After eating a lot of fast food, some of it on roller coasters, Six Flags has banned YouTuber Allen Ferrell from all of its amusement parks nationwide. For life.
McDonald's chicken nuggets were apparently too much of an ultra-processed food item for the folks at Six Flags' Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio.
“This guest has been banned for life from all Six Flags parks,” a Cedar Point spokesperson explained in an email Thursday to Cleveland television station WKYC. “Safety is the cornerstone of our business and we have zero tolerance for inappropriate and unsafe behavior.”
Zero tolerance for inappropriate behavior? Zero? Where's the fun in that?
“Our travel safety policy strictly prohibits all loose items on trips, including food that may pose a choking hazard,” the spokesperson continued.
“I had no idea that eating a 10-piece chicken nugget on a roller coaster would be a national headline, but here we are,” Ferrell told Fox 8 News in Cleveland.
He said he understands the park's point with the ban, even though he's been going there since he was a kid and is a big fan of the operation.
“I understand it. And we worked it out,” he told Fox 8 News. “They just don't want other people to get hurt during the trip. But for me personally, it was a really fun challenge.”
Ferrell's trick on social media is to accept challenges from his followers and then record himself trying to do what they propose. Eat a McDonald's Big Mac inside a Burger King. Throw a plunger at a Target sign. Bowl blindfolded until he gets a strike.
“If anyone asks,” Ferrell tells a seemingly bored ride operator in the video documenting this particular roller coaster crime, “I don't have chicken nuggets in my underwear.”
Ferrell decided to try the challenge on the park's Millennium Force attraction, a “looming behemoth among a park full of them,” a roller coaster that was “designed for the purpose of proving that bigger is better.” A roller coaster that when it was created in 2000 “demanded a completely new category just to classify its unique nature”, giving rise to the “giga-coaster”. According to Cedar Point, like all this mumbo-jumbo, Millennium Force “shoots riders down hills, gaps, and tunnels, all at unthinkable speeds.”
The ride actually tops out at 93 mph, a speed often thought of on Los Angeles-area freeways when traffic is going 8 mph. It's quite imaginable to eat fast food in a car in Los Angeles, but it turns out that what was really unthinkable was Ferrell getting the 10 nuggets through the hatch before the trip to Six Flags was over.
In the video, which had nearly 800,000 views on YouTube as of Friday afternoon, he transforms from a happy guy eating snacks to a guy groaning in discomfort, struggling to get nuggets into his mouth while inadvertently applying sauce to his face using G-force.
“Oh, I failed,” Ferrell says, wiping sauce off his face as the coaster approaches the platform and someone in line says, “Are those chicken nuggets?”
Turns out he robbed seven of them, he confesses to the two guys in front of him on the roller coaster car. Ferrell later said he was glad to be in the back row because it meant no one behind him was affected.
That being said, watching the sweet and sour sauce fly around in slow motion is pretty fun. But eating nuggets that have been in your underwear?
The permanent ban seems the least of their problems.
