California's Great America - Haunt 2017
California's Great America, Santa Clara, CA
HAAAAAAAY YOU GUUUUUUUYYS!
Intern here. So the Big Jim D let me outta my box and sent me up on my way to check out the super spoopy California's Great America Haunt. The only contingency was that I brought back all the left over fried frog legs from the Taste of Orleans. I don't know what he wants with thousands of frog legs, but I'm not gonna question it.
AAAAAAANYWAY.
HAUNT. Yeah, it's a thing in Northern California too. I guess they wanted in on all the fun SoCal was having. This place is still a baby though, because they've only been doing it (giggity) for ten years compared to Knott's Berry Farm's FORTY FREAKING FIVE. God, they're old. Like, wasn't Jeff Tucker in his teens when that started? He oughta be apart of the zombie maze at this point...
The Backwoods
So we were treated to a VIP lights on walk-through of their newest maze, Backwoods. This thing was really fun. Scroll down to see what I mean...
The trick with this maze is that it's in their old IMAX building. So you've got a maze with sets whose tops aren't lit and disappears naturally into the dark of the room. It ends up leaving you feeling very open and vulnerable. Quite a different feeling than most mazes where you're confined more.
See what I mean?
So alongside the tour, we got free food and a presentation of all the upcoming stuff. Mostly Winterfest, Railblazer, etc.
IT's ED!
LOOK! It's a rare sighting of a grouping of baby nerdlings in their natural environment. Be very careful, we don't want to scare them off by introducing a girl to the pack.
Wait, this isn't wizard of oz...
So this year, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Haunt at CGA, the witch up there on the carousel apparently had a long lost demon brother. Fairytale genetics really are lost on me, so I have no idea how a witch and a demon come from the same family. Chances are dad was a drunk Orc who slept with a slutty little mistress from the bowels of Narnia, and out came Elphaba. Man, I really let it go on that one....
HELL YEA I TOTALLY GET DOUBLE POINTS ON CROSS-POLLINATING TWO ADELE DAZEEM REFERENCES.
MYYYYY LITTLE DEMON, COMING ON DOWN....DA NA, DA NA, DAAAA NA, DAAAA NAAA
MMMMMYYYYY LITTLE DEMON'S TURNIN MY AAAAROUND
He's an angry elf.
Alrighty, so the way the rest of this will work is that I'll drop photos of each maze, and highlight at the end of it. Why? 'Cause square space doesn't let you batch-upload photos unless they're in a gallery without commentary and I just don't feel like sittin' around uploading one after another after another. I don't have that patience like Albert does...plus he's an overachiever anyways, soooo.....#ShowOff
Also, I don't know how Albert does it, but low-light, fast moving haunt photography is a b*tch to shoot. So enjoy my first ever attempt at trying to be awesome at that sort of photo-takin'.
Roadkill Cafe
So the Roadkill Cafe was fun, but holy crap was it hard to shoot in there. Like, it was ridiculously dark. Fun maze with some pretty good gore. I mean, look at Fat Bastard's redneck cousin up there. He wanted his babybackbabybackbabyback rrrrribs and ended up getting the entire cow. Or pig. Whatever. Ribs are delicious.
Roadkill cafe was good, but this one could benefit from better lighting for sure.
NEXT UP IS THE TOY FACTORY WHERE WE GET TO SEE SAAAAAAANTA! (I know him)
Toy Factory
So here's the deal. This deal be lit. Like, it was the brightest maze. But it worked 'cause OH MY GOD THAT DAMN SONG. They leave this song on repeat and its demented and a earworm and is the most terrible thing of all things. This one didn't get me to jump much, but it definitely left me feeling disturbed. So job well done for giving me nightmare fuel for the remainder of the week.
Cornstalkers
Hi, yes. Uhm...CORNSTALKERS WAS CREEPY. Basically it's like you're walking through some horrible place like...I don't know, Bakersfield. It's all corn and children of the corn with trucks. It'd only be worse if they started blaring Buck Owens on full volume...
Zombie High
The top shots are from Zombie High. REALLY fun idea, but sort of old hat. Needed to be more in dept. It was pretty much only zombies. If they had regular kids in there trying to escape, it'd add more to it. But overall it was pretty decent. REALLY fun bungee jump scare that comes out of the dark though.
Wax Museum...so basically if Madame Tussauds had a haunt maze. It was a cool concept, but really needed more to be truly scary.
We got some other shots of other mazes too, but I'm not a fan of how they turned out. The voodoo mazes was themed really well. Also, if you buy their skeleton key pass, you gain access to not only front of line for the mazes, but an additional five experience rooms. All of them were fantastically done, and I'm under the understanding that it's the first year they've done this.
So, that's CGA Haunt in a nutshell. Albert is flying up to check it out and if we can convince him to join the plebs, maybe Jim D will go too. But that'll be soon along with a revisit to the updated Winchester Mystery House Hallowe'en Candlelight Tours.
With that said, here's a shot of Jason Soyster's butt because Jim's a fan of butts.
KAY THANX BAAAAAAIIII.
