Mandrill Mayhem

In November 2024, Mandrill Mayhem played a very different role from its opening season. Chessington welcomed members of The Crypt Choir for a Christmas stunt on the coaster. The singers tried to perform a carol during the ride, while the train moved forwards and backwards through the Jumanji area.

The video worked because of the contrast between formal choral singing and a ride built around launches, direction changes and inversions. The article again framed Mandrill Mayhem as a Bolliger & Mabillard launched wing coaster: 20 metres high, reaching 72 kilometres per hour and sending riders upside down twice, once forwards and once backwards.

For visitors and fans, this was not construction or opening news, but it did add a small public-life chapter to the attraction's story. Chessington used the coaster as a stage for seasonal promotion around Winter's Tail. That showed Mandrill Mayhem functioning not only as a thrill ride, but also as a recognisable marketing symbol for the resort.

In August 2022, Chessington lifted the curtain on World of Jumanji. The announcement made clear that the previously leaked shuttle wing coaster was not a stand-alone coaster project, but the headline attraction of a new themed land based on the film franchise. For Mandrill Mayhem, this was the moment its later identity came into focus.

The coaster was described as a Bolliger & Mabillard wing coaster with a dead-end layout, backwards and forwards launches and a speed of around 70 kilometres per hour. The setting received a major visual centrepiece: the nearly 17-metre Jaguar Shrine, around which the train would climb in an upward spiral before returning.

For visitors, the news meant that Chessington was preparing its first major new coaster since Dragon's Fury opened in 2004. For fans, the combination mattered even more: a rare technical layout, a substantial 17 million pound themed investment and a prominent Jumanji licence within Merlin Entertainments.

In August 2021, planning documents surfaced for what would later become Mandrill Mayhem. At that stage Chessington was still using the project name Amazon Land, but the plans already showed that the park was aiming beyond a standard family coaster. The documents described a shuttle wing coaster from Bolliger & Mabillard, with seats mounted beside the track and launches in both directions.

The ride sequence was striking from the start: a backwards launch out of the station, a drop, a forward launch to about 70 kilometres per hour and a 380-metre layout ending in an upward spiral. From there, riders would travel backwards to the station. The zero-g roll, taken both forwards and backwards, was also already part of the proposal.

For coaster fans this was the first major sign that Chessington was preparing something unusually ambitious. A park known mainly for family attractions was planning a rare technical concept, wrapped in a tropical area with hundreds of trees and plants. The Jumanji connection was still hidden in the landscape design.