Newsletter: In The Loop: Take your dog to a Legoland water park
Welcome to another edition of In the Loop, the L.A. Times' theme park newsletter. I'm Funland theme park blogger Brady MacDonald, and this week we take a look at Disneyland’s “Star Wars” festival, tour the Great Wolf Lodge indoor water park and check out Knott’s Halloween Haunt.
Disneyland tickets
Disneyland raises the price of it’s top-tiered annual pass with no blackout dates to more than $1,000 as the Anaheim theme park ponders how to deal with crowding concerns.
The move irks some hard-core passholders who call the price increases “greedy.”
Meanwhile, Disney is actively looking at so-called variable pricing for daily admission tickets — with prices rising during high demand.
Times Business columnist Michael Hiltzik asks: Have Disneyland tickets outpaced inflation? The answer: Yes, but it's more complicated than that.
Plus: 7 reasons Disneyland raised annual pass prices
Walt Disney Co. is actively looking at “variable” pricing for Disneyland, a system in which prices would rise during periods of high demand. Above, parkgoers walk along Main Street in May 2014.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Star Wars Land
Disney raises questions with the recent announcement of plans to temporarily close the Rivers of America, Tom Sawyer Island and the Disneyland Railroad to allow for construction of Star Wars Land.
Concept art of the new Star Wars Land coming to Disneyland.
(Disney)
Building bump
Many of China's estimated 850 theme parks developed by cities and smaller companies struggle to attract thrill-seeking customers.
"They have these build-it-and-they-will come strategies — and then the people don't come," says one Chinese business professor.
The Dragon Fantasy amusement park, a 165-acre development in Tangshan City about two hours’ drive from Beijing, has no visitors. One section was opened for a few months in 2013, then closed.
(Jonathan Kaiman / Los Angeles Times)
17th Door
I visit the 17th Door haunted experience where you need to remember three things: Each of the 17 rooms is more intense than the last, the monsters will touch you and the safe word is “mercy.”
The 17th Door haunted experience runs through Nov. 1 at the Tustin Marketplace.
(17th Door)
Shuttle coaster
Take a point-of-view ride at a tiny Texas amusement park on the first new wooden shuttle coaster built anywhere in the world in more than a century.
Fatal crash
Federal investigators cite the parent company of Richard Petty Driving Experience with two workplace-safety violations and propose $7,000 in fines after a probe into the death of an instructor at the Walt Disney World Speedway, the Orlando Sentinel reports.
And finally
Dogs can go for a dip in the wave pool and water play areas of the Legoland Florida water park as part of an upcoming fundraiser for the local humane society.
Still need more theme park news? Check out the Los Angeles Times Funland theme park blog on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Instagram. Also feel free to email me with any feedback on the newsletter.
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