The entertainment VP made it pretty clear that they are moving away from a family oriented Howloscream to a more adult event. With this change, they are upping the intensity of the houses and scare zones and bringing back a show that originated at BGW but moved to BGT. Fiends is an adult humor review of the traditional monsters: Frankenstein, Dracula, etc. And there is a troop of scantily clad nurses too!
The presentation of all of this was pretty awesome. They brought out at least 50 actors representing the various aspects of this years Howloscream. They also introduced a new icon. After years of tolerating Jack (who was ALWAYS back [much to many peoples loathing]) they switched to The Lady of The Gardens. This icon is the same character that has been used in all of the advertising for both BGW and BGT. I imagine she will also be the icon for BGT's Howloscream.
At any rate, it was an exciting kickoff to the Howloscream season for sure.
Now onto the coaster. I think two things caused the coaster presentation to be lackluster. One, the VP of Engineering and Design was not the best speaker. And two, there wasn't anything new divulged that you couldn't already get offline all summer with even the most halfhearted attempts to find it.
The name and logo for the ride were unveiled: Verbolten with a logo that, to me at least, resembled the old WB networks logo but in red and silver. What was cool bout this was that they had the sign up on the elevated band stand and had it come down in a fog of "exhaust" and raring engines. Along with this, they unveiled to signs on either side of the main stage with 3d bar codes that redirected to short promo videos for the ride that didn't give any sort of detailed information.
The description of the ride itself was short on details aside from these: It will has two launch points, it will utilize the same drop to the Rhine river that The big Bad Wolf did, as well as the ensuing "S" curve back to the station, It will have max speeds of over 50 miles an hour, and it will tour through the Black Forest. Not announced, yet fairly obvious is that a large portion of the ride will be indoors. The coaster is utilizing the old Big Bad Wolf station as its own station, but behind the bumpercars a huge pit has been dug (I estimate at least 4 stories deep) and a concrete pad with the base for walls has been poured. The pad looked roughly double or triple the size of a gymnasium.
At the end of the presentation they held a raffle for some various prizes including tickets to Christmas Town, insider VIP tours, and an iPad.
Oh yea, and there was free breakfast! Woot!