“Here you leave today and enter the worlds of yesterday, tomorrow, and fantasy.” Since 1955, those words have welcomed guests into Disneyland, and their spirit pervades Disney theme parks across the globe. Filled with artistry, history, and memories, each of them is, in some ways, alive, with its own unique personality.
At Park Lore, I’ve been working on a very, very niche personal art project that I’m excited to finally share: a look at the histories and personalities of the theme parks we love… as told by their pathways. Made possible by the support of Park Lore members, each of the hand-drawn illustrations you’ll find below is part mathematical model, part artistic abstraction; colorful lines that would be meaningless to most, but that can be mapped with memories for some! I sure hope they connect with you and inspire you to see each park’s story in a new light…
In July 2011, it ended. Adapting the final novel in rags-to-riches author J. K. Rowling’s young adult fantasy book series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2 marked the eighth and final entry in the film series that had defined pop culture for a generation. For a full decade, fans had aged alongside Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson, starring as the heroic trio in the once-in-a-century, intergenerational story; a world that captivated Millennials, then grew up with them; a pop culture phenomenon to rival Star Wars. And now, it was over.
Sure, the $8 billion box office revenue of the Potter films were really just a portion of the “Wizarding World” franchise’s $33 billion in earnings since The Philosopher’s Stone‘s publication in 1997 (with the remaining billions earned by books, merchandise, video games, home video, and of course, theme parks)… But even so, the end of the film series serving as the Wizarding World’s cinematic tentpole would inevitably signal the end of a previously-assured billion dollar box office every other year or so, serving as a definitive finish to a finite franchise.
… Or would it? In 2013 – just two years after the $1.3 billion-earning send-off to Potter – J. K. Rowling and Warner Bros. announced that they’d begun pre-production on a new film that would expand the Wizarding World as never before – set decades before and far from the events of Harry Potter.
Image: Pottermore
You have to remember that when Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them was announced, fans knew only that the film would follow the exploits of wizard explorer and “magi-zoologist” Newt Scamander on his international adventures that would eventually lead him to write the textbook of the same name that would one day end up on Harry, Ron, and Hermione’s Hogwarts school supply lists. The idea of a subtle connection to Potter lore opening up an entirely new corner of the Wizarding World was spectacular. And at least on paper, so were the storytelling opportunities.
Set in the 1920s and ’30s, images were conjured in fans’ minds of the Wizarding World’s Indiana Jones; an explorer and adventurer, braving ancient temples and magical jungles in search of the rarest, wildest, and most dangerous of the Wizarding World’s creatures; a fun, colorful, adventurous, pulpy, and low-stakes exploration of a corner of the Wizarding World we’d never seen. It stood to reason that the globetrotting exploits of Scamander and his research into fantastic creatures could even become a standalone franchise in its own right – a potential made all the more real when it was announced in 2014 that before the film had even gone into production, Fantastic Beasts had been pre-approved for three films set in – but exploring a vastly different corner of – Harry Potter’s world.
Sounds fun, right? Then, the troubles began.
Fantastic Beasts…
Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them made its debut in 2016. To be sure, the film earned positive reviews and earned a high-respectable $800 million. But at least for many, it wasn’t really what they’d expected.
Image: Warner Bros.
For better or worse, the Fantastic Beasts series follows Newt Scamander – not a rugged, Oscar Isaacs-type, Indiana Jones-esque explorer, but a timid, buttoned-up, and introverted worker for the Ministry of Magic played by the soft-spoken Eddie Redmayne, wrapped in a perpetual peacoat. His adventures take place not in exotic jungles or Forbidden Forests, but in New York City of 1926, where an enchanted suitcase of iridescent, unusual, CGI, Rowling-invented creatures (a divergence from the classic unicorns, dragons, mermaids, centaurs, and spiders of the Harry Potter world) accidentally, anti-climactically opens.
Scamander allies with Tina Goldstein (a former Auror caught in the bureaucracy of the Magical Congress of the United States, or MACUSA) as well as a “No-Maj” (apparently, the American equivalent to the British “Muggle”) New Yorker named Jacob Kowalski. From there… well… let’s ask: do you remember the plot of Magical Creatures and Where To Find Them?
Image: Warner Bros.
We’ll give you a hint: it involves an anti-witchcraft legion of puritans who live in a ramshackle old schoolhouse weirdly set in the middle of Manhattan, whose adopted child Credence (Ezra Miller, in the actor’s second high-profile Warner Bros. franchise after playing DC’s The Flash) has so much repressed magical potential, it turns into a violent force called an Obscurus. MACUSA weirdly sentences Newt and Tina to death because a creature killed a senator, but they escape. Also, there’s a detective played by Collin Farrel who’s actually using a Polyjuice Potion (hey, I remember those!) to disguise that he’s not Collin Farrel, he’s Johnny Depp, playing the “Voldemort” of early 20th-century Wizarding World, Gellart Grindelwald, who was remembered as a long-dead bad guy and one-time Dumbledore foe by Harry Potter’s time.
Look, Fantastic Beasts didn’t have an easy job to begin with in expanding the Wizarding World. It’s okay that the movie was (as reviews put it) “bogged down by exposition” or a bit of a “slog,” having to introduce so much new world-building and a whole new cast of characters. It’s also okay – bold, even – that Fantastic Beasts was willing to leave Diagon Alley, Hogwarts, and other iconic locales behind.
Image: Warner Bros.
And even if viewers can get the strict sense that Rowling doesn’t know much about New York City, American government, or America’s home-grown concepts of magic and magical creatures, a New York City of the 1920s is a clever, intriguing setting no one would’ve expected from the Wizarding World’s next era.
Sure, Fantastic Beasts is a little color-drained, and pretty CGI-heavy, and a little too in-the-weeds with world-building. But the 2016 film was a sizable hit for Warner Bros., earning $814 million across its theatrical run and scoring a respectable 74% on Rotten Tomatoes. While that ranked it below any mainline Harry Potter film, it was a substantial showing for a spin-off film so narratively distant from the Potter line – for all intents and purposes, a legitimate “original” story.
Then, it started to crumble…
… and How To Lose Them
Even if fans largely enjoyedFantastic Beasts, it’s probably fair to say that its reception had something in common with Avatar. That is: it was received well, made good money, and then sort of… disappeared. Fantastic Beasts never quite picked up that “water cooler” buzz, and it just didn’t seem to leave many footprints in pop culture. (If we hadn’t told you that the film’s “Ron and Hermione” equivalent were named Jacob and Tina, would you have remembered?) Fantastic Beats didn’t introduce any “theme park-able” settings, snacks, or souvenirs… no memorable characters or quotes… and frankly, not even any iconic, recognizable, or fantastic creatures.
It didn’t necessarily feel that Fantastic Beasts screamed out for two follow up films. Which made it even stranger that in the months leading up to the films release, Warner Bros. and J.K. Rowling revised their promise, proclaiming that Newt’s adventures would now span a five film franchise. That made Fantastic Beasts similar to Avatar into another way: it left industry commentators wondering who, exactly, was clamoring for more.
Obviously, the second Avatar film proved naysayers wrong. The second Fantastic Beasts, though…? Well…
Don’t believe us? Just flashback to summer 2013 and you’d find yourself in a very different Orlando… There, you’d marvel at the brand new MagicBand, daydreaming about Disney’s promises of how it’ll eventually personalize the Parks to you; you’d fill your day at Disney’s Hollywood Studios with The Great Movie Ride and The Backstage Studio Tour, wondering what Disney might do with its brand new, $8 billion acquisitions of Marvel and Lucasfilm.
If you visited Orlando in summer 2013, you’d wander through Camp Minnie-Mickey at Disney’s Animal Kingdom, wondering why – three years after announcing it – Disney hadn’t begun construction on its land themed to James Cameron’s Avatar. You had never heard the song “Let It Go,” much less imagined that the upcoming movie Frozen might replace EPCOT’s Maelstrom. And you’d be far too busy with the #LimitedTimeMagic campaign to wonder what Disney would do for its 100th Anniversary a decade later.
Oh, and in 2013, it’s likely that you’d callously spit in the eye of Disney’s generous gifts of Magical Express, FastPass, Extra Magic Hours, and resort transportation to book yourself an Uber to that other theme park resort up the road… After all, Universal Orlando’s Wizarding World of Harry Potter isn’t just the talk of the town; it’s the project around which the whole themed entertainment industry has reoriented itself. The age of the “Living Land” has arrived… And as a construction site at Universal Studios Florida begins to take the shape of Diagon Alley, the battle for Orlando doesn’t seem as clear-cut as it once did… “Could the momentum finally be behind Universal and not Disney?”
It’s one of the most anticipated data drops in all of theme park nerd-dom… Every year, a consulting firm called AECOM partners with the Themed Entertainment Association (TEA) to release an annual report on the ups and downs of theme parks, waterparks, museums, and other “thematic” experiences from the year prior. The annual Global Attractions Attendance Report is a fascinating document that theme park fans should dive into in depth. It’s filled with the highs and lows, global contexts, and stories that permeated theme park news in the year prior.
But most importantly… it also contains a ranking of theme park attendance. To be clear, most theme park operators do not disclose their parks’ attendance, and even if they speak in broad generalities, totals, or percentages at investor calls, they almost never divulge specific attendance figures for specific parks… However, it’s known that many operators do work with AECOM to come up with fairly accurate figures since it’s in the best interest of their share price, financial disclosures, and year-upon-year narratives that their attendance be discussed vaguely, but honestly.
Theme parks are living creatures. Sure, they grow and change and “will never be complete…” But even more, they’re made of complex systems and elements all working together so effortlessly, you may not even realize they’re working at all. Berms act as skin, insulating parks from the sights of the outside world; intuitive layouts are a skeleton, giving the park structure; pathways act as veins and arteries, pulsing guests instead of blood; restrooms are… Well…
When I started Park Lore, I really hoped that this site would become the place on the Internet to read in-depth but accessible theme park and ride histories; a sort of deep dive library where you could get lost in the interconnected stories of Lost Legends, Declassified Disasters, Modern Marvels, never-built Possibilitylands, and more… I’ve also written hundreds of quick-read Extra Features, and dozens of in-depth Special Features reserved just for those who support this project with Memberships.
Three years and hundreds in-depth stories later, I’m still proud of those evolving stories… but I think I see a bigger picture now. As simple as it may seem, my Park Paths series and my Comparing Kingdoms diagram seemed to make a lot of people happy, and change the way they thought about the parks they know so well. Then, I hand-drew over a hundred detailed ride layouts, trying to create a cohesive, colorful collection that would help “paint the picture” of the parks in a new way.
By now you might’ve noticed that Park Lore is all about seeing theme parks differently. In over a hundred in-depth stories, we’ve covered the tales of Lost Legends, Modern Marvels, Declassified Disasters, and never-built Possibilitylands from across the world and industry. In other words, I love an 8,000 word deep dive into the making of an Imagineering classic… but sometimes the best way to understand an attraction is to see how it all fits together.
Earlier this year, I published THEN & NOW – a collection of 50 hand-illustrated ride layouts to compare the before-and-after of Disney and Universal’s most legendary closed attractions and their modern-day replacements. You made my year by sharing those layouts, asking to use them in your own projects, and even becoming supporting Members at Park Lore for $2 a month or more to help sustain this ad-free, clickbait-free, quality-over-quantity theme park storytelling project.
Because of the support of Park Lore Members, I’m able to introduce my next batch of ride layouts that I hope can “paint the picture” of another subset of Disney Parks attractions – the ones shared between HERE & THERE. The sets of rides below reveal just how much rides can evolve as they travel around the world, adapting to new spaces, new parks, new budgets, and even new cultures.
If you’ve spent much time around here, you know than for a decade, I’ve been trying to “paint the picture” of attractions – how they came to be, what they’re like to experience, and how they evolve. Our interconnected, inclusive collections of ride histories include the stories of closed, classic Lost Legends, cutting-edge Modern Marvels, cringe-worthy Declassified Disasters, and never-built Possibilitylands – each of which (I hope!) helps spark memories and preserve these rides for future generations of fans.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then hopefully my next major project here at Park Lore makes sparking those memories a whole lot easier to do! I couldn’t be more excited to launch a new, growing, comprehensive, and interconnected portfolio of hand-drawn ride layouts representing attractions from around the globe! With over 100 layouts across three collections, I’m hopeful that these floor plans become a useful tool for all of us when it comes to telling the stories of the rides, parks, and industry we love.
(I’ve made the full, HD versions available on Park Lore’s Flickr with a CC BY-ND Creative Commons license so they can be shared and distributed.)
First up, THEN & NOW – a series of hand-drawn ride layouts dedicated to exploring how the same physical space can house vastly different experiences… Be warned that this series highlights closed, fan-favorite rides and their (sometimes inferior) replacements, so have your tissues ready. But if you can bear to use the slider in each pair to explore these spaces, you may be surprised the context it adds to both the before and after…
Counting a park’s dark rides isn’t easy, and it isn’t objective. Traditionally, a “dark ride” is a genre of amusement park ride wherein riders travel through indoor, painted or projected, theatrically-lit scenes. But in the 21st century, it’s a lot more complicated than that… So before we can count, we need to establish a definition…
Most theme park fans probably agree that at the end of the day, Disney Parks are special places; pretty agreeably, “the best of the best.” But if you think you’ve got nothing to learn, you won’t learn anything. So today, we want to honestly and sincerely look at 12 Universal Orlando Exclusives That Should Make Disney Parks Fans Jealous. These 12 rides, attractions, experiences, decisions, and differences that make Universal Orlando an incredible, astounding, and amazing destination that even Disney could learn a thing or two from…
Do you love armchair Imagineering, in-depth storytelling, and seeing the theme parks we love differently? Park Lore is an ad-free, quality-over-quantity, one-person project centered on building a world-class collection of the interconnected stories of theme park attractions, design projects, and industry explorations.
This feature is one that’s usually locked in our Member Vault, where Park Lore patrons can find hand-drawn art, armchair Imagineering walkthroughs, and other in-depth Special Features, as well as quick-read, just-for-fun Extra Features. Thanks to supporting Members, this feature is temporarily unlocked as a preview!
But if you value my mission to provide clickbait-free, ad-free deep dives and new ways to see the parks, consider becoming a supporting Member of Park Lore for as little as $2 / month. That support is what keeps this unique themed entertainment storytelling project open, ad-free, and available to all. Thank you!
