www.themeparkinsider.com: That's the indoor amusement park that has been under construction in Glendale, Ariz. There are also plans for a second installation in the Kansas City area. But the initial Mattel Adventure Park has missed multiple expected openings since its announcement, and the entire resort project surrounding it has become, well, a topic of conversation in the Phoenix metropolitan area.
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It's always fun to see a new name enter the theme park space, especially in the United States where new theme park development is really dominated by the big 3 (Disney, Universal, and Cedar Fair). I had heard about the Mattel Adventure Park project, and as someone who's been a fan of many an adventurous project that never materialized, I was as suspicious as I was excited. Turns out, my intuition has been honed over many years of disappointment. Theme Parks, like all live entertainment, are a wildly tough business, and if Mattel stall out despite hundreds of millions of dollars, it doesn't seem like good news for indie projects. Not that this was the only problem with Evermore Park, but the inherent difficulty of the business certainly was one of them that was not *helped* exactly by Ken Bretschneider's... interesting investments.*
I also have a somewhat unique perspective on this park, though not this specific location, as a Kansas Citian. As a general curmudgeon who dislikes loud noises and fun things (kidding, mostly (-; ), I tend to be very suspicious of huge developments in KC -- the Kansas City Royals, who suck, are opening a stadium 10 minutes from my house, and I simply have never recovered from that news. However, as a theme park fan and person somewhat in favor of drawing whatever economic value we can out of our small, centrally-located city, a brand spanking new theme park from a very popular IP is good news, probably. Hopefully? If it ever opens, that is, which the news from this article does not inspire confidence in.
* Be forewarned that I will bring up Evermore at every opportunity.
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