TROPICAL AMERICA
Background
Okay, so let’s dig in. Pun intended.
As you know, when Animal Kingdom opened in 1998, the land located at the 4 o’clock position off of its “hub” was Dinoland, U.S.A. There’s no question that Dinoland was just as “realistic” and “textured” as the park’s Africa or Asia. But the world it brought to life was a whole lot closer to home by nature of recreating Florida.
Joe Rohde noted that at Animal Kingdom, “when you come upon animals, it is usually in the context of some story. In Africa that story ultimately reflects upon the question of resources, like ivory and rhino horn. Asia is chiefly concerned with habitat loss and habitat use and how animals and humans can live side-by-side; in Pandora, with pollution.” Dinoland had a context, too – the role of imagination, speculation, and pop culture in our relationship with animals. Fossils are just rocks, but Rohde notes, “We turn them back into dinosaurs by thinking about them.”
There’s a sort of good natured absurdity to the idea that gigantic reptiles once walked the Earth, and today, they’re the stuff of pajama sets, plush dolls, and animated films, right? Dinoland was meant to play with that humor. It was flush with narrative – about the interactions between fraternal and nerdy paleontology grad students drawn to some podunk town, the esteemed and academic Dino Institute that employed them, and the actual residents of “Diggs County” who bet on their town’s newfound fossil fame and turned it into a kitschy, roadside dino-tourist trap.
But even in its early days, Dinoland clearly made some fumbles. The land’s only ride (and indeed, the only dark ride in the entire park) was the Lost Legend: Countdown to Extinction – a ride that was, in a word, absolutely traumatizing for even the most dino-loving youngster. What’s worse, the ride famously copied-and-pasted the layout of Disneyland’s world-class Modern Marvel: Indiana Jones Adventure – a ride regularly understood as one of the best on Earth. Even two decades ago, Disney World fans were known to take to message boards and wish aloud that they’d just gotten a copy of Indy, instead.
Then, things arguably got worse. Clearly necessitated by evaluation suggesting that Animal Kingdom both lacked rides and desperately needed more for families, Dinoland received the park’s first serious expansion: 2001’s “Chester & Hester’s Dino-Rama.” Complete with a cartoon Dumbo-style spinner, an off-the-shelf wild mouse roller coaster, and a number of flashing midway games, the mini-land looked like a “cheap and cheerful” carnival built on the remains of an old gas station blacktop parking lot.
Of course, that was the point, and those in-the-know could doubtlessly preach about how the county fair was an on-the-nose pastiche of the same Americana and pop culture dino-dominance that underscored the rest of the land. But is any of that worth anything if 95% of guests haven’t bought into the backstory, instead perceiving the expansion as an actual cheap-out demonstrating the Walt Disney Company’s diminishing standards for its theme parks (which, by the way, was also happening at that time)? Even those who did “get the joke” tend to admit that the space felt out-of-place in an otherwise earnest, reverent park.
Long story short, despite the omnipresent popularity of dinosaurs (and indeed, the continued appeal and expansion of Jurassic Park at Universal Orlando down the street), Disney’s Dinoland never really hit the way the company hoped. For decades, fans basically armchair Imagineered transforming Dinoland into South America (which, obviously, would be a cleaner fit alongside the park’s Asia and Africa, anyway), making an even swap from Dinosaur to Indiana Jones Adventure and replacing the Dino-Rama carnival with anything else. It was a silly pipe dream… Until it… wasn’t?
At the 2022 D23 Expo, Parks Chairman Josh D’Amaro was short on actual announcements, but came with lots of Blue Sky ideas. In a cooly-received and incredibly awkward session of real time feedback, he displayed art that would’ve transformed Dinoland into a space celebrating Moana, while apparently transforming the Dinosaur ride into an attraction themed to Zootopia. A clear product of the thoughtless, IP-obsessed “Disney+ Parks” era, it… didn’t make sense.
Luckily, a change in leadership at Imagineering saw the plan interrupted. Instead, Dinoland is in the midst of a real-life transformation into a land called “Tropical Americas” – basically lumping together southern Central America and northern South America. Get it? Okay, okay, the incentive here is clear: to be able to swap Dinosaur for Indiana Jones Adventure (set in a Mayan temple), but to also be able to incorporate Disney’s sleeper hit of 2021, Encanto (culturally tied to Colombia), necessitating a sort of cross-continental, culturally-connected matchup.
Say what you will, but the “Tropical Americas” will be the first non-IP-based land built at a Disney Park in more than a decade (even if its contents are fully IP-based), which is also something to embrace. It’s been a long time since we’ve seen a land that is broad in its approach, allowing multiple IPs (and dare we say, IP-free attractions) to live within it.
So hold your tomatoes, but I do think that a “Tropical Americas” land will be a more natural fit for Animal Kingdom than Dinoland was – even if I recognize the importance of featuring dinosaurs in the park, and even if I know many Disney Parks fans will object. I might disagree on the specifics (and I can absolutely acknowledge that this park needs to add capacity instead of just replacing it), but for the sake of this build-out and its reasonableness, I’m willing to go along with the official plans for the most part and just “build-out” from there.
While Disney has released plenty of concept art around the new land, they haven’t gotten around to specific ride names or details as of the writing of this feature. As a result, I’ll take what we’ve seen and make a few guesses as part of our dreamy Build-Out, layering additional experiences for the sake of Blue-Sky-ness…
Build-Out
Just as the park’s Africa is incarnate as the village of Harambe, Asia as the kingdom of Anandapur, and Pandora as the Valley of Mo’ara, the Tropical Americas will come to life as the “in-universe” town of Pueblo Esperanza – “Village of Hope.”
The changeover from Dinoland to Tropical Americas is interesting because it’s a real life example of what armchair Imagineers like me try very hard to do – to make our designs reasonable by acknowledging that it’s the rare effort that’s a true “green field” project. In the real world reimagining now underway, Imagineers must preserve the three Rs: restaurants, restrooms, and retail; they have to preserve backstage access; avoid interrupting power or water infrastructure; to re-use all the ride hardware they can.
So I don’t have to start from scratch; real Imagineers have already done some heavy lifting here. For example, just as we discussed Animal Kingdom’s propensity for letting you actually get lost, Dinoland sort of dropped you down in an odd little pocket of space without any clue how to get to the land’s E-Ticket ride. You can already see via concept art how Imagineers are trying to retroactively turn the land’s entry into a “Main Street” of sorts, with a new entry arch, clocktower, and accessory structures lining the path to direct you into the land. From there, what once was a plot of trees adding further discombobulation is becoming a central fountain, establishing a navigational “town square.”
The land’s Restaurantosaurus will also be easy enough to reclad as a Central American restaurant on the plaza. I took a swing and called it CAFÉ ESPERANZA. (For better or worse, the Dinoland version fulfilled the park’s inevitable cheeseburgers-and-chicken-strips requirement. Here’s hoping the Tropical Americas version can be a little more creative, vibrant, and cultural.)
From there, the enchanted “Casita” from Encanto will be found up on a hillside to the left. It’s a beautiful structure. And from the moment this magical, “living” home made its debut on posters for the film, it felt pretty inevitable that this is how the IP-mandated American parks would finally receive their version of Hong Kong Disneyland’s Modern Marvel: Mystic Manor.
That said, as of this feature’s publication, Disney hasn’t released many details about the Encanto attraction, including its name or ride system. I called it LA CASITA ENCANTADA. Despite rumors that it’ll be a boat ride, it seems highly likely it’ll end up being a trackless dark ride. (The model Disney displayed at D23 includes a showbuilding much larger than Mystic Manor’s, though, suggesting that even if it is trackless, it probably won’t just copy the Hong Kong ride’s layout.)
To make Encanto at least kinda-sorta fit the brief of Animal Kingdom, we know that this ride will invite us into the Madrigal’s magical home on the day that young Antonio received his generationally-prophesied “gift” of speaking to animals. One can imagine that the hoard of South American animals will likely escape from Antonio’s room, requiring that guests be dispatched through the house’s many magically-expanding, musically-inclined chambers to find and return them all, giving each family member a chance to display their speciality gift.
In any case, there’s no question that Animal Kingdom needs more dark rides, more for families, and yes (gulp) more “Disney”, so this attraction (in both the real world and in my build-out) fulfills a necessary part of the park’s punch list… and considering that all it “cost” was the Dino-Rama carnival (which lost its coaster years ago and was limping along with just a spinner and midway games), can’t be anything but a win.
Also located right in town is a new flat ride. Disney has already laid the groundwork of “storytelling” behind the new carousel that’ll serve Animal Kingdom, here wrapped in the story of Pueblo Esperanza by introducing an unseen woodcarver who created each of the ride’s ridable figures. Never mind that (in true Disney-of-the-2020s style) this artisan woodcarver in a remote village somewhere in the Southern hemisphere has painstakingly, exclusively carved stylized Disney and Pixar characters for the town’s carousel… an act that would trigger a cease-and-desist from the Walt Disney Company with such speed that Disney would personally charter a private plane for the postal carrier delivering it…
I’m sure that the results will be both adorable and adored, but for the sake of my Build-Out, let’s leave the carousel while pretending that we could get away with the carved creatures being Central- and South American animals, not animated ones. (Indeed, if that happened, it would make this carousel the first IP-free major attraction at a U.S. Disney Park since 2006!) Since Disney hasn’t named this ride, we’ll call it GRAN CARRUSEL.
For those of us who lurked around Disney message boards in the 2000s, it’s sort of like having fan-fiction brought to life to see the Dino Institute’s domed rotunda structure become a Mayan temple. (It also at least somewhat resolves the issue caused by Dinosaur being “hidden” in a tucked away corner of the land, because now, narratively, these are the “ruins” outside of town, so it makes sense that they’re a bit off-the-beaten-path. It’s a slightly clumsy way of doing what Tokyo DisneySea’s Lost River Delta does beautifully, separating the “modern” from the “ancient.” Speaking of which, Indiana Jones‘ presence indicates that the Tropical Americas will be set in or about the 1930s, whereas Africa and Asia are set in the present.)
Despite the fact that Dinosaur and Indiana Jones Adventure do share nearly-identical layouts, no one would seriously expect Animal Kingdom’s ride to transform into Disneyland’s. Structurally, retroactively recreating California’s physical show scenes – including the legendary “Big Room” or the suspension bridge across it – would take such substantial infrastructure work, it probably wouldn’t be worth preserving the existing (25 year old) ride system at all.
Instead, it’s likely that the transformation will salvage and redress Dinosaur’s existing show spaces, meaning you should expect more claustrophobic corridors and dark caverns rather than the sweeping vistas and gigantic spaces in Disneyland. And that’s okay! Disney is proudly declaring that Animal Kingdom’s Adventure will be distinct from Disneyland’s or Tokyo DisneySea’s – even though the latter is also set in South America. Instead, they promise that this version of the ride – like Encanto – will adapt to Animal Kingdom’s themes by becoming a quest for a mythical Mayan creature said to be sleeping deep in the ancient, undisturbed temple.
Side note: it’ll be interesting to see how Disney adapts Indiana Jones to its current corporate push for inclusivity. Given Disney’s earnest, justified, but occasionally overwrought efforts to avoid cultural appropriation or simplified stereotypes, we’ll wait to see how a pulpy 1930s adventure ride ostensibly borrowing from a real culture’s myths can still be big, loud, and fun. Indiana Jones ain’t National Geographic. (Almost certainly, the Disneyland ride is on Imagineering’s shortlist to “fix” in that regard, so it’s surprising that they’d potentially double down on Indy’s inherent… Indy-ness.)
For my part, I called the ride INDIANA JONES ADVENTURE: TEMPLE OF THE FEATHERED SERPENT. It seems exceedingly unlikely that Disney would draw upon the real mythical Quetzalcoatl that serves as a major deity in Mesoamerican religions… but surely, the creature stands to be an “imagined animal” icon of the park if it’s done right, standing alongside the Yeti.
Speaking of unlikely, I have added a second thrill ride to this “ancient” sector of the land. Given that I’ve never stopped mourning the ultra-mysterious Lost Legend – TOMB RAIDER: The Ride, it’ll be no surprise that I’ve daydreamed of incorporating a smaller suspended Top Spin model into the land. Even though these nauseating carnival rides are flickering out of existence around the globe, I can’t get over the way these rides can be beautifully synched to water fountains, fire effects, and music, making them as fun to watch as they are to ride.
Top Spins feels like a real challenge or trial in a way that I think is compelling for a park like Animal Kingdom – a real “man versus nature” experience, strapping into an ancient device and facing the elements head-on. I called this version FIREFALL, and positioned it in front of a larger companion to the new Dino Institute-turned-temple creating a clear “weenie” for the land from its entry and a compelling backdrop for the flipping flat ride and the multi-tiered viewing area embedded in the rainforest in front of it.
If there’s one thing we haven’t heard much about for the Tropical Americas land, it’s animals. Dinoland itself housed just one (an American crocodile – which is fairly funny given that, evolutionarily, a chicken is more closely related to a T. rex than a crocodile is). Indeed, some are becoming worried that the Tropical Americas won’t bother to have animals at all. (It wouldn’t be much of a surprise. Surely modern Disney has at least considered that it could do away with all the animals except those on Kilimanjaro Safaris and most guests would be none the wiser.)
But I’ve tried my best to include a few: toucans in the town square, alpaca in a pen adjacent to the restaurant, nocturnal bats in the new, faux temple behind the Top Spin, and capybara in a habitat accessed from the Encanto plaza. I’m no zoologist, but I hoped that these animals would need relatively small support facilities – enough to wedge into the existing land’s footprint – versus something like jaguars or pumas.
Lastly, I have expanded this land’s reach to include the oddly standalone Theater in the Wild (currently home to “Finding Nemo: The Big Blue… and Beyond!”), which I’ve renamed the Teatro del Pueblo. Despite technically being within the purview of Tropical America, I don’t think it should limit or restrict what can happen there. Rather, I think that the productions the theater hosts can now just be stylized and contextualized as the craftsmanship of local storytellers and puppeteers, beginning with “Up: A Musical Adventure”!
NEW! TROPICAL AMERICA
RIDES
- Indiana Jones Adventure: Temple of the Feathered Serpent (thrilling EMV dark ride through an ancient Mayan temple in search of a legendary creature)
- La Casita Encantada (family dark ride and animal search through the enchanted musical home of the Madrigals from Encanto)
- Gran Carrusel (carousel of Central and South American animals)
- Firefall (suspended HUSS top spin with music, fire, and water effects)
ATTRACTIONS
- Teatro del Pueblo Presents Up: A Musical Adventure (1500-seat live stage theater)
- Animal Viewing Locations (toucan, bars, capybara, alpacas)
RESTAURANTS
- Café Esperanza (QS) (formerly Restaurantosaurus)
When it’s all said and done, this “reimagined” land would end up with two substantial new attractions. And though it offers far more in the way of IP than Africa or Asia, I think it fits alongside them nonetheless.
Having recently watched Hoppers, one of the first things I thought coming out of it is how incredible a fit it is for Animal Kingdom! Unlike movies such as Zootopia, it really fits the themes of the park, with our connection with animals and nature being one of its main themes. I think a Hoppers show would be perfect in the Tree Of Life theater, much better than the awful Zootopia show that’s in the theater now. The story for the attraction can be set up so easily as well, as it could be about Mabel and the scientists she’s working with showcasing a new Hoppers program to guests that gets them up and close with the animals! Putting Hoppers here could even work for Disney as a brand builder, since the movie is looking to be a genuine box office success! It is insane how perfect Hoppers and Animal Kingdom fit together, it almost feel purposeful!
I just wanna say I love this Animal Kingdom build-out, especially the Gravity Falls area. Including it was a brilliant idea! I’m just bummed there’s a lack of extinct animals in your version of the park.
I totally agree! When I sketched out the first ideas that would evolve into this Build-Out more than a decade ago, I thought Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur (which wasn’t out yet) might be a good way to do that. That tells you how long these ideas sort of lingered before I had Park Lore to put them down on paper. In retrospect, even if The Good Dinosaur had been a success, putting it here would’ve done the thing we try to avoid with Animal Kingdom, which is assuming that just because a movie has animals, it’s about animals.
The other obvious problem is that Universal owns Jurassic Park and leverages it heavily in their parks right up the road. Jurassic Park brings dinosaurs to our world in a way that’s very smart and perfect for a theme park. Sure it was meant to be a sort of dystopian sci-fi story about the hubris of man, but ultimately the setting of a theme park filled with dinosaurs still lets us adore and revere them as animals. It works really well. It gives Universal de facto “ownership” over the T. rex, and the Velociraptor, and “dinosaurs getting loose.” And it puts Disney on its back foot. Sort of like if Universal decided they wanted to start a line of animated Princesses. Like, sure, I guess you can try… but you’re never, ever going to supplant the pop culture image of that genre that’s held by your competitor.
If Jurassic Park brings dinosaurs to our world, then the logical inverse is that we visit theirs. The “problem” there has always been “theme-park-ability” – like, but where are the restrooms? The restaurants? How do you sell retail in a world that exists 65 million years before humans? I think you could do it by embracing the Dino Institute frame story… Perhaps you enter the land through a Chronotech portal that bridges us back in time to a dino-reserve operated by the Dino Institute. That would give us our needed infrastructure – restroom pods, and a futurustic pop-up canteen for Dino Institute researchers, and the frame story we need to have “rides” and “laboratories.” The problem is that even though that’s the inverse of Jurassic Park, I’m not sure it would read much different. It would still fundamentally be a dinosaur theme park.
Which is why it’s so brilliant that Dinoland U.S.A. avoided the trope altogether and found another way to explore how we as humans adore and revere dinosaurs, you know? Animal Kingdom is ultimately a park about us. That’s why it was such a smart idea to have a Dinoland so uniquely about something grounded (the absurdity of giant reptiles once being the dominant life on Earth, and now being plush animals and pajama sets and cartoons)… So even if that was lost on a lot of people (which, don’t get me wrong, is ultimately the fault of storytellers whose theme was obviously not conveyed or not connected to audiences), it was such a good idea that it’s hard to decide how else Disney can “own” dinosaurs with Jurassic Park a few miles away at Universal.
Thanks for checking this out!
The original concept for The Good Dinosaur posited that the creatures never went extinct, and lived alongside humans in a more egalitarian society.
That could be an interesting approach to bring prehistoric creatures to the park.
It’s an interesting idea! My only “worry” about that is the “dinosaurs & humans coexisting” thing, specifically as it relates to Animal Kingdom. Joe Rohde has talked about how when you visit Animal Kingdom, you are in a story, but not a fantasy. Even Pandora uses the fantastic to examine the real, with messages about biodiversity, indigenous people, keystone species, etc. So while I think there’s a compelling case for The Good Dinosaur’s sort of multiversal setup of “What if the meteor didn’t hit?”, I think there’s also a delicacy in putting that sort of thing in a park people do associate with real information. A YouGov poll a decade ago found that more than 40% of Americans think dinosaurs and humans coexisted (and unfortunately I’d wager that number has increased since! 🙃). Does Disney have a moral obligation to use its pop culture powers to develop a scientifically literate society? Probably, no… but it’s still something that’s probably worth considering specifically in Animal Kingdom! haha.
Brilliant, but I really do think that prehistoric animals deserve some real representation in a park like Animal Kingdom, though I wouldn’t change anything about this fantastic build-out.
Is there nowhere you could ‘squeeze in’ an expansion land for some of the most beloved creatures of all-time?
These are all fantastic and so well-crafted! Any plans for an Epcot one? Excited to see what you would concoct up
Hi Matt! Thanks for checking this out! An EPCOT build-out is probably my most-requested on social media! I have avoided it because I don’t think an EPCOT build-out meshes with my style, which is basically an overhead map. The “pavilion” situation makes it hard to do EPCOT that way, because the physical buildings maybe wouldn’t change? So it would just be the existing park but labeled differently? I don’t know…
I have been quietly working on something else, which is a sort of new age, next generation, what-if-a-park-like-EPCOT-were-built-today concept… so keep an eye out for that! Until then, thank you so much for reading!
I love these arm-chair imagineering posts, but I have what might possibly be a dumb question: How do you make the custom maps you have here? And do you have any tips and tricks for making your own? I’ve always wanted to design my own theme park like this but I don’t really know where to start!
Not a dumb question at all. I hand-drawn these on an iPad using the Procreate program and an Apple Pencil. I usually start by drawing on top of the existing park. I then do a lot of work to make sure things are at least reasonably scaled by looking back and forth at existing parks or showbuildings and using a 1:1 scale. And of course, contextualizing all of that in new layouts and pathways and backstage access. None of it is scientific or real (this isn’t actually my day job and I don’t know what I’m doing!) but it’s fun and, again, at least “reasonable” in terms of access roads, cast infrastructure, etc. It takes weeks to make one, but you can see an example of the process in this video here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qub3MDdxvao&t=1848s
Hey Brian, I have a suggestion. Can you please do another version of Animal Kingdom Armchair Imagineering, this time with a Lion King land and Dinosaur staying, and also an original park for Walt Disney World with lands based on Aladdin, The Little Mermaid, The Great Mouse Detective, Zootopia, Beauty and The Beast, Moana and Emperor’s New Groove / Atlantis The Lost Empire please?
Also, I love this idea you’ve done!!! It is brilliant!!!
Thanks for checking this out, and for these suggestions! For me, I wouldn’t probably come up with another version of Animal Kingdom for a few reasons. One is that I want to basically have one build-out of each park as my sort of definitive “version.” I just wouldn’t want to have two or three or four versions of each park. And I wouldn’t include a Lion King land in Animal Kingdom if I were given creative control because ultimately, Lion King has the same problem as Zootopia – it has animals, but it’s not about animals. It’s a parable for human experiences that’s no more about animals than Frozen would be if Anna and Elsa were designed as arctic foxes instead of humans. To my thinking, Lion King is used perfectly in the park as it is in Africa… as an excuse to celebrate African arts and storytelling. It becomes diegetic in that the people of Harambe are celebrating the story of the Lion King, which makes sense in the context of Animal Kingdom whereas a land of cartoon animals would not.
Your ideas for a new park sound really cool, and very specific! I did come up with a concept park I called Disney’s Fantastic Worlds you might enjoy. As for this specific arrangement of IP, I totally encourage you to sketch it out and see what you can come up with! Hope you do, and share it if you do!
I think if the pandora improvements, the Bugs land, and the riverboats/nighttime show happened, it would already be “complete” even before the fantasia gardens or other more blue sky stuff. Chester and Hester sought to “add capacity” but did so in a cheap way. Bugs land, if in right context, could be lower cost and add a ton of children’s capacity. Animal Kingdom doesn’t have a shortage of E tickets. It has a shortage of smaller, low-to-no wait experiences.
Can you next one be universal?
Amazing gravity falls but you should have added bill in the park
He’s there on the map, just like other creatures. 😉 He can visited in stone down a little discrete wooded trail.
I noticed that the rides for your buildout of Tropical America are the same as the rides you made for your build-out of Hollywood Studios. I think you should replace the ones in your build-out in Hollywood Studios with a Monsters, Inc. land instead.
Yep, you’re right! I designed that build-out of Hollywood Studios long before these changes to Animal Kingdom were greenlit, so it’s sort of wild that I got the mix of Indiana Jones and Encanto “right” – just at the wrong park. Haha! I think you’ll see me sweep back through that Hollywood Studios build-out eventually and do some reorganizing. I was never 100% happy with the flow that inserted an Incredibles land right between a 1930s Hollywood and a 1930s Walt Disney Studios… something seemed off about that flow, so maybe this is a chance to fix it.
Once again, you absolutely blew this out of the water! I love the Mythica, Gravity Falls, and Bugs Land combo, and the map is inspiring as always. A bit funny of a recurring joke though, is it just me or has every single buildout you’ve made (except HS) specifically include an Aquatopia-inspired ride, with the word “Skimmers” in it? Definitely enamored with the word lol
Additionally, aside from Ideal Buildout you might want to check out a few other amazing armchair Imagineering projects/blogs on the web for inspiration (if you haven’t already!) – this includes Imagineerland, DisneySky (Complete and Restored), and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice Season 8: Magic Journeys (one of many armchair Imagineering competitions). They’re all worth checking out!
I would recommend a Lion King land for Animal Kingdom. In my opinion, it really fits the theme
I think Lion King is present in Animal Kingdom in the best way it could be – drawing on its music that draws upon the “Circle of Life,” wrapped in a show that’s “decorated” with the artistry and culture of African artisans. Otherwise, I think the high bar to entry that “guards” Animal Kingdom would prevent Lion King from being included as a land or a dark ride.
Lion King is obviously a fantastic film, but I think it’s really not so different than Zootopia in that is has animals, but is not about animals. The characters could just as easily have been designed to look like humans, telling a “coming of age” story about a young boy who loses his family and is set loose in the world to find his way. The fact that its characters are stylized as lions adds a lot to the film, but it doesn’t actually make it have anything to do Animal Kingdom’s big idea – “the untradeable value of nature.” Joe Rohde’s thinking is that the park’s Africa is primarily concerned with resources – how the people of Harambe think industriously to make the most of what they have, and that they have decided to value the rhino over the horn. That’s big, deep stuff that’s dealing with human’s relationship with nature. Even though there are animals in it, The Lion King isn’t about that.
Thanks for checking this out!
As a huge theme park fan and a massive Gravity Falls fan, I adore the Gravity Falls land you made for the park! However, there are a few lore notes that I have to give about Strange Dimensions ride. Firstly, the strange creatures didn’t come from the portal. They were always in Gravity Falls, even before the portal was built, and were all at Gravity Falls because of the Law Of Weirdness Magnetism. Secondly, the portal was first built in order to get Bill Cipher and his pals to our dimension so he can start Weirdmageddon. So basically, if we reopen the portal in this ride, if this ride follows canon we should be starting the apocalypse!
THANK YOU! Like I said, this is not an IP I’m super familiar with! I have changed around the description into something more generic… but please feel free to let me know what the ride’s story should be and I’ll update it! Hahaha!
I asked the Gravity Falls subreddit on what a potential story for a Gravity Falls ride could be and they mainly said either a tour of the shack or a ride based on Weirdmageddon. Honestly, I don’t love either of those ideas. A simple tour of the shack is too quaint and small scaled for the type of E-Ticket you’re proposing here. I have always thought that a tour of the shack could be the queue of the ride, as you see the fake creatures made as the shack’s attractions while on the line, with an animatronic Stan or Soos (similar to the animatronic Mr. Potato Head from Toy Story Mania) presenting the the shack’s “wonders.” As for the idea for a ride that takes place during Weirdmageddon, I find it hard to make it work as part of the land’s timeline. There was no fair at all when Weirdmageddon started and Dipper and Mabel canonically don’t return to the shack until three days after Weirdmageddon started. Plus, we have to spoil the ending of the Weirdmageddon arc in order for the ride to have a satisfying ending. (To be fair, we pretty much have to spoil the existence of a certain character that the show keeps as a mystery for most of the show anyways, since I kinda feel like the land should take place in the summer after Dipper and Mabel’s original summer, and you can’t really do that without having that character appear.) However, I have come up with an idea that I think can work. In the Gravity Falls graphic novel Lost Legends, it is revealed that there are rifts that have opened in Gravity Falls after Weirdmageddon ended, rifts that can travel to other dimensions when someone goes inside of it. While we see the Pines fix and close one of these rifts in the graphic novel, it has not been confirmed that they closed all of the rifts, or that rifts have stopped appearing, so we can work with that. The Pines family can introduce themselves to the guests in the pre-show, and then in that pre-show we can have a character (probably Soos or Waddles) get sucked into a rift. Now we have to join the Pines and go into the rift and through the multiverse in order to save them. When it comes to what universes we go to however, I’m kinda stumped. I feel like the universes they go to have to be both relevant to the show and relevant to the themes of Animal Kingdom. I assume that most of these universes will be made just for the attraction, as the actual show never really goes dimension hopping itself, instead bringing characters from other dimensions such as Bill into our world. And even dimensions mentioned in supplemental material like the books are more sci-fi like worlds that don’t fit in Animal Kingdom at all. I had the idea of maybe crossing over with the shows Amphibia and The Owl House, shows that have basically acted as Gravity Falls’ spiritual successors, traveling to their dimensions Jimmy Neutron: Nicktoon Blast style, since I feel like those worlds fit Animal Kingdom quite well, but those shows are even more niche than Gravity Falls, making it kind of a hard sell. However, I do know that I want the last dimension they enter to be a parallel universe where the Pines family lost against Bill into Weirdmageddon. The new Gravity Falls book called The Book Of Bill confirmed that there are parallel universes that exist where the Pines family lost, so it’s a way we can have the incredibly popular and iconic Bill Cipher in the ride and go through Weirdmageddon without breaking canon! Of course, we end the ride with them barely escaping Bill, returning to their home dimension, closing the rift, and congratulating us on a job well done! My ride idea isn’t perfect, and we still need to figure out what will be the other dimensions that the characters will go through, but I feel like I have found a way to preserve your idea of traveling the multiverse with the Gravity Falls cast, without breaking the lore and canon this time!
By the way, if you want to see what other people answered on my post about what a Gravity Falls ride should be like, here’s the post: https://www.reddit.com/r/gravityfalls/comments/1gi5341/if_gravity_falls_had_a_land_in_disney_world_how/
My personal idea for a Gravity Falls ride is a “Mystery Tour” similar to the one stated in the post above with a new E-ticket focus. The idea is that Stan is testing out a new automated golf-cart mystery tour (so he doesn’t have to drive people around/pay anyone to drive people around) that will go through setup portions of the surrounding forest with cheap attractions and replicas. Soos is remotely controlling the test carts that you ride on (after going through the queue that is the Mystery Shack itself) and you load up “outside” at night for the tour. The tour goes pretty well and is “boring” until Dipper and Mabel appear over the radio and tell Soos that the tour doesn’t show anything real and to let the passengers go to some real interesting (yet safe) areas where we can find things. Unfortunately, one monster from the show (you can probably pick which one but maybe something like the Gobblewonker or bring back the dinosaurs) is a lot more dangerous than expected as you go on a high speed chase through the forest before outmaneuvering with Soos’s help allowing you to get back to the Shack.