Agree or disagree, that is a very thought provoking post.
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Fully Immersive Lands...Are They Played Out Already?
- Thread starter Sundown
- Start date
Twirlnhurl
Well-Known Member
I couldn't agree more about the existence of a distinction between realism and immersion. At the end of the day, I think there is a place for both, but the pendulum is definitely further in the realism direction than I prefer.
The realism of DAK is definitely one of the reasons I find myself wanting to go there less than the other parks.
I sort of suspect the presence of attraction writers is at least partly to blame for this shift to realism. It is my experience that the presence of writers in the early stages of attraction development nudges themed entertainment to have narrative arcs when in previous generation attractions were more likely to simply build in spectacle or be idiosyncratic.
I believe that written descriptions of rides like Pirates or Mansion were made long after the outline and structure of the attractions were pretty well formed.
I have met and worked with attraction writers, and I want to be clear that I have only ever had positive experiences with them. So don't interpret this to mean that I think they are bad at their jobs. I just think it bakes into the attraction a sense of realism that is less inevitable if an attraction is storyboarded by artists before writers are brought in.
Incomudro
Well-Known Member
All of the older attractions have the same realism that Pandora and Galaxy's Edge have.
The only difference is that areas like Pandora, GE and Potter more completely shut out the other lands.
I don't see how these more immersive lands prevent us from creating our own stories or ideas about them anymore than Frontier Land or Adventure Land - or any other land does.
If anything the problem if you will with these exclusive lands is that outside of the view - they don't differentiate themselves enough from the way Disney and Uni does what they do.
Mickeyboof
Well-Known Member
Flight of Passage begins with a 20 minute pre show explaining quite literally every minuscule detail involved with how you’re going to “fly” on the back of a “banshee.”
Gringotts doesn’t even let us enjoy the thrills of the bank escape without stopping us every possible moment to show us action, instead of inviting us into action.
Even Mystic Manor doesn’t let us weave our own stories. We know EXACTLY who owns the house, EXACTLY what the magic does, we even know EXACTLY what the ride vehicles history is. Comparatively- Haunted Mansion beckons us in with a poem, a promise of the macabre, and surprises us with song and dance.
Even Soarin in Tokyo just got a lengthy story pasted to it, which explains who created the vehicle, what the vehicle does, what you’re going to do, where you are, who you are, ect. It’s exhausting.
Older lands are also well isolated from each other. Disneyland’s Frointerland cannot be seen from Fantasyland. Fantasyland doesn’t bleed into New Orleans.
“Containment” isn’t the qualifier of an “immersive” land, as mostly all the lands are well contained.
Pirates is absolutely NOT realistic. It doesn’t even adhere to the logic of time. Modern attractions and lands cannot seem to escape time, nor are they interested in letting the guests piece together some of the logic for themselves.
Here’s an example: Disneyland Paris. Disneyland Paris Frointerland has more identifiers and narrative than any of the other Castle Parks. Frointerland here has story as designed by the Imagineers, but they left more unsaid than written.
My story, which might be different than others, is that Ravenswood did come to Thundermesa, but the house was not his construction. There is a changing picture in the portrait gallery of the dueling men in front of Phantom Manor. My story is that Ravenswood actually cheated the real owner, and “won” the house. Perhaps he won the dead man’s girl too, for the next item hanging is a marriage certificate. To stand at the front door of Phantom Manor and look out, you see Ravenswood’s empire. An empire built NOT by hardwork, but by cheating. You can imagine how it would have looked in its heyday! But now it’s taken by spirits and run by outlaws.
But this is just my interpretation.
Let’s now look at Galaxy’s Edge. In my mind, Oga’s cantina is run by a sweet old lady... who would blast your head off clean in a battle. But the imagineers don’t like that. Oga is actually some big alien beast. It’s written for me.
The Falcon. I imagine Han or Chewie parked it there... I’m going to go steal it for a mission! I’m going to cheat it from them! I’ll surely bring it back...
Just kidding. Han died, Chewie is renting the falcon out to Hondo, who is hiring me to smuggle containers of Coaxium for the Resistance but Hondo is somehow making money off of it (is he helping the Resistance, or is he smuggling??). It’s been written for me.
There’s so much logic. There’s so much writing. And there’s NO ROOM for my imagination. We are being spoonfed.
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Parker in NYC
Well-Known Member
No.
Really good points, @Mickeyboof. You're right. "Realistic" is the most apt. I was trying to get to that by saying "Fully Immersive". But "realistic" works!
Victor Kelly
Well-Known Member
The problem with modern life is people do not know what is going on unless they are spoon fed everything from their phones. So the Imagineers had to dumb down everything and give people everything because they lack imagination.
For example, when I was a kid riding Snow Whites Scary Adventures I knew whose point of view we were seeing. Same with Peter Pans Flight. Back then we had to think for ourselves.
I cannot fathom what walking through a land with no background music is like. That is why movies constantly have music playing in the background. It sets the tone, the environment, the emotion. Universal opened without background music, that mistake was fixed quickly.
yensidtlaw1969
Well-Known Member
The issue that I take with that is that rides that function that way like Peter Pan, Haunted Mansion, and Pirates are still tremendously (in Pan's case you could even say catastrophically) popular. Even after a half century. So it's not like their approaches don't work for contemporary audiences. Phones and spoon feeding had and have nothing to do with why the most popular rides are popular.
I'd also argue (and, it seems, agree) that a big part of their success is that these rides don't prescribe a storyline - even Peter Pan, based on a film, is less about recounting the events of the film in a 2 minute summary and more about letting you set sail on your own journey through the same spaces in which the film takes place. The ride is, contrary to current Imagineering practice, not about Story, it's about giving guests an experience. People still seem to have enough imagination to make those concepts work.
Pirates and Mansion, undoubtedly in the pantheon of themed attractions, are much the same, though there are enough threads in each of them to inspire guests to conjure their own sense of what the story might be for the various characters and events they're encountering. Which I'd argue is a much more ambitious and expansive frontier for Themed Entertainment than prescribing a story, which I think will be proven by how much love there is for the prescriptive rides when they turn 50. Rise of the Resistance, tremendous though it seems to bbe (and excited as I am to ride it - boy am I) goes to the trouble to answer all of the guests questions before they get out of the ride vehicle. Meanwhile Pirates and Mansion continue to keep many secrets 5 decades in.
I'd argue that THAT is the much more engaging approach because it beckons me to ride again and again in the hopes of being able to discover more each time I enter that unique space. I understand setting up the conceit of the ride so the guest has a framework as they enter an experience, which Pirates and Mansion do fabulously, but that's different from making sure every eventuality is known to the guest by the time they leave. Compare New Orleans Square and Galaxy's Edge - hearing people speak through the windows in the apartments overhead makes me wonder who could be in there, but there's no definitive answer that will be presented to me before I get too far. Meanwhile Galaxy's Edge offers comparatively few of these mysterious treasures, but makes sure I know who runs the Cantina and the Antiquities shop before I walk back out the door.
It's so fun as a guest to be able to answer these questions for yourself, but I worry a generation of Imagineers perhaps took the experience of enjoying that and translated that into their jobs being to answer those questions for the guest, forgetting that a lot of the fun in experiencing the thing actually comes from not being told. For the medium of themed environmental experience, the most successful approach (as proven by unwavering interest over decades) is setting up a romantic mystery for the guest that does not offer a definitive end.
A great mystery novel lets you meditate on the clues before drawing the pieces together at the end, and then reveals the planted seeds of that end when you read it again. That works for a long-form medium like a novel, and even shorter-form but still substantial mediums like television and film. But in a ride, where the longest you get is generally still half the length of your average TV program, it's a disservice to solve your mystery by the end because you didn't get enough time to enjoy trying to piece the clues together. In that case it's better to leave the questions unanswered, because it encourages the guests to come back and take another look at the clues.
The most fun bit of Sherlock Holmes is trying to figure it out for yourself before the truth is revealed. No one skips ahead to the end for the mere satisfaction of knowing the facts. The best mysteries make the re-read engaging because you see how well crafted the mystery was despite now knowing the answer, but even then there's a half-life that gets kicked in - the 5th reread will not be as fun as the 1st when the book was full of possibilities that crackled in your mind.
In a medium like a theme park where you're encouraged to return over years and years, better to leave guests in the fun part. Let the possibilities crackle into eternity, and the guests will answer them to their own satisfaction. One of the unique features of the theme park medium is that your experience will actually benefit from that. That is how you point the story inward - because the guest is in the position to be the lens against which the story is filtered, they get to decide how they interpret what's going on around them. Which is actually much more interactive than moving a joystick left or right within a given ride path, because it has the ability to spark your imagination in perpetuity.
I am ok with immersive, but the issue to me is that they are making the so called immersive "lands" to do nothing more than open a themed shopping mall they happens to have a couple of supporting rides. I mean how did we start considering two attractions and many more shops, restaurants and paid experiences a land? Really, for Galaxy's Edge, Disney lists the build a Droid and build your own light saber as attractions, yet you have to pay extra. The issue with this is the fine print on the tickets says unlimited admission to all attractions, except arcades. These are not arcades and are listed as attractions, yet they cost extra. To me this seems like false advertising and definitely a money grab. Now the experiences may or may not be worth the money, but the point is they shouldn't be listed as attractions AND cost extra, either they are unique shopping experiences and cost extra or they are attractions and don't cost extra. Additionally, the terms clearly states that unlimited admission is granted to all attractions, which means the way boarding groups are being handled for Rise of the Resistance where it is limiting you to once per day is also violating this.
But the idea of calling to attractions and a ton of shops and restaurants (and maybe some premium experiences) a land needs to stop.
But the idea of calling to attractions and a ton of shops and restaurants (and maybe some premium experiences) a land needs to stop.
Tony the Tigger
Well-Known Member
Sure, Jan.
Tom P.
Well-Known Member
This more than anything else. Galaxy's Edge has two rides. Two. That's not a "land." Sure, the rides may be good. Rise of the Resistance may even be groundbreaking. But it's still not a land. They need to put more effort into creating the actual rides and attractions and less on the shops and restaurants, IMHO.
yensidtlaw1969
Well-Known Member
I would even be happy if they implemented a "one-to-one" policy, where one ride must be built for every shop/restaurant.
Imagine a Star Wars Land with:
Dok Ondar's Den of Antiquities
Savi's Lightsaber Workshop
Docking Bay 7
Oga's Cantina
Droid Depot
The Marketplace (which I'll count as one)
First Order Cargo
(I won't even count the Milk Stand - call it a freebie)
and then
Rise of the Resistance
Millennium Falcon: Smuggler's Run
Attraction #3
Attraction #4
Attraction #5
Attraction #6
Attraction #7
Now you couldn't expect them all to be E-Tickets - but guess what! The land already has two, so you can get away with having the other attractions be less ambitious.
I don't expect Disney to operate quite this way, but there was a time the pendulum swung much further this way than the way it swings now. Count how many attractions there are in almost any land at the Magic Kingdom compared to the eateries and shops of the same land - generally the result is favorable to a guest who likes a well-rounded roster of rides. I do think that ratio is a standard the MK bears that the other parks could really stand to learn from.
The other parks need not mirror the MK in terms of content, as they seem to be trying now with Epcot, but they'd be better served by learning the lesson that offering guests and overwhelming amount of attractions to choose from is a better model than the "Magic Number" 9-rides-a-day nonsense. I don't think any park built on that model (Animal Kingdom, Disney Studios Paris, Hong Kong) hasn't had to go back and infuse a lot of cash after the fact to overcome being underbuilt. And any park that's been edited into that model (DHS, Epcot) is in the midst of recovering from it. Meanwhile Disneyland and Magic Kingdom continue to flourish even after five or six decades without serious need to gut the infrastructure and start over. You'd think that would be pretty telling.
FIFY.
bryanfze55
Well-Known Member
Umm, is New Orleans Square a land?
New Orleans Square has:
Pirates, Disneyland Railroad, Haunted Mansion and Rafts to Tom Swayers Island and one could argue then than Ton Sawyer's Island itself should count as part of New Orleans Square. Of course the Railroad is unique as it counts for four different lands and goes around the entire park, but still you get the idea.
So four, possibly five attractions can definitely qualify as a land and it also used to have the Keel Boats until they were closed.
If they also had shows and actual scheduled character meet and greets, it might help with this as well, it doesn't have to be just rides for me, but they missed the boat here.
Incomudro
Well-Known Member
How is it not a land?
If the other lands (the lands of 'yore) are lands, how is/are larger and self contained lands not lands?
There are varied "natural" vistas, as well as markets and place to eat.
Real lands in the real world sell goods and food.
Mickeyboof
Well-Known Member
Who cares what real places do. I go to Disney to see what Disney can do.
That means attractions.
Incomudro
Well-Known Member
Uhhh… Okay.
There are two rides dedicated to one IP, and the land itself and the things to eat and shop in it are attractions.