Friday, Apr. 03, 2009

Roller coasters to shed band names at Hard Rock Park

The two roller coasters named after Led Zeppelin and The Eagles at Hard Rock Park will be renamed for the 2009 season, an official with the park's new owners said Thursday, though he declined to say whether new names have been picked out for the rides, among the park's largest attractions.

The park's new owners also appeared to be backing away from a solely rock-and-roll theme for the park. John Stine, the director of sales and marketing for FPI MB Entertainment, the company that purchased the park out of bankrupcty in February for $25 million, said the park will be music-themed, with only an emphasis on rock and roll.

"We want to get the park right," Stine said. "We want to enhance a number of areas and create more fun, more value for guests coming into the park."

A federal bankruptcy judge in Delaware ruled Monday that some of the park's previous owners still had intellectual property rights to the park's overall theme, design and layout. Steven Goodwin, the park's former CEO, had asked the new owners for licensing fees and a small cut of the profits.

Regardless of Monday's ruling, Stine said the park's owners had already decided to rebrand portions of the park. Since the new owners did not have any rights to the brand names of either The Eagles of Led Zeppelin, Monday's ruling did not impact the decision to change the names of those rides, Stine said.

"There were a number of things that we had in the works with our rebrand and the new creative direction we were taking it in before the ruling," Stine said. "All this does is we continue to work harder, and we accelerate some things."

Stine, though, was mum on whether the park's themed areas, including a section devoted to British rock, would remain the same or would go through a massive overhaul. He also declined to say whether the park's two other big rides, a water ride named Slippery When Wet and another coaster called Maximum RPM!, would retain their names.

The new owners are especially focusing on making the park more family oriented, Stine said, but he declined to provide more details on which children's rides would be added to the park. The park's new owners have said they plan to add some children's rides.

"The rides will offer the opportunity for both parents and grandparents to enjoy the ride with their children," Stine said. "We want it to be more engaging. We want it to be more of a participatory ride so that grandparents are not sitting on a bench watching their kids ride."

Still up in the air is whether the park can retain the Hard Rock brand. The previous owners leased the brand from Hard Rock International for $2.5 million a year, but the new owners are still negotiating whether the name can be kept.

The park's Web site that sported the Hard Rock brand, www.hardrockpark.com, was recently taken down and now links to Hard Rock's main site.