Centauri Space Station
Well-Known Member
Nobody considers it a major offering. Its a cute filler that's usually not too long a wait. That's it.
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News Avatar Experience coming to Disneyland Resort
- Thread starter DCBaker
- Start date
PiratesMansion
Well-Known Member
The fixation on how much merchandise this franchise does or does not sell remains baffling to me. I ask again: do you really want a future in which the sole barometer of what gets built is how much merchandise is sold? Is that good for the parks or most people's enjoyment of the parks? No? Then stop asking this question.Well, if you say so kids.
But it seems very odd to me to spend all this money on park expansion for a franchise that doesn't sell chunks of plastic (LE Collectible!) and pajama sets and t-shirts and stuffed animals. Usually Disney/Pixar/Marvel/Star Wars stuff is all over that merchandise sales and plastic made in Communist China that you just gotta have or else your vacation is pointless.
One single E Ticket and a 5 minute long D Ticket boat ride did that?
I've never been a big fan of DAK and never spent much time there after my first two visits twenty years ago because I've been a member of the zoologically superior San Diego Zoo for decades, but if all it took to turn from a half-day park into a full-day park was one E Ticket and a D Ticket about a movie that doesn't sell merchandise, then what does that say about the park in general? Yikes!
In fairness, it wasn't JUST Pandora that bumped DAK's attendance. Pandora opened in conjunction with the Rivers of Light nighttime show, a nighttime version of Kilimanjaro Safaris, and projections on the Tree of Life. As a package it worked like gangbusters even if not everything was a home run.
What does or does not make something a full day park is kind of a pointless debate, but at the very least it expanded the length of stay and introduced some cool new offerings. The rides work pretty well for what they are, the area's nice, and somehow they made a land that everyone questioned seem to fit organically.
You haven't been there in 20 years, so you haven't seen with your own eyes the way that DAK has come into its own and filled out pretty nicely. Could it use more attractions? Absolutely, welcome to basically every Disney park in the US. But they've built it out intelligently and organically in a way that has largely continued to build on the park's strengths. It is the only Disney park in Florida that hasn't really been compromised in a major way. The Safari Park is great, not denying that, but I still think that DAK is the best Disney park in Florida and one that is underappreciated.
So are you saying that DCA has a respectable ride lineup? Because aside from sheer numbers I'd say I'd prefer what DAK has to anything at DCA. Sure DAK could use more, but let's not pretend that DCA has a blockbuster lineup of super high quality attractions either. They have RSR, a bunch of flat rides, and a bunch of stuff that isn't as good as it was seven years ago.
Again with Card Walker's Magic Kingdom...Card Walker built Epcot, not Magic Kingdom. I have never seen, and you have yet to produce, anything that definitively links those two things. Roy Disney championed Magic Kingdom, and the same team that built Disneyland built Magic Kingdom. If you have an issue with Magic Kingdom, take it up with them instead.
I don't think he was talking about wanting merchandise to be the barometer. Just commenting on what is likely a very realistic consideration. Chapek is gone, but he rose to the top overseeing the sales of all that merchandise. It's been a pretty high priority. And I bet those shoulder banshees have a pretty high profit margin.
And yes, compared with AK and Epcot, DCA has a pretty respectable ride lineup. We have visited all of those parks many times.
PiratesMansion
Well-Known Member
And I understand that with Disney merchandise is always going to be some sort of factor, but I feel like we are seeing evidence that the barometer determining what is or is not a success is changing, or has changed. They also have a highly successful land in Florida that people like and presumably moves at least some merch even if it's not at Star Wars or Marvel levels.I don't think he was talking about wanting merchandise to be the barometer. Just commenting on what is likely a very realistic consideration. Chapek is gone, but he rose to the top overseeing the sales of all that merchandise. It's been a pretty high priority. And I bet those shoulder banshees have a pretty high profit margin.
And yes, compared with AK and Epcot, DCA has a pretty respectable ride lineup. We have visited all of those parks many times.
The comparative worth of ride lineups is definitely subjective. And with that in mind, while DCA objectively has more rides than DAK and Epcot, I personally would take the DAK lineup over DCA. To me, it's a quality vs. quantity issue. I'm sure there's some bias there, because I have visited DCA a lot more than DAK and have grown very frustrated by the direction DCA has taken, and I enjoy Animal Kingdom more than most and feel it is genuinely underrated or overlooked by many people. I think KJ and EE make a better one-two punch than RSR and whatever the number two attraction at DCA would be. So I personally would take DAK's lineup over DCA's, even if I can recognize that many wouldn't.
Epcot though...it pains me to say, because there are a handful of things there I really like, but DCA might actually win over Epcot. What has happened to that park is just sad.
I don't think he was talking about wanting merchandise to be the barometer. Just commenting on what is likely a very realistic consideration. Chapek is gone, but he rose to the top overseeing the sales of all that merchandise. It's been a pretty high priority. And I bet those shoulder banshees have a pretty high profit margin.
This. This is by Iger and Chapek's design. They are the only ones with any sort of barometer. The rest were just talking about cultural impact.
Bob Iger can't even make a new ride in the states not based on a film or television series. So of course, it is a consideration.
PiratesMansion
Well-Known Member
Right. And cultural impact seems to either be there more than people want to believe, or the land works well enough in Florida that they're not worried about it (and almost certainly sells some merch as a bonus).
That's fair, however I don't think we are going to get more Avatar in AK, I think we are going to get more Avatar movies to keep their investment relevant.
Box office should not be the only reason an attraction or land gets built either.
And MK has two Blue Sky mini land expansions in the works for it, and not one of them is an original attraction.
Just like I don't want the merch do be the major barometer, i don't want the financial success of a movie to be either.
Hattieboxghost110
Well-Known Member
Welpers, a lot to unpack here. First off, when it comes to comparable rides at DCA & AK, I find it hard to believe that you actually prefer the AK version of the ride. For example, let's take an apples-to-apples comparison, 'Kali River Rapids' vs. 'Grizzly River Run.' They are both river rapid rides that serve a similar function at their respective park. You stated that you prefer what "DAK has to anything at DCA" which logically follows that you prefer KRR over GRR. To provide better context, below is a comparison between the two rides.
Kali Rivers Rapids at DAK
Grizzly River Run at DCA
If we're being intellectually honest, GRR is a clear winner from a thematic, pacing, thrills, length, and wet factor. DCA 1.0 certainly got a lot of things wrong, but GRR was not one of them.
Secondly, I think the contemporary notion that a theme park should only consist of exclusively E-Ticket attractions is dangerously misguided. Animal Kingdom perfectly encapsulates this wrong-headed thinking in theme park design. As of early 2023, DAK only has 7 rides: Dinosaur, Expedition Everest, Kilimanjaro Safaris, Kali River Rapids, Flight of Passage, Navi River Journey, and TriceraTop Spin. Feel free to correct me, but there are only 2 non-E ticket attractions out of the bunch. From of the 7 rides, my kiddos would only be able to ride 3 attractions that don't require a height requirement. The park severely lacks a well-balanced roster of attractions that can be enjoyed by different age groups, a slap in the face considering a standard 1-day ticket to DAK for the weekend is $154 per adult.
I'm worried for Epic Universe because it appears they are taking the Animal Kingdom/WDW approach of theme park design and that is a step backward IMHO.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge critic of the relatively recent decisions made at DCA, such as getting rid of 'Soarin' Over California" etc. But having a solid lineup of C, D, and E Ticket attractions enhances the park experience, it doesn't detract from it.
tcool123
Well-Known Member
It’s a good thing DAK has plenty of filler attractions!
- The Oasis Animal Trail
- Tough to be a Bug
- Discovery Island Trail
- Festival of the Lion King (one of the beat shows Disney Parks has ever put on imo)
- Gorilla Falls Trails
- Rafikis Planet Watch (Petting Zoo, Animal Exhibits and Animation Classes)
- Feathered Friends in Flight
- Maharaja Animal Trail
- Finding Nemo the Musical
- The parkwide Wilderness Explorers activities (not claiming this to be an attraction but a pleasant extra that adds on bringing interactivity and exploration into the park)
And of course the usual suspects of meet and greets and small scale entertainment of which both parks contain engaging and fun options.
DAK is more than just rides, part of its theme is the animals and ignoring them completely is a crime IMO. As a whole DAK in my eyes outperforms DCA with quality and engaging offerings many of which never require wait times nor height restrictions!
There is a reason that DAK is a favorite for many, and its not just an amazing roster of attractions (and Kali, I will give you that) but for the overall experience one receives
Professortango1
Well-Known Member
Do you not venture into WS? The sheer size of Epcot takes forever just to walk around it.
Professortango1
Well-Known Member
The trails are fun, but people want to go on rides at a theme park. Also the trails can be a bit inconsistent depending upon time of day, exhibits being closed, and luck.
I will also state that I found Festival of the Lion King to be one of the most overrated shows I have experienced. I had heard everyone gushing about this show. I walk through the beautifully themed streets of Harambe, steeped in gritty realism, to a warehouse where a guy in a Timon meet and greet costume poses to a pre-recorded track while 90's parade floats from Disneyland sit in the aisles. When the show opened with a pre-recorded version of Circle of Life's opening, I thought "oh no." My worst fears were confirmed with this potentially beautiful show turned out to be incredibly cartoony and lacking the ambiance the land excels at.
It might have worked much better at Camp Mickey Minnie, but in Harambe, it just feels like someone shoved a 90's Disneyland show into a hyper-real modern immersive land.
I also don't understand why Finding Nemo is in Dinoland.
Centauri Space Station
Well-Known Member
It’s a purpose built detailed building unlike camp Minnie Mickey where it was a hut
Professortango1
Well-Known Member
I'm aware. But the show doesn't fit the feel of the land and park that is in. The space looks great on the outside. Okay on the inside. But the show is the biggest problem. I was hoping for something that felt more authentic and drew on African performance. Instead, it was incredibly cartoony and inauthentic.
Robbiem
Well-Known Member
I wonder if this will be a joint development with another park. Avatarland would be IMO a nice addition to Hong Kong or the Paris studios (haven’t been to shanghai but I think the movies were big in mainland China so another possibility). We know how disney loves to share design costs
Hong Kong in particular would be a good fit. The park has fantastic greenery which would make pandora a good fit and could help to further differentiate it in the region from tokyo and shanghai
Hong Kong in particular would be a good fit. The park has fantastic greenery which would make pandora a good fit and could help to further differentiate it in the region from tokyo and shanghai
PiratesMansion
Well-Known Member
First off, welcome back! It's been a while.
I prefer the overall ride lineup and experience of DAK over DCA, yes. That doesn't necessarily mean every ride is better at DAK, as indeed Grizzly is much better than Kali. But river rapids rides aren't really going to sway me one way or anther, because I'm only going to do any of them if it's hot and I desperately want to get wet.
My preference of DAK's lineup over DCA's does not necessarily mean that I want nonstop E tickets. BOTH parks are horribly imbalanced in that regard.
DCA's lineup I find to be weak and shallow in spite of the fact that there's more rides than DAK, and there's precious little else to do at DCA other than the rides. At DAK I can go down the animal trails or enjoy the superior park atmosphere, see the Lion King show, etc. At DCA, the only thing other than rides really would be WOC (which is not good enough to compensate for all the work you need to put in to see it IMO) and Hyperion, which is currently vacant. There's almost nothing else. I mean, I'm sure the Redwood Creek is nice (genuinely unsure if I've actually ever been over there or not) and Animation is fine, but it's not as good as it was back when the zoetrope and the full walkthrough thing were available. Nothing I feel is good enough to be super repeatable, or variable in the way that watching animals can be.
Thematically, DAK is far stronger. Sure, it has Dinoland, which is trash. But it also has masterpiece themed areas in Africa, Asia, and Pandora, and pretty good areas in The Oasis and Discovery Island. At DCA, there are solid lands in BVS, Cars, and Grizzly Peak, but then? There's Hollywood, which has been terrible since the park opened, not that they seem to care about fixing it, and is done better an hour up the road. Avenger's Campus, which is far less pleasant than Bug's Land. Then there's Pixar Pier, which they ruined for no reason, and now they've also decided that Pacific Wharf needs to follow in PP's footsteps and become some bizarre IP mishmash fever dream. So it's all a bit jumbled, it's always been a bit jumbled, and they're going out of their way to make it worse.
Then the rides. As mentioned, Grizzly is great, but it's not something I'm going to want to do every time. There are lots of flat rides, yes, but sorry, I just don't care about them. I don't go to Disney parks to go on the same rides I could do at Six Flags for less money (exception: Mater's is a gem). RSR is fantastic, but there's really nothing else at its level. Mermaid and Monsters Inc have always underwhelmed me, and now that Monsters has Genie it's not something you can just do whenever and wait under 15 minutes either. Soarin Over the World to me is far inferior to SOC. Breakout I sort of like, but TOT fit better. I was never crazy about Screamin', but even so, the conversion to Incredicoaster really bothers me. Sky School is trash. Spider-Man is not only redundant but embarassing compared to a much older Spider-Man ride at Islands of Adventure. TSMM is fun but not essential. So really, I'm at the point where there are like two rides at DCA that I care about and am going to want to do every visit. If they ripped out everything else tomorrow it'd probably only merit a shrug from me.
By contrast, Kilimanjaro Safaris to me is an all time great attraction with a nice long ride time and something I can't do anywhere else. Everest is a great Disney coaster; not perfect, but less compromised in its current iteration than most of what's at DCA. Both Pandora rides are a bit flawed, but are more interesting than anything at DCA IMO. Should there be more there? Sure. Is everything there a home run? No. But there even if I threw out one of the Pandora rides, there are already more rides I care about at DAK, AND it's a much nicer place to spend the day. At least when the lines get long there are animals to look at, and other than the Pandora rides, DAK is honestly pretty chill, especially by WDW standards. And there's the added fact that DAK is my favorite Disney park in Florida and my number two Disney park in the country. DCA...is not.
So yes, I would take DAK over DCA any day of the week. Both parks have very flawed lineups that could be better balanced, but DAK's suits me better than DCA's, which I think is often given a pass because it has more attractions, which, again, is true, but let's be honest: a lot of that is from the Pier, and how many people here actually go and do all of those rides on a regular basis? I'm guessing a marginal number. So again I ask: is the lineup at DCA really solid, or does it just get a pass because it has a bunch of filler rides that no one really cares about unless they can be conveniently used in ride count discussions? If the ride count is inferior, at least Animal Kingdom has more than one truly dynamite knock out of a ride, something that can't be said, IMO, for DCA. Reasonable minds may disagree, but for me DCA's technically higher ride count (many of which are of dubious quality IMO) cannot mask the greater issues the park suffers from by comparison to the far more coherent Animal Kingdom, and for me that certainly includes the ride lineup.
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networkpro
Well-Known Member
- In the Parks
- Yes
So to equally meet your criteria, DCA should have mega-mansions and redwoods interspersed with homeless camps and wildfires.
PiratesMansion
Well-Known Member
I don't necessarily have a problem with the Lion King show. Maybe there's a little bit of a juxtaposition between the harsh reality of the Africa area and cartoony nature of a show based on an animated film, but not enough to bother me. I do think there's some weird stuff in there that gets glossed over a lot (why are we making animal noises? Do we NEED the Monkey gymnastics?), and I honestly prefer the Hong Kong version of the show, which I admittedly saw first, where it's in Adventureland and they drop some of the pretenses of the AK version and just do a book report of the movie. Maybe the book report approach seems a bit lazier on paper, but I don't feel like any of the stuff at WDW where they try to make it *more* than just a retelling of the movie necessarily adds anything. And the fact that they felt the need to preserve their ability to cart in mats from an old elementary school for the monkey gymnnastics meant that they don't have some of the staging upgrades HK got, so even though the theater is newer, at least some of the tech and presentation is older.
The Finding Nemo show, though, I've never liked. It reproduces the worst impulses of Disney Theatrical screen-to-stage adaptations to wild, undeserved applause. Furthermore, on discussion boards like these it's billed as one of the resorts signature must-see shows, but what is presented is something that's not dramatically better than something you would see at the Fantasyland Theater, and certainly doesn't compare to anything at Hyperion or Big Band Beat. Maybe that's an unfair burden to place onto a show that's being run in a theater that just cannot instantaneously become one of those big mega-theaters no matter how much I might wish for it to be, but that's how it's presented by both Disney themselves and WDW regulars, and from that perspective it just doesn't measure up. Magic Kingdom should have built that big theater off of Main Street so that they can actually have a legimately spectacular stage production in the way that DCA, SDL, and both Tokyo parks can; it's not like WDW can't afford it or that their guests wouldn't appreciate it. But why try if people will settle for what you've had forever, and people will simply believe that it's the best entertainment you are capable of?
tcool123
Well-Known Member
True but at the same time there is an extra expectation depending on the park while the goal for most is rides, at Animal Kingdom the other goal is animals. Another example is Epcot many’s ancillary goal is to eat or drink around the world or at SeaWorld where the ancillary goal is to (in the modern day) see the animals as well.
Given the wide ammount of exhibits for every otter not out, you could see the gorillas chasing a rabbit, tigers playing in the water, get pooped on by a bird in the aviary (has happened twice to me - memorable and awful). The nature of animals is unpredictable and its another understood (although often ignored by the public) principal of animal based attractions.
I’m not sure if anybody understands why it is there if I’m being honest, but the theater has always been a thematic enigma as it has also hosted a Jungle Book and Tarzan show - neither of which fit the theme. I think its just viewed as a generic theater by management.
Professortango1
Well-Known Member
I think that's a major issue I have. I hear of shows touted as one of Disney's best, but WDW shows all just feel like basic theme park shows. I was astounded when I witnessed their "Frozen" show in the "Hyperion." Our Frozen replacement for Aladdin was weak, but the WDW version made ours look Tony-worthy.
Aladdin wasn't perfect, but it was damn entertaining and you could feel the production value and care put into it.
I'm not sure if it is a talent pool issue as Southern California has a large stable of regional theatre actors and directors whereas Orlando has a much smaller scene.
PiratesMansion
Well-Known Member
I don't think it's a talent pool issue so much as a willingness on the part of WDW to invest in quality entertainment and infrastructure. Hollywood Studios and the other parks have similar issues with aged shows and theaters that could all use a refresh.
Additionally, WDW uses Actor's Equity as their main performer's union, and they are stricter than DLR's union (whose name I've forgotten) about what non-union members can do during performances, and so Disney, wanting to save a buck, will only hire Equity performers when the absolutely have to, resulting in a lot of entertainment that feels lifeless or deeply restrained.
So there are a few interrelated problems, but I wouldn't put them on the performers or talent pool; instead, it mostly comes back to WDW's deeply engrained cheapness.