Gazza, thanks so much for your post.
The dodgems weren't the problem at all - Retheming Detonator and the surrounding area to such an atrocious standard was.
The park had recently started marketing the place for families on the TV, where the adverts literally just showed Tidal Wave about 50 times because they don't have anything else. And following that, their most intense and terrifying ride, Detonator, gets a retheme to Angry Birds? Setting the public up for disappointment. I know that families sometimes complain at Thorpe that there's nothing for them and they're offered transferable tickets to Chessington.
And then this year, we get a walk through themed to a really naff TV show. I might be being a real arse here, but does ITV make anyone else think "cheap daytime telly for idiots"? It's not a sign of quality at all and I can't imagine people will be racing to the park for it.
But weirder still is that everything people associate with "I'm a Celeb..." they won't be able to recreate. The show highlights are eating gross foods, touching or being surrounded with terrifying animals, being covered with goo, etc. This is, like Gavin criticised, going to be hand in box gets blasted with air.
In essence, my criticism is that Thorpe sets guests up for disappointment. And even with major instalments, such as Swarm, they manage it by marketing the thing as this absolutely terrifying intense monster that it just couldn't possibly have been. Once the marketing had died down, people actually quite liked the ride. But when the TV fed them promises of this absolutely intense scary thing and it wasn't, people were like meh. And I'm not talking about enthusiasts. That first year of operation, Swarm received such negativity if you talked to anyone. It flipped in 2013. It was super weird. Proves marketing is doing it wrong.
EDIT: Following Swarm is when the park switched to their "yay families!" attitude. It's almost as if Swarm's marketing mishap made them think "ahh this isn't working QUICK MARKET TO FAMILIES!"
It's like they can't see that there's more to failures or successes than one thing. The weather that season matters, the Olympics mattered, etc. But most importantly, the disjointedness between marketing promises and actual experience matters. It's sensible to be thinking of marketing in terms of what will bring the most people in - yes, 100%. But then the attractions being designed need to be catering to that. Instead, it just looks like both the park and their marketing do one thing and the designers do another and don't ...talk?
But like I said before, what something looks like and what's actually going on are two completely different things. And it's not like Merlin haven't had successes with IPs or with doing weird stuff in the past. Saw turned out to be pretty genius, didn't it.
We are lucky to have a saturation of pretty good parks in the UK making good quality attractions, it's just sad when you glance over to mainland Europe and every park seems to be doing really high quality exciting stuff. That's not to say that Liseberg adding Helix, however wonderful it is, isn't weird because Kanonen exists and doesn't that render that pointless? But given this forum's UK base, it's hard for us to comment with any depth on stuff like that because I don't visit those parks often enough to know. I talk a lot about Merlin and Busch Williamsburg because those are the parks I have a lot to say about. I'm not ignoring the fact that parks everywhere are doing weird things too. Let's talk about how weird what Canada's Wonderland did with their hyper/giga combo that's now being replicated at Carrowinds. I'm personally concerned that, like Merlin, they are missing something here. There's some other piece of the puzzle as to why worked. Or maybe I am. Because I don't get it. Ya know? Stuff. I've written a lot. Gonna go get breakfast now. Yes it is 1PM.
