nevol
Well-Known Member
/As much as I am cynical about the reskinning of this attraction rather than improving upon it and its environs, and the potential that this may be the beginning of the abandonment of california adventure's theme, the problem of having an attraction not particularly at-home in its environment, etc etc etc, I always hated the look of the DCA tower of terror. I remember when they were getting ready to open it.. The company was so lazy at the time. They cut a few holes out of the animation facade and popped in windows and called it Sunset Boulevard. The bland stucco facade matched that of the side of animation and wasn't far off from Hyperion. I never ever ever felt any suspense as I approached the attraction. The queue was never eerie. The one nice garden section with a fountain in front of the building was off to the right, I think in the fastpass entry, and the line never even backed up over there. When you walked into the lobby, it was so brightly lit, even after 11 years of operation, it felt brand new to me, not haunted. I used to go hang out at old hotels in chicago like the Drake Hotel with the Palm room that still has big band style music and dancing on the weekends, and TOT felt just like that, and just like Carthay circle. In other words, still open for business. I loved the attraction itself but the lack of immersion up until the library scene made the overall experience feel so short, whereas in Florida you really get the sense that you are exploring every room of this hotel at the pace of Haunted Mansion even though the on-ride experience really only has two show scenes and the 5th dimension room is just your car lurking forward in a mess of steel support beams. The perfection that was sunset boulevard, the queue, and the better forced perspective in Florida really made Orlando's attraction feel like a departure from the theme park altogether. It anchored and defined the studios park, to this day.
When DCA opened, it was flawed. They thought they could bring in TOT and improve the park's attendance. The tower kept the park open but it really barely made a difference. However, the studios park is such a mess at this point. It is arguably worse than DCA 1.0, which goes to show that Hollywood and sunset boulevards and the tower in orlando really do anchor that park and allow people to overlook the rest of the mess and lack of attractions. DCA's hollywood pictures backlot and TOT were so inferior that they couldn't even save the park. If they were truly anywhere near as great as Orlando's, we wouldn't have needed a DCA 2.0. Attendance would have hit 8.5/9 million and they would have just forgotten about the rest of the place.
The new facade concerned me in that they went with a cartoonified facade, hyper-saturated, that didn't really seem to have anything to do with the film; not to mention that the building, ride system, etc were not built from scratch and organically evolving to tell the best GOTG IP-adapted story imaginable, it was instead about what could work in this existing structure. Having said all that... I'm telling you, this new facade is STILL an improvement over the old, in my opinion. And the bright red and primary colors actually ties the building in with the red car trolley's oswald's gas station, and mickey's fun wheel, unexpectedly, while everybody is talking about how it sticks out like a sore thumb. The cartoonified/saturated building now doesn't look as weird from the pixar-themed lands like cars land because its in the same playful high-saturation, slightly cartoonified, heightened reality rather than theliteral realism that the attraction sought before (which never made sense on a hollywood backlot that they never spend the money necessary to convert to a real city). There was nothing to look at on the tower, at the base of the tower, or on "sunset boulevard" before. Now, the building is making up for that. The ride system is super front-heavy on the next-gen towers, whereas Orlando's had a tall, slender, uninterrupted vertical facade that made the building look infinitely taller than that of California's, which looked like a front door buried behind a gigantic Fedex delivery box. When the ground level is revealed, regardless of how this monster was brought into the world, I am so certain that it will look better than what we had before. That entire stucco facade/fedex box with ill-placed windows/balconies and those windows with never-aged bright blue awnings over them and Italian cypress trees will be augmented/overlaid with far more to look at and based on the model, more aging as well. It used to be like, oh there it is, that menacing facade, tucked behind a boring wall and only consuming 30% of my field of vision, and now, top to bottom, there will be ornamentation.
As for the interior, and ride, no idea what to expect. Skeptical since there were whispers of the elevator shafts being covered with one elongated interior/show extension, and that isn't what we got, rumors that they then had to rewrite the script for when the doors open to say "why are we at disneyland?" breaking the fourth wall which is going to be criticized for years to come, especially if they build a marvel land that attempts full immersion. Unless the elevator vehicles are wrapped in a box of screens that basically turn the whole thing into VR, which would kill the need for the other show rooms so I doubt that's the case, then for most of the ride we will be in non-show thrill moments, which could be odd. Maybe the inside of the elevator doors will become LED/plasma screens that elude to that expansive interior space beyond. Who knows. Eager to see for myself though. Going to be a long two months.
I'll end by saying, they didn't need to do away with hollywoodland; they could have made it richer, rerouted the midways toward tower to emulate the approach you have in Orlando, tuck the marvel rides in the [second] homes and satellite offices of their protagonists, in the hollywood hills. Use the marvel stories to provide social commentary/context/subtext to social issues/relations/dynamics in LA. Dr. strange mystic manor, for example, while allowing for the preservation of TOT and allowing for mickey, minnie, donald to similiarly have bungalows in the land, a la toontown since that is going away soon. Could even move roger rabbit over since that was set in 1940s los angeles and have the red car trolleys dock in a show building facing the street like the one in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Possibilities endless. Anxious to see what we actually end up with come D-23 expo. I am expecting nothing more than HKDL's avenger's roller coaster militaristic facade. But with Joe Rohde leading the project, we should be anticipating so much more and be far more optimistic than we collectively have been. As somebody who crafted what has become the strongest WDW second gate through theme integrity and the unrelated abandonment of stronger themes at the other gates over the past 15 years, I understand him to be one person who takes the park-wide theme far more seriously than anybody else in the business, and he clearly thinks not just about how things will work today, but 20 years ahead. Its possible he hated DCA and its execution and doesn't care to salvage it, but I just don't expect him to be that cynical or reckless of a designer.
When DCA opened, it was flawed. They thought they could bring in TOT and improve the park's attendance. The tower kept the park open but it really barely made a difference. However, the studios park is such a mess at this point. It is arguably worse than DCA 1.0, which goes to show that Hollywood and sunset boulevards and the tower in orlando really do anchor that park and allow people to overlook the rest of the mess and lack of attractions. DCA's hollywood pictures backlot and TOT were so inferior that they couldn't even save the park. If they were truly anywhere near as great as Orlando's, we wouldn't have needed a DCA 2.0. Attendance would have hit 8.5/9 million and they would have just forgotten about the rest of the place.
The new facade concerned me in that they went with a cartoonified facade, hyper-saturated, that didn't really seem to have anything to do with the film; not to mention that the building, ride system, etc were not built from scratch and organically evolving to tell the best GOTG IP-adapted story imaginable, it was instead about what could work in this existing structure. Having said all that... I'm telling you, this new facade is STILL an improvement over the old, in my opinion. And the bright red and primary colors actually ties the building in with the red car trolley's oswald's gas station, and mickey's fun wheel, unexpectedly, while everybody is talking about how it sticks out like a sore thumb. The cartoonified/saturated building now doesn't look as weird from the pixar-themed lands like cars land because its in the same playful high-saturation, slightly cartoonified, heightened reality rather than theliteral realism that the attraction sought before (which never made sense on a hollywood backlot that they never spend the money necessary to convert to a real city). There was nothing to look at on the tower, at the base of the tower, or on "sunset boulevard" before. Now, the building is making up for that. The ride system is super front-heavy on the next-gen towers, whereas Orlando's had a tall, slender, uninterrupted vertical facade that made the building look infinitely taller than that of California's, which looked like a front door buried behind a gigantic Fedex delivery box. When the ground level is revealed, regardless of how this monster was brought into the world, I am so certain that it will look better than what we had before. That entire stucco facade/fedex box with ill-placed windows/balconies and those windows with never-aged bright blue awnings over them and Italian cypress trees will be augmented/overlaid with far more to look at and based on the model, more aging as well. It used to be like, oh there it is, that menacing facade, tucked behind a boring wall and only consuming 30% of my field of vision, and now, top to bottom, there will be ornamentation.
As for the interior, and ride, no idea what to expect. Skeptical since there were whispers of the elevator shafts being covered with one elongated interior/show extension, and that isn't what we got, rumors that they then had to rewrite the script for when the doors open to say "why are we at disneyland?" breaking the fourth wall which is going to be criticized for years to come, especially if they build a marvel land that attempts full immersion. Unless the elevator vehicles are wrapped in a box of screens that basically turn the whole thing into VR, which would kill the need for the other show rooms so I doubt that's the case, then for most of the ride we will be in non-show thrill moments, which could be odd. Maybe the inside of the elevator doors will become LED/plasma screens that elude to that expansive interior space beyond. Who knows. Eager to see for myself though. Going to be a long two months.
I'll end by saying, they didn't need to do away with hollywoodland; they could have made it richer, rerouted the midways toward tower to emulate the approach you have in Orlando, tuck the marvel rides in the [second] homes and satellite offices of their protagonists, in the hollywood hills. Use the marvel stories to provide social commentary/context/subtext to social issues/relations/dynamics in LA. Dr. strange mystic manor, for example, while allowing for the preservation of TOT and allowing for mickey, minnie, donald to similiarly have bungalows in the land, a la toontown since that is going away soon. Could even move roger rabbit over since that was set in 1940s los angeles and have the red car trolleys dock in a show building facing the street like the one in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Possibilities endless. Anxious to see what we actually end up with come D-23 expo. I am expecting nothing more than HKDL's avenger's roller coaster militaristic facade. But with Joe Rohde leading the project, we should be anticipating so much more and be far more optimistic than we collectively have been. As somebody who crafted what has become the strongest WDW second gate through theme integrity and the unrelated abandonment of stronger themes at the other gates over the past 15 years, I understand him to be one person who takes the park-wide theme far more seriously than anybody else in the business, and he clearly thinks not just about how things will work today, but 20 years ahead. Its possible he hated DCA and its execution and doesn't care to salvage it, but I just don't expect him to be that cynical or reckless of a designer.
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