Cash Coaster Gameshow

Concept, Direction, Copywriting, Editing

 The Brief
Enhance the experience of Cedar Fair customers who are on-site by delivering branded content.

Background
Cedar Fair saw an opportunity to enhance guest experience, strengthen its brands, and generate sponsorship revenue by launching FunTV, a digital network with hundreds of screens across Cedar Fair’s locations.

Content that was entertaining, on-brand, and sponsor-able would have to be developed from scratch.

Task
As one of the first three members of Cedar Fair’s in-house content studio, I had a key role in developing and producing original branded entertainment alongside the Executive Producer. While reviewing the current entertainment landscape, I was inspired by the popularity and simplicity of the game show Cash Cab: where people who think they’ve hailed a normal taxi are surprised to learn their driver is a gameshow host, and they’re contestants who can win money by answering trivia. Could we apply this concept to Cedar Fair’s roller coasters?

The Format
Our first task was to determine the format. Cash Cab’s format wouldn’t translate to roller coasters without considering several factors.

• Roller coasters are noisy, making it hard to hear the host.

• Roller coaster rides are also relatively short, introducing a time pressure.

• Our entertainment factor wouldn’t rely on the cleverness of the questions, but rather on watching contestants try to think while flying through the air and flipping upside down at 70+ miles per hour under intense G-forces.

The less the host had to talk and the more the contestants had to verbalize under pressure, the more successful the show would be. Hence, we landed on a format where the host asks the contestant to ‘name as many things in a given category as possible before the ride ends.’ Contestants would spend the ride shouting out anything that came to mind in hopes of winning money for each qualified answer.

The Production
There were several challenges we would have to overcome to shoot a gameshow on a roller coaster.

• How do we safely attach cameras?

• How do we overcome the wind and mechanical noise to record usable sound?

• How do we avoid negative impacts on the park’s normal operation?

‘Prototype-Test-Learn-Iterate’ was the strategy for all of our ideas at FunTV. We collaborated with the Ops and Maintenance department to gain access to the rides for testing before the park opened. We tested a variety of cameras, microphones, and rigging methods, finally arriving at a system that satisfied Cedar Fair’s Safety Team and could be setup and broken down in <2 minutes while the ride was in normal operation, serving up to 1600 riders per hour in addition to our production.

Casting
For our contestants, we declined to pursue the casting call, audition process of many gameshows, instead choosing contestants on the shoot day from passing guests in the park. This approach kept our production fast and flexible. If a contestant was a dud, a new person could be recruited and filmed in under an hour.

We iterated our way to casting a host as well, starting with a promising FunTV intern, trying Cedar Fair employees from other departments, and finally using a casting agency to find a host with talent and availability that would give us a consistent, high-quality result with less coaching and fewer scheduling conflicts.

Results
Cash Coaster became a hit with FunTV viewers and sponsors alike.

• Comments online and on-site were enthusiastically positive.

• The show attracted external sponsors from CPG, QSR, Gaming, and Entertainment, generating six-figures in revenue. The format was flexible enough to allow tie-ins with movie and videogame releases.

• 20+ episodes were produced in the US and Canada.