The train departs the station stops just outside, idling for a moment next to an orange Volkswagen lofted up on scaffolds. The cars rumble as bass vibrates the track. For those who know what’s coming, it’s a great moment of anticipation… Then, with the gentle push of a drive tire, the train is released onto the ride course…
It begins simply enough, with an S-turn that dips and twists through the ride’s weakest part – that in order to create the ride’s Black Forest, the actual forest that had contained the Big Bad Wolf was cleared of foliage.
At the conclusion of the S-turn is another mildly disappointing view: the wall that holds back the Black Forest… which is, quite obviously, a small section of wall lifted up on obvious steel supports, not connected to the ground and clearly not “containing” anything. In fact, the single wall segment can barely disguise that there’s an enormous “go-away green” showbuilding looming behind it…
But now, the moment has arrived. The distant sound of blowing wind grows louder as the train aligns with a dark break in the wall. Then, as the train hits the LSM launch, an all-consuming sound of wind being sucked into the tunnel surrounds riders, who feel not launched from behind, but pulled from ahead into the darkness.
The ascending launch is weirdly long, rising continuously as it gathers speed. Suddenly in the dark, flashing blacklights illuminate highly stylized, poison-tinged leaves, glowing green and purple and surrounding riders. Then, at the height of this, a really spectacular special effect sees arcing lightning bolts surround the train, blinding riders just as they reach the launch’s height and blast out of the leaf “tunnel” they’ve been contained within. Blinded, the train suddenly plummets into a giant, towering backdrop of leaves, brambles, and branches, all with the same bioluminescent, otherworldly purple glow.
That first drop bottoms out fast, whipping riders to the right and racing through cutout branches and roots, each brought to life by enormous translucent scrims hung from the ceiling. As the train twists and turns through these keyhole-sized plant portals, there’s a real sense of being out of control, slaloming through the blackness and narrowly missing these highly-stylized, uniform designs.
Then, having broken through the branches, the train enters an upward double helix, spiraling around a massive lit cut-out of the moon (actually positioned on the building’s floor, but meant to be disorienting) as brambles appear to choke out its light.
Having risen around the moon, the train aligns with the ride’s mid-course brakes. Here, the ride comes to a virtual stop. It’s a rare moment of silence in an otherwise insanely compact experience. Initially, the train sits quietly in the dark, with only the ambient noises of the woods… Gradually, though, each layer of the forest begins to glow, revealing the true scale of the woods – all-encompassing and all-surrounding. It’s impossible to explain that the image above would appear before you, fifty feet tall. It’s a weird, tranquil, almost peaceful moment…
It’s also where one of the ride’s secret features kicks in. Verbolten’s “show” actually offered three different dark ride scene options – and the one selected for you would only first make itself known here, in this quiet moment stopped in the woods. The fate that the forest selects for you will either be a thunderstorm (indicated here by the sounds of approaching thunder), the siren-like appearance of a Spirit protecting the forest, or the distant howling of a wolf, signaling that you’re en route to en encounter with a wolf pack…
With the forest fully alive, the train slips off of the mid-course brakes, dives to the left, and re-emerges on a new straightaway. Here, the forest’s chosen event alters the scene entirely:
- Thunderstorm – the train will swing up under an arcing row of flowers buzzing with an electrical charge. As thunder rumbles, it shakes the track with its booming bass. Flashes of lightning illuminate stylized, curved flats overhead – claw-like branches wrapped around the track as if gripping it. The train advances slowly through the sounds of pattering rain as the track beneath cracks from our advancing weight like heavy branches beneath us. Finally, caught in the midst of the storm, we stop in the darkness when all of a sudden…
- Spirit of the Forest – Flowers at the track’s rise undulate with pink light as a distant female voice draws the train inward. “Closer…” it whispers as the claw-like branches overhead pulse lightly in patterns, drawing the train toward the track’s dead-end. There the spirit’s face is formed from branches. Wisps of sound surround the train as it stops beneath the purple-hued branches. Then, the glowing face darkens as all sound cuts out…
- Wolves – the train levels out under an archway of red flowers, advancing forward into the pitch black darkness. The sounds of low snarling surround the train as slowly, pairs of glowing red eyes appear and disappear, following the advancing train as it creeps through the darkness. As a howl cuts through the night, every set of eyes opens at once, vibrating with red light…
All three events lead us here – to a dead-end. Will we launch backwards? Will a door ahead of us open? Will the track rotate on a hidden turntable? None of the above. Of course, we’ve pulled into the ride’s most acclaimed and surprising feature – one that, especially in 2012, was practically unprecedented (unless you were a coaster nerd aware of this ride’s ugly stepsister, the Declassified Disaster: TH13TEEN).
Yes, with the train officially stalled in either a raging lighting storm, in the Lothlorien-esque bioluminescent glow of a spirit’s call beckoning us, or surrounded in the blinking red eyes of dozens of wolves, the ride officially unveils its secret: the track you’re parked on is, in effect, a drop tower, with the entire track section and train plunging into the darkness.
Having free-fallen two stories, the track settles, with the sound of our car’s engine struggling to turnover. It manages it, as we dip down into a second launch out of the Black Forest, weaving left and right en route to the destination we knew we’d hit: the covered bridge looming a hundred feet over the Rhine River. The train slows to a crawl it the bridge creaks and cracks before we take that final 88 foot plunge – just as riders had on the Big Bad Wolf thirty years prior – skimming along the water’s edge and then racing back up the hillside for a final return to Gerta & Gunter’s Tours and Rentals.
There, the ride memorably ended with Gerta’s warm welcome back. “We’re glad to see you’ve escaped the Forest! Please lift up on your safety harness and exist carefully to your left. Enjoy the rest of your day at Boosh Gardens. AUF WIEDERSEHEN!“
Look, Verbolten wasn’t perfect. But it was a damn good ride, especially for a regional, seasonal park. Sure, if Disney or Universal had pursued such a concept, we would’ve gotten a more refined story; a more fleshed out theming package; on-ride audio; and of course, the ride space would’ve been more properly forested and with more convincing sets…
But in retrospect, it turns out that maybe Verbolten’s relative simplicity – its blacklight flats and keyhole scrims and stylized encounters with wolves and spirits and storms actually was its charm? This was a beautifully simple, intuitive, and weirdly thoughtful family coaster, with some iconic sights, sounds, and sets.
You could call it “charmingly naive” if you wanted; but because Verbolten measured itself as this super-saturated, stylized, snarling adventure through Dayglo forests, it was sort of remarkably successful! Not just in its cohesion, but in its unthinkably lofty hopes to strike the same delicate balance between family and fright; mayhem and mystery that the Big Bad Wolf had found.
Verbolten succeeded, striking that same balance between storybook warmth and dark menace, all wrapped in this very beautiful, flawed, colorful visual package…
Frankly, there might not have been a better 21st century successor to the Big Bad Wolf than Verbolten. And now, from our lofty perch more than a dozen years later, looking at the results of a multi-million dollar reimagining meant to “plus” Verbolten, I sort of can’t help wishing that they… hadn’t? Be sure to take the ride above, then we’ll dig into the changes that came to this spectacular family ride… Read on…