Growing up in Southern California, Six Flags Magic Mountain was always one of my favorite places. So the second my daughter was old enough (tall enough, really), I couldn’t wait to take her there. Unfortunately, when that time finally came around, a few Mondays ago, my first visit in twenty years didn’t live up to those childhood (teenage, really) expectations. 

Back then, the various SoCal amusement parks could be broken down by the ages they catered to. Disneyland, despite its Mickey Mouse and Snow White foundation, wasn’t necessarily the youngest option. That distinction belonged to Knott’s Berry Farm, with not much in the way of rides. Mostly Old West shows and maybe a log ride. It was even the first amusement park to offer a kiddie area in Camp Snoopy, although it was added after the time I would’ve been interested.

While the characters and overall motif at Disneyland caters to little kids, many of the best rides are far from that. That’s probably why it has such staying power and parents can’t wait to take their kids. Hey kids, look at Mickey and Minnie over there while I ride Space Mountain again. 

Now if you took the characters and the Fantasyland rides out of Disneyland, and add in about ten more Space Mountains, you’ve got Magic Mountain. All thrill rides, no frills. My happy spot.

It’s odd that Magic Mountain became a favorite since the single most miserable day of my upbringing happened there. I was about 46 1/2 inches tall. So I had to sit on some benches with my aunt while my mom and older sister went on and then gushed about all the rides. This was back in 1980 or so when there wasn’t any kiddie land. Or misters or tv’s in line or, really, anything other than thrill rides. Fucking brutal. I hope my mom didn’t pay full admission for me. Or my aunt. There ought to be some sort of “Designated Driver” discount for someone who isn’t going on rides. 

Actually, a waterslide park I recently went to was free for anyone over the age of seventy, presumably because they aren’t likely to ride many water slides. Magic Mountain, unfortunately, did not follow that logic, so my mom had to pay full admission when she and I took Daughter, despite not going on any rides. She sat on some of those very benches she left me on back in the Carter administration. 

Revenge is best served cold.

My mom wasn’t the only one who paid more than her fair share. All summer long, I tracked prices that consistently showed the day we wanted to visit at $70. There was also a season pass option that would allow us as many visits as we wanted for the rest of 2023 for only $100, including free parking! That free parking made me think long and hard about paying the extra $30 to upgrade from one day, but I would’ve had to get three season passes. It’s not like I would return without Daughter and if the two of us were going to trek all the way to SoCal for an amusement park day, Mother would probably join us again. So $30 extra bucks times three? Meh, let’s pay for parking.

If only. The walk-up admission wasn’t actually the $70 that was showing on the website as recently as yesterday. This paying a little extra for walking up has become relatively common. My local minor league baseball team was the first place I saw it, about fifteen years ago. At first I thought it was stupid to discourage last-minute customers. Hey, what do you want to do tonight? Should we head to the ballgame? Nah, they charge two bucks more because we didn’t buy it yesterday.

Still not a fan of the practice, but much like assholes backing into parking lots, I’ve made peace with it as a permanent addition to this hellscape. You see, discouraging walk-ups isn’t a glitch in the plan, it’s the actual plan. They need to make staffing decisions, and if they don’t know how many customers are going to show up, they have to pay more hourly wages. If they can predict 24 hours in advance, they can staff (or lack of staff) accordingly. Maybe the issues we had once we were inside Magic Mountain were our own damn fault for not “letting them know” we were coming. That would be their explanation, I’m sure. 

But shouldn’t an amusement park in the middle of summer budget for a handful of walk-ups?

So I expected them to charge us an extra ten percent or whatever. Tag on the minimum wage they’re paying the employee mumbling through an explanation of how one day costs more than an entire year. Because that’s what it came out to. One twenty per person. Plus parking.

Naturally, we asked if we might just get the season pass instead, seeing as it was twenty dollars cheaper than the daily admission. They said no with some gobbledygook explanation of adding the season pass onto the top of today’s admission. In all honesty, I couldn’t tell you what the total price would be. It sounded like we’d get no discount whatsoever for actually having already purchased that day’s tickets. So for $100, you can come all season, but to come today and all season, it’ll put you back $220.

Our Magic Mountain experience didn’t improve much once we were inside. It felt like a ghost town. 

We got there around just before noon, a little over an hour after it opened, but you wouldn’t know that anywhere other than lines for a few rides. I had specifically picked a Monday to avoid  terrible crowds, but sheesh, this place felt at maybe twenty percent capacity. Monday, sure, but it’s still a Monday in Summer. Did the former overshadow the latter? Or is this par for the course these days?

Almost nothing was open between the entry gate and the first batch of rides, about a quarter of the way around the park. We walked past closed Dippin’ Dots stands, closed souvenir shops, an entire closed kiddie land. Perhaps this should’ve been a hint about what the rest of the park was going to be like, but it wasn’t a foreshadowing I portended at that moment.

Of course, Daughter wanted to go on the ride she saw from the parking lot first, so we had to truck all the way over to the far corner. Not a bad starting point, since we’d be starting the day at the back of the park while other attendees (if there were any) would start at the front. If more than half the rides were open, it might’ve been a great plan.

Not that we could track how long lines might be like at Disneyland. Because the Six Flags app absolutely sucks. On the way to the Scream we passed a cool looking ride called Full Throttle. It didn’t seem to have anybody in line, but when I checked the app, it said it was a 55 minute wait (that’s where all the customers are!). No way was Daughter waiting an hour for her very first ride of the day, so we continued on to Scream and Colossus (I refuse to call it by its new name), where we found a “Ride Wait Time” TV that showed Full Throttle only had a 15 minute wait. That jibed more with the line we had seen. Meanwhile, the app on my phone still showed close to an hour. Throughout the day, the screens said one thing, the app said another, and neither seemed to have much bearing on reality.

Scream, meanwhile, had a five-minute wait, so we rode that not once, but twice in a row, which, it turns out, wasn’t great for my constitution. I know I’m getting older, but holy crap, that ride zips you back and forth fifteen different directions. Then went on Batman, the Ride, which also had virtually no line and similar movement. I had to take a breather after riding those back-to-back. 

I’m fine with loops and corkscrews and most of the other things a ride will throw at you, but those rides did this weird bob-and-weave on the drops that brought up a dizziness I’ve never really had on roller coasters. Clearly my center of gravity ain’t where it was when I was nineteen.  I should add to my list of reasons for taking Daughter to Magic Mountain now the fact that, at the rate I’m going, she might not have a ride partner much longer. Then again, Scream pretty much never had more than a five-minute wait (if my app and the screens were to be believed), so maybe I’m not the only one that took a hard pass on that one.

Fortunately I rallied shortly thereafter and didn’t experience that vertigo on any other rides. Waiting an hour for the thirty-second Superman ride, which only goes straight, probably helped.

The lines seemed to fall into that all or nothing range. Less than ten minutes or pushing an hour. Two of the rides with short lines were Ninja, which was state of the art back when I was a regular here in high school, and Revolution. Ah, poor Revolution. The world’s first “successful” loop roller coaster. I’m curious about some of those unsuccessful ones. At one point, Revolution and Colossus were the lifeblood of the park. Now, they’ve rebuilt Colossus to add some upside downs and corkscrews and they’ve rebranded Revolution as “The New Revolution – Classic.” What the hell does that even mean? As far as I could tell by riding it, it’s the same ride it’s been since 1976. 

I guess it’s to be expected for a park that adds a new ride every year. The old ones become obsolete instead of classic. You don’t see that happening at Disneyland, though. Matterhorn, Space Mountain, and Big Thunder might not require a virtual queue like their fancy new Rise of the Resistance, but I’ve never been able to walk right on Space Mountain three times in a row like we did Viper. Maybe a paint job is in order? Because every ride more than a decade old at Magic Mountain looked like it belonged at the state fair. 

The ones I was able to get on, at any rate. Because on a Monday in the middle of summer, half the damn park was closed. Riddler’s Revenge:  closed. Goliath: closed. Lex Luthor: closed. Ninja: closed. Apocalypse, which was my favorite ride and now that Colossus is fancy-dancy upside-down and loop-de-loop, the only genuine, straightforward wooden coaster: closed.

Not just the thrill rides, either. The Justice League building was closed. The carousel might’ve even been closed. The most unconscionable decision on a 100-degree day, they even closed one of the two water rides. Maybe they were pissed more of us didn’t pre-buy access to Hurricane Harbor, their waterslide addendum next door. 

Yes, I know amusement parks have to refurbish from time to time, but don’t they usually try to do those one at a time? Also, there’s this wonderful thing called an offseason. Okay, maybe Disneyland doesn’t have a legitimate offseason, but I’m pretty sure Magic Mountain is literally only open weekends between October and April. Tons of time to close down rides for a paint job. And preferably, one at a time.

Especially the water slides. Did I mention they used to have misters in line? How thoughtful!

So yeah, much like childhood friends or a class reunion, the intervening thirty years hasn’t been kind to my simpatico with Magic Mountain. Once upon a time, we were on the same wavelength regarding the proper types of rides and lines and everything an amusement park should be. Now they’re my stoner friend who never left our hometown and has no clue that the rest of the world has moved on to bigger and better things. Even Universal Studios!

A friend of mine calls this the Sizzler Syndrome. He loved Sizzler growing up, but he refuses to go to it as an adult, because he knows he will be disappointed. There’s probably an element of that going on with me, where the things that entice me about an amusement park today aren’t what I would’ve enjoyed back then. But while Sizzler is probably the same it’s always been, I’m standing my ground and saying Magic Mountain is mostly at fault.

It felt rundown, unkempt, and ignored. There’s been talk that many developers want to tear it down and sell the land. Ironically, the reason it’s in Valencia in the first place is because you couldn’t give that land away sixty years ago. Now it’s prime real estate.

At the rate they’re going, a strip mall might be an improvement.