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The cost of a contemporary Disney attraction is around $100 million. The cost to run TSI is the cost of minimum wage raft operators and janitorial services, neither of which will change. The riverboat, itself, has larger maintenance costs with it but those are an order of magnitude smaller than...

Areas equivalent to TSI have been included in parks built by both Disney and their competitors for decades. This includes in Adventure Land at Shanghai Disneyland. These companies don't include these spaces without good business and design reasons for doing so. Although it's true that Cars is a...

I’m not sure what your point about the role of water is. Sure - DisneySea is great at using it - a few Cars waterfalls doesn’t compare. And yes, if it were up to me I wouldn’t have put FantasySprings in DisneySea. It belongs in TDL. But WDI and OLC at least understood that it didn’t fit with...

Fantasy Springs is almost completely isolated - by design - from Tokyo DisneySea. Independent of what you may or may not think about its success, it is a $1 billion+ expansion with multiple attractions and highly detailed environments. Well beyond what is proposed for Cars in even the most...

Although I agree with the general point, I don’t think the Tom Sawyer IP, if it can be called that, is at fault here. Many Disney parks contain low capacity play areas in this style and Disney (and its competitors for that matter) continue to build them with or without an attached IP. They’re...

The categories refer to whether an area is expected to suffer frequent flooding of if that area has conservation requirements attached to it. Flooding risks in some area are expensive but not impossible to mitigate. In other areas, there may not be a feasible mitigation at a cost that justifies...

The sad thing is that it might have been true each time it was said… and I’m afraid it might be true next time too.

My read of the concept art is a fairly small show building with rock work facing on-stage areas and primarily landscaping doing most of the remaining thematic work. I suspect many people are imaging a much more significant structure than will actually materialize. This is a D-ticket level...

Which would be great if “various regions of America” was the organizing design principle of Frontierland. Ironically, that’s more true of Disneyland - which doesn’t have a well defined and well publicized design principle. As others have pointed out, Tiana’s already bulldozed a lot of the...

The point that is being made is that beautiful settings aren’t a substitute for theme. No one doubts that WDI can sculpt concrete. It anything, they do too much of that. It’s often less expensive than a fully realized environment.

Right about “as decent a neighbor for these two extremely different things” is when this should have been nixed.

There’s zero analogy between this and Fantasy Springs. The latter is far more ambitious and, consequently, expensive. Again, however, no one is saying Disney can’t do good rock work and water falls. It’s the concept that is intrinsically flawed.

Marketing video of the (apparent) attraction vehicles in motion from the ride system manufacturer exists. Unless the speculation is wrong - which seems very unlikely given the close match between said marketing material, the concept itself, and the art depicting it - this simply isn’t a high...

I could be wrong but I don't think anyone is saying it will look especially bad. Disney is pretty good at rock work and waterfalls. It just doesn't belong in Frontierland or fit in the area it's replacing. Large amounts of rock work can look impressive and still not make for a pleasant...

I don't think these things are unrelated. Costs for modern day Disney (and Universal) attractions are very high which forces less ambitious and risk taking designs. It's only projects at the top end, like Forbidden Journey, that don't seem to face the same problem. If I had to guess, a larger...

As evidenced by Joe's instagram - and if you know any designers in any industry - they are artists and take this stuff seriously. That doesn't mean their managers do. Disney's core fans that also care about this stuff didn't imagine its importance. Disney actively cultivated the idea that...

His comments were more than the original facade at DCA wasn't especially 'hotel-like' and could be adapted to another theme. The arguably more hotel-like version at TDS is an almost identical building. The end-result is neither an improvement on the original nor fits especially well in...

I won't link directly to it since this forum has some strict rules about links, but: Most of his other public comments (that I know of) are about how the team approached delivering a good experience with the mandate they were given.

The closest parallel I know of is Joe's work on guardians at DCA. And despite leading the project, I don't believe he gave much in the way of a thoughtful defense of it in public. So it would depend on what motivates their opinions. As far as this goes, my view that Cars/ROA is a poorly...

To be clear - when describing the engineering side, I'm just referring to the clearly false claims about the state of the RoA itself that were made and repeated. Operational challenges are a more cogent explanation, although it's not an especially difficult or costly engineering challenge to...