Something that just occurred to me--take it with a grain of salt:
Back in Walt's day, the whole tacky, loud carnival atmosphere was in its heyday, and so Walt avoided it like the plague. He wanted to get away from what everyone else was doing, and evoke a different feel in his parks. Obviously, one of Walt's great passions was evoking nostalgia--thus, the quaint railroad running around Disneyland and the use of Main Street as the portal to the rest of the park. These evoked a sense of a bygone era, a place and time no longer available to most people.
Nowadays, that loud carnival atmosphere is clearly on the decline. Coney Island is a shell of its former self; political correctness and consumer advocacy have forced carnies to tone down or clean up their atmoshere; the old, quaint midway atmosphere is disappearing, being replaced with high-concept theme parks and the race to build the most thrill rides.
My point is that--for a lot of people--walking down a midway, with its dirt paths, loud barkers, smell of hot dogs and cotton candy, and sounds of screaming kids on a bunch of corny, unthemed thrill rides, evokes a sense of nostalgia. I know that just thinking about it takes me back to the few weeks every fall when the traveling fair would stop in my town as a kid.
So does Dino-Rama accurately capture this sense of the classic midway? Probably not. I don't like the idea of charging people to play games after they've already paid full park admission. But the area does evoke some of that...and I think that's the reason why, despite the fact that it's so garish and cheesy-looking, I can't make myself hate it.
The fact that Walt strove to avoid that type of atmosphere gives me some pause...but maybe if we remember that it was a different America that Walt lived in, it could help bring the debate into context. I'd bet dollars to donuts that, if Walt were alive today, he'd probably focus a lot of his energy on building well-themed attractions that did more than thrill the senses (in response to the current trends in the industry) instead of making such an effort to avoid the feel of the carnivals.
OK, I'm done.
