Dorney renames Voodoo to Possessed to avoid trademark dispute

Yeah, but I bet you miss your "Giant" paycheck...

(seriously, it never gets old for me...) ;)

It's not the store where I do most of my grocery shopping, but I have my Giant bonus card dangling from my keychain. It's still the best place to get discounted tickets for Hersheypark. And Giant Center is a much better name for an arena than say. the Dunkin Donuts Arena in Providence.

Are tickets to HP still only $24 at giant, Bear? That's where I always got my tickets.

We had a grocery store chain in Columbus and central Ohio for years called Big Bear. (I think they lay claim to the nation's 1st supermarket on Lane Ave near OSU. Most of them are Giant Eagle now, go figure). Anyway, they had a huge warehouse near a freeway in town with a giant sign in red neon letters over the building. Every once in a while part of the sign would burn out so at night it would say, maybe, Pig Bear. Or it was Big Pear. Then there was the proverbial favorite-Big Rear. One of those things where you'd drive by, see it and suddenly hope that nobody from out of town was passing through.

I don't think they've been $24 for several years, LK. Not with the gate price approaching $50. I think they were $36 last season. Maybe they'll be a little less this year with the economy, but I doubt they'll be $24 anytime soon.

HAHA! I guess it's been a while since I lived in PA.

I could have sworn HP tickets were $24 in about 2005 at Giant. I think that was weekdays and it was a little more on weekends, but my old mind could be misfiring...

Rob Ascough said:
You mean to tell me no one did what seems to be simple homework before the ride was named Voodoo?

From what I understand Six Flags already had the Top Spin called VooDoo first but they didn't have a trademark on it. And CF wasn't smart enough to trademark their coaster name.

Does anyone really like Voodoo/Possessed? I personally am bored with it. I rode it about 6 times last year... each time they had to reset the gates about 5 times, one time it misfired or something and only went up about 1/2 the way it normally does, not even high enough to hit the stop going up the spike and just had so much downtime in general. Between that and what I finally found out is true about the accident it had before it was at Dorney, I'm avoiding it this year! I'm happy with Talon. :)

^It misfired on my only lap on the silly thing last year. Of course, with Laser and Thunderhawk being closed (and already having ridden it at SFWoA), it wasn't Dorney's best day on the night before PPP. The Impulses do seem to misfire pretty frequently in my experience.

I'm a big fan of the impulses in general but they don't have great capacity and their reridability is about 1/3 of most coasters (seeing as they do the same thing 3 times in a row).

I really like the impulse coasters as well. They are not the most relible coasters, but I think that they are a lot of fun.

I have a great memory of riding front seat on Wicked Twister in the pouring rain one evening at Cedar Point with a bunch of employee friends. The waterfall coming off of the spirals and directly in my face sounds like torture, but I really had a blast.

Voodoo was a great name for a coaster. It's a shame.

I think the impulse coasters are fun. I like to sit in the second to the last or last row. It makes looking down through the spiral on WT pretty cool.

I must have been lucky last season when I rode Voodoo. I rode it about 3 times the day I visited and there were no issues.

...and what I finally found out is true about the accident it had before it was at Dorney...

What happened to it? I'm uninformed (and curious!) on this one, LOL.

^^ Yeah, I'm curious as well. What happened?

Taken from DorneyOnline (modernphoenixv2)

"Thankfully nobody was hurt with Voodoo's first crash- but with the extent of what happened, if anyone had been on the ride at the time, there would have been severe injuries or worse. Incidentally, it was pure luck that nobody was on it, the ride had already gone through it's morning dry runs and was ready for guests. Luckily, a ride op alerted managment to a funny sound she heard and when maintenence came down to check it, they did one more dry run, which is when the crash occured.

Look at what happened to the car that was in the crash and imagine what that would have done to a human being. Now, imagine repainting that ride and calling it Voodoo, even going so far as to market the ride as having a curse."

That sounds pretty major. How did it crash? I still don't understand what happened. :(

Are we talking about 2 separate events? Yoshi's post refers to an accident on Voodoo, and Jennifer mentions an accident before the coaster came to Dorney.

Oddly enough, none of us seem to have heard about either previously. Seems a little strange, doesn't it?

I don't have a source, but I remember hearing about it at the time. I believe it involved a partial derailing of one or two of the cars during testing. Steel Venom was out of commission for the rest of that season, as I recall.

My post was about when the ride was still at Geauga Lake.