So the kid & I hit up SFNE last Sunday to see if the park is a bit better during Fright Nights.
There were a few Halloween 'scenes' on display.
They were only along the main entrance walkway, with very little setup elsewhere.
The section of the park that leads over to Mind Eraser & Batman was themed Area 51.
It has an absolutely ghetto haunt that consisted of a couple of army tents.
We couldn't even be bothered to wait in the relatively short queue line.
This was the only other Halloween 'scene' we could find along the main walkways (also in Area 51).
After walking around a bit we decided to ride some of the coasters, but the ride operations were so bad that we skipped all but Bizarro. I was filming a Batman off-ride video & thought they were running only one train until I went around to the side & saw that it was just taking forever to send the trains out of the station.
Bizarro has also really gone down since opening last year. The fire effects have been removed & the audio was only working on one train, plus all of the monitors had a windows error dialog box on them.
I spoke to one of the ride ops about the state of the coaster & she confirmed that the fire effects have been permanently removed. She also said that they are going to change the audio next year so that it just plays music since they are having so many problems.
At least I was able to get a great nighttime POV, even without the fire effects.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bC3SvM_Hsc[/youtube]
I hope they can do something to bring this coaster back to it's former glory...
...because the way it stand right now is insulting to it's top steel coaster ranking in my top 10 list.
So after multiple rides on Bizarro we went to check out the haunts.
This huge guy is located just outside of the Wicked Woods haunt. You have to buy separate tickets to go through the haunts & the line just to buy the tickets was so long we decided to skip it as well. The queue line to the actual haunt was even longer than the ticket line.
So we decided to make an early night & leave. The Halloween stuff looked much better after dark.
They even added a little smoke effects.
But the best scene was actually the one that's there all year round...
...and is used to advertise Fright Nights.
Just before we left we made a slight detour to see if the queue line was just as long at the haunted house.
It wasn't quite as bad, but still not worth waiting for. At least it appears that the fire damage from the previous week was minimal & couldn't be seen.
So with that it was time to hit the road back home.
Goodbye SFNE. I don't think you'll ever see us return more than once a year. It simply isn't worth it anymore.
