So then my question to you is how does the current IP strategy appear to be different from previous IP implementations over the past couple of decades in your opinion? Be specific.
The implementation we are seeing is unheard of. Actually unprecedented.
1. It is an OVERLAY, a legacy it shares only with smaller attractions like Tiki Room and Alien Encounter. It deviates further from this in that it doesn't fit its land environment whatsoever, a point I'll get to later. Those other overlays were always smaller attractions and shows and they were typically updates that made the shows more contemporary or more family-friendly, without really changing anything too dramatically.
Rather than creating an experience from scratch, deciding what story to tell and the best way to tell it, what ride system to use, what kind of show building to use, theme architecture, queue layout, all of that, they worked backward from what could fit in TOT. I have argued a few pages back that I actually like what I am seeing, that the colors/cartoonification actually makes the ride not take itself too seriously, almost admitting defeat before it even opens, and fitting in at dca which is more cartoony, sarcastic, punny than disneyland. That I like the ornamentation, it gives me something to look at.
But all of these observations are as much a critique of TOT as they are a compliment of guardians. The truth is, we look at this building, and I hypothesize one moment that the black part is on the tower to break up its horizontality and make it taller, yet they also employed inverse forced perspective on the facade with color, with ground level aging/natural tones and higher saturation and brighter colors higher in the air, which FIGHTS the accentuation of height and makes the building look shorter. Its as though they know the forced perspective was bad on TOT to begin with, and want to separate this attraction from its predecessor as much as possible by making the building look as much like a stumpy warehouse as possible. These two design strategies are working against one another, so what is the actual design intent? I digress, but basically, this could have been a mystic manor style ride system in a show building with a forced perspective of griffith observatory a la Be Our Guest, that the collector uses as a teleportation device somehow to hollywood, under which he's tunneled his museum/warehouse/prison. We could have had a completely different storyline altogether. The show building could have been a downed space ship. but that isn't what happened. And since we don't have any real world references or any story-world references as to what we are looking at (even though I admittedly am experiencing aesthetic pleasure, if not dystopian in nature) we can't know and even the designers can't know what they are doing. It is, best case scenario, abstract and stylized with confidence, the way that Mary Blair's facade of small world is. That is the logical conclusion of that style of abstraction that doesn't expect guests to believe they are in a story world. Limited by the architecture and ride system that is, the ride system and the architectural ornamentation choices are limited, and the design decisions seem to be running counter to one another. We don't believe we are anywhere but in front of the guardians of the galaxy ride that was once the tower of terror when we look at it, which places us in the contemporary world, specifically in Disney California adventure. we aren't in a Polynesian jungle, as a point of comparison. So point 1, It is an overlay. That it is an overlay means that story and story-world are limited and unclear, both in the ride experience and the architecture and land. The overlay nature now has consequences that have brought us out of the building, where we can discuss its land context.
2. Violates traditional style of an attraction appropriate to its land. The traditional disneyland style was land-driven. Here is a theme/environment.. what kinds of adventures would you want to experience, what would you want to explore, in that environment? It could contain both original experiences or IP attractions like star tours and Indiana jones that share spatial or dramatic themes with that land, or both, in the case of Indy (with dramatic themes of adventure/exploration/exotic, and amalgamative environment/setting themes of the jungle/tropical global south). Hollywoodland was always flawed. Poor layout, 2 dimensional sets, poor payoffs, bad framing of the tower of terror, the midway layouts and building massing even created horrible shadows everywhere, etc. Animation's Massive show building blocking off all the empty space behind it from an expansion that could extend the land (we got bugs land and tower, but the hard right angle streets of hollywood boulevard and sunset don't make the area feel particularly big or worth exploring). So there is all of that... It was lazy. This violates the most basic rule in traditional design; that the land comes first, and the attraction lives within that land or departs logically from it. Is it in hollywoodland? When you are at DHS, being on sunset boulevard makes you believe the hotel is real and you want to go explore it. when you get in the tower, it reinforces that the street you were just on is real, alive, storied. This attraction doesn't fit that lazy, half baked land. Which is fine, if you consider then that they will replace the land, and hopefully it WILL fit, right?
3. It violates, or is unclear how or to what extent, it will violate new traditional style logics that have made IP worlds/attractions successful. The new traditional style that has come roaring back with Potter, Cars land, Star Wars Land, Frozen, even MK's Little Mermaid (in that the show building extends the IP) is that the IP drives both an original concept attraction and its architecture, and beyond that, the entire LAND. We are not supposed to think, oh boy, here I am standing in front of the Guardians Ride, as we do in old fantasyland with the Traditional style. These successful experiences are supposed to make us think, holy cow, I am IN HOGWARTS. I AM ACTUALLY IN THIS STORY WORLD. It isn't any longer about queuing up for a ride, seeing some vinettes and gags that retell the animated movies, and then walking out to wipe your toddler's diaper. To quote myself, "This attraction doesn't fit that lazy, half baked land. Which is fine, if you consider then that they will replace the land, and hopefully it WILL fit, right?" However, that logic brings us to a fork in the road;
a. it doesn't change the fact that it was shoehorned into an ill-placed building to tell a story for which the building was not built to tell, and that the rest of the marvel land now can't just be built from scratch, it has to be built around and in harmony with this massive show building.
b. it doesn't contribute to the legitimacy/believability of DCA in general, unless that Marvel land is set in California, which is highly doubtful.
The limitations that the existing ride and show building had on the guardians attraction don't stop at the guardians attraction; they extend to and set design limitations around the development of the entire marvel expansion. Even if it is an incredibly rich, successful Marvel Cinematic Universe that they bring to life, under Joe's guidance, which I hope is the case as its the best case scenario, options were limited for land layout, architecture, sight lines, ride placement and layout. Everything has to work around, with, even in spite of, this tower. Who knows how different the land could have been had they not had to deal with that giant box in the middle of it.
and to expand on b., which really deserves to be a 4,
4. "it doesn't contribute to the legitimacy/believability of DCA in general, unless that Marvel land is set in California, which is highly doubtful." So even if it manages to blow us all away by being a perfect example of new traditional IP-driven design and fits its land, that land still violates the broader park theme, which will remain a cause for concern.
Consider this; could you ever imagine Universal, working with JK Rowling, would close the revenge of the mummy for 6 months to convert it into another Harry Potter attraction? absofreakinglutely not. So why would we blindly worship Disney for doing that? Should we not hold them to a higher standard? All of the Harry Potter rides, ride systems, show buildings, and lands/land layouts/architectures, are designed in harmony. So while a marketing guy says IP's are hot, everything has to be IP, there is a very clear distinction between IP projects that have been successful and projects that have not, or have not lasted longer than 10 years, which is why everybody expects this conversion to get replaced yet again by 2030. Those successful attractions are the potter ones, Cars Land, Star Tours, Indy, and Jurassic Park. Ones successful for a time but not forever include back to the future, the mummy, its tough to be a bug at DCA, Terminator, Shrek. Transformers is great at what it is, but is still flawed in that the ride building just fell out of the sky and the story experience doesn't even extend to the show building, never-mind beyond it. This is fine in a studio park, but not a disney park.
Disney is violating the rulebooks of traditional and new traditional styles that are its bread and butter. On top of these theme park design approaches that have led to the success of other IP implementations, they multiply the absurdity of this project by giving us an OVERLAY rather than an organically created, original attraction. One or the other wouldn't have been so bad; if the IP fit with its environment, like if they introduced Iron Man experience into Tomorrowland and made it work, fine. Replacing Star Tours then wouldn't have been the end of the world. But they committed that violation, and then they violated the land design rulebook as well.
The last time they deviated from traditional design into post-modern drag and drop attractions with disregard for show quality and land design was when we got DCA. They thought they could follow in the footsteps of the studio parks and make a theme park that felt like a movie theater. All the forgettable attractions at universal are those unattached to their traditional, immersive lands. So its misguided that they would think an IP overlay of an existing attraction, a tactic only ever seen before on a project like alien encounter or Tiki Room, will generate the same excitement or be just as successful or be taken just as seriously as those IP attractions that were either built from scratch or built with an associated IP-world land like harry potter. The truth is, there is really no way of knowing how this will go and it could be a smash hit, and when they announce marvel land, it could make sense as a massive IP-world, but it could also set off a trend of dragging and dropping unrelated attractions together in lands that violate basic theme park principals yet again, a la DCA 1.0. Joe Rohde is a genius, so I continue to return to that and hope that he is truly excited to deliver us a sophisticated, complex, layered Marvel Universe to explore, and as an aesthetic object, considered separately from context like a sculpture in a museum, I like this thing. But in the context of theme park design, and with lack of information about what is to come between now and 2022 in this corner of the park, its concerning. D23 is when hopes or fears will be confirmed and we can lay rest to much of this speculation.
One certainty is that the laziness of DCA 1.0 is like herpes--the gift that keeps on giving; bad decisions made then are still being dealt with today. I hope that Joe is brilliant enough to make these projects work within the design parameters given to him spatially, creatively, financially. His best work has been when he gets to design something from scratch.
