7th Invades Dollywood
Posted by 7th on June 14, 2006

I considered making this a part of the Gatlinburg series of Invasions, but since, technically, Dollywood isn't IN Gatlinburg (it's in Pigeon Forge, right next to Gatlinburg) I decided to keep it separate.

I'm constantly surprised by the number of people who don't know that Dolly Parton has her own theme park (and water park, though I haven't had the pleasure of trying that one yet, mainly because the Smokey Mountains can sometimes be cold and overly rainy in the peak of Summer.) It's tucked back in the Tennesse hills, half-draped in smog half the time, so it would be perfectly possible to drive right past it without even knowing it was there, were it not for the thousands of billboards across the south advertising it and Dolly's other... endowments.

But even the people that ARE familiar with the little theme park that could aren't familiar with its history. It started out in the late 50s'/early 60's as just a small, simple park with a locomotive visitors could ride for a nostalgia fix, similar to the Chattanooga Choo-Choo complex in my hometown. It was called Rebel Railroad (you can imagine what today's politically correct wasteland of anti-culture would think of that these days.)

Eventually the park was bought out and expanded, with a petting zoo, an underground roller coaster (it's not as cool as it sounds, trust me) and some carnival rides like a log flume, Spider, and so on. The park's name was changed to Silver Dollar City. I can remember my parents taking me there around that time. There's even a picture of me as a boy being led on a donkey by an old man that looks like Uncle Jesse on a bender, right in front of that underground coaster's entrance. If I ever find that pic, I'll scan it and add it here, just for history's sake, as I haven't been able to find ANY pics of the park from either its Rebel Railroad or Silver Dollar City years.

And then, right around 1984 or 85, when Dolly's movie and TV career had overshadowed her music and made her a Hollywood star, she bought the place up, changed its name to Dollywood, and started putting a lot of money into new attractions. Twenty years later, the park is still going strong, and though it's certainly not the largest theme park I've ever been to, it is one of my favorites. So let's take a gander at this grand old park.

And if you're expecting to learn about a shitload of cool rides intermingled with numerous "big boob" jokes, you're sure to be disappointed.

There's only five cool rides.

The first thing you'll notice when heading into the front gates are all the butterflies. There are butterflies everywhere: on the walls, in the flower arrangements, on the souvenier shirts, everywhere imaginable. Apparently they're a favorite of Dolly's. I wonder if she knows that butterflies love to munch on dog feces.

Isn't it funny how beautiful things can commit (insert awful durrogatory adjective here) acts?

There usually isn't a long line at the entrance, and if you buy a one day admission, you can often get a second day free or for just a couple bucks more.

One warning I will give, however, is on their parking lot. Dollywood invested as little land as possible on this lot, which narrowly wraps around a bluff leading up to the entrance. Because of this, the road that encircles it winds in and out, down and around, and people are liable to be headed the wrong way at any given time, so be prepared to swerve for your life.

One thing can be said about this park. It takes the concept of "rustic" and runs screaming with it. Almost the entire park looks like someone took the Frontierland concept from the Magic Kingdom and expanded on it. This, my friends, is hillbilly Mecca.

The stores look like they were built when Davy Crockett was still killin' bahrs. Candy stores sell caramel apples, homemade taffy, and other old-fashioned southern sweets. And of course, there's country music EVERYWHERE, blasting through hidden speakers all over the park, constantly.

This concept is pushed even farther when you're standing in line. Despite the fact that a good number of the rides were there before Dolly bought the place, there are speaker systems along the line paths for the big rides explaining how each one is based on something fun Dolly used to do when she was a kid. Considering that the "Blazing Fury" underground coaster is about a coal mine catching fire, I have to call into question the parenting skills of Ms. Parton's parents.

One of the holdouts from the Rebel Railroad years are the trains, which take you on a long, winding ride around the park and into the woods behind it. Here, you'll see several mock up long cabins with mannequins dressed as hillbillies sitting on their porches. Considering how long the park has been around, there's really no excuse for them not replacing these with updated scenery, especially considering how much better the train ride was when I was a kid.

At one point during the ride, a bandit on horseback would come charging up, guns blazing, and stop the train. Then, he'd inform everyone that he was highjacking it. Thankfully, the local sheriff would show up just in time, and a well choregraphed shootout would take place. Then, with the bandit properly dispatched, the Sheriff would tip his hat to the crowd, ride off into the hills, and the train would get back on its way.

In today's "we don't want our kids exposed to violence" sanitized society, things like that are frowned upon. Disney's Frontierland once had a very similar show, with desperados being shot and falling off rooftops and such. It's a shame that shrinks have convinced us that our kids can't handle things like that, as I always thought they were a lot of fun, and I think I turned out all right. Yes, I can look through my archives and say that with a straight face.

One of the new additions since I was there last (the summer of 2004 was the first time I'd been there since I was fifteen) was a Veggie Tales stage show. Now, for those of you who don't have kids, let me explain briefly what you're looking at above.

The Veggie Tales is a Christian-themed kids show starring CGI vegetables that talk, sing, tell jokes, and teach kids about trust, faith, honesty, and that a man once died a horrible, agonizing death so that they wouldn't burn in eternal hellfire.

Since Dolly is very open about her Christian beliefs, you'll find Christianity spread in varying degress all over the park, from religious trinkets to country gospel music to this show. But fear not, you awful, evil non-Christians out there, it doesn't shove Christ down your kids' throats. This show is mostly based on just plain good morals, which any kid can learn from, regardless of which God they pretend to worship while playing with their action figures in church.

It is a funny show, to be honest, and some of the practical stage effects they use are really impressive, though it's not up to the standards of a Disney park stage production. Plus after the show it rained really hard and the only rain smocks they had were Veggie Tale brand, so I got to spend the day walking around looking like a giant pea.

At the time that I went, Dollywood had just put in a new wooden roller coaster called the Thunderhead. Stylewise, it's fairly similar to the Gwazi wooden coaster at Busch Gardens Tampa Bay, only there aren't dueling coasters here.

I've never been a huge fan of wooden coasters. They're not smooth enough for my tastes, and tend to give me a headache afterwards. But as far as teeth-rattling, migraine-enducing rides go, this is one of the best I've seen.

Here we have a unique twist on the "giant flume" style ride they have in just about every park on earth, short of Disney themselves. Custom built by Dollywood's own design team (?!?!?!) DareDevil Falls boasts a long, slow lift, a turn, and then an impressivly steep drop, followed by a bazillion gallons of water soaking my digital camera while I'm standing on the bridge trying to catch a picture of my wife.

I've never understood why kids love standing on the bridge and being soaked by the tidal wave that hits when these boats come down. In Florida, I can understand it. The heat on some days can just about bake you where you're standing. But in Gatlinburg, where it's so smoggy that the sun is often mistaken by the locals for a UFO? I was wet enough as it was, what with all the rain coming down. I didn't need to have every pore of my being saturated with enough water to put out a Miami brush fire.

According to Dolly, she came up for the idea of this ride, the Mountain Slidewinder, based on something she and her siblings did as children: wait for a rainy day and then slide down the side of the mountain on grocery bags or whatever else they had. This alone should have been enough to generate thoughts of safety concerns.

Basically, you walk all the way up the side of a hill that has to be 4-500 feet high, then you sit in a boat made of soft rubber foam that has no seatbelt restraint and slide at an extremely fast rate down a giant, winding water slide, often taking turns so fast that the boat goes up the side of the slide wall within inches of flipping over. It ends with an almost tsraight down drop through a dark tunnel to a splashdown at the bottom that soaks the square inch of you that was still dry.

It's fun once, but the seemingly endless and calfburn-inducing climb to ride it really isn't worth the experience.

And of course, there's a bright, colorful play area full of jump rooms, slides, areas where water shoots up from the ground for kids to run through, and long range WATER CANNONS WITH CHILDSIZED PISTOL GRIPS.

If by this point you parents out there have somehow managed to make it without getting soaked, this may very well be your Waterloo (nyuk nyuk chuckle nyuk.)

There's apparently nothing a kid loves more than shooting their old man in the crotch wih a high-powered water stream, which I witnessed a number of times. I swear, I think the designers of areas like this really have it in for the parents. Because once your kid gets in, they don't want to leave, especially the little ones too small to ride the big rides. So you invariably will have to go in after them... and then, they are upon you, ganging up to take you out, and it's like you're on the beach of Normandy being assaulted by little 3 foot tall Germans packing water pistols.

I haven't experienced this firsthand yet, but I have witnessed it from a distance. It's not a pretty sight, especially the aftermath, where Dad sits on a bench, in public, and tries to wipe the crotch of his L.L. Bean shorts dry with a wad of napkins.

There's also an area of the park that's all about the 50's, with all the buildings designed to resemble that bygone age that most people living in the Appalachians never saw because they were too busy brewing moonshining and boinking their sisters.

There's a 50's Sha-Na-Na/Grease style stage show, and one single ride, a simulator that uses the same 25 year old technology used by Star Tours, Body Wars, and a dozen other attractions like it across the country. In this one, Dolly's "genius relative" (which in this case means he only went through the third grade FOUR times) invents an "all-terrain" vehicle and takes Dolly for a ride. What this means is that you sit in a theater that bounces up and down watching Dolly sitting in front of a green screen on a car that looks just like Jethro Clampett's truck, while footage of the Smokey Mountains taken from a helicopter flies by in the background. I racked my brain to think of a better term to sum up this ride, but try as I might, I kept coming back to "stupid."

This ride is stupid.

This is the section of the park that was least changed by the Dollywood takeover of Silver Dollar City. There's an old-fashioned log flume ride (which was not running when I was there) a swing ride, a Ferris Wheel, a few kiddie rides, and this, the Scrambler.

As you can see by the looks on those faces, this is quite riveting. When I was there at age 15, there was also a large video arcade, but I saw no sign of it this past trip, most likely due to the fact that most kids nowadays have better looking games at home. Still made me a bit sad though. I had a lot of fun in that arcade. I remember winning my Dad a plastic case to keep his cigarette pack from getting wet on the water rides. He was quite happy with it. Of course, he lost it a few months later when we went fishing and he dropped it in the lake, but I still remember the look on his face when I gave it to him. Funny what you take with you sometimes, isn't it.

Of course, no park would be complete without a generic water rapids ride. This one is small, but really effective. Had I had any dry areas left, this would have freed me of them. The line for this one is always incredibly long, but on this particular trip I was befriended by a family whose oldest son was mentally challenged, and because of that, they got to ride every ride twice... and on this occasion, they insisted on taking me along for a second ride. By the time I got off that boat, God could have picked me up and squeezed me to put out a campfire.

One thing I noticed that was missing was the pay-for-play water cannons thet have at Busch Gardens. There's a turn on the BG Congo River Rapids that cuts around a hill. At the top of this hill are several control boxes with a single red button on them, and a coin slot. You drop a coin in, hit the button at just the right moment, and a high-pressure water cannon blasts a concentrated arc of water into the air that douses the whole boat and everyone on it. I swaer to God, I could spend all day and twenty dollars easy on it. I consider it the highlight of a Busch Gardens trip, and Dollywood's ride is lacking from their absence.

Then comes the aforementioned Blazing Fury. This is an underground steel "coaster," that's more Pirates of the Caribbean style dark ride than it is anything else. Apprently, you're supposed to be the fire department racing through an old Appalachian mining town that's caught fire. There's several "animatronic" scenes showing rednecks fleeing their log cabins and such (the animatronics are the worst I've ever seen... even the Schristmas scenes they put up in the mall every year look better than this) and culminates in a high speed trek through the mine shaft in the dark. There are no loops, just several steep drops and tight corners, but it never really seems to go faster than 20 miles an hour or so.

Not bad, but I've ridden a lot better. It could be spruced up with better animatronics and it would at least make for a decent dark ride experience.

The Tennessee Tornado doesn't have the most inversions of any coaster I've ridden, but it is one of the view that ever made me a bit queasy (though I was on the verge of catching a cold already, so it probably wasn't the coaster's fault.) With a max speed of 70 miles per hour, the Tornado shoots up, down, and around the hills surrounding the backside of the park and has one of the most harrowing 360 loops I've ever been on.

If nothing else, this coaster is worth the full price of admission. Having seen pictures of it on the web, I was expecting it to be another Wabash Cannonball, but was more than pleasantly surprised. This is the real deal folks. Don't miss this coaster.

And that's about it for Dollywood. As I said, it's a pretty small park, probably the smallest I've been to, if you don't count Lake Winnie in Chattanooga and the recently defunct Miracle Strip in Panama City Beach. But what it lacks in size, it makes up with rustic charm and family friendly thrills. It definately has a sort of "place-out-of-time" feel to it, which is one of the reason I ;ove going back to the place, even if I only get back there every decade or so.

One thing that can said about Ms. Parton: she has no reservations about pumping more money into the park to keep people coming back. Every few years, she buys up a little more land, and new rides spring up. I have to admit though, this year's addition is one experience you couldn't drag me onto. It has to be, without a doubt, the most dangerous looking ride I've ever seen in my fucking life. Take a gander at this insurance nightmare:

Yeah, nothing I want to do more on my vacation than be strapped to a giant spinning top and dangled over a pit of spikes. When I think of Dollywood, huge pointy things do spring to mind, but not of the potentially fatal variety.

Well, not unless you you go for a Dolly-sized Bromsky and forget to come up for air.

-=7th=-