SON OF BEAST
Kings Island, Mason, OH
Kings Island is one of many parks owned by Cedar Fair, including Cedar Point, Knott's Berry Farm, Carowinds, Michigan's Adventure (my home park), and Canada's Wonderland to name a few. It opened in 1972 in what's now Mason, Ohio, just outside of Cincinnati. Kings Island is home to many roller coasters and rides, including 4 wooden coasters which are Racer, which sparked the second Golden Age of Roller Coasters, The Beast (I'll get to that in a moment), Woodstock Express (formerly Scooby-Doo, Beastie, and Fairly-Odd Coaster), and the recently opened Mystic Timbers. But there was another wooden coaster that isn't there anymore. A coaster that was to be a ground-breaking scream-machine with staggering stats for a wooden coaster, some of which still stand today. For my first coaster on Roller Coaster Blunders, I'm going to talk about the infamous Son of Beast, the first and only hyper wooden coaster to ever be built.
ORIGINS
No talk of Son of Beast would be complete without mentioning its father, The Beast.
The Beast is the longest wooden coaster in the world, and, if the park not being featured on The Brady Bunch episode "Cincinnati Kids" didn't already do so, it's what put Kings Island on the map. Taft Entertainment, which owned Kings Island at the time, had bought Cincinnati's Coney Island, which is located right on the Ohio River. Coney was prone to flooding because of its close proximity to the river. So Taft had begun building Kings Island with the intention of moving the rides from Coney to the new park (Coney is still open, btw). Sometime later, Kings Island got the idea of rebuilding Shooting Star, a wooden coaster that ran at Coney. But then they looked at the vast amount of land and wooded area that they had to work with and got an idea. Rather than recreate the Shooting Star, they would build a whole new wooden coaster that makes use of the wooded area. And so from 1977 to when it opened in 1979, the park started constructing what would be, at that time, the longest coaster in the world, The Beast. Beast's layout is, for the most part, hidden from view. Outside of both lift hills and the big drops, you can't see any of the coaster track. And that was the point. You had to ride it to see what was in store for you. (FYI- Taft WOULD eventually make that Shooting Star clone in the form of the Mighty Canadian Minebuster at Canada's Wonderland in Vaughn, Ontario, Canada, two years after The Beast was built)
MAKING A SEQUEL
Around the 1990s, the park was now called Paramount's Kings Island after the film studio bought the Kings Entertainment Parks which also included the aforementioned Canada's Wonderland, Kings Dominion, Carowinds, and Great America (currently called California's Great America to separate it from its Six Flags-owned sister park in Gurnee, Illinois). And the park was feeling the heat from not only Cedar Point, the only other big amusement park in Ohio, but especially Six Flags Kentucky Kingdom in Louisville, Kentucky. Paramount knew they needed to act fast if they were going to beat Six Flags at their game. So in 1999, Paramount Kings Island opened a new area to the park called Paramount's Action Zone (now just simply Action Zone) which was themed to a studio backlot. The new area had some action-packed rides, which included the already existing rides like Top Gun: The Jet Coaster (now The Bat) and Congo Falls, but added new rides like Drop Zone: Stunt Tower and FACE/OFF (now Invertigo), an inverted version of Vekoma's infamous Boomerang model. But this was just the start. Paramount knew it needed a star attraction to anchor the new area. For this they looked to the past, i.e. make a sequel to The Beast. But this coaster was going to be taller, faster, and, unheard of at the time, actually have a vertical loop in the middle of the ride. While loops on a wooden coaster wasn't anything new; back in the early 1900s people tried to add a loop to wooden coasters before, but they were circular, making it way too intense and forceful for riders. The ride was announced by placing a wooden crate covered in a tarp by The Beast, which snarled and shook. Then on May 11, 1999, they made the announcement that coming in 2000 would be the tallest, fastest wooden coaster to ever be built and that it would be called Son of Beast.
At the cost of over $20 million, Son of Beast would stand at a height of 218 feet, a record that has still yet to be unbroken to this day, and it would be the second longest wooden coaster in the world, behind its father, of course. Plus this would give Paramount's Kings Island the most wooden coaster track of any park in the world at a whopping 22,619 feet. Son of Beast was designed by the legendary Werner Stengel. The construction of the coaster was to be done by Roller Coaster Corporation of America (RCCA), which was best-known at that time for the building of Rattler at Six Flags Fiesta Texas. But as construction began on the coaster, it was already plagued with problems. Paramount Parks fired RCCA and finished the coaster on their own. And when the coaster opened on May 26, 2000, folks were treated to an insane ride like no other.
A BEAST THAT'S WAY TOO WILD
Son of Beast, during its first six years, was plague with issues. The main issue was that the coaster was unbearably rough, even for a wooden coaster. Many folks complained about the large helix that was too intense. Many said that the smoothest part of the ride was the loop mainly because while the track in the loop was wood, the infrastructure was steel. But there was a reason why Son of Beast was so rough. Paramount was holding back a secret. Now I had stated that they had fired RCCA, the folks who were building and designed the coaster with Werner Stengel, but what wasn't known was that RCCA actually used bad wood in the initial construction. Paramount over the first five years of the coasters lifetime had to do some corrections in the layout of the coaster. But what they weren't telling folks was that these "corrections" were pretty much patchwork fixes; the equivalent of putting a bandaid on a bullet hole. It was a recipe for disaster.
EXIT PARAMOUNT; ENTER CEDAR FAIR
In 2006, Viacom, Paramount's owners, split with CBS, and CBS became their own separate company. While both were (and are) still owned by Sumner Redstone's company National Amusements, they operated independent of each other. CBS would acquire former Paramount subsidiaries like their entire pre-2006 television library (i.e. Star Trek, The Brady Bunch, Cheers, etc.), and one of those was the amusement park division of Paramount, which meant all five Paramount Parks (it should be noted that the Spain-based Terra Mitica was managed by Paramount before they left due to filing the Spanish equivalent of bankruptcy, and has been ran independently since 2004, prior to the Viacom/CBS split) were now part of CBS. But the network didn't want to be in the amusement park business, so they put all five parks up for sale. And in June of 2006, they found a buyer in Cedar Fair, the owners of Cedar Point, Valleyfair, Michigan's Adventure, Knott's Berry Farm, among others. Also in the deal included the managing of the small city-owned Bonfante Gardens, which was renamed Gilroy Gardens soon afterwards, in Gilroy, California, ironically not too far from fellow Paramount Park Great America in Santa Clara. But little did Cedar Fair know that they were in for one of the worst coaster disasters to hit their company in years.
THE ACCIDENT
When Son of Beast opened, it originally operated with trains built by Premier Rides, who are best known for their launched coasters. These trains were pretty beefy and heavy, necessary to navigate the vertical loop in the ride. Each car held six riders per car and had six cars per train, which held a capacity of 36 riders per train. For the 2006 season, the trains were shortened to five cars per train, lowering the capacity to 30 riders per train, which wasn't a big deal, as it could still get through the loop just fine. But on July 9, 2006, just weeks after Cedar Fair bought Kings Island and the other Paramount properties, an accident on Son of Beast occurred. A structural failure caused a bump in the track in the Rose Bowl helix section of the coaster. At 4:45 PM, a train filled with riders came to an abrupt stop in the Rose Bowl. 27 injuries were reported, mostly in the neck and chest. About 17 people were released from the hospital after being checked out and two were admitted. The coaster was closed after the accident, pending investigation. The next day, an inspection of the ride saw that the wood had split in that section of the coaster. Cedar Fair was not charged with any negligence because this wear and damage was prior to their ownership and CBS was still running the park to the end of the year. And the accident didn't affect the sale of the park and other Paramount parks. But Son of Beast would not reopen for the rest of 2006 until repairs were made.
SON OF BEAST 2.0
In 2007, Cedar Fair announced that Son of Beast would reopen, but there was a major change. While the damaged section of track was repaired and other maintenance work was done on the coaster, the ride would open WITHOUT its signature loop! As mentioned earlier, the Premier trains were heavier than your average wood coaster train like those made by Philadelphia Toboggan Coasters, or Great Coasters International's Millennium Flyers. So to alleviate the stress and wear on the track, Cedar Fair added some lighter trains from Gerstlauer. These trains previously ran on the defunct Hurricane: Category 5 wooden coaster at the then-recently closed Myrtle Beach Pavilion Amusement Park. While it was much smoother than the original Premier trains, it came with a cost. Because the new trains were lighter in weight, they couldn't navigate the loop. So Cedar Fair opted to remove the loop so the trains could get through the course. It should be noted that the loop played NO PART in the accident the previous year.
So Son of Beast returned without the loop, but was still the tallest wooden coaster in the world. And for the next two years, it continue to operate without incident. That would change in 2009.
ANOTHER ACCIDENT, AND FINAL YEARS
On June 16, 2009, a woman had complained that she ruptured a vessel in her brain after riding Son of Beast. She did not report the incident to Kings Island, but said she had to go to the hospital afterwards. This incident happened on May 31, but she reported it on June 16. And no one else complained about the ride during the period between those dates. Another investigation happened, but this time there were no irregularities to report. In spite of the good news, Son of Beast would close and never reopen. It stayed dormant for three years, with no activity going on with it. Then in 2012, demolition of the coaster began. The final piece coming down in November of that year, leaving Outpost 5, the loading station to the coaster which was used for a haunted house during their Halloween events.
SON OF BEAST'S LEGACY
Although thought of as a huge failure, Son of Beast did get wood coaster builders thinking about adding inversions on wooden coasters. The first to do so was Rocky Mountain Construction (RMC). After converting wooden coasters to steel coaster, and even adding inversions on some of them, they thought about building ground-up wooden coasters utilizing their state-of-the-art "Topper Track", which replaced the two top boards on a wooden coaster. They had added this to non-RMC coasters already. So the first coaster to have inversions since Son of Beast was RMC's creation Outlaw Run at Silver Dollar City in Branson, Missouri. This coaster has three inversion, including the very first Zero-G Stall on a wooden coaster, which is a signature element on RMC coasters, wood and steel.
Then, The Gravity Group would join in on the looping wooden coaster game when they redesigned their very first coaster, Hades at Mount Olympus Water and Theme Park in Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin. On the turnaround section in the parking lot after the tunnel, they added a corkscrew-type inversion and an extreme overbanked turn, making it the first traditional track wooden coaster since Son of Beast to have an inversion. The coaster was renamed Hades 360. Gravity Group has since even made new coasters with inversions, like Mine Blower at Fun Spot America in Kissimmee, Florida.
Meanwhile back at Kings Island, eventually, after the demolition of Son of Beast, a new Bolliger and Mabillard inverted coaster opened on part of Son of Beast's former spot, called Banshee, which opened on April 18, 2014. It holds the record for the longest inverted coaster in the world currently. It also houses a tribute to its predecessor in the queue; a gravestone with the coaster and years it existed.
Then in 2017, Kings Island received a new wooden coaster in the form of Mystic Timbers, built by Great Coasters International (GCI). While it is far from the size of Son of Beast, and doesn't invert, it became one of Kings Island's favorite coasters, some even calling it one of the best GCI coasters around. This coaster brought the wood coaster count at the park back to 4 wooden coasters (5 if you count Racer as two seperate coasters). Also, Mystic Timbers has some theming around it, mainly with the shed at the end of the ride. The main advertising for the coaster said "What's In the Shed?", but unless you cheated and watched the endless POVs of this coasters, I won't reveal the answers here.
While many still mourn the loss of Son of Beast (it did have its fans in spite of the roughness) many praise the replacements, Banshee and Mystic Timbers. And even though Son of Beast was a flawed coaster, RMC and Gravity Group owe a thanks to the coaster, as if it wasn't for its creation, those companies probably wouldn't had tried to build the Outlaw Run's or the Mine Blowers. Even GCI is considering building coasters with inversions. At the 2018 IAAPA in Florida, they unveiled their new trains called the Infinity Flyers, which will handle inversions, while keeping their Millennium Flyers, as well. They also released a model of a dueling coaster with corkscrew-type inversions in the track as part of the new concept. So wooden coasters with inversions are becoming the new norm for wood coasters.
And while many miss their Son of Beast, they can take comfort in the knowledge that on the other side of Kings Island, its father, the Beast, still roars through the woods of the Rivertown section of the park, and is about to celebrate its 40th anniversary this year. But make no mistake. As innovative as it was, Son of Beast was, in fact, a Roller Coaster Blunder!
