inquiry revealed that there was nothing wrong with the coaster itself, but rather that two people had jumped the fence. As the fence was designed to keep people out of the area through which the roller coaster traverses, I understand the need to stop the ride, if only to keep blood off the guests. What I recommend is, rather than announcing "technical difficulties," have the staff announce "two goddamned idiots forced us to stop the ride just to save their stupid lives. Superman will start moving again just as soon as our security people finish kicking the living crap out of them. If you would like to help security kick the living crap out of them, please speak to an attendant after you have completed the ride."
7: The Employees
I commend your staff on being very polite and courteous, although this may have been because few of them spoke english and therefore couldn't understand what we were saying. (There is a large pool of available local manpower in Western Massachusetts. Perhaps you could reduce the cost of admission if you hired neighborhood people instead of importing employees from the Netherlands, although I admit you will have more trouble finding polite, courteous people in the local work force.) We were assaulted a few times by employees who wanted to take our picture and demanded that we stand still, but they were mostly small employees we could easily overpower. However, you may wish to consider not paying them by the picture, as this has obviously forced them to be a tad over-eager.
Unfortunately, due to crowd sizes my family and I were unable to try every ride you have at your park-- we were there on the Fourth of July, and so was the entire population of Western Massachusetts and most of Connecticut-- so I cannot offer a more comprehensive review. I will say that most of the adult rides we didn't have time for looked mainly like further attempts to kill us. For example, the Tomahawk Chop appeared to be a giant pendulum with a rapidly spinning barrel at the end. I do not see how anyone can survive this experience. Likewise, the Bungee Drop evidently involves harnessing three people together, attaching them to a large elastic, and then dropping them from a great height. This looks very dangerous, not to mention very painful.
In closing, I would like to point out that while you have fallen somewhat short of Disney in your efforts, there were a few things you got right: high prices, ridiculously long lines, and an obscene number of gift shops, to name a few. However, Disney does not smell like urine, and has almost never tried to kill us. Also, remarkably, Disney has only one ride that completely sucks: Test Track. You currently have several rides that completely suck, and I recommend improving this ratio.
Yours in writing,
Gene Doucette
© 2001, Gene Doucette
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