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Joe Rohde on Themed Entertainment as Art
- Thread starter lazyboy97o
- Start date
RobWDW1971
Well-Known Member
From the guy who gave us the asphalt parking lot carnival.
TrainsOfDisney
Well-Known Member
He and his team had a wonderful on theme coaster planned for that area.
Animaniac93-98
Well-Known Member
He just wrote "do not judge us by our worst works" and acknowledged that themed entertainment is not immune to commercial constraints or outside forces.
Chester and Hester's is garbage, but it wasn't the design team's first choice.
TrainsOfDisney
Well-Known Member
By the way.... it seems kind of odd to just copy and paste all of these posts this way. I follow Joe so I’ve seen them already but maybe you could copied some of your favorite quotes and referred guests to his Instagram? Just an opinion
I personally love Joe’s Instagram! He’s such a great thinker.
I personally love Joe’s Instagram! He’s such a great thinker.
Tom Morrow
Well-Known Member
Always complaints, cynicism, and unpleasantness with you. Yes, lets ignore the MANY great things Joe has done and go straight for the ONE bad area he was hand-wrung into doing.
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RobWDW1971
Well-Known Member
I'm sure he did - if I was responsible for the asphalt parking lot carnival, I'd write that, too.
Tom Morrow
Well-Known Member
What have you accomplished in life? Probably not Disney's Animal Kingdom. Dino-rama was a symptom of late-era Eisner and you darn well know that.
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TrainsOfDisney
Well-Known Member
Do you blame John Hench for All-Stars?
The only thing I copied and pasted was the URLs to the posts. The forum software did the rest. They’re all live content, not images, that can that be clicked. Anyone who has not seen them can read them all collected in their entirety without having to search through his Instagram page, especially as they move further down as new content is posted.
TrainsOfDisney
Well-Known Member
Ohhh that makes sense. I’m all for spreading Joe’s Instagram around. I quote it often.
I thought you had just copied and pasted everything and I was like... whoa that’s a lot! Ha.
One of the more challenged sets of critiques that Joe just sort of dismissing as irrelevant is archiyectural criticism of themed entertainment. This criticism is particular goes much further than others he referenced that simply posit themed entertainment as not being art, and instead frames themed entertainment as a malicious force in the world. The back cover of the 1992 collection of essays edited by Michael Sorkin, Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space, reads as follows:
“America's cities are being rapidly transformed by a sinister and homogenous design. A new Kind of urbanism--manipulative, dispersed, and hostile to traditional public space--is emerging both at the heart and at the edge of town in megamalls, corporate enclaves, gentrified zones, and psuedo-historic marketplaces. If anything can be described as a paradigm for these places, it's the theme park, an apparently benign environment in which all is structured to achieve maximum control and in which the idea of authentic interaction among citizens has been thoroughly purged. In this bold collection, eight of our leading urbanists and architectural critics explore the emblematic sites of this new cityscape--from Silicon Valley to Epcot Center, South Street Seaport to downtown Los Angeles--and reveal their disturbing implications for American public life.”
Here the theme park is not just crass commercialism lacking in artistic merit, it is a means of social control, a new mass opiate that maintains oppression by rewriting popular understanding of history and confusing the fake and the real.
This gets us to John Hench’s architecture of reassurance and the rejection of escapism. Framing of themed entertainment as escapism aligns it directly with the criticism of Sorkin et al. Escapism means theme parks are places where people ignore the world, that they are running away from it, reducing the theme park to a recreational drug. Hench reframes the Disney park not as a place where the world is shut out and ignored, but as a place that celebrates the best of the world and reassures its audience that the world is and can be a better place.
“America's cities are being rapidly transformed by a sinister and homogenous design. A new Kind of urbanism--manipulative, dispersed, and hostile to traditional public space--is emerging both at the heart and at the edge of town in megamalls, corporate enclaves, gentrified zones, and psuedo-historic marketplaces. If anything can be described as a paradigm for these places, it's the theme park, an apparently benign environment in which all is structured to achieve maximum control and in which the idea of authentic interaction among citizens has been thoroughly purged. In this bold collection, eight of our leading urbanists and architectural critics explore the emblematic sites of this new cityscape--from Silicon Valley to Epcot Center, South Street Seaport to downtown Los Angeles--and reveal their disturbing implications for American public life.”
Here the theme park is not just crass commercialism lacking in artistic merit, it is a means of social control, a new mass opiate that maintains oppression by rewriting popular understanding of history and confusing the fake and the real.
This gets us to John Hench’s architecture of reassurance and the rejection of escapism. Framing of themed entertainment as escapism aligns it directly with the criticism of Sorkin et al. Escapism means theme parks are places where people ignore the world, that they are running away from it, reducing the theme park to a recreational drug. Hench reframes the Disney park not as a place where the world is shut out and ignored, but as a place that celebrates the best of the world and reassures its audience that the world is and can be a better place.
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Model3 McQueen
Well-Known Member
- In the Parks
- No
Joe Rhode is a creative genius, no doubt. But no working yeti and that hideous industrial warehouse fortress powerplant are unfortunate results of the suits not caring much for what he can do.
Animaniac93-98
Well-Known Member
Which was the point of EPCOT Center, as ultimately built.
Though today the EPCOT of 1982 would also be criticized for being the work of corporate messaging and cultural appropriation, with a World Showcase that's also dominated by North America and Western Europe.
RobWDW1971
Well-Known Member
If he designed it, yes. Can't have it both ways.
TrainsOfDisney
Well-Known Member
I mean the yeti can’t be blamed on Joe. He’s a designer... the scene and AA were designed extremely well. Now... I suppose you can blame him for designing attractions where he chose to spend money on 1 super impressive AA that will disappear when / if it breaks and not create multiple simpler AA’s... he repeated that mistake in the avatar boat ride. But then you have to blame Scott for the complexity of Rise.
I will say, as a fan of Joe I try to forget that he had anything to do with the guardians tower... I’m not sure how much he got to say in how it would appear but wow... it ruins the skyline of DCA and even parts of Disneyland.
The Dino land is actually very well themed for what it is.... I very much dislike it. But it’s almost like he said “well if I have to put in cheap carnival rides why hide the fact?” - can’t really blame him for that.
Also..... the very idea of cheap road side attractions is almost a part of history now. So there’s something interesting about that.
RobWDW1971
Well-Known Member
So in short, when you builds something you like, you give him credit. When he builds something terrible, it is management's or the budget's fault?
My view that painting is an art is not invalidated by me being a lousy painter.
TrainsOfDisney
Well-Known Member
Hey I’m not on trial here. Do you want to judge everything I say or have a discussion.
Who’s your favorite imagineer and why?
Do you just not like Joe for some reason?
Are you not a fan of DAK as a whole?