Casper Gutman
Well-Known Member
This argument simply highlights the degree to which at least two of Disney’s four parks are massive failures on there own terms. EPCOT abandoned the world’s fair conceit decades ago and has failed to even attempt to replace it with a new identity. At the moment, it is a prime example of a group of often lackluster rides with no organizing principle. As you say yourself, if MGMs focus is meant to be live entertainment, it’s an equally glaring failure, trotting out little but stale content that often dates to before the Berlin Wall fell.
AK remains WDWs best park, but the degree to which it succeeds as a zoo is very debatable. The parks development since opening has increasingly marginalized the live animals, and many city zoos across the country offer an equal or, very frequently, superior range of animals and animal-related experiences.
One of Universals biggest drawbacks is the similarity of all its parks, each a variation on “ride the movies,” each full of (highly detailed) lands that could be plunked in another Universal park with equal logic. But that’s how Universal has been designed following the abandonment of the initial “working studio” conceit, and it succeeds on those more modest terms. Disney’s parks SHOULD be far more differentiated, but since the turn of the century they are not. They are merely a collection of rides placed with even less thought to organizing principles then can be found at Uni. Uni doesn’t have to catch up to Disney, because Disney has reduced its ambitions to those of Universal, and fails on those terms while Uni succeeds.
