They couldn’t even be bothered to paint it silver.
At least Scream is hidden in the back corner of the park where you can easily ignore it if you want to, and I doubt anyone will shed a tear over the loss of their once beautiful car park. In short, Silver Bullet is a sincere attempt to be as much of a parking lot coaster as it can. But what is a body of water to a roller coaster designer other than a flat, open construction arena with a minimum of obstacles complicating the engineering process? CAD works way easier when you don’t have to figure in annoying things like a preexisting environment. No, it doesn’t do much reflecting today with all the concrete footers strewn throughout. Yes, it has a more ‘natural’ location than Scream, over the former Reflection Lake. Several miles away, Scream would go down in history for being the worst example of a “parking lot roller coaster”, but one look at Knott’s Silver Bullet and I determined that it takes only a bare minimum of effort to appease the theme park foamers into overlooking a far greater crime against good taste. Or someone realized a few days before it opened that long time fans might raise issue with the fact that they were removing a significant section of Knott’s historic Ghost Town for a West Coast Raptor, and so found an intern who had taken a creative writing class in college so she got a break from running coffee for an afternoon. I guess words are cheaper than the cost of ordering more colors of paint than red and yellow. It is a roller coaster without subtly or humility. Apart from the use of narrative on a laminated sign, there is no attempt to disguise Silver Bullet. Thus I am informed by a sign in front of the main entrance for Silver Bullet, a bizarrely incongruous attempt at thematic back story to “explain the ride away”, despite the fact that I read this while a massive, elevated transfer track platform blots the sun from view. The silver bullets could then be rushed through tunnels and caverns as gunslingers sat perched on benches protecting the precious cargo, and this eventually rid the town of its demons. Jacob, however, devised a contraption to outsmart the demons by creating powerful ore cars that were suspended beneath a floating track. Operated by a recluse known only as “Just Jacob”, the evil spirits eventually determined the source of the silver bullets and descended upon the town in force. According to legend, there once was a time when demons and evil spirits stalked the plains of the west, and the only way to stop them was with a supernatural silver bullet from the Jacob Mining Co., located in parts north of the quaint town of Calico.
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