Octopus
Website: Lakemont Park Homepage
Ride Type: Flat Ride
Ride Status: Running
Average Rating: 3.5000
TPC Overall Rank: Rides need more than 25 reviews to be ranked.
Reviews: 5
Last Review: 8/6/2012 6:00:00 PM
In User Top 10: 0 times.
User Tracker Count: 7 times.
 

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4 Rating
0 Rating Rate Down Rate Up coasterwom on 8/6/2012 6:00:00 PM
The Octopus is a flat ride. It is fast, fun, rerideable, it has a laong duration, and a large capacity.

4 Rating
0 Rating Rate Down Rate Up Timberman on 8/23/2008 7:10:00 PM
Lakemont has both the early model &quot.Octopus&quot. and the more recent &quot.Monster&quot. versions of this venerable carny classic. Those with a strong stomach and a sense of adventure, however, will want to head straight for the Octopus. You, like me, may have grown up riding Octopi variants at county fairs, parking lot carnivals, and boardwalks. You, like me, may think you could take pictures, eat an ice cream cone, or chat in conversational tones while riding the Octopus. You, like me, may remember the Octopus as your first serious carnival ride and think you&#39.ve long since surpassed it. However, you, like me, will not have ridden a real Octopus until you&#39.ve been on the one at Lakemont Park. What Coney Island does for the Breakdance, Lakemont does the for the Octopus, transforming a familiar experience into a white-knuckle excursion into Tasmanian Devil-like intensity. Think you&#39...ve mastered the Octopus? Visit Lakemont and think again.

I don&#39.t have to explain what this ride looks like or does. We&#39.ve all seen it, and most of us have ridden something like it. Lakemont&#39.s is distinguishable mainly for the bright red, uni-chrome color scheme of its sheetmetal pods and its early vintage. This is the stiff-legged version that predates the more organic-looking fiberglass model with the curvy lines and curling tenacles. It&#39.s not there to impress you with its high-tech looks or booming soundtrack. It&#39.s there to lure you into its little washtub of a coach so it can spin your ass silly.

That it does, swooping and spinning with a ferocity I&#39.ve rarely encountered on any ride and certainly never on one of this genre. And it doesn&#39.t stop. It .... just .... keeps ... going. And going. And going. Not only that, but I and co-pilot Granny Timbers experienced our fastest, most out-of-control spinning right about the time we normally would have been half-way through the ride cycle on our next flat after having stopped for a bathroom break and a box of popcorn. That late-ride spinning tripped the psychic panic wire that separates what&#39.s normal but stimulating from what happens right before you&#39.re snapped up by the alligator. You know you&#39.re on a good flat when you can&#39.t tell whether or not something has gone horribly wrong.

I might be mildly exaggerating on the length of the ride cycle, but that&#39.s how it felt. A full minute before the ride was over I was already contemplating whether to try to throw up at our feet, to let fly over starboard (in which case I likely would have been feeding the carp some 200 meters away at the entrance to the Island Waterpark) or, like my hero Kobyashi, to catch what I could and force it back down. Thankfully, I swallowed only my bile and not my pride this time around and staggered away from the ride a few shades greener but with my breakfast intact. The Timber Clan does not easily forget a good puking, and I was not eager to add another chapter to the family archives, especially with my mother, having boaked her way through four tough pregnancies, sitting beside me looking as fresh as a daisy.

A good friend of mine used to live by the motto that anything worth doing is worth overdoing. That ethic clearly informs the function and operation of the Lakemont Park Octopus. Sure to please thrill-seekers and bulimics of every stripe, it is clearly king of the Crazy Eights.

4 Rating
0 Rating Rate Down Rate Up T-Rex on 12/31/2007 8:46:00 AM
Insane flat. This one takes forever to load, but once I got on I was impressed. The rides cycle seemed endless and I got tons of spinning and forces throughout my ride.

3 Rating
0 Rating Rate Down Rate Up SLFAKE on 1/26/2007 11:12:00 AM
Lots of spinning... my wife and I couldnt stop laughing on this thing (and the Op was laughing at us as much as we were laughing at the ride).

3 Rating
0 Rating Rate Down Rate Up larrygator on 10/6/2005 9:08:00 PM
A lot of spinning on this ride and I thought the ride op had fallen asleep because he ran it for such a long cycle. Unfortunately it is slow loading and unloading as only one of the 8 arms can be loaded at a time. This is the rare instance where I have to penalize a ride for running too long as it really started to feel uncomfortable during the last minute of the cycle.

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