The skull design of the cabinet also makes little sense in the real world, unless we’re meant to believe that in addition to sailors and thieves (and antiques aficionados), pirates are whimsical craftsmen who infuse their self-styled branding into all the work they do. Similarly, why are there ornate carvings of POTC movie characters everywhere, rather than simple graffiti that was plausibly scratched in by a pirate? It doesn’t make the elements convincing, it makes them look like props.
Instead, the cabinetry could have been made from salvaged materials, like ship hatches and shutters. It could have used full-scale (or close enough to trick the eye) elements to convincingly feel like it’s a real object. It could have included wood joints to avoid the look of plywood, and it could have used angles that correlate to actual construction rather than a fanciful sculpture. Instead of looking like a real object, it’s fallen into WDI’s trap of too many layers of references getting in the way of simply making sense.
Well put. The issue I expressed, when Disney released its video highlighting the back bar, and still have today is the "spoon-feeding" nature of this sort of design. It's a back bar shaped (not deftly, but rather overtly and too-obviously) like a giant skull...and it has another small skull on it, up high. And in case you are even dumber than Disney apparently thinks its guests may be, a parrot who is wearing a skull on his hat will come out and talk to you. GET IT? This place is "pirate themed."
Is it "fun"? Sure. Mini golf courses are fun too. But given that this is Magic Kingdom's first bar, all the kid-friendly dressing gives the place a Joe Camel vibe...
Is it for kids? Is it for adults? Let's argue. Or let's face it, it's for adults to get a buzz on and not feel guilty bringing in their kids. (Because if you bring them into a real bar -- for adults -- you may have a problem.) The giant skull and cute parrot say it clearly: "you're in here, you know, for the kids."
I am well aware that the amusement industry has a history of cartoonish design...
Particularly from an era of amusement parks with concession operators, screaming at guests --
through design -- to try to attract them over to their ride or attraction, and not a competitor's, in the same way that "California Crazy" architecture hollered at drivers-by in the early 20th century...
In a competitive landscape, desperate means call for desperate measures. And even though -- for a moment -- this approach was celebrated at the most acclaimed levels of architecture, for example in the Postmodern works of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown...
Its case can be made out there -- in the real world of competition -- more so than in the captured world of the Magic Kingdom. Magic Kingdom is, mostly, a diegetic place. It's not screaming or panicked to conduct commerce with you (yet). Liberty Square is realistic, as a colonial town, and you don't see things quite like this:
Same with Frontierland, where luckily we don't yet have this...
Themes are generally allowed to play the long game, to envelop you with "realism" (as much as is realistic in a theme park). The park doesn't tend to treat its guests as dolts, and despite the decades-long criticisms of academic "cultural elites," the park doesn't actually clobber guests over the head with glaring semiotics and patronizing gambits, desperate to make its point. At least not at the level that's possible...
The back bar of the Beak & Barrel does that, even with the lights down low. And yet, in many things I've seen about this bar, it otherwise feels like it's trying to be diegetic...a real place built by and inhabited by pirates, filled with details and decor of believable scale and explanation. So I focus my criticism on that back bar -- which was
the thing they most wanted to showcase in that video a while back. I still think it's corny and unnecessary, though it may actually be an outlier of the place.
