Kings Entertainment Company


Kings Entertainment Company owned and/or operated six theme parks around the world. The company was originally owned by Taft Broadcasting and in 1984 was purchased for $167.5 million by senior executives and general managers of Taft's Amusement Park Group.
In 1992, the company was sold to Paramount Communications, then the parent of Paramount Pictures, which changed the name of the parks by adding "Paramount's" in front of their names. The park in Australia was not purchased by Paramount and was sold to a local company.
The company was renamed Paramount Parks in 1994, around the time of the Viacom purchase, and remained in existence until 2006. As part of the 2005 Viacom split, ownership of Paramount Parks was transferred to the CBS Corporation.
CBS, in turn, sold the parks to amusement park management company Cedar Fair Entertainment Company based in Sandusky, Ohio on June 30, 2006. As of January 2007, Cedar Fair has begun dropping the Paramount name from the individual parks and restoring their original KECO names with new Cedar Fair logos. This transaction also returned the parks to Ohio-based ownership, as Taft was once headquartered in Cincinnati.

Theme parks

The company owned: