Magic Mountain

The Brea Community Center is offering an excursion to Magic Mountain amusement park Saturday for seventh through tenth graders. The $30 fee covers admission and transportation. A bus will leave Brea at 7 a.m. and return from Valencia at 10 p.m. Registration is required: (714) 990-7100.

I used to think the ride on the Superman shuttle coaster essentially ended when the car reached the climatic 415-foot-high peak. But now that Six Flags Magic Mountain has flipped the trains around to run backward, the fun is just getting started when you reach the top. I took a test drive this week on the re-dubbed Superman: Escape From Krypton coaster at the Valencia amusement park between takes of a TV commercial shoot...

You're going to need a cheat sheet to keep track of all the new roller coaster names at Six Flags Magic Mountain in 2011. That's not to say that Magic Mountain is actually getting five new coasters this year. The Valencia amusement park is adding only one truly new coaster. The four other coasters will be re-branded, relocated, re-themed and remade -- one of each, in fact. Confused? Well, you should be. Most of the new coaster names are the result of a cost-cutting move to strip an array of intellectual properties from Six Flags parks.

I have seen countless articles and columns such as Dear Abby that show a very disturbing trend in people's inability to handle problems. The unfortunate incident at Magic Mountain, where an employee hurled a racial epithet at a black family, prompted me to write this letter. Those few offending words sent an entire family into total chaos and 18 months of therapy under three different psychiatrists. Of course, litigation raised its ugly head, and Magic Mountain has to pay $35,000 and make countless changes in its operating procedures because of an incident that it had no way of predicting or avoiding.

Magic Mountain, a rugged peak rising out of the Angeles National Forest, is unknown to all but the most intrepid hikers. For good reason. The former Nike missile site -- not the amusement park of the same name -- is a Cold War remnant, one of 16 such outposts erected around Los Angeles during the 1950s as an air defense system. This battery, with its subterranean concrete missile silos, was built in 1955 and monitored by the Army until the '70s.

MY VISIT to Six Flags Magic Mountain was only a few minutes old when I sighted them: the legendary "rowdy teenagers" who are endangering the future of the park. From a distance, I observed two teenage boys racing down a hill -- in wheelchairs. I suspected that they had feigned injuries so they could get wheelchairs and preferential treatment, a suspicion that was confirmed when I later spotted them pushing friends in wheelchairs to the front of a line.

Pounding hammers and whining saws at Magic Mountain in Valencia signal a new roller coaster dubbed Terminator Salvation and other changes in the works for the summer tourist season. But the noise and excitement about the park's plans can't completely muffle the bad news coming from New York-based parent company Six Flags Inc., which announced Thursday that its stock value had fallen so low that it was being delisted by the New York Stock Exchange. Trading was halted, with shares at 27 cents.

Six Flags Magic Mountain reported that attendance at the Valencia amusement park rose 3% during 1990, from about 3.1 million in 1989 to 3.2 million. The park attributed the increase to its new Viper looping roller coaster, which has given nearly 3 million rides since it opened in April, Magic Mountain spokeswoman Courtney Simmons said. The park is open during weekends and school holidays from Labor Day to Memorial Day, and is open every day during the summer, Simmons said.

Magic Mountain, the Valencia theme park, is short of smiling student faces willing to work at the park for $3.60 an hour during the summer. Usually the park relies on high school and college students to fill out its staff for the busy summer season. But the park is still 600 employees short of its goal of 3,200 staffers, of which 1,700 of would be temporary summer employees, said Gary J. Vien, Magic Mountain's personnel director.