TOUCHWOOD PICTURES
FINDING NEMO UNDERWATER ADVENTURE
The prompt: To develop a theme park based on any one film featured on the old Great Movie Ride from Disney/MGM Studios. While the prompt allowed for a vast range of creative freedom, it was conceived as a boutique park project. As you discovered early on, it just isn’t realistic to expand a single movie into a vast park on the scale of Magic Kingdom. Rather, with over 100 famous movies covering every genre, and with absolutely any sort of park style in play, you had the opportunity to stray far, far from the norm. Behind the scenes,
@Disney Dad 3000 & I discussed our own approaches to this prompt. I landed on an
Adventures of Robin Hood (1939) boutique park featuring historical reenactment and stunt shows in the vein of France’s Puy du Fou. Didn’t flesh it out, but I found the prompt very freeing.
When working as a group, there’s a habit to default to the lowest hanging fruit. No one became a passionate defender of something personal or esoteric, so the group slowly gravitated back towards the same familiar Disney properties which form the bedrock of Armchair Imagineering. For a park style? Magic Kingdom! This is…very traditional. From veteran players, I see it as a deliberate choice to accommodate newer players who
only want to wallow in familiar Disney tropes. Fair enough.
Even with our half-week extension, a Magic Kingdom scale park is extremely ambitious. (Needless to say, project scope informs how you present it.) This is a whole lot to bite off and chew. A lot more than a boutique park like, say, SeaWorld’s Discovery Cove.
Perhaps inevitably, with player retirements along the way, this titanic Magic Kingdom variant morphed into a single land in the final day. (Some other ideas got fleshed out enough that I’d like to see them pop up again, especially
@ThemeParkPriest ‘s
10 Commandments area.) So we finally wound up with a Finding Nemo park in Sydney, something with a scale and theme closer to Discovery Cove. Some veterans discussed a marine park approach. This bolder concept is still visible in fleeting moments, when Underwater Adventure threatens to be more experimental and experiential, like an aquarium attraction meshed with an animal interaction facility…like Discovery Cove. But the group-wide instinct to default back to the Magic Kingdom template is oh so very strong, so in the end we have a simple land project.
I appreciate the map showing the location within Sydney. That’s the one moment where this feels like a park, not a land. I’d be interested to know more about ticket packages, about how you sell 1/8th of a Magic Kingdom and make it a large enough draw to drive visits. What’s the park’s headliner? Is it anything more than a transplanted DisneySea land? Underwater Adventure was formed in a last minute rush, limiting its potential to go deeper with design considerations.
The park/land design takes strong inspiration from DisneySea’s Mermaid Lagoon, which is a good choice. That’s an excellent template for creating a family-friendly “underwater” land. My favorite part of this project are the simple descriptions of how this space would look; simple land descriptions are often overlooked in team projects. Seaweed Segue is a strong opening statement with the swaying kelp effects. Nemo’s Odyssea is a charming version of a Fantasyland dark ride, with a well-chosen ride system and the most complete description. It too is a major winner.
There seems to be a “find & replace” going on with some Mermaid Lagoon features. Flying Fish Coaster becomes Moonfish Express Coaster, in place of Blowfish Balloon Race we get Crush’s Totally Tubular Turtle Twister. There are already A LOT of Nemo attractions in Disney parks worldwide, and only
some of theme are duplicated here. While I usually dislike cloned attractions, I do wonder why there’s no Turtle Talk, no Crush’s Coaster, no Submarine Voyage or Living Seas. Had you chosen something less overrepresented, or even -
gasp! - a non-Disney concept, you could've avoided such comparisons.
South Pacific Swirl, a river rapids ride, gets the briefest description? This would be by far the largest ride here, it needs a whole lot more if you plan on including it. Would this even be indoors or outdoors? The Harbour Sea Aquarium, the section which intrigued me the most coming into this project, gets extremely short shrift.
Then we get to Nemo’s Homeland, a Nemo-themed mini-land within a Nemo-themed mini-park. It reads like a second park proposal. Like multiple players did the same thing. Here we get a whole bunch more flat rides, a few restaurants with nice concepts, and Finding Nemo: The Musical somehow wedged in between menus. Which suggests another path not taken. Could the Musical have become your big draw, expanded into a Broadway caliber headliner? With the whole park built around the theater venue, a bit like the Vegas show prompt?
There will be fewer active players going forward. If any upcoming prompts truly inspire you, do not hesitate to grab a leadership role. Do not wait for others to do that.
I’ll be absent for roughly the next two weeks, on a wilderness expedition and without internet. I leave you in the confident hands of Disney Dad. Good luck, Touchwood!