Interview: Pete Carmichael

We had a chance to meet Pete Carmichael, Operations Director in Six Flags New England, one of the main attractions in New England, only 90 minutes away from Boston.

Interview with Pete Carmichael,
Operations Director of Six Flags New England

Parkworld.be: Hi Pete, it’s great you found some time to welcome us. Can you tell us more about Six Flags New England? What are the main reasons for people to pay this park a visit?

Pete: First of all, we have a very beautiful park, in a nice natural environment. Six Flags New England is also a complete park: we offer family pleasure with a lot of attention to the children, with rides for different ages, but we also offer a great deal of thrill rides, like Bizarro, one of the most popular rides in the USA. This rollercoaster won already 5 times the Golden Ticket award from Amusement Today, a very prestigious price which is considered to be one of the most important recognitions in the USA. This year we were voted number 2 after Millennium Force in Cedar Point. Besides Bizarro we also offer a great B&M ride, Batman - the Dark Knight, an impressive wooden coaster ride in Cyclone, a spinning coaster Pandemonium and for next year we will welcome Goliath, a Giant Inverted Boomerang.
Six Flags New England is one of the bigger amusement parks in the Boston region, we also have the largest waterpark of New England. No separate entrance fee needs to be paid to enjoy the several water rides. So we offer two parks in 1.

Parkworld.be: What makes Six Flags New England so different compared to other Six Flags Parks?

Pete: Our park has a very long history. It has been founded around 1840 as Riverside Amusement Park. A few rides are from the early days, like the Carousel from 1909 or the 1941 wooden roller coaster Thunderbolt, an ACE landmark rollercoaster, which is still running… Also our theater is very old and precious. It was built in 1940. It was initially housing the carrousel, which was moved later on to our Main Street area.
In 2000 the park became Six Flags New England. This was also my first year I started to work for the park via internship inside the DC Comics area.
Because of our long history and the fact that our park is situated in a natural environment, close to the Connecticut River, New England’s longest river, our park has its own identity…

Parkworld.be: Six Flags stands for the six flags of each country inside the park. In Six Flags New England we have: Crack Axl Canyon, DC Superheroes Adventure, Kidzopolis, Looney Tunes Movie Town, North End and South End. How important is it to have such “themed areas”?

Pete: It is very important. An amusement park wants to be more than just a collection of rides. Thanks to Six Flags we were able to introduce the Looney Tunes, which are very popular in the US, and also our DC Superheroes Adventure giving us great opportunities to use favorite characters like Superman, Batman,… to use inside our park.

Parkworld.be: The park has several rollercoasters. Next year the park will welcome a new rollercoaster, Goliath. Can you tell us more about it?

Pete: We will add a new rollercoaster experience to our park in 2012: Goliath. It is a so called Giant Inverted Boomerang coaster. The ride was operating in Six Flags Magic Mountain, but will be totally revised. The rollercoaster will also feature new Premier Rides trains, having 4 people in a row, instead of the V-shaped form trains. We are currently in progress of cleaning up the area. We have removed one of our water rides in the park, Ship Wreck Falls, which was rather ancient. The entire area will be renewed and the scene will be completely different compared to the current sight. It will be a totally new experience.

Parkworld.be: You have a similar rollercoaster, Flashback. Will this rollercoaster be removed, as Goliath is a more impressive version?

Pete: No we have no such plans. Flashback is still a thrilling experience, not as impressive as Goliath will be, but it will still find enough brave visitors to ride it. We also would like to see it differently. We see Goliath as the large baby of Flashback (boomerang coaster) and Mind Eraser (suspended looping coaster). All three rollercoasters have been manufactured by the Dutch company Vekoma.

Parkworld.be: You removed a popular water ride. Does this mean that the park will install a new water ride on the short term again?

Pete: Of course anything is possible, but we still have several water rides left in our park, especially inside our water park, giving sufficient water fun for the moment. But we will of course keep in mind the reactions of our visitors, and based on their feedback and remarks, we may make a decision in that way.

Parkworld.be: Bizarro is like you have mentioned one of the most spectacular rides in the park. In the past it was named Superman - Ride of Steel. Why did you change the name of this rollercoaster?

Pete: It all started with a rehab of the DC Superheroes Adventure area in 2009, where we were looking into a way to make some kind of a makeover of Superman - Ride Of Steel. We started a campaign where we introduced ARG, alternative reality game. Players were introduced to a newly-formed relationship between Six Flags and Clawshun Industries. Soon they discovered that Clawshun was actually a subsidiary of LexCorp, the company of Superman’s enemy Lex Luthor.
A special edition of the Daily Planet newspaper, inserted into regional weeklies in New York, Philadelphia, Hartford and Boston, confirmed the relationship and invited players to participate in an eight-week investigation by the Planet's enterprising young journalist Jimmy Olsen via jimmystruth2power.com and Twitter. Speculation ran rampant as players worked together to discover the names and plans for the coaster transformations, designed by LexCorp CEO and Mastermind, Lex Luthor. The DC Comics character, Bizarro, is best known as a peculiar Superman-like creature from a parallel Earth known as Htrae where inhabitants believe in "doing the opposite of all Earthly things".
This character is the opposite of superman, twisted but also exciting, just like our rollercoaster, and that’s the link that we used to rename our rollercoaster. It all fitted perfect in this story, and the rehab would not just be a cleaning up of Superman.
We modified the trains, so an on-board audio system could be part of it, and we also adapted our queuing area, where the story in fact begins.

Parkworld.be: How important is a Halloween event for an American park? Can you tell more what people can expect in Six Flags New England?

Pete: Halloween is important for every major American park. Our Halloween event is the largest in the entire New England area, and we are very proud to it. We also offer a wide variety in rides and shows, which are suitable for every family member. We also make a lot of effort and retheming our park, and creating several haunted zones, which become very spooky after 6PM. We offer three horror attractions, which require a small additional fee. These are walk through adventures, where we are using several actors, animatronics and tons of scary elements. We just keep one motto in mind: “Don’t touch the actors, and they will not touch you.”
From the moment the darkness starts inside the park, several creepy creatures will be wandering around inside the park. For children, we have introduced a special ring they can wear. It is a spider, which has been cursed by one of the witches, and which will glow up in the dark and protect against any monster. During the daytime families can enjoy several fun (and scary) shows and acts, like the Bandit Brothers, Mr. Six Spooktacular Street Party, Mayhem Mission, Mort’s Used Coffins,… Children can enjoy our Trick or Treat trail. Also worth mentioning is David Garrity who is hosting the “Haunting Illusions” show, an amazing show with several illusions acts.

Parkworld.be: This sounds very promising. I am looking forward to explore all these Halloween attractions. Thank you very much for your time.