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CAROWINDS
Charlotte, NC
Cedar Fair Entertainment
Park News - (11/2/11) It’s time for some more throwback pictures and history from Carowinds this week… take a look at the latest entry in Shane’s Amusement Attic.
(8/3/11) For the record, Carowinds has states that with the new 61-acre addition, the park’s total size is a comfortable 398 acres.
Meanwhile, according to Screamscape spies Carowinds is working on plans to develop their own resort hotel on some of the new property next to the freeway in about two years, along with an attached Famous Dave’s BBQ restaurant, which would be the first in North Carolina.
(8/2/11) In a surprise announcement Cedar Fair has announced the completion of a 61 acre land purchase for Carowinds. The new land purchased is actually pretty much all the available land between the park at the freeway starting next to the Plaza Fiesta mall building and going around to just behind the Season Passholder parking lot. (You can see it in the official map, highlighted in light blue.) Not exactly prime land for adding new rides for the most part… but a perfect site for a future hotel if they chose to build one. Or a perfect way to expand the main
parking lot to allow for an eventually future closure of the old South entrance to the park, where the could expand the park out to take over that whole rear section of the parking lot (alongside Thunder Road) that remains unused except on the most busy days.
(7/25/11) I’ve been told that Carowinds may be planning on repainting Afterburn for the 2012 season to look a bit more like Patriot at Worlds of Fun. So the supports would stay blue, but this would see the main track repainted red with a white stripe along the side if true. Interesting, but with Intimidator already rockin’ the red track color in the nearby skyline, I’m not sure if that idea will hold water in the long run. Stay tuned!
2011 - SCarowinds XI - (10/7/11) One of our readers has sent in four great examples of the great makeup effects being used at SCarowinds this year, taken just before dark so you can see it in bright detail. I’ve added them into my SCarowinds review below. Enjoy!
Review by Lance Hart - (9/30/11)
Today I’ve got a brief review of SCarowinds to report. Bottom line, as a one of the better theme park haunts in “The South” outside of Florida, SCarowinds is still a must see. That said, I’m going to start out with the bad news first. In the past SCarowinds has typically made sure to offer 2-3 new haunts in their list of 8 rotating haunted mazes and usually at least one new or modified scare zone. I’m no
t quite sure why, but SCarowinds chose to put all their eggs into one basket this year and only offered one single new haunted maze for 2011, called FURY.
The storyline is simple, company named Fury Industries has created a drug cocktail to transform an ordinary person into an incredible super solider, stronger, faster, better… you get the idea. I get the silent nod to Captain America here as well, but to be bluntly honest, FURY stands out as possibly the worst new haunt I’ve seen at SCarowinds in years, which is a shame as it replaced the popular Slaughterhouse.
On the way in you’ll pass through neat looking queue portals with video screens, fog and lighting effects that show off just how great the Fury cocktail really works on their test subject. By the time you get past the final portal in the queue, your looking around for a can of Fury energy drink yourself. This is where things fall apart, as the queue turns bland for the next 15 minutes of your wait, and as soon as you enter the lab… it’s apparent something disastrous has gone wrong and you feel like you just missed an important part of the story. It’s like running to the restroom at the movie theater, only to come back and find out that you missed the major plot turning point of the movie… and your confused for the rest of the experience. That’s what entering FURY feels like, so one additional pre-show video just outside or even a brief pre-show performance in the first room would be helpful. Unfortunately everything goes downhill from here.
The rest of the maze takes you through a twisted series of pathways through the Fury Industry’s labs, where the staff have been apparently maimed by one of their own creations. I say apparently, because the walls are lined with human sized alien abduction style glass chambers, all seemly to have an occupant silently sleeping inside. No sign of who or what caused the fuss to the dead and dying lab workers all around you.
From here things get more confusing: longer empty hallways and ramps where someone was let loose with the blacklight paint, putting odd things on the walls, a painted glowing missile sitting in a pit, and an increasing series of basketball sized solitary giant freaking eyeballs stuck to the walls and ceiling that made no sense at all. (What do giant eyeballs and missiles have to do with anything?) By the end, when you finally come into contact with a couple of giant odd looking blacklit glowing cartoonish mechanical freak creatures (with human heads… with eyeballs in place mind you). They’re behind steel cages… where they can’t get to you, and make loud electrical shock noises when the mechanical arms touch a metal wall. They’re meant to be frightening, but even my two boys (7 and 9) looked at them and laughed at their cartoon like nature and asked, “What are those?!”
Clearly, this is an example of Sci-Fi gone wrong… and while I try never to be too critical of an event like this based on a single haunt, SCarowinds promoted this haunt as if this single new addition was going to be the best thing in the entire park for years to come, and not the giant mistake that it is.
Now that I’m through beating up FURY for the night, lets focus on what is great at SCarowinds… damn near everything else! There is the always fun Defex, where you take a trip through a defunct toy factory where chaos reigns. Then there is the return of Camp Killauee, in an all new and improved location, tucked away behind Afterburn. The more remote forested location is a big improvements for this maze, which was already good fun last year. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but there’s just something missing here that could make Camp Killauee go from good to great.
Speaking of great… Cornstalkers is back again, running you through the very twisted and fog filled corn field maze. The scareactors here are great, as they even scared me a couple of times this year. Across the way from here is the venerable Dead Inn… which really is in need of replacement as possibly the oldest maze left. The haunted hotel theme seems to rely more on creepy atmosphere and old furniture than true scares.
Tucked away in the forest behind Nighthawk is The Asylum… probably the greatest maze in Scarowinds history still. Large in size, intense in both scares and gore makes this your one must see maze every season. Improving once again is Silver Scream Cinema, hidden away inside the structure of the Hurler coaster. Enter the movie theater façade and into a realm full of all your worst nightmares come to life. While it gets better every year, like camp Killauee, there is just some missing element here that could make it go from good to great.
And last off… we have Last Laff in 3D… the seemingly mandatory “clown maze” of the season. For what it is… it’s ok, but just not scary to me in the slightest, and the addition of the 3D glasses to little to help. To me these cheap 3D add-ons always seem to put up barrier between me and the maze itself, making everything even less real.
Beyond the eight haunts, you can also wander through the park’s three scare zones, but they are so small far away from each other that it’s possible to wander through the park and actually miss them entirely if you tried. And I’m not sure who was casting these, but there seemed to be a 2 to 1 female to male scaractors in all three zones this year when I passed through which just struck me as odd. I like the overall theme of Freeding Frenzy, but I think it needs to be bigger and more intense. The Cemetery is back around the fountain as usual, has a great amount of fog, props and scaractors, but the biggest thing that hurts it is that you can skip it entirely and never even see it. The pathways should be rerouted to gmake going through there manditory, or perhaps just turn it into a proper haunt of it’s own. Speaking of which… why has Carowinds never tried to enclose the bumper cars and turn them into a haunt? Knott’s has had great success with a similar sized space over the years, and I’d love to see this space used at Carowinds in the future for a maze as well instead of as a temporary home some video games. Finally… The Playground… not scary… not fun… just odd. I’m hoping his one goes away entirely next year.
So in addition to 2-3 new mazes in 2012, I think the park really needs to ramp up their Scare Zones so that virtually no place is safe anymore. Five or Six scare zones, each loaded with about 50% more scaractors than they have now would be incredible… and where are the sliders? I saw NO sliders this year for some reason… they were always popular the last couple of years, bring them back! And one more request before I go… SCarowinds needs their own annual staple show somewhere in the park… a SCarowinds version of The Hanging would be an incredible hit with the crowd I think, so please find somewhere to make this happen. If you build it... they will come...
(9/8/11) Fury will be unleashed at Scarowinds this year when the Haunt opens early this year on September 16th. According to Scarowinds, “Medical experimentation goes wrong in the latest diabolical maze to debut at SCarowinds' Halloween Haunt - Fury. Fury is a top secret military facility creating the ultimate human ‘weapon’. The ‘Fury’ drug cocktail is used in experimentation that mutates, disfigures and weaponizes its human subjects then pits them against mankind to test their endurance, depravity and lack of conscience. Rage is power in the world of sickness and insanity in this new 6,082 square foot maze. ”
(8/15/11) The new Scarowinds haunt website is now live. The site lists three scare zones (Feeding Frenzy, The Cemetary and The Playground) and eight haunted mazes. Seven mazes will be returning from last year (Defex, Dead Inn, Last Laff in 3D, Silver Scream Cinema, The Asylum, Camp Killauee and Cornstalkers) along with a mystery haunt labeled only as ‘New Fright Coming This Fall’. I’m just going from memory, but the only haunt I remember from last year not listed this year is Slaughterhouse. Also, the Live Show list is still listed as “Coming Soon”.
 2012 - Windseeker - (1/30/12) The following update comes to us courtesy of a reader who decided to take this story to the next level.
"Hello and welcome to the first "episode" of the WindSeeker Race: Carowinds vs Kings Dominion! Both parks are fighting to be the first to the top! Last week we saw both parks place the first (base) piece of WindSeeker's eight piece tower (not including the maintenance platform and "UFO"). On Saturday, Carowinds installed not one...not two but THREE PIECES putting them in the lead! This makes Carowinds half way done the tower while Kings Dominion is still at 1 piece tall. At this rate, Carowinds could finish the tower by early February!!! Tune back soon for the next "episode" of the WindSeeker Race: Carowinds vs Kings Dominion."
(1/24/12) Carowinds has placed the first tower section down for Windseeker. Check it out on their Facebook page.
(1/20/12) Another set of Windseeker construction photos have been posted to the Carowinds Facebook page.
(1/19/12) Carowinds reported on Facebook that the first few tower pieces for Windseeker have now arrived on site, along with a few pictures.
(1/17/12) Carowinds has posted a few new construction pictures of the Windseeker project area on their Facebook page this week.
(12/7/11) Carowinds has started to make some progress on setting up the foundation area for the park’s huge Windseeker ride coming next season. You can find some construction pictures here.
(8/24/11) Carowinds has confirmed that Windseeker is coming for the 2012 season, a 301 foot tall monster tower that will swing riders around at 30mph. Check out the animated video below.
(8/17/11) Carowinds has placed an interesting teaser graphic up in the park with a QR code
on it, on the pathway not far from Carolina Cobra. It’s not the QR code that is interesting however, but rather something else that has been discovered. Compare the first picture of the graphic with the second where I’ve added in something new.
Sure looks exactly like the metal frame of a Windseeker right, doesn’t it? I’m thinking those short-lived “Huss GF” survey markers up only for CoasterStock weekend were a red herring to throw everyone off the scent for a few weeks and that the park is adding a Windseeker after all, as the graphic art we’ve seen in the teasers seems to suggest as well. Stay tuned and thanks to Westcoaster.net for the quick borrow of a Windseeker photo.
(8/3/11) A few readers out there took the challenge of Carowinds new riddle to a new level by digging out the other unseen clue pages as well as two more QR codes along the way. There are a total of six images, that when put together to indeed form the riddle from The Hobbit, along with the date, August 24th.
(8/2/11) Several readers have pointed out that the phrase “Mouthless Mutters” as seen on the teaser graphic seems to be taken from the infamous riddle made popular with The Hobbit book that goes something like “Voiceless it cries, wingless flutters, toothless bites, mouthless mutters, what is it?”
The answer was “The Wind”… and it’s kind of ironic that the swirly art in the background behind Mouthless Mutters looks quite a bit like the same style swirls seen in the Windseeker logo.
(8/1/11) Carowinds has put up a “teaser” on their main website this week for the 2012 attraction in one of the rotating graphics on the main page. The teaser graphic contains some text and drawings mentioning the Wright brother’s “Flying Machine” and a large QR code you can scan with a cell phone. Scan the code and it will take you here, an odd graphic that simply says “Mouthless mutters”. The real clue however may in the image’s URL, which is in a folded called “8.24.11”, which I assume is the announcement date for the 2012 attraction: Aug. 24th, 2011.
(7/27/11) I’ve been told that the numerous survey flags that popped up in the Intimidator lawn area marked “HUSS GF” have all suddenly vanished from sight. What this means is anyone’s guess at the moment other than to quietly sit, wait and watch.
(7/25/11) Clear pictures of the new 2012 survey markers in the lawn in front of Intimidator, complete with a clear “HUSS GF” written on it, can be found at The Coaster Critic’s Blog this week.
(7/22/11) While I haven’t had time to get down to the park to see myself, I’m told that survey markers have shown up in the big grassy field in front of Intimidator at Carowinds. Even better, according to our source, one of the markers says “HUSS GF”.
Huss GF? Giant FRISBEE?! Could we see another Delirium ride like the one at Kings Island make it’s way to Carowinds for 2012? The site certainly is perfect for a giant flat ride like this. Now… anyone have a picture of this?
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