American-style theme parks finding a welcome home in Europe

Posted | Contributed by RagingBull

Just a few years after giving EuroDisney a tepid response, Europeans are now eager to pay for an American-style park experience. Disneyland Paris is currently the number one tourist destination in all of Europe, and both Universal and Six Flags have entered the hot European market.

Read the whole story from the Wall Street Journal.

According to the article Six Flags is building a brand Movie World in Madrid and they mentioned rides already under construction including Superman. Anyone know what kind of coaster it is?
It's a floorless...
A B&M floorless (Superman),a B&M batman klone (Batman the ride)wild wild west (mega woodie!) and twister (Vekoma Super Invertigo) I've seen the trains and track from twister at Vekoma.I'm visiting the park next year with the coaster club.We get 1/2 hour on Batman,Superman,Twister,WWW!
We already have arguably the best American-style amusement park in the world: Blackpool Pleasure Beach!

The park is amazing to visit. It has been running for over a hundred years, observing what was happening in America, and copying it to a similar quality (apart from The Big One!).

The biggest American traditional amusement parks, such as Coney Island and Riverview, unfortunately are either no more or not what they were.

But on-topic, yes, we are getting the big companies in some of our European countries now. Warner Bros in particular, with their Madrid Park seem to have gone all out! Universal haven't done much to Port Aventura yet though.

I wonder if the UK could support such a park in addition to Alton Towers? Or perhaps a big company may actually take over Alton Towers?
The biggest traditional park in the US would be Cedar Point, would it not?
How could you even say that Cedar Point is a traditional amusement park. It has been around for a long time and the park is very modern, not traditional. A traditional amusement park would be Kennywood. It has been around for around 100 years and it has all great woodies, a spin n puke and one recent hypercoaster but I would still classify Kennywood as a traditional amusement park. Knoebels, Holiday World, and Lake Compounce are also traditional amusement parks. Cedar Point is not even close to a "traditional" amusement park. It is based on steel coasters. It has MF, Magnum, Mantis, Raptor, etc... Cedar Point is classified as the future and the forerunner of amusement parks. CP is a modern not traditional amusement park. Also, where did CP even come into this news??!!
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Dave
Jeff's avatar
Don't even start a war of semantics over incredibly subjective terms.

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Jeff
Webmaster/Admin - CoasterBuzz.com
staticman00's avatar
I think the term "traditional park" refers to the lack of themed areas, like in theme parks. Traditional does not refer to the types of rides present in a park. Therefore, CP is the largest "traditional" park, because it is the park in the US with the most rides and area, without any seperate themed areas to it.

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"Highways should have beer lanes."
-George Carlin
Jeff doesn't want arguments about this, so I won't explain why I think Blackpool Pleasure Beach is the most intense, traditional American-style amusement park in the world. I certainly wasn't having a go at Cedar Point, Kennywood, etc. It didn't cross my mind...

I'm just saying Europe's theme and amusement parks have always been influenced by their American counterparts. Generally technology debuts there, and Europe copies the outstanding developments.

We've had the 20s/30s traditional amusement park era, we've had the inland theme park era, and like this headline says, we are just beginning to get some of the major players like Six Flags and Universal.
janfrederick's avatar
I find it interesting that after all the protests, Disney Paris is the number 1 tourist destination.

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Forget about it. It can't be THAT bad!
No offense to the guy who said Blackpool Pleasure Beach is the best traditional American-Style amusement park...
If it is the best American style, why is it not in America? Common sense would say that would be the best traditional UK-Style amusement park.
Jeff's avatar
Perhaps because there were many American amusement parks with a similar feel long before Blackpool opened.

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Jeff (who is troubled that most of his fellow Americans think that the US is the center of the universe)
Webmaster/Admin - CoasterBuzz.com
No offence taken. It's just that in my opinion there really is no such thing as a UK-style amusement park. Blackpool Pleasure Beach copied virtually every American trend. I was there the other day and people were playing "Skeeball". I mean, we don't even know what that is!

But if some people think Kennywood is a better example than BPB, fine, maybe it is. The two parks are hardly in competition with each other!
DragonCyrs. . .did you READ the topic headline? There you go. . .
I think it's really sad that American culture dominates the cultures in most other developed countries the world over, even down to theme parks. But having said that without the influence of American parks we wouldn't have Nemesis, thanks US.

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