How Not To Kill An Anaconda
"This new trend of closing coasters without prior announcement is getting old fast."
“Perhaps I treated you too harshly.”
This is pity speaking, because hot damn was that a cold way to go…
Cold blooded. Perfect for a snake, right?
“Merry Christmas Eve from the Old Dominion!” –Six Flags as they warm by a fireplace burning the goodwill of their paying passholders
There wasn’t a press release.
No press event.
Not even a farewell tweet drafted by an underpaid intern.
Just a permit. A sterile little PDF filed on December 24th, stamped with the surgical certainty of premeditated demolition. The kind of thing you file when you don’t want anyone to notice. When you're hoping people are too busy wrapping presents to ask why a thirty-three-year-old roller coaster that aged like milk in the Florida sun suddenly needed to disappear before New Year’s — no ifs, ands, or buts.
Anaconda didn’t get a goodbye. It didn’t even get a warning.
It unceremoniously closed for the season after Halloween Haunt — standard procedure. Nothing unusual. Guests assumed it would reopen with everything else come spring. Again, status quo.
But in the shadows of the off-season, with the gates locked and the midway music on mute, the wrecking ball came in hot and fast.
And the only reason we knew?
Because coaster nerds found the paperwork. Looking for something no one knew needed to be found yet.
The news broke not from Kings Dominion, but from a corner of the internet where theme park detectives gather to track permit numbers like they're signs of seismic activity. And this one shook people just as everyone was readying for Ole Saint Nick to slide down the chimney.
Because Anaconda wasn’t just some Vekoma kiddie coaster or a flat ride tucked in a forgotten corner. It was a prominent Arrow Dynamics roller coaster that dominated Lake Charles for well over half of the park’s history. The most photographed attraction in Kings Dominion. A red, green, and yellow serpent arrogantly coiled over the lake, a staple sight from all the prime angles in the park — the waterpark’s lazy river, the midway’s pizza parlor, the top of the Ferris wheel… A visual anchor for the park, especially Jungle X-Pedition.
It had an iconic sound, too. That classic Arrow lift hill chain rattle, a mechanical zipper scraping skyward. That unmistakable clack-clack-clack that drilled its way into your memory whether you rode the coaster or not. And you were going to hear it regardless of where you were.
And then, all at once — nothing.
Spring would come. The gates would reopen. Families would walk the midway, frozen lemonades in hand. And somewhere between Auntie Anne’s and the queue for Flight of Fear, someone would stop and ask:
“Wait… where’s Anaconda?”
And the only answer would be crickets, and the sound of murky water where a snake used to slink.
Love at First Strike.
Anaconda was the first roller coaster in the world to make such a splash, diving underwater. An exciting feat once upon a time.
Back in 1991, Anaconda debuted with a fuss in fanfare. A sleek, serpentine showstopper slithering through the park’s jungle themed section (The Congo, Safari Village, Jungle X-Pedition… the names all run together).
A Ron Toomer original, Ana was born in the era when Arrow Dynamics was still spearheading the amusement industry and Ron himself was designing coasters by bending wire coat hangers at his desk like a madman. But he was always onto something. A method to the madness.
And if the future ever felt real at Kings Dominion, it was on that lake — watching Anaconda dive beneath the surface, train after train disappearing into mist and tunnel and myth.
The splash effects at the tunnel’s entrance were synchronized to the second. The airtime through the double corkscrews gave kids their first taste of gravity betrayal. And that first drop? A wide, sweeping plunge that felt chomping at the bit.
Ron Toomer built milestones.
And Anaconda was a milestone for thousands.
It was your first big coaster.
Your mom’s favorite ride in the ‘90s.
The thing your cousin swore she’d never do until she did and bought the photo at the exit kiosk with her eyes wide and her hair whipped in the wind.
It was distinctly Kings Dominion.
Not cloned. Not duplicated. Not an off-the-shelf layout dropped into six other parks like a flat-pack thrill ride.
Anaconda wrapped around Lake Charles as if Lake Charles was dug up solely for Anaconda (despite there being two decades separating the both of them).
And yeah, Ana got rough.
Arrow rides didn’t always age too hot, especially if their supports were fast set in lake sediment. Engineer as they might, time and nature were going to do what time and nature do best.
The butterfly turns after the mid-course brake run were notoriously a neck-thrasher, especially if you weren’t prepared for the throttling. It became part of the experience — the section you warned your friends about. The part you were either too short to mind or too tall to ignore.
But the decline never erased the fundamentals.
Anaconda was never a bad coaster, just a little worse for wear in the end. And with the right retrack treatment (à la Loch Ness Monster), could’ve kept gliding above that lake for years to come.
Instead, the dame of Lake Charles was quietly unmade.
Not because it had no life left to live.
But because the new people in charge went on a coaster killing spree. Something about cutting back costs, something about satisfying shareholders. You know the drill.
Off-season slaughters.
Anaconda was one of the first to go, but it wasn’t the only one.
By the time the 2024-2025 off-season ended, over twenty-five attractions had been quietly removed across the Six Flags/Cedar Fair parks. Some of them small. Others of them massive. As in like the tallest coaster on Earth, Kingda Ka, massive.
All of them gone without warning.
No announcements, send-offs, or “Last Chance to Ride” banners.
It’s a corporate sleight-of-hand trick — distract the audience with season pass deals, then drop a coaster when no one’s looking.
Take the aforementioned Kingda Ka, for example…
Rumors circulated last summer, but the park never confirmed them. Employees whispered that if you wanted to ride one last time, you’d better do it before the season ended. A week after closing for the year, guess what manifested? A jumpscare filing permit.
Then came the shell game.
The demo date was posted... then changed. Local police warned residents about explosion sounds from the controlled demolition. But Six Flags shifted the hour at the last second, twice, in the dead of night, to stop people from showing up and filming.
But they’d be remiss to underestimate the mania of the coaster enthusiast community. The dedication. Some showed up early enough that they caught the final fall of a world record-holder on camera. The park’s meal ticket crumbled into Lego pieces in a Six Flags parking lot.
And the company?
Still allergic to official statements.
This isn’t poor communication. It’s strategy.
Keep the closures out of the headlines. Delay the fallout until after the merchandise has sold, the passes renewed, the family trips booked. Let the guests figure it out when they’re already inside the gates and it’s too late to demand a refund or change plans.
And what’s lost in the process isn’t scrap metal.
It’s trust.
It’s the sense that the park you spent well-earned coin and varied affections on doesn’t value your business.
Which truth is every guest, every rider is just a numerical value on the ticket turnstile and decimal in the quarterly report. But parks can pull off making guests and riders feel otherwise, when they want to. And if they don’t, the numbers start to bleed.
Like micro-purchases peddled on mobile phone games, one day the ‘just this once’ $2 purchase added up to $200 by the end of the month. The park’s loss of ‘just one’ $200 season pass purchase compounded to $20,000 worth by the end of the quarter. Bridges afire in the background.
People know as much and notice these plays by the parks. In real time.
Back to Anaconda’s case, Kings Dominion’s comment section immediately erupted. On every post. On every social media platform. Laced with backlash and vitriol.
PG highlights from the community:
“This new trend of closing coasters without prior announcement is getting old fast.”
“Y’all just destroyed my childhood memories.”
“For the first time, my family has not purchased the season pass.”
“No announcement or last minute rides is starting to piss me off.”
“Taking out all the coasters and charging double to get in and see the destruction.”
“The corporate disconnect with this chain and its regular visitors is starting to get sad.”
“I hope this blows up in their faces.”
These aren’t trolls. These are the loyalists. The passholders. The people who built their summers around return visits, who remember riding these coasters with their parents before taking their own kids on the very same ones.
Now, they’re watching the parks hollow out in real time, with none of the grace, none of the goodbye, and absolutely none of the respect.
It’s more than okay for attractions to close. But, the way that they’re handled is the difference in how the park’s relationship with the people funding them will look afterwards.
Six Flags thinks they’re only steamrolling rides when truthfully, they’re steamrolling relationships.
And Anaconda?
A stark red flag.
Where defunct coasters go…
Anaconda lived in the periphery of a thousand childhoods. Looping through birthday photos. Glittering in the distance during summers. Slithering through the fog during Haunt.
You didn’t need to ride it to know its presence.
It contributed to the park’s unique flavor. You couldn’t find another Anaconda at Six Flags Over Texas or Great America. It was Kings Dominion. Unmistakably so.
The park where you could dive underwater on an Arrow or launch out of a volcano on an invert. So, with each of these questionably handled closures, that personality is eroding.
It’s becoming a little uncanny.
Kings Dominion has to toe with individuality with its new additions to come.
What does Kings Dominion have that the closer Six Flags America doesn’t? What does Kings Dominion do that the nearby Busch Gardens Williamsburg doesn’t?
Say what you want about Anaconda, but it helped define Kings Dominion as Kings Dominion.
When a park treats attractions like clutter — outdated money pits to be leveled at leisure — it’s burning a chapter of the story that made people care about the park in the first place.
Go about it gracefully. Because it’s easier to sour a reputation than it is to recover a soured reputation.
Anaconda was aging. Had its faults. But it was part of the park’s charm. And in a chain increasingly defined by interchangeable, off the shelf attractions, rides like Ana pulled some weight. Maintained favor.
You can argue the exact number in the snake’s fan club, but when you add them with Winter Fest’s, Berserker’s, Sky Coaster’s, Volcano’s (all attractions axed without warning)… how many disillusioned passholders and prospective ticket buyers do you end up with?
March arrives. You walk Candy Apple Grove like always — same blue ice cream, same singing mushrooms, same humid Doswell air. But when you reach the lake… there’s an absence you can’t unhear.
No clack of the chain lift.
No weighted wheels coasting faded tracks.
No screams and squeals echoing over the water.
You look out over Lake Charles. It’s plain. Unremarkable. And for the first time, the park feels ever so slightly more… generic.
The kinetic energy is gone.
From the outdoor queue of Flight of Fear, where you used to peek through the trees and glimpse the trains snake by in the dark, a slinking silhouette against a foggy spotlight...
From the backside of the pizza parlor, where you could watch three coasters swoop, twist, and turn in harmony...
From the waterpark, where the loop and sidewinder once lurched overhead, and the odd train careened through at top speed…
And it hits you in a way that feels off. Like walking into your childhood home and realizing someone painted over the wall you used to measure your height against. The memory’s still there. But the proof is gone.
“Perhaps I treated you too harshly.”
It’s a funny thing, watching a ride you didn’t think you’d miss getting blitzed.
Anaconda was never your favorite. A little too rough, a little too dated — but she was very unapologetically herself. Always.
And Ana deserved a curtain call.
Not an obscure permit filed quietly on Christmas Eve. Not a demolition done in secret. Not a ghosted goodbye from a park that once prided itself on sending their coasters out on a high note.
But that’s the thing, isn’t it?
If a trailblazing, thirty-three-year-old roller coaster can vanish in the night without so much as a press release — what chance does your favorite coaster stand?
Ride it while you can, because come off season, you might find your Christmas present being another quick coaster closure.
To the late, great snake of the lake, say “hi” to the Blast Coaster and Big Bad Wolf for us. And thank Ron Toomer for us too.