I've had the day to think about this, and here are my rambling thoughts:
- I think this replacing the ROA is incredibly stupid. We will look back derisively on this for, well, 50+ years most likely. Ask me when I'm 78 years old, and I'll still think replacing the ROA is stupid.
- BLESSING OF SIZE. Do it all. Just do it somewhere else. Spend the money, make the land suitable (as the company was capable of doing in 1966), and EXPAND YOUR FREAKING PARKS WITHOUT REPLACING STUFF.
- I'm 28 years old, and I have nephews who are 7, 5, and 3, and all of us think Westerns are AWESOME! And Cowboys VS Indians is an authentic part of American history.
- The "fun map" released today is deliberately intended to assuage the fears of people who thought the water would be gone. It's NOT JUST ABOUT WATER. This looks like a very nice area on this map. But it doesn't belong right there.
- People really are twisting themselves up trying to defend this. But can anyone say it wouldn't be better if they had expanded the park? @Mr. Sullivan you're a reasonable fellow, can you answer this? Wouldn't it be better if they built both of these expansions outside the footprint of the park? Why can't it be this way?
Looking at things from completely outside of my own personal opinions, I would agree it would have been better as an expansion beyond the existing park because as I said, I’m still not sold on Cars.
That said, I don’t think it would have been better to do it as expansion while also not doing anything to address Frontierland. I feel and have long felt that Magic Kingdom’s Frontierland has been in need of dire assistance for decades. Very little about it works, especially in comparison to the vastly superior versions elsewhere.
Why it can’t be that way I don’t really know. I don’t know what motivates Disney to make their decisions. I can take some guesses, but I also know that I could guess 1 million things and there would be 1 million other things that I have no idea about that goes into what choice they make.
I could absolutely get behind Cars and Villains all being completely outside the existing park as their own thing. But I would nonetheless still support a transformation of Frontierland, and that includes replacing the river.
I agree there needs to be some water, but I would rather the water be a facet of a newly reimiagined take on the area than be a part of the existing River. I think the land is incredibly outdated and to be so large, they don’t do very much with it. I do not see a way to do what I feel needs to be done in Frontierland while also leaving the river as is.
My disagreements with Disney on this is their chosen IP. I do not disagree with the decisions to change Frontierland and change the River into something else. That is why I defend the concept. I am neither defending or disparaging the chosen IP completely because I have yet to see how it works or doesn’t work. I don’t have enough information. But I am overall skeptical of that specific choice. They’re going to have to justify that to me even though I agree with her decision to do something else with the river.
I know that that isn’t really a popular school of thought among parts of the parks fandom. In the past, I have been quite hostile to those who are upset. And that was wrong of me to do, because yes I can understand why losing the River hurts others even if it does not hurt me.
That said though, I don’t think that hurt should at the same time lead to someone completely closing themselves off to a valid wider discussion about elements of this that could be a positive for the park. I also don’t think that hurt should make anyone hand down a final verdict while we’re still years away from this opening. When this gets open and we can all see it and experience it and those folks still really hate it than I do consider that fair. Not everyone is going to like everything.
However, I do feel that even when one may not like something that does not preclude them from having a seat at the table and acknowledging some points that maybe bristle against how they feel but also maybe have some merit to them.
I don’t believe that any particular side of this question is definitively right or definitively wrong. I believe there have been points worth considering in favor of this and against this. And I think that a lot of this discussion could be made a lot easier on everyone if everyone was more willing to hear what the other has to say and consider points of view that may be don’t align with their own. And that includes myself. I have been guilty of not doing that.
At the end of the day, we’re all still talking about concepts. We have nothing tangible to really base a definitive feeling off of. There may be people who are in this thread defending this now, but when this opens, they may hate it. There may be people in this thread, who hate the idea now, but when this opens, they may really enjoy it. We really can’t know until it’s here.
So at the moment, yes I am very open to explaining why I think a transformation of Frontierland is a good idea. I am also open to hearing genuine discussions about why one thinks its not (I will not be entertainintng the behavior some of chosen to conduct themselves with as they do it though. That discussion needs to be respectful or I don’t want to have it. That’s not aimed at you, it’s about other folks here).
However, I am not going to sit here and say it with any degree of certainty that this particular idea is the correct way to do it. I don’t have enough information to say that. I can only say what about the concepts and ideas I support and what I am unsure about.