Yes it’s that time of year. Six Flags has just made their chain wide announcements for the coming attractions that are opening in 2017. They will be adding three roller coasters, all themed to the Joker, that will be coming to Six Flags New England, Six Flags Over Texas and Six Flags Great America. Below, we’ll discuss what we think of these coasters, the theme, as well as how well they fit each park!
For the initiated, The Joker is an S&S 4D Free Spin model that has been installed twice already. Once under the name Batman: The Ride at Six Flags Fiesta Texas and also carrying the same theme of The Joker at Six Flags Great Adventure. These coasters feature a 12 story lift hill, two beyond vertical drops, and magnetic induced tumbling inversions.
I’m sure there’s some of you that are unhappy about these additions for one reason or another. I can assure you however that these are incredibly fun rides, and you’re in for a treat if you’ve never ridden one before. We recently got the chance to ride Batman: The Ride at Six Flags Fiesta Texas and it’s a pretty remarkable experience. It’s a glass smooth ride with very natural yet intense spinning, and both the drops provide incredible forces in whichever direction you happen to be pointed. These really are very intense, yet re-ride able, not only due to how surprisingly comfortable the experience is but also because your ride truly is different every time. This being said we’ve heard that The Joker at Six Flags Great Adventure doesn’t quite spin as much, but hopefully that’s not the case with these newly announced rides. Regardless, these are really wonderful small-footprint coasters, and any coaster enthusiast should be excited to have one near by.
What about the theme? Between the three installed this year and last year’s addition to Great Adventure, that makes four out of five of these attractions themed to The Joker. If anything, this is reminiscent of how Six Flags rolled out the B&M invert Batman clones to many of their parks. They took a smooth, intense, compact, and relatively affordable ride themed a popular DC Comics and installed them all across their parks reliably knowing it would be a hit with guests. The Joker is a very popular character and thus a solid theme to go for, and these insane coasters go hand in hand with an insane character. It has a very neat color scheme, and if they follow form from Great Adventure, each should have a decent bit of themimg to go with it. Not outstanding, but several elements of scenery. The theme of The Joker of course works at each one of these parks as they all have a Batman (or in New England’s case a Dark Knight) to match thematically. Now that does bring up a good question, disregarding the theme, how well does The Joker fit in at each of these parks?
We think adding The Joker at Six Flags Over Texas is an okay fit for the park. Having been there, the park already boasts a pretty extensive collection of thrill rides. Thematically it will fantastic, giving them another notable DC attraction and hopefully further establishing that area of the park. As a ride? There’s already one of these at the sister park, Six Flags Fiesta Texas, a few hours away. Regardless, like we said, they’re great rides, and it’s very unique to anything they have in their line up. It will certainly compliment the Gotham area that just last year received 3 new Batman related thrill rides.
At Six Flags New England we think it fits pretty well. Despite already have two compact thrilling coasters: Goliath and Flashback, neither of these are smooth comfortable experiences. The park is lacking another thrilling coaster to round things out a little bit, and The Joker does that very well. It probably won’t overshadow Superman: The Ride or Wicked Cyclone too much, but that’s not the idea. It will be a good addition that will expand their line up nicely. 
At Six Flags Great America, The Joker will also be a very good addition. If they put it in their Enterprise’s old spot (rumored to be the location), it’ll nicely compliment Batman The Ride, the first Inverted Coaster ever built. In addition, they have Batman, Superman, and Justice League rides so they’re really building a DC Comics catalog. On one hand they do have a lot of mid-level very good thrilling coasters already, and some could argue they really need something to stand out with Goliath, X-Flight and Raging Bull. On the other hand, this could easily be the most intense roller coaster in the park, and of course is unique to just about everything they have.
Have you ridden one of these coasters? Are you excited, or just tired of the clones comment below and let us know! Check out the announcement video below.
Make sure to check out our article on Justice League: Battle for Metropolis coming to Six Flags Magic Mountain here, and look out for more content regarding the announcements in the near future, thanks for reading!
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