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Absolutely. I don't necessarily fault CF for not wanting to spend what it would've cost to renovate and restore those attractions. In the case of trying to tell the story of this period in the park's history, it was more about trying to convey how locals and longtime fans perceived these events as the new management not caring about the park's history. It's like them donating the historic materials to the OCA. I fully understand from both a business and practical side why they did that, I appreciate that it means those items are publicly available, and these videos directly benefitted from it. I would never want them But I also see where some fans viewed it as a company located 2,300 miles away just dumping off the park's history on locals to maintain, especially when you count all the other early decisions that ignored the park's history. Taken individually, many of those decisions make sense. Collectively, it wasn't great optics for a new company dealing with a customer base that had been visiting the park for literal generations.

@@ThemeParchive well I know when I worked there lots of people thought cedar fair was the wrong move but I knew if it didn’t happen Knotts would have eventually shut down. I can remember days where only 1000 people were in the park. But I do miss working there. If I got paid what I do at dland there at Knotts I wouldn’t have left lol.

Cedar Fair still owns the park... sort of. They merged with Six Flags and adopted that branding going forward. But Matt Ouimet, who we talk about taking over as CEO at the end of the video, only left the company in September of last year. So the next (final) video will mostly be about Ouimet's time as CEO of Cedar Fair, and how the company's handling of Knott's changed under his management (spoilers, but you can guess from his background how it went).

To be fair to the designers, all we have are early concepts that didn't get much revision after Walt passed, but the concept was definitely more car-dependent than a lot of people imagine. Walt talks in the Florida Project film about residents only needing cars to travel outside of town, but I have a suspicion a lot of people in the "petal" suburbs would've used cars instead of dealing with tourists and city center foot traffic.

The crossover of talent between Disney and Knott's, especially people who lived and worked in the Orange County area, is pretty significant. I think some locals like to imagine a rivalry between Knott's and "the park up the road", but behind the scenes, there's a ton of mutual respect. Check out artist Sam Carter. He does work for both companies, and his Knott's stuff in particular is very good.

There were plans to do something like this in the '90's, designed by the head of Knott's design department, Robin Hall. But the company struggled to get financing for it and other projects of the era. With Cedar Fair (now Six Flags) in charge, it seems that kind of investment would be more likely, but I don't see them getting rid of the water park. Many of the parks in the chain have an adjacent water park, and they tend to be surprisingly profitable.

He recreated the idea in city skylines

Thank you for keeping the ride's memory alive. Your videos made giving the ride the time it deserved much easier in this format. I'm definitely jealous of that Pteradon. What a cool piece of theme park history to own.

Definitely. There were no plans or even mentions of a second Florida park in the original Epcot city plans. There were mentions of other attractions, like the swamp boat ride near where today's Coronado Springs Resort sits, but nothing about a second gate. That said, we mention it in the episode more to highlight a concern with the original city design. Walt said Florida would solve the biggest problem with Disneyland: space. The modern company (after Walt's death) would almost certainly want to add more parks, like they added DCA in Disneyland. But given the way the Epcot city was laid out, adding a second gate would've presented a significant infrastructure hurdle regardless of where they put it on the property.

Correct, those kinds of nighttime shows were not counted. Part of the reason is that some parks only run those shows seasonally, so it was easier to exclude them all rather than decide on a case by case basis what should or shouldn't count. Also, those shows use existing park infrastructure, whereas the kinds of shows we counted use their own infrastructure. To that end, Fantasmic! at Disneyland doesn't count, because it's performed and viewed along the Rivers of America, but Fantasmic! at Disney's Hollywood Studios in Orlando would count, because it has its own dedicated amphitheater. In the same way, street performers weren't counted. Again, some parks have them daily; others seasonally. Sometimes even within a single park, street performers and character meet-ups can vary day to day. So counting these kinds of things wasn't feasible. To you point though, these kinds of shows and street performers are very much an essential part of the park experience. These attractions per acre calculations were meant to represent a generalized idea of how space is utilized in parks, and not represent any "real" endorsement or criticism of a particular park.

Same here, my kid love Knott’s, and I’m sure they will eventually take their children in the future.

Glad this one kept up the quality. This particular time period was hard because for some reason there’s just not as much documentation.

That’s actually going to be two videos for our series, since there’s actually a good bit of changes to cover. That, and for “story” reasons, it felt more interesting to talk about it in terms of the Farm during the Kinzel era and Ouimet/Zimmerman era.

With all respect to Robin Hall and the design team that worked on it, I agree. Boardwalk just didn’t feel like it fit with the rest of the park. Its connection to California history feels tenuous at best. I do think it’s improved since it first opened, with Xcelerator and HangTime giving the 50’s-60’s SoCal cars and surfing themes. If they came through with an update like they just did to Fiesta Village and really leaned into that midcentury Southern California teen culture vibe, it could fix a lot of the issues I have with the area. But it is a shame how little of the Airfield stuff has survived. And given what they’ve done with bringing back Beary Tales (spoilers for the final episode of the series), it’s entirely possible we’ll see a new, better version of WSBR in the future. 🤞

@@ThemeParchive As you had previously pointed out - not all attractions were as well received as others. Walter Knott had his arena and Marion had her Gypsy Camp. (Walt Disney had his circus) So sometimes attractions do fail to take root. Theme Parks are not a perfect science. But this park has some great sightlines.

That’s so cool! It was definitely an interesting time for the Farm. That means you also got to see Mystery Lodge in its prime! I’m still hoping they’ll bring it back, though it’s hard to say what’ll happen. Sky Jump looks like such a fun ride. A lawyer’s nightmare, so I understand why they got rid of it. But I am a bit disappointed I’ll never get to ride it.

@@ThemeParchive, I took my kids back to Knott’s a few years back and was absolutely disgusted that they took out the Mystery Lodge. Sky jump was knarly. I remember crouching down and holding on to one of the bars on the cage as a kid. It was terrifying, and loved it. They could easily put a new mystery lodge in the park and completely redo the gold panning area. They stuck it back in the same area, but it needs to look and feel like it used to.

Thanks!

Most people living out in the "suburbs" section of the city would've owned cars, so they would've probably used those. But since the idea was that cars wouldn't be needed, and the people living in the apartments in the city center would've been younger and poorer, it's hard to say what solutions they would have in cases of monorails closing for maintenance. The plans were in such an early stage when Walt died that a lot of these kinds of problems were never considered or solved.

A lot of sites have reposted those images over the years. One of my personal favorites, which has not just a ton of image resources, but has a bunch of good writeups and stuff as well is www.the-original-epcot.com. Also, most of the video stuff in these two episodes came from the E.P.C.o.T. film produced by Disney a couple months before Walt's death.

Ah wait never mind I think I see where the truck problem is. It’s outside of the city. Although I though the truck road broke off outside of the city into it’s own mini highway?

Yeah, so the idea was that trucks (coming from Interstate 4 or U.S. 192) would be traveling north into the property. That means most of the truck traffic bound for the industrial park area would never even reach the city. Any trucks in through-traffic (ie, going to the themed resorts for deliveries) wouldn't stop in the city by taking the underground highway, as you stated. There were, however, trucks that would need to stop in the city center. These would mostly be deliveries of food for restaurants and merchandise for retail shops. From the animated plans in the "Florida Project" special, it appears these trucks would've had a special exit ramp from the highway under the city, and a large underground loading docks/parking lot. How feasible this would've been is definitely debatable, but that was what they were planning, at least early on. The way the game handles trucks means that there were a number of caveats necessary to make the city function. First, the nature of the game's industrial zoning and traffic means that we're seeing a lot of the delivery of retail merchandise, manufactured goods, and food come from the industrial park area, which wouldn't have been the case. Second, the game really doesn't like when heavy trucks (semis) can't deliver to retail locations, and it causes all kinds of grief. But since the plans were very explicit that no heavy trucks would enter the city streets, we kept true to that by banning all heavy vehicles from the city center and suburban zones. This means that all of those deliveries are conducted by smaller, van-sized vehicles, which creates its own traffic issues. This is a major reason why we make the point in both of these Epcot simulation videos about taking everything with a grain of salt. It's really cool to see something close to the original E.P.C.o.T. model brought to life, with people and traffic, but it's hard to separate the flaws in the design from the flaws in the game's way of handling the city's design.