There have been rumors flying on the net, and I’m pretty sure Kevin mentioned this rumor on one of our podcasts, but Kings Island is “going” to be getting a hyper for 2009. Someone scanned in an image from the latest edition of the First Drop Magazine. I figured I would pass it along if you haven’t seen it yet.

It clearly shows the layout for KI’s hyper. I read a lot of coaster boards, and people seem to be really split if this is true or not. I’m going to go with it being true, and hope for the best. Someone clever has superimposed the layout over a satellite picture of the park. It sure looks good to me, and should be a killer addition to the park. It’s nice to see all of the former Paramount parks getting some love.

Six Flags Great America’s Deja Vu has run for the last time. The Giant Vekoma Boomerang will not be operating at the mid-western amusement park in the 2008 season. The last rides were given to local ACErs on Sunday night.

It’s possible that the ride will be sold to another amusement park, like it’s brother that operated at Six Flags Over Georgia for the last time this season. At this point the only Deja Vu that has not been hit by the axe is the one operating at Six Flags Magic Mountain. However, rumor has it that this Vu may be closed after this season as well.

It’s sad to see such fun rides being closed down, I’ll be getting my “last ride” on Deja Vu at Magic Mountain on a week from Friday. I’ll be sure to bring back an update of some kind, until than, I guess we’ll have to wait and see what happens.

Since everyone has helped out with the Hershey announcement and all of the games, I figured I would let you in on the fun. Here is a link to the new coaster, and the announcement that should come tomorrow (it’s down). If you missed it, it was a No Limit’s video of the ride. Nothing super big deal, heck the announcement is only 12 hours away.

Now lets see how all of this plays out tomorrow and see if we have all been had (I don’t think we have though).

EDIT:
Nantimi Closes

“Effective immediately, Nantimi, Inc. is no longer in business. Existing clients will be rerouted as discussed in Tuesday’s conference call. Pending liquidation and total asset sell-off, all private investors will receive fair market value of existing shares. Our final 11 investors will receive further payments in 2008.”

Only a few more hours till we can unravel all of this, I know I’m excited.

While this is totally unconfirmed and based solely off of some connections I have made, I have a feeling that Hershey’s new coaster is going to be named Afterburner. If you have been reading Nantiman’s blog there have been several references to flying and airports. Hershey’s site indicates that the theme will be heat, fire, or something else that is very hot. With all of the airport and plane talk on the blog and the heat information on Hershey’s site, I just tried to connect the dots. Afterburners are very hot, as they basically just add put gas to a jet engine’s exhaust. I could be totally off base, but that’s just my guess. We will see how my theory holds up next week at this time.

Here is a link to the image that people have gathered together so far. Credit goes to this forum for doing the work.

I feel a bit like Charlie from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. If you haven’t been keeping up to date with Hershey news, apparently they selected 25 people to send pieces of a picture to. Hershey’s own little golden ticket hunt. I just checked my e-mail and I received one of the pictures. The title of the e-mail read 25, and the image file was named hp_r1_c5. You can see it below. If you follow this link, there are the other site’s that they sent pieces to. Apparently they sent the pieces to members of those sites, and those sites only. I showed my piece, lets see if we can get more together to make the full image.

Edit: Jake also received a piece. His piece is below, we are just waiting for him to share the name of the file given to him so that we can add it to the grid work. Once we have all of the pieces, we should be able to get a good glimpse of what this coaster might look like.