Shakespeare’s Juliet once mused, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet!” She was right, of course… But had Juliet been responsible for explaining how to grow one to a family from Brazil, she might wish she had concise, clear, and intuitive language to use.
That’s the reality faced by Cast Members responsible for helping guests at Disney Parks to understand why they’re several steps away from being able to access the sold-out Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance Individual Lightning Lane they’re blocking the entrance to.
Stand-by. Virtual Queue. Lightning Lane. Individual Ride Reservations. Boarding Groups… The language of waiting in line at a Disney Park in the 2020s is enough to leave even the most ardent theme park aficionados puzzled. But it doesn’t have to be that way! Let’s take a glance at the Disney Genie Glossary and propose a quick fix that would sure help clear things up…
theme [theem], n., a unifying idea; the deeper meaning; the thing that a story is about.
Once upon what feels like a very long time ago, each of Walt Disney World’s four theme parks was imbued with its own theme; a concise identity; a clear vision of what, exactly, it was about. Make no mistake, when Imagineers discuss “theme,” they don’t mean decoration, or props, or intellectual property; they mean an underlying, unifying idea; even a message. Theme with a capital-T, if you will.
Image: Disney, via D23.com
Consider the Theme underlying each of Disney’s parks at the time of its opening. Magic Kingdom was fantasy made real; EPCOT was reality made fantastic; The Disney-MGM Studios was about the romance and reality of Hollywood; Animal Kingdom, an embodiment of the supreme and untradeable value of nature. In the design and development of each park, each had an identity – one distinct from the others and wholly its own – that not only informed the attractions and environments within, but set a bar for, protected against, and served as stalwart gatekeeper to would-be interlopers.
It’s clear today that Walt Disney World’s four theme parks are four very different places built at four different times and with four different visions. (Few would stand in EPCOT believing they were in Animal Kingdom.) But beyond the decoration, are they really about four different things? Does each sum up to have something uniquely big – or for that matter, anything at all – to say? Or have Disney, Pixar, Marvel, and Star Wars created an era of interchangeable “Disney+ Parks” differentiated only by their decoration?
But not every unbuilt idea is scrapped. Sometimes, concepts merely evolve. So as we glimpse through the veil into the multiverse of possibilities, imagine if these nine Disney “classics” had looked a whole lot different. How might each have changed the parks forever? We’ll leave you to decide…
Stories in the Extra Features and Special Features collections of Park Lore are all about connections – they’re the threads that interlace between the Lost Legends, Declassified Disasters, Modern Marvels, and Possibilitylands you’ll find in our Main Collections. In other words, these features are for people who really want to dig deep.
This article and hundreds more are available for Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum Members who help support this ad-free, clickbait-free, quality-over-quantity collection with a monthly membership. Park Lore Members can access more than a hundred Member-exclusive articles, unlock rare concept art and construction photos in every story, stream audio across the site, tune into podcast exclusives, and receive an annual member card and merch in the mail!
If you choose to join Park Lore’s community of Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum Members, you’ll instantly unlock this story (and of course, a lot more). You can learn more about joining and supporting Park Lore (and browse all the available Extras and Special Features) in the “Memberships & Perks” menu above. If you can’t afford a Pass, please contact us; we’ll make some magic happen.
If we’re being honest, it’s pretty understandable that Disney World’s “Golden Anniversary” is lacking some of shine fans had hoped for. Still mired in a tourism downturn caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, the timing just couldn’t have been much worse for the resort to launch a global marketing campaign around the 50th Anniversary. Stalled construction and pared-down budgets have left Disney World woefully short on the major projects once envisioned for 2021, leaving specialty food and souvenirs, two nighttime “same”-taculars, rising prices, and a lot of new upcharges to make headlines instead…
Stories in the Extra Features and Special Features collections of Park Lore are all about connections – they’re the threads that interlace between the Lost Legends, Declassified Disasters, Modern Marvels, and Possibilitylands you’ll find in our Main Collections. In other words, these features are for people who really want to dig deep.
This article and hundreds more are available for Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum Members who help support this ad-free, clickbait-free, quality-over-quantity collection with a monthly membership. Park Lore Members can access more than a hundred Member-exclusive articles, unlock rare concept art and construction photos in every story, stream audio across the site, tune into podcast exclusives, and receive an annual member card and merch in the mail!
If you choose to join Park Lore’s community of Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum Members, you’ll instantly unlock this story (and of course, a lot more). You can learn more about joining and supporting Park Lore (and browse all the available Extras and Special Features) in the “Memberships & Perks” menu above. If you can’t afford a Pass, please contact us; we’ll make some magic happen.
Our world moves in cycles; predictable patterns of ebbs and flows, beginnings and endings, life and death… like the phases of the moon, some things can just be counted upon as tried, true, and sure. And so it is with annual price hikes at Disney’s two resorts in the United States. Truly a tale as old as time, you can bet your bottom dollar that come hell, highwater, war, recession, or pandemic, somehow and some way, the cost of a day at Disneyland or Walt Disney World will rise.
Every day, themed entertainment designers ask themselves and each other the same question: “What if?” In the so-called “Blue Sky” phase of design, there’s no limit; no capacity; no technology; no budget. The idea is to dream big and let reality hem in the project’s scope later. In this new Theme Park Tourist mini-series, we invite you to “Blue Sky” with us, and to reimagine a ride that could use a refresh.
As part of Park Lore’s Member-exclusive Extra Features collection, we launched into a new “WHAT IF…” miniseries when we pitched a retheme of Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster, turning this Sunset Blvd. E-Ticket into a 1930s head trip into The Twilight Zone. Today, we’re wondering what it would be like if Disney’s ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter was reborn at Universal Orlando, and merged into the Jurassic World mythos…
Think this hybridized concept is crazy enough to work? Here’s our pitch…
The multiverse has unfolded before us, and out has arisen AVENGERS CAMPUS – Imagineering’s newest entry in the ongoing “IP Wars” and the latest of Disney and Universal’s “Living Lands.” A training compound built to assemble and mobilize the next generation of heroes (that’s us), this superhero Silicon Valley wedged between California Adventure’s Cars Land and Hollywood Land is… well… surprisingly low-key. Some fans have been quick to note a relative lack of ambition in the land’s scale and attraction lineup, especially compared to Pandora or Galaxy’s Edge.
… But make no mistake: Avengers Campus is a revolution if only in the way it could rewrite the rules of “immersive” theme park attractions from here on out. For all the lore that underscores the Marvel Cinematic Universe it’s based on, Avengers Campus doesn’t care much about canon. It’s a storytelling playground; a sandbox in which Imagineers can at last let loose and have fun with the comic book heroes they acquired over a decade ago.
Stories in the Extra Features and Special Features collections of Park Lore are all about connections – they’re the threads that interlace between the Lost Legends, Declassified Disasters, Modern Marvels, and Possibilitylands you’ll find in our Main Collections. In other words, these features are for people who really want to dig deep.
This article and hundreds more are available for Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum Members who help support this ad-free, clickbait-free, quality-over-quantity collection with a monthly membership. Park Lore Members can access more than a hundred Member-exclusive articles, unlock rare concept art and construction photos in every story, stream audio across the site, tune into podcast exclusives, and receive an annual member card and merch in the mail!
If you choose to join Park Lore’s community of Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum Members, you’ll instantly unlock this story (and of course, a lot more). You can learn more about joining and supporting Park Lore (and browse all the available Extras and Special Features) in the “Memberships & Perks” menu above. If you can’t afford a Pass, please contact us; we’ll make some magic happen.
“Avengers… Assemble!” Well… if only it were that easy.
Forget Thor and Loki; Wanda and Agatha; Iron Man and Thanos. When it comes to Marvel superheroes, one of the most cosmic clashes of all time isn’t been heroes and villains at all. Instead, it’s between two entertainment titans engaged in a decades-long war over control of Central Florida, now embroiled in an unlikely custody battle over a teenager from Brooklyn… with web-slinging powers.
For those outside theme park fandom, it’s one of the oddest bits of “fine print” in modern pop culture: that somehow, despite Disney’s $4 billion purchase of Marvel outright in 2009, the company is forbidden from using its own heroes at its flagship resort. To make matters worse, not only is Disney practically powerless in leveraging its pop-culture-dominating IP in its own theme parks, but those heroes have somehow been ceded to their comic-book-esque archnemesis just a few miles north.
So how can Universal hold Spider-Man hostage? What’s the legal asterisk that explains the slow drip of Marvel heroes into Disney Parks across the globe… including Florida? What does the future hold for Disney and Universal’s uneasy co-parenting of Marvel heroes in theme parks? Like all custody battles, it’s… complicated. So we may as well start at the beginning…
Stories in the Extra Features and Special Features collections of Park Lore are all about connections – they’re the threads that interlace between the Lost Legends, Declassified Disasters, Modern Marvels, and Possibilitylands you’ll find in our Main Collections. In other words, these features are for people who really want to dig deep.
This article and hundreds more are available for Gold and Platinum Members who help support this ad-free, clickbait-free, quality-over-quantity collection with a monthly membership. Park Lore Members can access more than a hundred Member-exclusive articles, unlock rare concept art and construction photos in every story, stream audio across the site, tune into podcast exclusives, and receive an annual member card and merch in the mail!
If you choose to join Park Lore’s community of Gold and Platinum Members, you’ll instantly unlock this story (and of course, a lot more). You can learn more about joining and supporting Park Lore (and browse all the available Extras and Special Features) in the “Memberships & Perks” menu above. If you can’t afford a Pass, please contact us; we’ll make some magic happen.
There was a time when Disney was Disney, and Universal was Universal.
Then, Islands of Adventure changed everything. Opening in 1999, the much-heralded second gate at the redesignated Universal Orlando Resort at last dispensed with “beige backlots” and “boxy soundstages” in favor of a park built using Disney’s own formula… with a dash of something twenty-first century.
Simultaneously the most and least “Disney” park since Disneyland itself, Islands of Adventure was a mould-breaker. Eschewing blockbuster movies to instead bring to life timeless, intergenerational stories; building unheard-of, IP-centered lands; co-mixing immersive environments with bare steel coasters; brandishing technology as a weapon in the theme park wars, and embedding it in next-century dark rides and shows…. This park was often big, loud, fast, vibrant, and in-your-face.
Image: Universal
Except when it wasn’t… After all, Islands of Adventure opened with Universal’s first seeming intentional investment in the unsung heroes of theme park lineups: hidden gems. In our recent look at the kinds of rides Universal should pluck from Disney’s playbook, we highlighted hidden gems as a particularly important element of parks – the kinds of experiences that reward exploration and build-out both a park’s capacity and its mythologies.
So today, we’ll take a tour around the exceptional stories of Islands of Adventure to highlight some of those “secret spots” or thoughtful design details; the kinds of attractions, nooks and crannies, and unexpected surprises you can only find between E-Tickets. We hope you’ll have at least one item to add to your Islands of Adventure “scavenger hunt” after reading about these off-the-beaten-path extras…
Stories in the Extra Features and Special Features collections of Park Lore are all about connections – they’re the threads that interlace between the Lost Legends, Declassified Disasters, Modern Marvels, and Possibilitylands you’ll find in our Main Collections. In other words, these features are for people who really want to dig deep.
This article and hundreds more are available for Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum Members who help support this ad-free, clickbait-free, quality-over-quantity collection with a monthly membership. Park Lore Members can access more than a hundred Member-exclusive articles, unlock rare concept art and construction photos in every story, stream audio across the site, tune into podcast exclusives, and receive an annual member card and merch in the mail!
If you choose to join Park Lore’s community of Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum Members, you’ll instantly unlock this story (and of course, a lot more). You can learn more about joining and supporting Park Lore (and browse all the available Extras and Special Features) in the “Memberships & Perks” menu above. If you can’t afford a Pass, please contact us; we’ll make some magic happen.
Whether you like it or not, Disney and Universal Parks have evolved. Since at least the 1990s, theme parks M.O.s have been shifting from places to “Ride the Movies” aboard Modern Marvels: Star Tours, Indiana Jones Adventure, and The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror to today’s immersive lands where you can “Live the Movies” by stepping into Hogsmeade, Pandora, Springfield, Radiator Springs, Batuu, or Avengers Campus.
Both Disney and Universal tend to be pretty picky about the films that are afforded permanent, expensive attractions inside their parks… No one wants a ride themed to a box office bomb, after all… However, just because you pick a good, revered, classic, or award-winning movie, you’re not guaranteed a good, revered, classic, or award-winning ride will come out the other end. Here’s our short collection of eight really good movies that somehow got lost in translation, turning into rides that just don’t live up to the film’s legacy.
Stories in the Extra Features and Special Features collections of Park Lore are all about connections – they’re the threads that interlace between the Lost Legends, Declassified Disasters, Modern Marvels, and Possibilitylands you’ll find in our Main Collections. In other words, these features are for people who really want to dig deep.
This article and hundreds more are available for Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum Members who help support this ad-free, clickbait-free, quality-over-quantity collection with a monthly membership. Park Lore Members can access more than a hundred Member-exclusive articles, unlock rare concept art and construction photos in every story, stream audio across the site, tune into podcast exclusives, and receive an annual member card and merch in the mail!
If you choose to join Park Lore’s community of Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum Members, you’ll instantly unlock this story (and of course, a lot more). You can learn more about joining and supporting Park Lore (and browse all the available Extras and Special Features) in the “Memberships & Perks” menu above. If you can’t afford a Pass, please contact us; we’ll make some magic happen.
