Busch Gardens Tampa Bay has announced the last call for its Scorpion roller coaster.
The Florida theme park announced today that the 1980 Schwarzkopf Silverarrow will make its last runs on Labor Day - Monday, September 2, 2024.
"While parkgoers will say goodbye to Scorpion, Busch Gardens Tampa Bay is excited that this closure paves the way for exciting new future attractions, with more details about what’s coming to be revealed soon," the park said in its announcement.
For discounts on admission to the park, please visit our partner's Busch Gardens Tampa Bay tickets page.
To keep up to date with more theme park news, please sign up for Theme Park Insider's weekly newsletter.
Scorpion is a classic and it's shameful of BGT to remove it out of the blue with 10 days notice. From a historical preservation perspective, this is a way bigger deal than Rivers of America, yet it will generate 0.1% of the outrage. The plot is too disconnected from the rest of the potential giga plot to have anything to do with it, it's tiny and can likely only house some kids rides or at best an RMC raptor that will feature dreadful capacity. United Parks continues its reign of terror.
Ok this one is a genuine surprise for me. Scorpion plays a pretty important role in the park being the first "big" coaster many in the Tampa area will experience (though it seems that's why they built Phoenix Rising to fill that gap now). It is one of those generational coasters, "my parents took me on it, i'm going to take my kids on it" type thing, and with such a small footprint I have no idea what you could put there that would be better. Maybe being an old Schwarzkopf Busch Gardens didn't see it as worth the maintenance investment and just wanted to get it off the books (as a former ride op of Whizzer at SFGAm I take personal offense to this lol).
On the other hand Kumba takes up a huge plot of land. It's rough, unpopular, and it seems like that whole side of the park is dead because no one goes back there to ride it. I thought for sure it would be the next one to go.
If you still want to ride this type of coaster, Frontier City in Oklahoma City has the Silver Bullet up and running (some of the time). You might even get lucky enough to get stuck on it.
This article has been archived and is no longer accepting comments.
The footprint of this attraction is pretty small so this removal is either for a flat ride or part of a larger project **cough** the long rumored hyper/giga across the northern property boundary **cough** that will further reshape Pantopia.
FWIW, Scorpion was my first "upside down" roller coaster, so it's sad to see it go, and even more disappointing that we were at BGT earlier this summer and skipped it because it was sporting a 20+ minute line - SIGH, c'est la vie!