Jeff is the ultimate enthusiast, having ridden every fairground ride hastily installed at a theme park due to management panic about capacity concerns.
As Douglas Adams said in his lesser known book, The Upcharge at the End of the Visitor Attraction: "In the beginning, the flat rides were removed. This made a lot of visitors very angry and was widely regarded as a bad move". No truer a prediction was made for what would subsequently occur at Alton Towers. Jeff can only imagine how different the world could have been if legendary theme park attraction storyteller Julia Donaldson had written that book, whose work is compulsory reading at Merlin HQ.
It is lucky then that the former owners of the Towers had both the foresight to invest in rides and attractions, but also the ineptitude to find a courier worse than Hermes. For in 2021, three rides destined for the park just after opening day 41 years ago, finally found their intended destination. Or so the legend goes.
Dotted around the park are three rides obtained from traveling fairs. There's a spinny one, a rotatey one, and a bouncy-rotatey-spinny one.
The spinny one is hidden within Dark Forest, although first time visitors may be hard pressed to find it due to its tasteful and on-brand use of 80's pop music. The rotatey one exists in Forbidden Valley, and provides the long awaited missing link between Nemesis monster and Galactica space exploration, via the medium of flashing lightbulbs. The branding disaster that is the bouncey-rotatey-spinny one is dumped in X-Sector, and looks like some sort of weird science experiment gone wrong.
True to marketing promise, on arriving within Towers property these fairground attractions instantly received the Power of the Towers. Whereas in their natural environment of a community playing field where these mechanical workhorses would operate all day generating their owners a constant stream of revenue, the Power of the Towers ensures that their uptime is more in keeping with visitor expectations at the nation's largest theme park. Jeff really appreciates a closed ride, as it gives Jeff time to ride a different ride.
Jeff doesn't have to pretend there are rides in these locations anymore
But what does Jeff think about them? Well Jeff loves them all, because now Jeff doesn't have to pretend there are rides in these locations anymore. Now Jeff can shout "whee" in these locations without disapproval.
Unfortunately, the coveted Jeff Seal* of Approval cannot be awarded, despite Jeff's enjoyment of these rides. Jeff cannot reward what was a foreseeably bad set of management decisions, which have led the park to go back to a forgotten purchase 41 years ago to solve an inevitable future capacity problem, Doc Brown style. Therefore Jeff rates The Retrosquad 23 out of 41 "I told you so"'s.