5. The Xs
Arrow’s coaster legacy began with the development of the world’s first modern steel roller coaster – Disneyland’s Matterhorn Bobsleds in 1959. Just over forty years later, the company’s last coaster left Arrow bankrupt. That was X at Six Flags Magic Mountain – a captivating and beguiling engineering marvel meant to prove that Arrow could survive the “Coaster Wars” alongside ’90s giants B&M and Intamin.
Embodied by its pink and yellow color scheme, X was based on an absolutely unhinged idea. Essentially, guests sat in winged trains with riders cantilevered out from either side of the track. Those seats were able to spin – but not freely. Instead, their rotating mechanism road along its own rail – separate from the main running rails of the coaster. As that secondary spin rail would rise and fall relative to the tracks, it would mechanically dictate the direction of the seats. For example, at the top of the ride’s lift hill, the seats would rotate to position riders face-down for the first drop.
The so-called “4th Dimension” prototype reportedly cost $45 million – an unbelievable sum given that Millennium Force – opened two years earlier – cost “only” $25 million. X was a big, bold, brash show of force for Arrow, and a massive piece of artillery for Six Flags at the height of the Coaster Wars. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. The ride was an operational disaster for years, including missing its entire debut summer. Many of the ride’s issues were blamed on its Arrow-designed trains, which were too heavy to comfortably navigate the track and its embedded spin rail system.
In the 2000s, Six Flags went through an era of adding special effects (flamethrowers, on-ride audio, mist tunnels, etc.) to its coasters while giving them new names and paint (i.e. “Superman: The Ride” becoming “Bizarro”) to market old rides as new again. X got that treatment, but it also got new trains from S&S (the company that absorbed Arrow’s assets after their X-caused bankruptcy) meant to increase the ride’s reliability. $10 million, the ride X2 emerged with a new, more “serious” paint scheme and logo. But it really is a different ride than its predecessor in that it works.
6. The DarKastles
In 1999, Universal’s Islands of Adventure opened with an anchor attraction that arguably changed theme parks forever – the Modern Marvel: The Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man. A cutting-edge, technological dark ride, Spider-Man merged physical sets and projections with a cutting-edge ride motion simulator ride system creating a gotta-see-it experience that was genuinely one-of-a-kind… well… for a while.
Just six years after Spider-Man, a second dark ride utilizing the “SCOOP” ride system opened… and unbelievably, it wasn’t at a Universal or Disney theme park at all, but at the seasonal, regional Busch Gardens Williamsburg in Virginia. With “hamlets” themed to old world Europe, the park co-opted the “SCOOP” dark ride technology for a completely original dark ride exploring the legend of Germany’s “Mad King Ludwig” – a jaw dropping endeavor for a park of its caliber. The result was the Lost Legend: Curse of Darkastle. Filled with original lore, characters, settings, and music, this mix of haunted house and family thrill ride was a clever re-imagining of what the “SCOOP” could do.
Of course, a post-Blackfish SeaWorld Parks had far less interest in maintaining DarKastle than Universal has demonstrated in continuous upgrades to the beloved Spider-Man. After the 2017 season, Busch Gardens quietly conceded that DarKastle would never reopen. Instead, the showbuilding would be hollowed out to become a flex space containing haunted houses, Santa Claus meet-and-greets, etc. It was a tragic end to a legendary ride.
In 2023, DarKastle got a proper new inhabitant: DarKoaster. Mechanically, DarKoaster is a clever Intamin family “straddle coaster” that uses a first-of-its-kind real-time switch track to have riders pass through the layout twice without passing through the station. That’s important, because the showbuilding it takes place in is relatively small. It also allows the ride to pack in a surprising four tire-propelled launches while some show scenes change between lap one and lap two.
Narratively, the ride is a sort of “spiritual sequel” to the dark ride, basically inviting us back to the Mad King’s castle as ghost hunters. There, we board “straddle coaster” snowmobile vehicles (cleverly re-using the vehicles that sister SeaWorld parks frame as jet skis) to head out into the supernatural blizzard that’s coalesced around the castle grounds, seemingly meant to keep us from escaping.
Altogether, as our review notes, DarKoaster is… kind of a bummer. Fun but frustrating, it’s incredibly low capacity and unfortunately quite hokey, with Party City-level decor in the emptied-out warehouse that once housed spectacular sets. And most frustrating, the park seems to have kept a very wide berth from actually referencing Curse of DarKastle (probably for reasons of licensing; it appears that DarKastle’s design firm retains the rights and could sell the dark ride to another park if anyone were interested). The result is a ride that’s very lightly decorated, and alludes to – but doesn’t ever want to officially connect to – the spectacular characters or music from the dark ride, making it more of a half-baked spin-off than a sequel. Still, conceptually, it’s an interesting idea to have a coaster serve as narrative follow-up to a beloved modern dark ride.
And funny enough, DarKoaster is mere steps from the most recent addition to this list…
7. The Wolves
We already discussed Kings Island’s original 1981 ride The Bat – the first of Arrow’s suspended coasters. But new to our list of sequel coasters must be the story of the best-known suspended coaster. Built at Busch Gardens Williamsburg, the Lost Legend: Big Bad Wolf opened in 1984. Set in the German hamlet of Oktoberfest, the ride saw guests hop aboard suspended trains and “become” the Big Bad Wolf, swinging through an abandoned German village, emphasizing the ride’s inherent ability for “near-miss” encounters.
A second lift hill concealed in the woods then carried the ride up to its highest point – dangled on a cliff, overlooking an 80 foot drop to the park’s “Rhine River” below. A truly pulse-pounding finale saw the playful coaster turn predatory as it raced down the hillside, swinging out over the water at the last second for a growling race back through the woods and a high speed, swinging return to Oktoberfest. It’s difficult to emphasize just how much the Big Bad Wolf is remembered as the “first big coaster” for thousands and thousands of people in the region, and across its quarter century of operation, became a beloved, untouchable, intergenerational icon.
Still, Busch Gardens cited the coaster’s 25 year shelf life in its decision to retire the family favorite in 2009. It was replaced in 2012 by an equally spectacular family coaster – Verbolten – which sees guests caught in Germany’s malevolent Black Forest. Verbolten even retraces Big Bad Wolf’s steps, literally recreating its iconic river dive and re-using the former ride’s cement footers for much of its second half! But even so, Big Bad Wolf is a difficult ride to replace in the minds and hearts of locals…
In 2024, Busch Gardens Tampa (themed to Africa) added Phoenix Rising, a B&M family-sized inverted coaster. Given that the two Busch Gardens parks tend to have paired, sister rides, few were surprised when it was leaked that Williamsburg would add its own B&M family inverted coaster the following year. But the notion that it would be located in the park’s Oktoberfest – behind Verbolten, and re-using the station for the failed Declassified Disaster: Drachen Fire – seemed to set up the dominoes just right to make the ride an ode to the Wolf.
That was assured when a viral marketing campaign in 2024 teased the new ride’s connection to the original. A series of storybook-style videos built a new legend: of a German village that, long ago, forced a terrorizing wolf over a cliff to its seeming end, ringing the town bell each year in commemoration of the event… and a new generation’s realization that the big, bad wolf may have survived… The multi-week lead-up resulted in a poll asking guests what its new wolf-themed inverted coaster should be named: Wölfsturm, Wölfsreign or Geisterwölf.
Ultimately, the park announced that the winner was – none of the above! Apparently in response to thousands of comments that said “Just call it the big bad wolf!,” the new coaster will make its connection overt by being named The Big Bad Wolf: The Wolf’s Revenge. Let’s be honest – it’s a little circuitous, clumsy and cloying (not to mention out of synch with the otherwise-musical tempo of Griffon, Verbolten, Tempesto, Invader, and Alpengeist). But hey, in an era where the only thing more powerful than nostalgia is search engine optimization, The Big Bad Wolf: The Wolf’s Revenge leaves nothing to the imagination and very officially adds another “sequel coaster” to our list.
Now to be sure, the new Wolf won’t hold a candle to the original. Indeed, the park may actually end up wishing it had steered clear of the connection given that its social media comments are likely to be bogged down with the lack of swinging, the lack of a river dive, and calls to “Bring back the real Big Bad Wolf” for years… But for those who know and accept that this is an “off-the-shelf” family coaster, it’ll be a fine “sequel coaster!”