Santa’s Land Fun Park & Zoo is a great affordable family amusement park on the southern side of the Great Smokey Mountains. Santa’s Land has only one roller coaster and that’s the Rudicoaster, a highly unique Zamperla powered coaster. This is a custom coaster was built in 1989 and features a Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer theme to go along with the Christmas theme of the park. The Rudicoaster is from the Zamperla Powered Coaster line where the coaster train itself actually has a motor to propel it up the lift hills. Rudicoaster has trees all through and surrounding the course, adding to the atmosphere and really making it feel like a coaster in the woods.

It was announced earlier in the week that the highly anticipated Georgia Surfer Intamin Launch Coaster at Six Flags Over Georgia was being delayed until 2025. Although this was disappointing, it’s also not uncommon in theme park world. However, this delay could represent an opportunity for the park to solve a potential issue with the new attraction, that being its low capacity. However, there is a solution to this and Six Flags Over Texas used a delay to add capacity to their new Aquaman: Power Wave water coaster just a couple of years ago.

In sad, but not entirely unexpected news, Six Flags has bumped the Georgia Surfer, the new Intamin launched “surf” coaster, until 2025. The same day it was also announced that Six Flags Great Adventure was delaying The Flash Vertical Velocity, a Vekoma boomerang. Being already August with construction still ongoing the writing seemed to be on the wall although there was still hope after a Novermber 4th opening of Kid Flash Cosmic Coaster last year. The social media posts from the park read as follows:

Last night at the very end of the D23 Experiences Showcase a suspended coaster announced for Monsters Inc. Land at Disney Studios! This land was not something that was telegraphed or widely expected and was quite surprising. What was even more surprising was that construction is set to begin next year, so this isn’t “blue sky” stuff, this appears to be really happening. In fact it is supposed to being construction next year in 2025!

Pat McAfee, the popular and sometimes controversial ESPN host, spent nearly 20 minutes of his June 30, 2024 show talking Kennywood and its rides. The show was commenting on a tweet by a local news channel showing The Racer roller coaster apparently being held up by a cinder block. It was obvious Pat loved the park and talked about his childhood visits there that devolved into watching a POV of the ride and reviewing the park in general. The viral story started with a Facebook post by oneBURGH and resulted with the park briefly shutting down the ride, a state inspection and some non-structural repairs.