So after a tiring day at Holiday Park the day before, I got some sleep before once again getting in my friend's 1997 VW Polo to drive 1 and a half hours to Movie Park Germany in Bottrop. I can't speak for all of the German parks, but the two that I visited were in the middle of nowhere. You're driving along next to farms and fields and then there's an amusement park.
Upon arrival at Movie Park, I immediately wondered how the hell it was ever a SF park. The nice
entrance was very clean, and the
entry area was really nice. As I turn to my left and walk down the path, I can't help but think that the park has a Universal Studios feel to it. The
street is a little narrower, but it's still very nicely themed. I noticed the SpongeBob 4D ride playing in the theater and tried to decide whether or not I was gonna watch it later. As we get out to the town square area, we find what has to be the only Subway restaurant in Germany and eat there. The large drink was actually a large! Am I still in Europe?!
For our first ride, we rode their top spin named
"NYC Transformer" although it was obviously a Riddler themed ride before SF sold the park. As I'm standing in the queue house waiting for the next cycle, I notice that this ride is a ture German ride, and is running very intense. Awesome. I get on, and about 15 or 16 flips later, our ride is cut slightly short because someone on the end is throwing up...that's nice.
We continue walking down the parth and Gotham....er...New York City turns into the old west, and the ride I was looking most forward to was standing right in front of me, The Wild Bunch...er...High Fall. For those of you who don't know what kind of ride it is, it is basically a clone of Acrophobia at SFOG. In case you don't know what kind of ride that is, it is an Intamin standing, tilting gyro-drop. The ride takes you up like 200 feet while you spin around the tower, like an observation tower. In all, you make 1 full rotation before you drop. As you near the top, the....seats? tilt forward, so you're facing the ground. When you stop rotating, you drop. This ride was truly awesome, although it was a little painful to be standing...with no floor.
Next, my friend insists that we ride the SLC, but I manage to convince him to ride the woodie first. Before both of these, however, we see the frisbee and decide to ride it. This ride was running great as well. It was running at full swing and full roatation, which was a cool feeling.
After searching around for a bit for the entrance (the entrances to rides are hidden in facades, but most are easy to find), we got in line for Wild Wild West....er...Bandit. We rode in the worst seat of the ride (the back seat) and let the
premier trains do their work on this crappy CyClone coaster. This is the first time I've ridden in Premier wooden trains. They felt really weird....like a steel coaster trying to be a wooden coaster or something. This ride sucks.
Afterwards, my friend insists on riding the SLC, Eraser....er...FX, so I force myself into line for that. As I sat down in the seat, I noticed that my head was touching the padding on one side of the OTSR, so I move my head no more than 1.5-2 cm to the other side...and it's touching the padding there, too. We leave the station, they blare the "zoom zoom" song that's in Mazda commercials as they do every time a train goes up the lift and I fight witht he ride to prevent a concussion throughout the circuit. Surprisingly, probably because of all of the padding, I don't have a headache afterwards. Awesome.
We then make our way over to Lethal Weapon Pursuit....er...Cop Car Chase, after riding the frisbee and The High Fall a couple more times. After waiting in line for a while, they finally let us in to walk through the pre-show room and out to the actual loading platform. I wonder if that pre-show was any good. Shame that they had to strip all of the theming from their rides. Being that it is an older Intamin looper with OTSRs, I was expecting it to be quite rough. Surprisingly, it's not rough at all. I didn't even realize there was a loop in this ride. It was pretty fun, IMO. I liked it.
So now it's time to go on a water ride. We head over to
Bermuda Dreieck, after riding High Fall another time. This ride is okay. Actually, it's rather boring aside from the drops. It's kind of a bootleg shoot-the-chutes ride that doesn't get you very wet. It would be slightly better if the ride was still called Bermuda Triangle and not Bermuda Triangle, Alien Encounter. As we're walking back into the park (Bermuda Triangle is right at the entrance), my friend decides he wants to see SpongeBob, but he doesn't feel like waiting, so we skipped it. Instead, we saw the stunt show, which wasn't too good. It probably would have been better if I knew German, though.
After the stunt show, we headed over into the former Looney Tunes Town and we ride
Tom & Jerry....er...Mad Manor. Pretty cool ride. I like the theming, although it's just kind of a painted box around the ride. We then head over to Mystery River, which appears to be a rapids ride, judging by the map.
As we're walkign through the queue, I get the idea that I'm getting on another kiddie boat ride. Once the ride begins, I can't see 5 feet in front of me because the lift is completely filled with fog, and then afterwards we start going through scenes from what else but German fairy tales. Awesome. I didn't get wet, and the ride was about fairy tales. At least it was very nicely themed.
We ride NYC Transformer again, as well as the frisbee. We also went on High Fall one more time and then it was nearing park closing. These crazy Germans like to close rides before the park closes, so you have to go around searching for rides that are still open starting about an hour before close. The next ride we went on was Ice Age Adventure, a Pirates of the Carribean style ride about the movie Ice Age. Since I haven't seen the movie, nor do I know German all that well, I had no idea what the hell was going on and didn't like the ride all that much. I'm sure it would have been good if both of the above conditions were met.
I went on Bermuda Triangle one more time, and then we left the awesome park known as Movie Park Germany. Luckily, there wasn't too many people there that day, so I had a great time, despite the mediocre rides. I loved the atmosphere of the park. As I said before, it really reminded me of Universal Studios for some reason. I'd suggest this park to anyone in the area.
*scrolls up* Oh my....it seems that my short TR turned into the next Harry Potter book. My bad.
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