SeaWorld San Diego

Reena Roy, ABC News, New York.

A sixth beluga whale rescued from Canada has died, this time at SeaWorld San Diego.

Nine-year-old Cypress died last night.

He had suddenly just stopped eating.

Kind of transitioning to California...

Magic Mountain, Knott's Berry Farm, and SeaWorld San Diego all have top-notch haunted housing attractions.

And that's not even including Universal Hollywood and Disneyland.

So I was actually at Disneyland a few years ago when they did have their Halloween event.

Not, not really.

There was a lot of, um, metal stanchions and, and like, it, SeaWorld San Diego has the weirdest [sighs] eclectic collection of stuff.

Like you'll be walking through and they're like, "Here's just a pile of, of skulls and decoration, and then let's go wine tasting.

We have a little wine tasting bar, and we have fishnet up on it because it's SeaWorld.

Lot of activities in the area.

SeaWorld, the famous San Diego Zoo, Tijuana nearby, and of course, the great golf courses in the area all up and down the north San Diego County.

S- uh, Singer ready to go to work here to Garcia.

And now wants Torborg to go through the signs again.

... they're not, they're not the Icelandic species that most of SeaWorld's killer whales are.

So even though SeaWorld's got some really big bulls, like, at SeaWorld San Antonio, SeaWorld San Diego, like Kai that we saw in, in San Antonio, or, um, Ulysses is pretty big.

Keyd is pretty big.

There's, there's a couple of big bulls at, at both at San Antonio and San Diego.

Like, everything the park has to offer is all in one ticket, and it's not like you have... 'Cause I think most events, like Magic Bound or Fiesta Texas or whatever, where you go to, like, a Fright Fest or something, you...

And it's included with the, with the park admission, where the park hours usually gets really long, you have to buy your way into the houses, you have to buy your way into the mazes.

Or it's a separately ticketed event, like SeaWorld San Diego, SeaWorld Orlando, the Busch Gardens parks, they have a separately ticketed Howl-O-Scream event where then everything is included once you're in that separately ticketed event.

But this is my first time visiting a regular long park operating s- seasonal event day where it is everything was just included.

[upbeat instrumental music] Hello, and welcome back to the Wear in the Park podcast.

This is Kevin, and this is a special episode where Amanda and I get to interview Alexander Krikes, the Entertainment Manager of Creative Show Operations at SeaWorld San Diego.

He's managed production logistics for various annual events, including Lunar New Year, Seven Seas Food Festival, Christmas Celebration, and the Inside Look series.

But today, since we are in the middle of spooky season, we'll be focusing on Howl-O-Scream.

He acts as a primary creative producer behind the Halloween nighttime experience at SeaWorld, engineering the concepts for its haunted houses, scare zones, and vial vignettes.

All right, and not to waste any time, Alexander, our first question is, is there a story behind how you became creative director of Howl-O-Scream?

So I actually grew up in the Southern California region, uh, very, very close to Carlsbad, so I was surrounded by a lot of the San Diego theme parks.

And so my role as a producer started to kind of naturally develop during that time when I was trying to pull people together for projects.