BTW... lucky you!! Have a great trip! We ll be expecting a full trip report.
How many days are you going for? Will you be seeing other parts of Paris/ France? Or other countries?
I might hit up Alain and see if he will join me at the park too. Haven't decided yet on that. A happy medium would be to have dinner or something in the park with him but spend some time alone with the people I'll be with. I'm just going for one day. Wedding in the south of france about a week later. Flying out of LA the 19th, getting in the 20th? Certainly a red eye. Covering as much of paris as possible on day 1, dlp day 2, then flying to madrid and driving up from there hitting beach towns on the way. If I need more time in paris I might have to just hurry back and fit a day in before I fly out. I honestly feel weird spending 50% of my time in paris at disneyland but I also would feel regret for not going at all since this is something I've wanted to do forever. I made an itinerary for when I'm at the park and it includes about 3 rides LOL. That park will be all about exploring; the arcades, seeing the mural in plaza gardens, the dragon and the stained glass windows in the castle, the alice maze, nautilus, tree house and pirate ship.
As for more Disney reading, Joe Rohde shared his reading list for theme park designers and none of the books were industry-specific. I'll have to hunt the list down. A lot of the stuff was out of print. More along the lines of architecture/humanism, anthropology, and storytelling fundamentals. I went to grad school last year and bought up all of these books alongside my existing curriculum.
Theme Park Design (David Younger) Good catch-all book about process, lots of examples of things in existing attractions. Really redundant though but it is the only source that covers just about everything. It covers the current industry well but is light on philosophy.
The Mouse and the Myth (really good read. Disneyland through a mythology and theology lens. Juiciest analysis of the theme parks since John Hench or Architecture of Reassurance.)
Disney Vs. Universal. I haven't touched a lot of Sam Gennenway's books but I imagine they're all entertaining
The rest I haven't touched yet:
Three Years in Wonderland
Building Magic: Disney's Overseas Theme Parks
And then I have a bunch of non-theme park books to just strengthen storytelling: Writing subtext, understanding show, don't tell, the aesthetic of play, the psychology workbook for writers, story climax, writing active setting, etc. all cheap workbooks for writers essentially. This kind of stuff really reenergizes the theme park discussion. Theme park books can only go so far, but making connections with other subjects makes it more rich.
I also have some academic articles that my professors shared in architecture school that I can try to hunt down. I'll share the pdfs with anyone who would like them. One in particular analyzes tomorrowland and future world in the 80s, comparing them with the cyberpunk movement of the era. How disney's futurism is autocratic and top-down, whereas cyberpunks are more insurgent citizens. Really incredible insights about Disney parks being a giant computer and guests the electrons moving through the system, and simply by penetrating and confronting the future, we become cyber punks. Other interesting observations about how Disney parks dress down technology with folk art as a way of making it less scary. One could also look at star tours and see that the simple "something goes wrong" narrative (star tours being the first time in a disney park that "something goes wrong") is a way that humans can laugh at technology rather than feel threatened by its emerging superiority. That idea lends itself to the concept of reassurance that john hench spoke about so often, that disneyland's experiences are all about survival and that survival lightens the burden of fears we have about our reality. I guess you don't actually need to read it anymore lol
preproduction blueprint: how to plan game environments and level designs is really F-ing cool. Basically lifted the techniques as a way of procedurally approaching land design because they are so similar. The difference only being that in level design, the character typically has obstacles between point A and point B and the character has a "spawning" location where they first emerge in the landscape. In theme park design, the entrances are the spawning locations and there aren't obstacles, but everything else is the same; why is the character there? what happened before you got there? how will the player/guest orient themselves in the space (weinies)?
