More importantly, the ground Colossus is sitting on is worth more to the park’s future expansion plans than the attraction itself. The most attention Colossus got came during Fright Fest when the park ran the coaster backwards using the thankfully-defunct Psyclone’s trains. In the eight years I have visited Magic Mountain I have seen it race a single time - at a special event hosted by a theme park site. First of all, the park clearly gave up on the ride years ago. But a couple of factors roll into why this decision is sort of a no-brainer for Six Flags. (Down is good, up is bad in this chart)Ĭolossus finished 116th out of 175 tabulated roller coasters in 2013, which for a nearly 40-year-old roller coaster isn’t anything to sneeze at, really. I embedded a graphic below to give a better idea of the way Colossus’ approval rating has trended. You can see here that the popularity of Colossus amongst roller coaster enthusiasts (for whatever that’s worth) has plummeted in the 20 years that Hawker has run the poll. I’ve mentioned previously that Mitch Hawker also runs a great annual roller coaster poll. It only pulls a "Good" 7 on Theme Park Insider's reader ratings, leaving it outside the top 100 roller coasters in the world, as rated by our readers. One problem is that the ride has been pretty awful the past few years. But there are a couple of problems with advocating for the survival of rides like Colossus on the basis of nostalgia alone. Colossus is a special roller coaster for many people, even if it never meant anything particularly valuable to me. Theme parks are, by and large, valued for the memories created while we’re there. You caught Colossus in National Lampoon’s Vacation, in the intro of Step By Step and even in an episode of the A-Team! This was a big deal! With those memories comes a seeping sense of nostalgia - the feeling that we as theme park fans are losing something by the closure of Colossus and those like it.ĭon’t get me wrong: There’s absolutely nothing wrong with nostalgia. It stood as a mark for an era of rapid theme park growth and popularity it’s one of the coasters that thrust Magic Mountain into the national spotlight. The closure of Colossus means something, probably. There’s reason to believe that someone who rode this coaster for the first time in 1980 would have a very different perception than someone who first rode it in 2006. Over the years Colossus has been re-profiled at least twice over the last 40 years - once to remove the double-down segment and another time to flatten out a valley. All of this makes Six Flags’ announcement that the ride is to be closed on August 16, well, less than surprising. It’s the 163rd-tallest coaster if you include both steel and wooden coasters. According to the excellent RCDb, Colossus is now just the twelfth-tallest wooden roller coaster in the world. It’s hard to imagine a time when Colossus was the tallest and fastest roller coaster just a sign of how much the roller coaster business has changed in the 36 years since it was unveiled in 1978.
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