News Magic Kingdom's Main Street Emporium Under Construction, Shortcut Blocked

[brettf22]

I'm not clicking the link. Care to summarize what sounds like a tinfoil hat conspiracy?

More philosophical and psychological than tinfoil hat. Nor are his conclusions earth shattering. But an interesting take on how we got here. Some conclusions:

“Appeasing homogenous, mass consumer markets improves profits in all sorts of things.

There's a related shift in music, where complexity is being stripped out to appeal to worldwide streaming audiences.”

“There's no single explanation for the achromatic shift across industries.

But commercial incentives is a big one: appeal to the broadest possible tastes and offend no one.”

Sound familiar?

 

[James Alucobond]

That could just as easily be attributed to shifting preferences in general rather than a concerted attempt to avoid offense by being bland. For instance, look at any collection of advertisements throughout the years and you'll see color saturation either key up or shift down for periods of time. This feels very much like the hubbub from a decade ago about "every" movie poster being color graded toward blue and/or orange.

 

[castlecake2.0]

It looks like half the room will be tiled and the other half “hardwood” tile, I guess to help break up the space

 

[Agent H]

What’s even the point of this? Do they think this will somehow increase merchandise sales?

 

[HauntedPirate]

That could just as easily be attributed to shifting preferences in general rather than a concerted attempt to avoid offense by being bland. For instance, look at any collection of advertisements throughout the years and you'll see color saturation either key up or shift down for periods of time. This feels very much like the hubbub from a decade ago about "every" movie poster being color graded toward blue and/or orange.

The music industry has gone down a similar route around 1996. Everything “popular” since has had roughly a similar sound. But look at how music trends shifted from the 50’s through the mid-90’s, and then since then.

Disney had continued to tone down colors, remove uniqueness (World of Disney, as a prime example), and bring more ubiquity across the resort rather than uniqueness. Call it what you want - it’s there, it’s indisputable, and it’s not changing anytime soon.