Yes, the Muppets, famously “subdued.”
They dethemed the Muppets area and further discouraged foot traffic.
Yeah, as I said in my original post, I understand that their changing the fountain and removing the mural were disliked by many (though I don’t know if there was an impact on foot traffic). And I particularly empathize with people for whom the iconic fountain had treasured memories.
However, this was of course ancillary to my main point, which was that the updated MV3D marquee, Gonzo’s facades, and PizzaRizzo indicate that they can add a sufficiently cohesive theme to an area even without it being a massive, long-term project… and this gives me cautious optimism they could do the same with Animation Courtyard.
Replacing Launch Bay with a return of the Animation Academy or similar, and adding some animation-themed murals to buildings and banners to the lampposts, would allow the area to at least “make sense” again.
...and it looks like crap and at no point does it ever look like anything but Tower of Terror with stuff projected on it...
Perhaps, though what I was trying to get at was that they’re happy to use many non-flat surfaces for projection mapping, from ToT to the Chinese Theater to the Main Street facades to Cinderella Castle. So I doubt they’re saying “we’d really like to improve these ‘beige box’ warehouse-looking things in the center of the park, but their flatness makes them such fantastic projection surfaces that it would be too big of a sacrifice.”
That said, I agree with you that if the options are keeping vs removing the structures entirely, they could be keeping them for the projections—after all, they *added* to them to create more projection surface!
And IMHO, this is quite a shame, as it’s an example of missing the forest for the trees a la old-Universal: not thinking about the holistic impact of making an area unattractive / less thematically compelling because of some narrow purpose (similar to the HarmonioUS barges).
