ThrillRide! Special Features

Listen to The Season Pass Ep. 211 - Live at Six Flags Over Georgia: Deep South Bash! 9/19/12

The final stop on The Season Pass Trip last August was Six Flags Over Georgia, a park I hadn't been to in quite some time. It was good to get back, with a few new coasters to enjoy, plus there was all the special Theme Park Review Deep South Bash fun. (The Georgia Cyclone "Water Challenge," after a couple of beers? I laughed till my sides ached.) Plusity-plus, the bending of minds by Sir Anton, all still accomplished, quite ably, without over-the-shoulder restrains, and, no, Magic Mountain, I will not let it go. Plusity-super-plus, there was the refurbished Monster Mansion dark ride.

I have a lot of time machine fantasies and one of them is to go back and enjoy all three original Six Flags parks (Texas, Georgia, and Mid-America) when they were filled with quirky goodies, like Georgia's Horror Cave or the "Tales of the Okefenokee" dark ride. These days, SFOG is a clean, beautifully landscaped, and very well-maintained theme park; it's easily one of the nicest in the Six Flags chain. But there's enough of its unique personality poking through all the 21st century IP-branding and trademark recycling and all that rot to make me long for those earlier times. (I remember watching an episode of "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire" where the penultimate, half-million dollar question was "What did the 'six flags' of Six Flags originally stand for?" Like this was supposed to be a very difficult question to answer. Sigh.)

But I'm so glad to say that the updated Monster Mansion (courtesy of The Gary Goddard Group, who did an AMAZING job) is really delightful. And getting to take a backstage tour was an incredible Deep South Bash treat. (Turns out some of us got another special behind-the-scenes peek, too, and you'll hear more about that at the end of this report.)

The morning air was thick at the early-hour start of Deep South Bash, but we needed to get cracking right away, with tons to do.

That thick haze burned off in no time and the first activity on the agenda was the backstage Monster Mansion tour. That's how you start a day properly. Here's Robb welcoming us and I should have moved over to the left a bit and gotten a more respectable photo, but it was pretty crowded and I didn't want to come off like I was jockeying to get in before someone else, but I really did sort of want to do that because I COULD NOT WAIT to get in there.

Three cheers for water-propelled dark rides!

Spoiler alert: there are monsters in Monster Mansion.

In the first portion of the ride, the monsters are perfectly nice monsters, having a big party, minding their own business. (This is very much a family-friendly ride.) All the new animatronics, the scenic elements, everything looks terrific.