The story of Australia's best ever ride… and its replacement…



If you ask any Australian theme park enthusiast what defunct ride they most wish was still around, there are two common answers: Tower of Terror, and a certain flume ride at Sea World. So what made that flume ride so special? This is the story of Sea World’s Bermuda Triangle, as well as its replacement, Storm Coaster.

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Footage credits:
Arcadora
Parks On The Coast
simon smith
Theme Park Review
Yogiew2
Gary86
TMBA Archive
OzTVClassics
Theme Park Ogre
John65
R William Robinson
Canobie Coaster

Music by: Meizong & Diviners

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38 thoughts on “The story of Australia's best ever ride… and its replacement…”

  1. I got to ride the Bermuda Triangle once as a kid. I remember it being excellent. The aliens were freaky, the fire effect at the end was really hot and I swear the theming at the end of SC was also apart of the Bermuda Triangle.

    That being said. I reckon the Storm Coaster is great! I think it's a good fit. Can't complain.
    I had this heart warming moment on that ride last time I went to seaworld. My wife and I rode the ride with another family from Burma who had a little kid around 4 or 5ish who was riding his first Coaster. He was stoked to be there and wasn't even scared and was getting up his family for not holding on to the handles. Was funny!

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  2. weird you did not mansion Bermuda Triangles near exact clone at movie park Germany, which is still running with most its effects and is still in realy good shape after a recent refurbishment(it is now known as Area 51)

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  3. It sad that you think that we’ll never get another great themed attraction in the wake of the 2016 Dreamworld incident. But the fact that the first ever water dark ride in this country was only built for $3 Million and it still worked gives me hope that VRTP can do it again. Though that was the late 80s so you would have keep in mind price inflation.

    Australian theme parks have a knack of taking that at the surface doesn’t look like much but actually have a great experience underneath.

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  4. You can still ride a similar attraction which is almost the same as Bermuda Triangle. Area 51 at Movie Park Germany. It actually used to have the exact same name, theming and story as bermudia triangle

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  5. I rode both Lassiters and Bermuda Triangle as a kid, but the Looney Tunes version (in my preteen mind) was the superior, and has certainly proven to be far more memorable in the long run.

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  6. Weve been getting some of the best rollercoasters in the southern hemisphere in our country lately, but dark rides and log flumes have fallen out of favour sadly.

    I hope we see more storyline dark rides again in our theme parks one day. I know it will happen, because lots of people are telling Village Roadshow and Dreamworld they need them in their feedback.

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  7. Storm Coaster failed because it's designed back to front. What i mean is the main themed indoor story section is at the end of the ride. It should have been at the beginning, that would have made for a better ride experience.

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  8. Personally I’ve rode both rides and I think storm is as good of a coaster as Bermuda but they aren’t the same ride and we are trying to compare them as they are and storm if only running one boat and say Bermuda is too, storm has more people ride per every 8 minutes then Bermuda does by double, plus there is anyways a nostalgia effect with rides you rode as a little kid.

    Plus Sea world really has been moving away from rollercoaster recent like without the new three rides the newest ride was the storm but in 2013 so has been a good 9 years since we had a new coaster just says it all about the parks future direction

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  9. The Bermuda Triangle had the absolute best theming. I remember climbing up the stairs into the video broadcasting room where they'd mention 'suspicious disappearances'. After the video ended, going down the stairs to load up into the boats. I think Storm Coaster is still a good ride, but not a touch on BT. When you're going through the queue and going up the launch hill on SC you can see some of the theming leftover from BM, and obviously at the very end when they've recycled a whole-ass area from BM. I wonder if people who never rode BM think the theming is cool and relative to the ride. Whereas those of us who loved BM look at the 'leftovers' and think it's really out of place and random.

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  10. I only remeber bits and pieces of the triangle as i was 5 but my god it was a crazy bit of imagination they had my little brain in complete aw. The flames, the aliens and the flooding room where amazing and the dissapearing ship was just crazy! Im really glad i was able to ride it. I really wished they had of just maintained its for longer but i guess it had an amazing ride 😂 and thanks for the video i went on the ride not long before it closed and i honestly thought i maybe imagined the flames when i was 5. 😂😂

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  11. I only saw Bermuda Triangle once when I was like 4 or 5 around 2006. I didn't go on it because the theming was so good it freaked the shit out of me and everytime I saw the flames out the top, I swear I got scared it was actually going to erupt lmao. I didn't actually realise that Storm replaced it but at the same time, I haven't been back to Sea World since that one trip.

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  12. The Bermuda Triangle Ride has been an obsession of mine that no one else understands. It was fantastic as a kid. After the first terrifying ride I had I jumped back on right away.
    Loved the story, the aliens, the peppers ghost UFO, the mystery, that shit fuelled my imagination.
    Made a playlist of various videos of the ride either here in Australia or the sister ride in Germany.
    Thanks for the video.

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  13. Interesting that you say international tourists wouldn't write home about Lassiter's Lost Mine. Our family still quote the lines that the animatronic characters yelled out to this day lol. Amazed to see it only ran for six years!

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  14. Me and my best friend both had seaworld annual passes for multiple years growing up. When we were 13 in the year 2000. We used to catch the bus there almost every weekend. It was basically our playground. This was our favourite ride hands down.

    I remember from about 3pm in the afternoon people would start leaving and by 4pm, there would zero wait time for every single ride. The staff used to let us stay on the same boat because nobody was lining up.

    We figured out where the sensors to activate the scenes were and realised if we ducked down in the boat, the scenes wouldn't activate and we were able to see the scenes as they were when empty boats came through. We did this only a couple of times because we were always being watched by the CCTV and the staff would often come out and get cranky at us.
    Some of my best childhood memories come from seaworld and that specific ride.

    Thanks for making this video. I learnt a lot from it. Had no idea it was all in house. Absolutely brilliant.

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  15. Thanks for making this awesome video. I was at SeaWorld today and found myself talking about this ride to my kids. We watched some old footage of the ride and found your video. I really enjoyed all the information and research you put into celebrating the memory of this fantastic ride. I'd love to see you do another about the Looney Tunes Ride that was at Movieworld.

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  16. The Bermuda Triangle and ET fuelled a 15 year genuine fear of aliens. I’ve only just gotten over it and can be alone in my house at night without getting paranoid. My brain actually repressed the memory of the peppers ghost effect. It was so damn real to me 😭

    It was one of the only rides my motion sensitive mum could enjoy so I was coaxed into it many times over the years. Freaks me the fuck out.

    Definitely peak nostalgia and still one my favourite rides behind the looney tunes river ride.

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  17. The Bermuda Triangle and corkscrew were the best rides SeaWorld has seen. But now I think storm coaster is necessary and helps many kids get into coasters as it’s not fast but still fun

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  18. I remembered this right a couple of years ago and thought it was a fever dream 😂 scared the shit out of me when I was a kid but so wish I could ride it again. I can still remember how hot the end was and the smell of stale water will never leave my nose. Storm is a fine coaster but it’s just not what Bermuda was. No other coaster on the Gold Coast had what Bermuda had, that truly immersive ride. We need another one like it!

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  19. Big sad over Bermuda being gone, although I think your maths is off when you talk about capacity – Storm coaster's output is a little lower than Bermuda's, but it's not as dire as it sounds:

    Bermuda triangle – 12 boats (+1 spare) over an 8 minute course = dispatches every 40 seconds (90 dispatches/hour) times 16 riders/boat = 1440 riders per hour

    Storm coaster – 5 boats (+1 spare) over a 2 minute course = dispatches every 24 seconds (150 dispatches/hour) times 8 riders/vehicle = 1200 riders per hour. Certainly less than Bermuda, but still respectable.

    Admittedly, the ops involved in dispatching Storm Coaster are a lot more complex than those involved in Bermuda, and it's unlikely that they'd manage to get boats out quite as quickly as advertised – but that's the amusement industry for ya.

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  20. Bermuda Triangle wasn’t just a ride, it was an experience. While storm coaster has some theming, there’s not much of a story behind a it, unlike its predecessor. Bermuda was the type of ride you’d experience in a Hollywood theme park, not a pared down version we so often get in Australia to save on costs. There’s also nothing worse than queuing for a long time for a very short ride. Bermuda was worth the wait.

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  21. Unfortunately my only memory of Bermuda Triangle was being too much of a whimp to ride it when I first went to the park in 2005 (if I'm interpreting the timeline of the video, it might've already been less impressive by then). I was ten years old and mostly wanted to go to the park to see the animals (it was definitely worthwhile going just for that imo).

    I hadn't researched the ride and when I saw the rollercoasters at the park, they looked way too scary for me (I'm a whimp about that sort of thing, tbh), so I assumed Bermuda Triangle would be like that but inside (like the Scooby-Doo ride at MovieWorld). I didn't realise it was a more thematic / story-themed attraction with just a small drop at the end, which I definitely could've handled. So I waited on a bench until my brother was done riding it. When he told me what it was actually like, I regretted not going on it, but it was late in the day by then, so we went back to the hotel. Remembering that after watching this video makes me feel really sad. 🙁

    I didn't get to go back to the park until 2010, when it had already been replaced, by yet another rollercoaster. Nothing against anyone who likes that sort of thing, but I wish theme parks would remember that not everyone does. On the plus side, I remember there being a big tank with marine animals you could feed / pet. Is that still there?

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  22. I worked at VRTP when it closed. We played the opening video at the Australian Outback Spectacular on the big screen one evening while setting up the meals and warming up the horses before guests came in the day Storm opened as a tribute as most of us were Gold Coast born and bred growing up with fond memories of the ride. I was told while working at Sea World in promos that Bermuda's old service areas in the back end were too small and tight for new Queensland OH&S laws and it was going to be very expensive to retrofit approved service areas, if even possible. This was why staff were told Bermuda was closed permanently.

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