Special Features: TN Exclusive: Jeff Jouett of Marine World

Posted at 1:50 PM EST (1850 GMT)

Jan. 13th, 2008 -- Feature first ran: 5/24/2003

During a recent visit to Six Flags Marine World, ThrillNetwork’s Tom Zeliff had a chance to sit down with Six Flags Marine World Public Relations Manager Jeff Jouett and chat about the new Zonga and other future plans for the park.

What kind of challenges have you faced in moving Zonga from Six Flags Astroworld over to Six Flags Marine World?

The difference that you’ll see in the track is in the first two loops, which are 10 feet higher off the ground then they were in Texas. The safety restraints were redesigned. They are a lot more padded, they combine a shoulder restraint and a lap restraint, and they go full over the shoulder unlike in Texas where they were partial ones that slid down. These are one piece restraints, and the side panels or neck panels depending on how tall you are farther apart and much more padded, so it should be much more user friendly, although I keep hearing “why do we need shoulder restraints at all?” The ride originally ran with only lap restraints, but with our litigious oriented society we had to make sure we had every sort of restraint in place.

I know the track was reconfigured and also repainted. I think there was a lead based paint on it originally so that came off and it was repainted to the bright new colors you see it in now. So those were the main changes that were done in the ride.

You mentioned that the loops went up 10 feet. Why was this done?

Lifting the bottom of the first two loops by 10 feet was done to make the ride more comfortable for the majority of people. There are coaster enthusiasts who really love a super intense ride, and as I understand it this ride was on the top end for intensity. We tried to reduce the Gs by about 10%, and it should work out to a little over 5gs, which should be more comfortable for more people. They are still full 360-degree loops, and not those wimpy tear drop loops.

What would be the best way to describe Zonga to people who haven’t seen it or heard of it before?

It’s brightly and multi colored, kind of psycadelic looking. We say that you can get looped just looking at it. It has red, green, purple and yellow loops, and the track is a bright blue. The ride is all twisted and pretzely, and very tight and compact. The restraints keep your arms down in the car because the ride is so tight and compact, and we don’t want riders to even try reaching out and touching anything while on it.

As you come off the first drop it is a 70-degree drop that twists inward and dives into those first two loops, so it starts with a real kick. After that I’m sure you’re thoroughly disoriented as you’re shuttled back and forth, it’s a lot of fun.

As of this interview Zonga is only running one train. Is there any estimate for when you will have the remaining trains ready to go?

They have one currently running, and another sitting beside the tracks ready to go. I think there were 5 trains originally on it, and we’re only planning to run 3. Train 2 should go on soon, and the third one by this summer.

How do you think the public will perceive the ride? What will be their reaction?

Well, I think the public is really going to dig this ride. I think about how it fits in this park-we’ve been a Six Flags Park since 1999, and 1998 was the first year that we really had any rides brought to us by Premier Parks. Marine World is 35 years old, and known Nationally and Internationally as a great animal park, and now we have a mix of rides.

We have Medusa, which at the time it was built was the third floorless coaster and that is a cool ride, a big ride for us. We’ve got a good wooden coaster that occasionally gets ranked up in the top 25 or so. We’ve got V2, a LIM Propulsion coaster, and that’s a fun ride. Ours is unique now. We have an agreement with the city for a 150’ height limit, so instead of going vertical it juts out at an angle, so I guess it’s more like diagonal velocity now. What that did is put that corkscrew right out side of the station, so everybody goes through the corkscrew…even on the first time off the train stops in the corkscrew so if you’re sitting in the fourth seat you stop upside down, where you then stop and go through the whole thing backwards. It’s turned into a good ride.

Zonga gives us a 4th top thrill coaster. We have boomerang, which is a pretty common coaster, with 30 or 40 of them around the world. But it’s fun to ride. Zonga gives us something really unique, a Schwarzkopf coaster, something to be proud of. In helping create and round off the whole park experience, Zonga is important to us. It gives us a nice coaster group with a good level of uniqueness and moderately high thrill. We’ve still got kids rides and family rides. And we have animals, and good shows, so it kinda rounds off the package for us. Plus, it went in about the last possible space we had left in the park. Luckily we got this ride and it had the perfect footprint to fit.

You mentioned not much room left in the park. How will that affect future plans for expansion, and what is on the drawing board now that you can tell us about?

Well I can’t tell you much! Ideas get floated out at various levels, some are good, some are great, some are not so good, and eventually corporate office will decide what SFMW will get in the future in the way of rides and animal attractions. If you walk around the park we’re pretty full. We’ve done a good job of placing the rides in areas that used to be parking lot. Smaller rides are in between areas where our animal exhibits are. So there’s a good mix in the park where everything is. So we’ll just have to see. There all kinds of possibilities.

Even with the 150’ height limit?

Yes. We might have a chance to renegotiate that sometime in the future.

Previously Marine World was owned by the non-profit group The Marine World Foundation. It started in Redwood City and moved to Vallejo in ‘86. The cost of expanding land in Silicon Valley was so expensive that they borrowed money to move to Vallejo. And the city of Vallejo was a co-signer to the loan. They were very happy that Marine World, a big park came to town. Later the non-profit group didn’t have any money left to add new attractions though and attendance went down in ‘93. The non-profit group missed a loan payment in ‘96, and the city had to pay it. The city is small with only 115,000 or so people, and having to make a $2 million loan payment with another coming up was a tall order. So they looked for someone to come in and manage the park and Premier Parks was selected from several major groups.

This is all kind of a long story, but what I’m getting at is the city still owns the park and has a management contract with Premier Parks, now Six Flags who has the exclusive option to buy for the next four years. So we may see Six Flags purchasing the park in the next 4 years and at that point during the negotiations it would be a good time to renegotiate everything about the park, including the point of all this, the current height limit.

What’s the reason for the current height limit?

Originally there was no height limit when there were only animals. When Premier Parks came in to manage the park they had to do an environmental impact report looking at noise, light, and various other impacts that you’ll have. We’re located on a really beautiful lake. Part of our neighbor across the lake is a park, and part of it is residential, so there are people who’s homes overlook us. There’s some residential on the other side of the freeway. We looked at the impact of noise and light on our neighbors, and the thought was if you have a really tall ride, most people will be screaming and it will be more noise for the neighbors. So in fact the park is actually zoned with 4 height zones.

Closest to the lake is a 50-foot limit. There you’ll see that Monkey Business and Thrilla Gorilla and the other rides there are screened to contain the noise. If you go in the park a bit there’s a 75-foot high zone, then 100 foot high zone, then the 150 foot zone is on the outer edge of the park furthest away from neighbors and closest to the freeway where there is already a lot of noise and light. And so the limits are there to try and be a little more neighborly to those folks who are living across the lake.

You’ve already done a wonderful job with keeping your coasters quiet. I haven’t seen a B&M coaster as quiet as Medusa.

Absolutely. We spent an extra half million dollars to fill the supports with sand which keeps the vibration and noise levels down.

Any future plans for new animal attractions?

We are negotiating and expecting soon to file for import permits for elephants, two new ones from India. We’re beginning a breeding program. We just got 3 lion cubs. Other than that I’m not aware of any solid plans. We’ve talked about taking our gentle jungle area and making it more into a farm area…getting some goats and cows and farm animals so city kids could see them, but that’s not definite at all.

On behalf of ThrillNetwork, I’d like to sincerely thank you for the interview. Congratulations on the opening of Zonga! We can’t wait to see what you put in next!