Crazy Bats, formerly known as Space Center and Temple of the Night Hawk is an enclosed roller coaster located at

Phantasialand Phantasialand is a theme park in Brühl, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany that attracts approximately 2 million visitors annually. It was opened in 1967 by Gottlieb Löffelhardt and Richard Schmidt. Although starting as a family-oriented park, ...

. It opened on 1 April 1988 and was manufactured by

Vekoma Vekoma Rides Manufacturing is an amusement ride manufacturer. Vekoma is a syllabic abbreviation of Veld Koning Machinefabriek (Veld Koning Machine Factory) which was established in 1926 by Hendrik op het Veld. History The company originally manu ...

History

Opened in 1988 after 18 months of construction, the ride was originally called Space Center. It led passengers past models of rockets and emulated asteroids, and the darkened hall was dimly lit with lights resembling stars. Due to the construction of neighbouring themed area Wuze Town in 2001, the roller coaster was redeveloped with a fantasy jungle theme and renamed Temple of the Night Hawk. The ride has four

trains A train (from Old French , from Latin">-4; we might wonder whether there's a point at which it's appropriate to talk of the beginnings of French, that is, when it wa ... , from Latin , "to pull, to draw") is a series of connected vehicles th ...

, and one spare train for repairs, each with seven cars. Each car has two rows of seats, each holding two people. During the four-minute ride, the trains traverse of track, utilizing three lift hills. The building containing the ride is around , and rests on 180

concrete Concrete is a composite material composed of aggregate bound together with a fluid cement that cures to a solid over time. It is the second-most-used substance (after water), the most–widely used building material, and the most-manufactur ...

pillars buried deep in the ground. The building's basement level contained the Hollywood Tour

dark ride A dark ride—or ghost train when horror themed—is an indoor amusement ride on which passengers aboard guided vehicles travel through specially lit scenes that typically contain Animatronics, animation, sound, music and Special effect#Live spe ...

before the latter was closed. The total investment for the ride was around 15 million DM. Until 2014, the song "The Egg Travels" from

Disney The Walt Disney Company, commonly referred to as simply Disney, is an American multinational mass media and entertainment industry, entertainment conglomerate (company), conglomerate headquartered at the Walt Disney Studios (Burbank), Walt Di ...

's ''

Dinosaur Dinosaurs are a diverse group of reptiles of the clade Dinosauria. They first appeared during the Triassic Geological period, period, between 243 and 233.23 million years ago (mya), although the exact origin and timing of the #Evolutio ...

'' was played by several speakers placed inside the hall. In the station of the roller coaster, the song "Inner Sanctum/The Nesting Grounds" and the intro of the song "The End Of Our Island" from the same movie were played. In 2015, these songs were replaced with custom songs produced by IMAscore. Originally, the coaster was to be manufactured by BHS/Zierer, with linear induction motors (LIMs) as transport elements. After a track layout had been designed and models created, the park instead decided to work with Vekoma, and to utilize lift hills over LIMs.

References

{{Phantasialand Roller coasters in Germany Roller coasters introduced in 1988