Sunday, April 26, 2015

After-Action Report: Enchanted Tiki Room



I had so much fun assembling last week's post about hosting an Enchanted Tiki Room-themed luau that I decided to dedicate this week's article to the attraction itself.
Having already written one of these for the Jungle Cruise, the obvious thing to do is a compare-and-contrast between these two Adventureland attractions from Disneyland's first decade. So here it is: In addition to the two points of commonality already mentioned, the Jungle Cruise and the Enchanted Tiki Room both heavily feature comedy involving audio-animatronic tropical animals. And that's about it for similarities.
The Jungle Cruise is a boat ride, the Enchanted Tiki Room a stationary show. The Jungle Cruise evokes Africa, Southeast Asia, and South America, while the Enchanted Tiki Room evokes Hawaii. The animals in the Enchanted Tiki Room are all birds, while the Jungle Cruise showcases a few birds, lots of mammals, some reptiles, and even fish and insects. The Enchanted Tiki Room is about one-and-a-half times as long as the Jungle Cruise—over twice as long if you include the pre-show. The Enchanted Tiki Room revolves around music; the Jungle Cruise decidedly does not. The Enchanted Tiki Room presents a pre-programmed show that never varies, while the Jungle Cruise, thanks to its live spiel, is different every time.
Do I have to keep going?

Sunday, April 19, 2015

Kidnap the Magic: Enchanted Tiki Luau

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Spring has sprung and the weather is warming up! It's the time of year when people start to think about moving their recreational activities outdoors, and one of the classics is the luau. A better term might actually be “Hawaii theme party,” since we mainlanders don't usually follow all the genuine island traditions, but “luau” is the accepted term used by all the party supply stores. Luau gear is in abundance all throughout the spring and summer in the U.S.—all the leis, tiki torches, and plastic piña colada glasses molded to look like coconut halves that you could want.
But this isn't just any party planning guide. This is the Disneyland Dilettante! And when a Disneyland aficionado gets it into their head to hold a luau, there's only one place to go...
To the Tiki, Tiki, Tiki, Tiki, Tiki Room!
In this issue of Kidnap the Magic, I'll provide tips for turning your party space into a tropical hideaway for the lucky people you welcome there.

Sunday, April 12, 2015

Beyond Blue Sky: In Search of the Perfect Disneyland Video Game

Disneyland was designed and constructed as something like a movie brought to life in three dimensions, so that you could walk through it and experience it as your own story. The ground at the entrance resembled a red carpet (at first), emerging from the entry tunnel is like a curtain lifting and revealing the scene, the Main Street windows feature “credits,” etc. But while a theme park can include a lot of movie-like content, visiting one can never really be comparable to watching a film. The audience of a film is entirely passive; the story on the screen unfolds as it will no matter how the viewers feel about it, or even whether they are paying attention. Outside of a few avant-garde experiments, there is nothing interactive about a movie.
But theme parks are inherently interactive. Even if you just wander around and don't actively engage with the attractions, you still choose where and how you wander, plotting the “story” in the process.
My point, I suppose, is that the reason Walt Disney and the Imagineers thought of the Disneyland concept as a living movie is that video games hadn't been invented yet. Exploring even the most cinematic theme park is a lot more like playing a sandbox-style video game than it is like watching a movie.
Think about it. You start the game/enter the park and get your overworld map. If you need “quests,” you can talk to an NPC (park employee) and find out what is available to do (attractions) and the difficulty of succeeding (wait times). At Disneyland itself, most of the area themes have ready counterparts in many games, especially classic platformers—you can visit the jungle level (Adventureland), the desert level (Frontierland), the outer space level (Tomorrowland), and the zany level (Mickey's Toontown). Most “levels” have atmospheric music playing non-stop. There's even a “final battle” at the end, although in this case, instead of an evil overlord, you're fighting human foot traffic.
Given all that, wouldn't it be cool if there were a Disneyland video game? Well...there have been some. A half-dozen or so—not bad for something that is usually seen as an adaptation of works of media, rather than a work of media in its own right that can be adapted. (Although I should note that only one of these games actually takes place in Disneyland itself. Likewise, only one of them takes place in Orlando's Magic Kingdom. The rest of the time, the game's designers meld the two parks together into a genericized “Magic Kingdom”1 containing salient features of both.) Perhaps the most interesting thing about them is how different they all are. To the best of my knowledge, none of them was ever an overwhelming success...perhaps Disney Interactive is still searching for the perfect template for the perfect theme park-based game.
That's okay. So am I.

Sunday, April 5, 2015

Imagineering Theory: The How and Why of Dark Rides

In this Imagineering Theory article, we’ll explore that staple of Disney theme parks, the animated film-based dark ride. We’ll see what makes them effective, what doesn’t make them effective, and how this information has typically played into actual Imagineering decisions about which films to turn into rides.
For starters, what is meant by “dark ride”? While any ride taking place in an enclosed building can be considered a dark ride (even if the scenes are actually well lit), for the purposes of this article we’ll consider only the “classic” type: a ride involving a simple, relatively slow-moving, electric-powered vehicle that transports guests through a sequence of blacklit scenes that tell a story. Disney’s dark rides are an elaboration of the “haunted house” type of attraction found at many amusement parks dating back to the early 20th Century. These primitive precursors provided the ride system and the basic special effects, but tying it all together with a story was Walt Disney’s own innovation.
However, while the story is the thing that sets Disney dark rides apart from their competitors, it is not the most important factor in creating each unique experience. Indeed, most dark rides do not do a very good job of summarizing their respective films. Notable scenes may be whittled down to a single image and line of dialogue, placed out of order or eliminated altogether, while less plot-relevant sequences may be given disproportionate attention. This is because the job of a dark ride is not to simply tell the story, but to allow the riders to experience it for themselves by transporting them to the fantastic settings depicted in the film. Place, not plot, is the most important factor.