Sabrina's Brochure Spotlight: Idlewild 2006

They say good things come in small packages. This week I'll show you how that same rule can be applied to parks and brochures! Idlewild may not be the biggest park on this planet, but it sure packs in the family fun. Even more amazing is the fact that they continually manage to condense all that fun into a comparatively tiny brochure. This baby is short on pages but long on information!

When it comes to Idlewild and Golden Ticket Awards, it is not a matter of "if". Rather, it is a matter of exactly how high they will place! This park is a shoo-in for the "Best Children's Park" category. In 2006, they captured the #2 spot.

But the biggest "winner" of 2006 was SoakZone, which underwent a massive $1 million expansion that increased its area by twenty percent! The star attraction of this new area was Captain Kidd's Adventure Galley, an interactive water play structure featuring slides, tunnels, spray jets, you name it--all capped off by a 500 gallon tipping bucket.

The strip of thumbnail images across the top of this page is used to showcase Idlewild's seven themed areas. It reminds me of a movie reel, which seems appropriate since it's essentially giving us a sneak preview of what each area has to offer.

It just so happens that one of these themed areas was celebrating a special birthday in 2006: Story Book Forest had just turned 50! This unique area is a perfect example of what makes Idlewild such a great children's park. Story Book Forest is a place where nursery rhymes come to life in the form of life-size displays and live characters.

And I would be remiss if I didn't take a moment to point out Idlewild's historic Rollo Coaster, a gentle family woodie that has been putting smiles on riders' faces since 1938!

They've even managed to squeeze a little Halloween into this brochure! One could argue that Story Book Forest injects a little bit of Halloween-style make-believe into every day of the operating season, but Idlewild really kicks it up a notch in the Fall by allowing children to trick-or-treat amongst their favorite nursery rhyme characters. Sounds like fun to me! Where do I sign up? (And no, I will not be dressing as a teenage witch! Darn that stinking TV show...)

As you can see, this brochure is like a metaphor for Idlewild itself: Small, but chock full of good stuff. Of course the paper lover in me certainly wouldn't mind if they were to expand their brochure format in the future!