Written by Ben Mills
Published: March 26, 2005 at 11:10 AM
March 28th marks the culmination of the first ever European Theme Park Critics Awards, and sees the announcement you’ve all been waiting for.
Will Disneyland Paris keep the habit of walking away with most awards? Will the European underdogs bring any surprises to the party? Will Disney’s infamous Walt Disney Studios park somehow manage to not win the ‘Road To Nowhere’ award?
All these questions and more will be answered this Monday. But in the meantime, I wanted to take a moment to give props to everyone who helped these Awards come to fruition… ETPCA’s very own Cast Members, if you will.
Perhaps the most obvious contributors to the Awards have been my fellow board members. It’s been a pleasure for me to work with each of these talented and dedicated people, and I’m sure you’ve seen these qualities in their articles. Marcus Sheen, Jamie Shoesmith, Alex Smith, Andrea Monti and Dirk van Diringshofen, stand up and give yourselves a pat on the back, and a nice cup of coffee. But not at the same time, or you might spill it.
Now on to the back-stagers…
All artwork for the ETPCA – most of which you won’t have had the opportunity to see yet – was created by Martin Miles from LiquidSet Designs.
Robert Niles, the editor of the site, built Theme Park Insider’s ETPCA page. He also had to put up with my whining, moaning, incompetence, procrastination and total ineptitude at any given task, so I guess he should also get a special shout out for that.
Arthur Levine, creator of the About.com Theme Parks section was kind enough to give us a mention on his news page. Which was cool. (Great site that, by the way.)
I’d also like to thank boarders Marcus, Alex and Dirk for covering the Awards on their own sites. Coaster Kingdom’s coverage in particular is great – go read it all now!
Next year’s ETPCA coverage will be bigger, and include a lot of ideas that we didn’t have the resources to implement for 2005. But is there anything that you, our beloved readers and dedicated fans would like to see? Let us know by posting here or emailing me through my TPI space – click on my name up at the top of this article.
Thanks to everyone who has supported the Awards, and remember to pack some spare underwear for Monday’s final journey into the twisted world of the ETPCA – we’ve some surprises in store…
And, of course, a huge thank you is due to Ben, for all his work developing the awards and bringing the panel together. Thanks, Ben! And to everyone else involved in the awards.