Attractions Experts Q&A: Dennis Speigel

by Kendall Wolf

As an experienced leader in the industry, Dennis Spiegel has a long history of working on successful themed entertainment projects. As a former chairman of IAAPA, Dennis helped build the international membership by working with Germany, Russia, Brazil, Mexico, and Japan; he also received awards from the organization for Lifetime Achievement, Meritorious Service, and Outstanding Service.

Spiegel has worked on over 500 projects in over 55 countries, is the author of two monthly magazine columns for the European/global leisure market, and has a bi-weekly Podcast – “I’M 4 FUN” – interviewing Industry leaders.

What theme park souvenir might we be surprised to find on your shelf? What’s the story behind it?

That would be the Las Vegas showgirl, which is half-ostrich and half-human, carved by the head toy designer for Kenner Toys when it was located here in Cincinnati. It’s all hand-carved in wood and has eyelashes and ostrich feathers. I even put an ostrich egg on the floor underneath it.

It’s an amazing piece. He designed a four-piece carousel for his thesis, which is all hand-carved, and it really is beautiful. I used to take it to IAAPA and put it in our booth, and we’d have a thousand pictures taken with it that week – and that was before selfies.

What theme park have you always wanted to visit but have never been to? 

The ones I have wanted to visit, I have. I’ve visited pretty much all the parks in Europe, most of them in Asia.

We were the first American company in Saudi Arabia to help design and build a water park, which we operated for three years. At one time, ITPS managed more parks internationally than anyone in the industry. We were in Korea, The Philippines, China, America, and Asia, so we were all over the world and had teams of people everywhere. As the industry grew and matured, we taught people how to do it. We would “fly alongside them,” I would say. Then, once we had them trained, we would peel off, and their plane would continue.

Was there a theme park or attraction that made you want to be in this industry? How did it inspire you?

I started as a ticket taker at Coney Island in Cincinnati when I was a kid, and I learned the industry from there. The ticket entrance was the nerve center, the brain of the park. Everybody had to go past me. Whether you were a guest or a worker, you had to tell me what you were doing.

I was 13 years old. I worked there from junior high through high school and college. I liked it and studied it. And I did as much as I could in the summers and the off-season, and even in the winters. Then Taft Broadcasting bought Coney Island, and plans were underway to build a new park that would be Kings Island. I was graduating from college, so being at the right place at the right time, they hired me as one of the 16 people, and we haven’t stopped since. That was 1969.

Coney Island Cincinnati was the park that Walt Disney came to numerous times to get ideas for Disneyland. He became very good friends with the park owners I worked with, the Schotts and the Wachs. When Taft Broadcasting, a major television, movie, and cartoon company, wanted to exploit the Hanna Barbera characters (the Flintstones and Yogi Bear), they went out to Hollywood for advice.

Walt Disney had passed away a couple of years earlier, so they met with his brother Roy. Roy told them it was interesting that they came to him when they wanted to get into the amusement park business. He said, “When Walt and I wanted to get into the amusement park business, we went to Cincinnati. You’ve got the nicest park.” It was called America’s Finest Amusement Park, Coney Island. Roy said, “You ought to go talk to them,” and they did, and we merged, and that’s how Kings Island, Kings Dominion, Carowinds, Canada’s Wonderland, and Great America all came about.

What was your favorite ride or attraction as a child, and why?

My favorite ride at Coney Island was the Shooting Star, which was a dogleg left roller coaster 96 feet high. It went out and made a turn at the top, came back in through a tunnel, and then into the station.

That was the lead-up to the Racer we built at Kings Island. There really hadn’t been a wooden roller coaster of any significance built from 1947 to 1972, so we took the idea of the Shooting Star at Coney Island, which everybody loved, to Kings Island. We brought John Allen out of retirement from Philadelphia Toboggan and created the Racer—the red and blue trains that raced each other. But the Shooting Star was my favorite back then.

Was there a ride, attraction, or character that frightened you as a child?

We had another roller coaster at Coney Island in Cincinnati, a wooden one. Shooting Star was what we called an “out and back.” The Wildcat, which we tore down in 1964 when we built the Sky Ride, was a “figure 8,” basically, and it did a lot in a very short period. That would really scare you when you got on it – it would lift you out of the seat. This was before the seat belts that we have today. We did have lap bars, but nothing over the shoulder. You got the real benefit of the positive and negative G forces.

What was your oddest or coolest job in a theme park?

My coolest job was as Vice President/ General Manager of Kings Dominion when I was only 28. I was the youngest VP/GM in the industry, responsible for taking the park through construction.

At that time in the industry, Kings Dominion was the second most expensive park to be built after the Magic Kingdom, so that was pretty cool. During one of our greatest times of inflation, we brought the project in on time and budget. Only a few people have had the opportunity to oversee the building of such a themed attraction. 

What ride or attraction do you think everyone needs to experience and why?

I’ve always said that the coaster is king, and it’s been like that for over 100 years. And the one everyone needs to experience is The Beast at Kings Island. It’s a wooden coaster that runs over a mile and a half – a four-minute-plus ride with two drops and a 560-degree tunnel. It’s still in the top ten of roller coasters and has been since it opened in 1977.

If you were tasked with creating a new theme park food, what would it be?

I’m actually writing an article right now about the technology of food. In my estimation, food will go through the biggest transformation we’ve seen since technology has advanced rides. It would be a more healthy-oriented food, but it would be tasty and exciting to look at. I think we have to do that in the future, and it’s going to happen whether we want it to or not.

You’re a walk-around character for a day; who do you choose?

I’ve actually done that. When I was Vice President and General Manager of Kings Dominion, I was always in the park looking around and hoping to improve something. The workers all had radios, so they’d say, “Here comes Dennis Speigel; he’s in the park, and he’s over by the carousel.”  They’d see me coming.

During the summer – and it was hotter than hell in Virginia and steamy and humid – I would jump into a Fred Flintstone, Scooby-Doo, or Huckleberry Hound costume every once in a while. We owned Hanna-Barbera, so we had all those characters. When I was in costume, nobody knew who I was, so I could walk around the park incognito until it was too hot, and I couldn’t breathe, and I’d head back in. We had a rule back then – If you pass out in character, don’t take your head off—we’ll drag you back behind the fence, and then you can take it off.

What types of attractions would you like to see more of and why?

I would like to see more of the family-oriented attractions that are experiential, immersive, and interactive. I think one of the greatest attractions in the last 15 years was Disney’s Buzz Lightyear ride, where you’re in the car shooting rings in 3D and building a score.

That’s how our industry has gone – hands-on, and you’re guiding your adventure. The technology is changing so rapidly. I had lunch with someone in our industry who said if we could come back in 20 years, we wouldn’t recognize it. It would be like Henry Ford coming back to life, and we put him in front of a Tesla; he wouldn’t even know how to open the door. And once he got in the car, he wouldn’t know what to do. And that’s the way our industry is. It’s empirical, the technological changes that are happening. We have to take advantage of those and work them into our guest experiences to make them more fun and participatory.

Do you have any interesting theme park pandemic stories?

The best things that came out of the pandemic, from an industry standpoint, were that it forced us into the technological touchless, cashless payment systems with food and merchandise because we were constantly disinfecting and sanitizing, and no one wanted to touch anything in a queue or on a counter. As an industry, we’d always been looking at improvement in those areas, but parks were forced to accelerate the touchless, cashless procedures. And in that year of 2021, when we reopened, and everybody came back in droves and spent like drunken sailors like it was the Roaring ’20s, our per capita increased between 11% and 36% throughout the industry. We’d never see that kind of spending increase, and it has yet to maintain quite as high as that level. It’s come down a little bit because people have slowed down, and so has the economy, but it’s still very high compared to what it was in 2019. That was the most important thing that we found.

When I was running Kings Island and Kings Dominion, we would always do a zero-based budget, where you go back every year and try to look at what the pandemic did to the industry. It caught us by surprise, of course, and forced us to go to what I call zero-based planning. We had to go back and throw all the pages away of everything we had done and start replanning how to service the guests from scratch. We had to consider everything from offsetting queues to seats on roller coasters and rides, disinfecting, sanitization, spacing of people in the parks, and how many guests we let into the park in a day. It made us rethink everything, and I think it made us smarter.

Can you talk about what you are working on these days?

Today’s big market that’s going crazy (almost absurd) is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. We did a lot of work on the projects in Dubai, most of which failed. When I say that, I mean we did studies for the banks and the investment groups and told them not to build two or three of them. But they built them, and they have failed. They’ve been around for all these years and really have not made a profit. That should be a lesson for Saudi Arabia. They’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars in these areas, and I’ve said that you can’t create Orlando overnight.

If you look at the numbers, they may get 20 million tourists to Saudi Arabia a year. That isn’t enough to support the number of theme parks. One company is building six parks and 21 Family Entertainment Centers. That’s just one company; other companies are doing the same thing.

Dubai found out with Bollywood Motiongate and Lego that they don’t have enough people to support all those parks. And, as we know right now, geopolitical issues are happening, so who knows what the world will be like in 5 years?

It’s so mega – to me, over planned and being overspent. The infrastructure required can’t keep up with what I’m seeing and what they’re proposing, as far as the timetables for opening these parks in the next 2 to 3 years.

When Disney or Universal starts planning a park, it’s 10 to 15 years from when they begin planning to when they open – if everything is on schedule. But they want to do these parks in 2, 3, or 4 years. And they don’t have the infrastructure around them. By that, I mean construction and the support of retail, gas stations, and all of the other necessary components to feed and drive the tourists to be able to go there.

I’ve been around long enough to know you don’t plant a seed that grows overnight. You have to build a market, a business, and a geography related to what you’re doing. It can happen, but it’s going to take time, a lot of time.

You are going to your favorite theme park; which industry people (dead or alive) are you taking with you?

Bill Hanna from Hanna-Barbera. I knew him and Joe (Barbera). Bill and I were best friends for 30 years; he was like my father. I have pictures of us at the opening of Canada’s Wonderland and Kings Dominion. He had this wonderful boat called the Galatea that he kept down at the Long Beach Yacht Club. I had a key to it for all those years, and I stayed on it many times with my family. We’d go out on it for three or four days at a time and never touch land.

When he was older, he called me one day, and I knew he’d just had open heart surgery. My assistant told me Bill Hanna was on the phone, and I thought, I wonder if he’s okay. I said, “What’s up Bill?” and he said, “Denny I have some bad news for you.” I asked him what was the matter. He said, “I sold your hotel today. I was thinking about giving it to you, but I wasn’t sure how you would get it to Cincinnati.” I’d love to have him see the industry’s evolution and what it’s become since they became involved with us 60 years ago.

Writer Kendall Wolf is a long-time consultant in the themed entertainment industry. She has worked with designers, producers, and fabricators to help developers create unique and successful projects around the world. In 2017, she introduced Merlin Entertainments to a development group in Sichuan province for the first Legoland park in China. Kendall continues to consult for the developer to open more themed resorts in China.