Gatekeeper
Image: Martin Lewison, Flickr (license)
In 2013, the towering tan showbuilding was no more. Instead, the lakeside midway became an open plaza with stellar views of the water, with winged shades covering a beachfront queue. A new roller coaster – royal blue, white, and gold – rose from the sand. Gatekeeper is an elegant, soaring, swooping B&M Wing Rider that rises high above the park’s skyline, gracefully gliding above the beach.
Riders are seated aboard "winged" trains suspending them with no track above or below – an unexperience unlike any other at Cedar Point.
Image: Cedar Fair
With its station and lift hill rising in the area once blocked by a corrugated steel warehouse, Gatekeeper filled Disaster Transport's spot in more ways than one. Despite its awesome size and statistics, the soaring, swooping, elegant, oversized ride is a perfect family attraction – massive, but gentle and smooth.
More than just a massive thrill ride investment, Gatekeeper opened up Cedar Point's beach and redefined the front half of the park. The blazing blue track and soaring golden trains dominate the skyline and – true to the ride's name – signal your entry to the Roller Coaster Capital of the World
And that's probably one of the ride's most stellar features: to accomodate Gatekeeper, the park's entrance was reconfigured, and designers took the opportunity to give the experience of arriving a true rebirth. The entry gates were restylized in retro-modern textures and typefaces with master-planned gardens and signage. From the entry gates rise two impeccable white towers, each with a cutout "keyhole" perfectly aligned for Gatekeeper's track.
As the train approaches the park's gates, it leaps skyward and races toward the white towers, twisting at the last second to pass through the carved keyholes with an elegance that makes passers-by stop and stare. For riders, too, the illusion of an impending collision is a signature experience.
Image: Cedar Fair
Whatever your thoughts on Gatekeeper, we can be sure that it is a fitting replacement for Disaster Transport and a wonderful ride to transition Cedar Point from its Coaster Wars heyday into the modern, built-out family park that's it transforming into.
Disaster
There's no question that Disaster Transport ended up living up to its name. The unfortunate roller coaster started its life as a fun family coaster and ended as a letdown without ever changing a single square foot of track. All it took was an overbaked attempt at theming and then a total and complete abandonment of it to spoil a unique ride and darken Cedar Fair's attitude toward theming for a generation.
Image: Cedar Fair
The truth is, Disaster Transport will likely always be remembered as a major (and rare) miss for the Roller Coaster Capital of the World, though it no doubt holds a special place in the hearts of children of the '80s and '90s for whom it might've been their first "grown-up" coaster. If only Cedar Point could've committed to the ride's special effects and themes, they might've indeed ended up with their own Space Mountain. Instead, Disaster Transport was a mess destined for inclusion in our Disaster Files series.
We leave you with a final retrospective lights-on look at the interior of Disaster Transport's main showbuilding.
If you enjoyed our detailed look at this unintentional flub, make the jump to our LEGEND LIBRARY to dig into another Disaster File, or pick up with another full feature!
Now we have to know: did you ever get a chance to ride Avalanche Run or Disaster Transport? What were your thoughts about the confusing ride? Did Cedar Point's seasonal take on Space Mountain ever stand a chance, or was the half-baked low-budget concept doomed to be lost among the stars? Record your memories and thoughts in the comments below to keep this bumbling ride alive for another generation!
Comments
I live in the Detroit area, about 2.5 hours from Sandusky, so Cedar Point has always been my "home" park. Disaster Transport, along with the Iron Dragon, was one of my first "big" roller coasters. This was back in the early and mid-90s, when the ride was relatively new. And the theming was much different than in its final days.
There was an actual storyline: if I remember correctly, you were on a cargo route to Alaska, shooting through the stars to get there from Sandusky in record time. There were no glow-in-the-dark handprints in the queue. In fact, there were two large showrooms that used video and animatronics to set up a story. One was a control room (in the last few years, this was shuttered and used as Halloweekends storage)and the second room, The Repair Bay, had some robots doing some sort of shtick. As a kid, this was all great and entertaining. Even going up that final flight of stairs, there was some "pre-flight" safety video, and I even remember the tag the spokesperson would use: "At Dispatch Master Transport, we get you there on time, or we don't get you there at all."
The ride experience was also less cheesy (again, to a kid). I feel like the red chaser lights were added late in the ride's run. Originally, you'd have some sort of implement come down and "fuel" your car before starting the lift. I can't remember what sort of lighting was used, but I think it was just the star field. But the ride itself actually used quite a bit of theming in its heyday -- giant props, stars. There was even a video projector that had an explosion as you rolled by. Probably the most famous part is that, at the midpoint, your "onboard computer" would shout "I'm losing control!" and there'd be flashing lights and a few wild turns before ending. As a kid, it was great.
But your article really hit the nail on the head. In the last year's, this was a mess. The theming wasn't kept up and it just got worse and worse, until it was just a ride in the dark with no storyline and very few effects. I believe Kinzel actually called the ride "a dog" in an interview once. And the box it was in was horrendous. The last time I went to CP was actually in 2012, just a few days before the ride was demolished (it was already closed), and I have to imagine the view is so much nicer without it.
And it's extremely sad that CP has no dark rides. That wasn't always the case. In their early days they had Earthquake and, I believe, Noah's Ark. And growing up, they had a pirate ride that we loved. It basically used the track of a carnival haunted house, but as a kid I thought it was fun. It's now the arcade that looks oddly like a castle right next to Blue Streak.