Howdy folks, I hope your Thanksgiving was a great one and that your shopping dreams come true this Black Friday. I was able to spend some quality time in a very special plans to me and am back on MiceChat to share the good news . . . it’s Christmas time down on the farm! Knott’s Berry Farm is once again filled with the spirit of the holiday season as it transforms into Knott’s Merry Farm! Knott’s is one of our favorite places to make holiday memories. Guests can celebrate the season with live entertainment, a crafts fair, festive food, lavish Christmas decorations, and nightly snow in Ghost Town.
Read the rest at MiceChat
Friday, November 27, 2015
Tuesday, November 24, 2015
Saturday, November 21, 2015
IAAPA Legends Panel: How Disneyland Changed the Industry, and How the Industry Changed Disney
Ouimet also talked about his career after leaving Disney.
"The things that you give up when you leave? You give up the brand. There's not a phone call in the world you can't make, to get someone to answer the phone, if you say you're from Disney. And the amount of resources. I had to retrain myself. Now, some of that is satisfying. I probably had 84 less people to ask, [but] I have 83 less people to do the work."
Still, fewer resources can still lead to success, provided you focus on what the public wants, that you do best.
"Knott's is having best year in its history," Ouimet said. "About three or four years ago, that was not the case. So we took a step back, went out, and talked to the consumers in the marketplace, and we were trying to figure out why [Knott's] wasn't doing as well as it had done before. Part of it was our fault. We'd starved the asset."
"We did focus groups, and we weren't getting much," Ouimet continued. "So the moderator said, 'I'm going to go back in the room and I'm going to tell them that Knott's is closing.' They started crying. Out of that, we came back to the basics."
Over the past three years, Knott's Berry Farm has moved from competing with Six Flags by building more iron rides to refocus on more family-friendly attractions. Under Ouimet's leadership at parent Cedar Fair, Knott's refurbished its Timber Mountain Log Ride and Calico Mine Train, added the Voyage to the Iron Reef interactive dark ride, and next year the park will celebrate the 75th anniversary of its Ghost Town with improvements throughout the land, including a rebuild of the Ghostrider coaster and Mrs. Knott's Chicken Dinner Restaurant.
"We have a saying: Having fun should be fun," Ouimet said. "The day you go to the park, it shouldn't be about - with my apologies to the organization that did so well for us - it shouldn't be whether I'm going to get my $100 worth. It should be about, am I going to create a memories? I'm going to relax, enjoy the Chicken Dinner restaurant, ride the Timber Mountain Log Ride. It shouldn't be stressful."
Ouimet credited a focus on the community over the corporation in making a connection with potential customers.
Read the rest at ThemeParkInsider
"The things that you give up when you leave? You give up the brand. There's not a phone call in the world you can't make, to get someone to answer the phone, if you say you're from Disney. And the amount of resources. I had to retrain myself. Now, some of that is satisfying. I probably had 84 less people to ask, [but] I have 83 less people to do the work."
Still, fewer resources can still lead to success, provided you focus on what the public wants, that you do best.
"Knott's is having best year in its history," Ouimet said. "About three or four years ago, that was not the case. So we took a step back, went out, and talked to the consumers in the marketplace, and we were trying to figure out why [Knott's] wasn't doing as well as it had done before. Part of it was our fault. We'd starved the asset."
"We did focus groups, and we weren't getting much," Ouimet continued. "So the moderator said, 'I'm going to go back in the room and I'm going to tell them that Knott's is closing.' They started crying. Out of that, we came back to the basics."
Over the past three years, Knott's Berry Farm has moved from competing with Six Flags by building more iron rides to refocus on more family-friendly attractions. Under Ouimet's leadership at parent Cedar Fair, Knott's refurbished its Timber Mountain Log Ride and Calico Mine Train, added the Voyage to the Iron Reef interactive dark ride, and next year the park will celebrate the 75th anniversary of its Ghost Town with improvements throughout the land, including a rebuild of the Ghostrider coaster and Mrs. Knott's Chicken Dinner Restaurant.
"We have a saying: Having fun should be fun," Ouimet said. "The day you go to the park, it shouldn't be about - with my apologies to the organization that did so well for us - it shouldn't be whether I'm going to get my $100 worth. It should be about, am I going to create a memories? I'm going to relax, enjoy the Chicken Dinner restaurant, ride the Timber Mountain Log Ride. It shouldn't be stressful."
Ouimet credited a focus on the community over the corporation in making a connection with potential customers.
Read the rest at ThemeParkInsider
Thursday, November 19, 2015
Wednesday, November 18, 2015
Raising My Rating On Cedar Fair
I hope you guys realize on these calls we tend to moderate our comments a little bit, but I am most excited about 2015 as anything I have seen since we got here. I like the mix of traditional steel basically the Cedar Point clearly has done an anchor for us in a good way over the last decade, several decades. But the digital interactive I think is going to tap into a new audience. My favorite line that was posted online about our product which Mack attracted Great America was a guy that said I don't know what Great America is but I am going. So I think the collection of that, Knott's Berry Farm with the 75th Anniversary of Ghost Town plays very strongly to the legacy that's worked so well for us in a highly competitive market. So '16 for me is really well positioned from a capital standpoint and we got some of the older stuff behind us. The Breakers Hotel behind us is good and the reputation its built this year because of how the job the team did in restoring it have to beat the better results next year as well. So look I got stop there, it's not my usual approach, but I am really solid about 2016.
Read the rest at SeekingAlpha
Read the rest at SeekingAlpha
Knott's News: This was actually a really interesting read. I only posted what specifically pertained to Knott's but the whole thing is worth reading. Haven't read the conference call but the excerpts point towards a very positive outlook for Cedar Fair.
Saturday, November 14, 2015
O.C. Answer Man: Doesn’t the Panda Express in Ghost Town at Knott’s Berry Farm ruin the Old West illusion?
True, a Chinese fast-food place looks odd, but there’s an easy fix.
Read the rest at OrangeCoastMagazine
Read the rest at OrangeCoastMagazine
Saturday, November 7, 2015
New concept art for Mass Effect: New Earth
Announcing the name of our new attraction for 2016 - Mass Effect: New Earth! It is an incredible 4D Holographic Journey. Like this post for a chance to win an XBOX console or a copy of the Mass Effect game.
Posted by California's Great America on Saturday, November 7, 2015
How Snoopy Killed Peanuts
By the end of its run in 2000, Peanuts was an institution. It had become an omnipresent part of American culture, and that’s not a compliment.
The general response to reading the average Peanuts strip in the 80s and 90s was a ‘meh’ half-smile — a snicker, maybe, but never a full-blown laugh. The strip had run for over 50 years, but it was a flicker of its former flame, mostly coasting on its reputation and its endurance. Humor-wise, it was aggressively safe and took no risks, which of course, made it ripe for global, unprecedented popularity. There was a figurative mountain ofPeanuts merchandise everywhere, and the smiling faces of Charlie Brown, Linus, and Lucy stared back at us from shelves.
Perhaps Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin & Hobbes, had the right idea. He stopped working on his strip after only 10 years — a fifth of the time that Schulz spent working on his — and he never licensed his characters. Because as legendary as Peanuts is, it was only ‘great’ for a 15-20 year period — from about the mid-50s to the early 70s. And even by the 70s, there was a slow, but definite drop-off in quality. By the 80s, with the exception of a few notable storylines, the strip was essentially dead. The 90s was just more of the same.
And unfortunately, much of the blame for this can be traced back to Snoopy, the most beloved of Schulz’s creations. As the strip progressed, the beagle hogged more and more of the spotlight in increasingly negative ways. And the intelligence and darkness of the strip, which once made it so distinctive on the comics landscape, was replaced by more mainstream, cutesy humor.
Read the rest at Kotaku
The general response to reading the average Peanuts strip in the 80s and 90s was a ‘meh’ half-smile — a snicker, maybe, but never a full-blown laugh. The strip had run for over 50 years, but it was a flicker of its former flame, mostly coasting on its reputation and its endurance. Humor-wise, it was aggressively safe and took no risks, which of course, made it ripe for global, unprecedented popularity. There was a figurative mountain ofPeanuts merchandise everywhere, and the smiling faces of Charlie Brown, Linus, and Lucy stared back at us from shelves.
Perhaps Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin & Hobbes, had the right idea. He stopped working on his strip after only 10 years — a fifth of the time that Schulz spent working on his — and he never licensed his characters. Because as legendary as Peanuts is, it was only ‘great’ for a 15-20 year period — from about the mid-50s to the early 70s. And even by the 70s, there was a slow, but definite drop-off in quality. By the 80s, with the exception of a few notable storylines, the strip was essentially dead. The 90s was just more of the same.
And unfortunately, much of the blame for this can be traced back to Snoopy, the most beloved of Schulz’s creations. As the strip progressed, the beagle hogged more and more of the spotlight in increasingly negative ways. And the intelligence and darkness of the strip, which once made it so distinctive on the comics landscape, was replaced by more mainstream, cutesy humor.
Read the rest at Kotaku
Friday, November 6, 2015
Knott’s Berry Farm Announces Ghost Town 75th Anniversary Celebration
Howdy folks, I’ve got some great news for you from down on the Farm. This week, Knott’s announced an unprecedented restoration and refurbishment of a huge portion of the park in honor of Ghost Town’s 75th Anniversary. This will include the full renovation of Knott’s Chicken Dinner Restaurant, the construction of an all-new Ghost Town stage, an all-new interactive game (“Ghost Town Alive”), and the full refurbishment of the classic wooden coaster, Ghostrider. All of this news came hot on the heels of a hugely successful haunt season. They are hardly wasting time on the farm, basking in success, they are also in the middle of rapidly changing the park over from Halloween frights into Christmas cheer.
Read the rest at MiceChat
Read the rest at MiceChat
Thursday, November 5, 2015
There's something about Charlie: From an annual holiday display to a theme park, Orange County loves 'Peanuts'
Over at Knott’s Berry Farm in the 1970s, the Buena Park theme park was struggling to find an identity, a front-and-center character that would greet guests just like Mickey Mouse at Disneyland.
The park tried and failed – until it found one in an imaginative beagle with a trusty bird sidekick and a loving owner.
Read the rest at OCRegister
The park tried and failed – until it found one in an imaginative beagle with a trusty bird sidekick and a loving owner.
Read the rest at OCRegister
Tuesday, November 3, 2015
A Celebration 75 years in the Making
In 2016, Knott's Berry Farm’s Ghost Town will celebrate its 75th anniversary with two major offerings next summer. The centerpiece of the summer 2016 celebration is the interactive entertainment experience, Ghost Town Alive!, which immerses guests in new stories and adventures in the familiar town of Calico. The west is about to get even wilder when GhostRider returns from a major restoration project with all new trains that will gallop along over 4,500 feet of new wooden track. In addition to the Ghost Town offerings, a complete refurbishment of the legendary Mrs. Knott’s Chicken Dinner Restaurant will be completed in 2016. Become a 2016 Season Passholder now at the lowest price of the year for unlimited visits in 2016 to experience all of the new farm fresh fun coming to Knott's next year.
Read the rest a KnottsBerryFarm
Read the rest a KnottsBerryFarm
Sunday, November 1, 2015
Here's what you can see from the Snoopy blimp above O.C.
Snoopy was in the air over Knott's Berry Farm on Saturday.
No, not a flying beagle on top of a red dog house. It was Snoopy Two, the MetLife blimp.
The dirigible floated over Knott's Berry Farm's Camp Snoopy for a few hours, promoting the opening of the new Peanuts movie.
“It's like being in a boat in the sky,” is how pilot Cesar Mendez described flying the light-than-air ship. “We keep it slow and low - 30 mph and 1,000 feet above the ground,” he said.
The blimp will be floating over Westwood on Sunday for the premier of The Peanuts Movie. It will be over Southern California for the rest of the week.
Read the rest at OCRegister
No, not a flying beagle on top of a red dog house. It was Snoopy Two, the MetLife blimp.
The dirigible floated over Knott's Berry Farm's Camp Snoopy for a few hours, promoting the opening of the new Peanuts movie.
“It's like being in a boat in the sky,” is how pilot Cesar Mendez described flying the light-than-air ship. “We keep it slow and low - 30 mph and 1,000 feet above the ground,” he said.
The blimp will be floating over Westwood on Sunday for the premier of The Peanuts Movie. It will be over Southern California for the rest of the week.
Read the rest at OCRegister
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