GEAUGA LAKE: The Legendary Life and Loss of The World’s Most Adventurous Amusement Park

In 2004 – just four years after it first bore the Six Flags name and a short three years after it absorbed SeaWorld – Six Flags Worlds of Adventure had burned out.

Beneath their Six Flags Inc. shield, the same Premier Parks that had gobbled up dozens and dozens of amusement parks across North America and Europe got a reality check. Overextended, over-invested, and buried under massive debt, Six Flags’ strategy shifted from acquisition to offloading. Three years after buying SeaWorld Ohio (their final park purchase), a first wave of sell-offs saw the company shed all eight of its European parks… and Worlds of Adventure.

Just two months before the start of the 2004 season, the announcement was made: Six Flags Inc. had officially agreed to sell Six Flags Worlds of Adventure. The entire complex – including “substantially all assets” of the park, 690 acres of land, plus an adjacent campground and hotel –  would be offloaded for $145 million. (Remember: Six Flags had spent $110 million just to acquire SeaWorld three years earlier, and had spent at least $70 million on rides and roller coasters alone for the amusement park between 1996 and 2001.)

A pretty definitive statement on Six Flags’ one-time hopes to position their Ohio park as an industry flagship and competitor to Cedar Point, the massive mega-park was purchased by Cedar Point’s owner, CEDAR FAIR.

Cedar Fair’s then-CEO Dick Kinzel said in a March 2004 press release, “This is an excellent and unique opportunity for both companies. With this acquisition, we have the ability to add another successful operation to the Cedar Fair family of parks in a market we already know well. The park […] offers numerous marketing and operational synergies that we hope to take advantage of almost immediately.”

In time for the 2004 season, the now-enormous Aurora park gained its fourth name in six seasons; this time, a familiar one: GEAUGA LAKE. In the fleeting months ahead of the park’s seasonal re-opening, any references to Six Flags, its trademarks, and its Warner Bros.-licensed Looney Tunes and DC Heroes were hastily dismantled.

• The Gotham City “land” was repainted bright yellow and renamed Power City;
• Batman: Knight Flight became Dominator (Batman logos molded into each coaster’s seat were famously seared off with blowtorches);
• Serial Thriller (the Vekoma SLC) was renamed Thunderhawk (and repainted from teal supports and red track to a pretty blinding bright yellow and orange);
• Mind Eraser (the Vekoma Boomerang) became Head Spin;
• Hurricane Harbor waterpark was renamed Hurricane Hannah’s;

• Mission: Bermuda Triangle was changed to Dino Island II: Escape from Dino Island;
• Shamu’s Happy Harbor became simply Happy Harbor;
• Superman: Ultimate Escape was renamed Steel Venom (somewhat senselessly stapling a black-and-purple logo onto a blue-and-red coaster, above);
• Looney Tunes Boomtown became the generic KidWorks Play Zone (with Looney Tunes characters plucked off of the land’s architecture, leaving a curiously vacant carrot-house);
• The Roadrunner Express family coaster was renamed Beaver Land Mine Ride

You can imagine why many Millennials, in retrospect, can logically understand Cedar Fair’s hasty, necessary re-branding, yet still be sore about it. It’s too easy to fault Cedar Fair for the disappearance of heroes and cartoons who – in only four years – had come to define the park for ’90s kids. Often shielded from the realities of the park’s shortcomings, many thirty-somethings today merely remember feeling that the end of Six Flags Worlds of Adventure was the end of an era, after which everything changed.

Frankly, it doesn’t help that their 2004 transformation of Geauga Lake was Cedar Fair’s first attempt at removing intellectual property from a recently-acquired and heavily-branded park. Arguably more “de-branding” than “re-branding,” Cedar Fair’s generic names, weakened identities, and nondescript logos pretty famously irritated fans. (They also served as merely a preview of the “de-branding” that would fall upon the Paramount Parks after Cedar Fair’s 2007 purchase, with cringe-worthy generic names and the total destruction of the Lost Legend: TOMB RAIDER: The Ride.)

More to the point, though, the instantaneous name changes drew a line in the sand: the time before, and the time after… which set Cedar Fair up pretty nicely to take the blame for what was to come…

Though Cedar Fair had taken control of the park with barely enough time to move into the offices, the 2004 season was meant as a nostalgic one; “Geauga Lake” was back; the “Family Amusement Park” was back; a widespread marketing campaign even promised: “The FUN is back!”

Something else was back, too: just as it had been the last time the park was called Geauga Lake, guests riding the park’s coasters could gaze across the lake at the clamshell-shaped stadiums, pyramidal aquarium, and Japanese Village of SeaWorld… but they couldn’t reach them. Though the new Geauga Lake maintained Worlds of Adventure’s forest path and boardwalk to the east side of the lake (as well as the former “SeaWorld” entrance and “Main Street” as a secondary gate), aside from “Happy Harbor” and the Water Ski Stadium, the former SeaWorld was cordoned off like a quarantine zone.

It makes sense. When Six Flags left, they took their whales, dolphins, stingrays, sharks, penguins, tigers, flamingos, and even dogs and cats with them, distributing the collection to their Discovery Kingdom and Great Adventure animal parks.

Cedar Fair, meanwhile, had no animal collection from which to restock the park… and frankly, probably no interest in operation – but much starting up – a marine life park in Northeast Ohio anyway. But erasing SeaWorld wouldn’t be as simple as a park map would suggest. The remains of the beloved local institution – so visibly nested into the hillsides that served as a backdrop for the Geauga Lake – naturally left a bad taste in the mouths of locals. Forget the “Wildlife” side being “half” of the park; SeaWorld – a treasured piece of Northeast Ohio for generations – was closed, probably forever, and was sitting behind fences.

This is a good time to remind yourself that even the darkest moments may someday be remembered as “the good ole’ days.”

Waves of change (2006 – 2007)

After a year of SeaWorld’s skeletal infrastructure casting a dark shadow over the “new” Geauga Lake, in 2004, Cedar Fair invested the no-doubt immense cost of the marine park’s demolition and removal. Everything south of the water ski stadium was leveled, including the two iconic hillside stadiums. Whether you called it SeaWorld or the “Wildlife Side,” it was gone.

In 2005, Cedar Fair began to repurpose the east side of the lake. The seven-waterslide Hurricane Falls complex was relocated to the cleared-and-leveled former-SeaWorld side of the lake as Thunder Falls. A new ProSlide Tornado called Liquid Lightning, the fast-paced Riptide Run “action river” (in place of the old Dolphin Cove), and the Splash Landing water playground rounded out the offerings of a new waterpark. (A single slide complex and wave pool still remained on the former-“Wild Rides” side – leftovers of Hurricane Hannah’s.)

Aside from the repurposed SeaWorld entrance gates, several shops, and the Happy Harbor area with its adjacent 4D theater and simulator, the only sizable, visible leftovers from the former park’s identity were the water ski stadium and the familiar lakefront Aquarium – both now gated off from the public.

Fittingly, in 2005, the park received its fifth name and logo in a decade: GEAUGA LAKE & WILDWATER KINGDOM.

Cedar Fair even previewed a “Phase II” expansion of Wildwater Kingdom that would fill up most the rest of the real estate SeaWorld had once occupied… But aside from the construction of 2006’s Tidal Wave Bay wave pool (built in the footprint of the former Sea Lion & Otter Stadium), it never happened. More to the point, the opening of the new wave pool coincided with the closure of the rides side’s Hurricane Hannah’s waterpark and its remaining waterslides – a net loss.

Unfortunately, 2006 was also the beginning of the end. After the close of the season, Cedar Fair announced that just five years after Six Flags had installed them, X-Flight and Steel Venom (formerly, Superman: Ultimate Escape) would both be dismantled and relocated to other Cedar Fair parks.

To be sure, the decision was a logical one. Both of the thrill rides had contributed to the park’s over-expansion; neither fit with Cedar Fair’s restoration of the “Family Amusement Park” that Geauga Lake had been before Premier’s intervention; and with dwindling attendance (reportedly, 700,0000 in 2006 – barely a quarter of the 3 million Worlds of Adventure had seen in 2001) and no incentive to compete with Cedar Point, neither was needed. However, the move surely didn’t make Cedar Fair look like a hero any more than the end of SeaWorld had.

In fairness that many would say is not earned, Cedar Fair had inherited a fixer-upper, and part of fixing up the park formerly-and-once-more-known as Geauga Lake was undoubtedly to slim down its thrill ride offerings. Maybe on paper, Cedar Fair could even have “undone” the park’s decade of overexpansion, reverting it back to the what it had been before Premier’s involvement.

But memories are a tricky thing, and neither the generations of locals who had vigorously visited, defended, and loved the “classic” Geauga Lake and SeaWorld nor the young people who’d been starstruck by the hyper-saturated, thrilling, IP-infused Worlds of Adventure found much to love in Cedar Fair’s treatment of their park. Now excised of its its extended Halloween and Winter seasons, Geauga Lake closed briskly at the end of the summer of 2007.

It never re-opened.