Flipping the Script: Enchanted Tiki Room

Okay, so it wound up being two weeks instead. I'm still getting back up to speed in more ways than one.

For those of you in similar circumstances (getting up to speed, that is), Flipping the Script is my new post category addressing the wide (but perhaps not wide enough) world of Disney-attractions-turned-movies. Last time, I briefly examined the existing list of such movies to see what does and doesn't work about them. Now it's time to start proposing my own ideas for what Disney could do with this underserved concept in the future. And the first one is perhaps a little obvious, but I think it potentially has legs: the Enchanted Tiki Room!

Genre and Themes

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl and its sequels are fantasy action/adventure films. The Haunted Mansion is a supernatural mystery, The Country Bears is a comedy (I assume), Tower of Terror is a family-friendly thriller, Tomorrowland is a soft science-fiction adventure. The Enchanted Tiki Room can, I think, afford to be light in tone, and the presence of small animals as major characters suggests something toward the kids' end of things. So I'm going to devise this one as a kids' fantasy adventure. The protagonists are children, there's a lot of emphasis on traveling to beautiful and exciting fantastic places, and there can be some suspense and spookiness, but nothing really dark or violent.

As for themes, let's go for the contrast between natural wonders and genuine traditions on the one hand, and modern, manufactured, commercialized stuff on the other. Obviously the movie is going to come down on the side of the former, because most people have little sense of irony and thus don't expect pro-conformity, pro-commercialism messages from their Disney fare.

Rough Plot Synopsis

The two children of a standard middle-class American family, on vacation in Hawaii and bored because all their parents want to do is lounge on a fake beach and drink in a chintzy tiki bar, meet a native child of about the same age who leads them literally off the beaten path to a ramshackle bamboo hut surrounded by Tiki idols, all of it overgrown with vines and moss. They go inside, and the hut comes to life and flies them all away to a whimsical, pure fantasy version of Hawaii where the birds sing words and the flowers croon. They must earn the return trip by accomplishing a quest, which takes them to the realms of the Tiki gods and teaches them many heartwarming lessons about the “real” islands in the process.

Opportunities For Fanservice

With most attraction-based movies, the readiest source of fanservice is the attraction script itself—quoting directly from it here and there (and sometimes too much, as with The Haunted Mansion). However, I don't think this would work with an Enchanted Tiki Room movie. The entirety of the script is performers speaking (and singing) directly to their audience, excerpts of which would sound incredibly forced if someone tried to re-contextualize them for an adventure story.

Here are some more fruitful avenues to take with fanservice in such a movie:

• Visual design—the Enchanted Tiki Room has a pretty distinctive style in its faux-native art. I would hope the movie would be more authentic, but some recognizable elements could be included, especially where it draws on genuine Pacific folk art motifs.
• I think this would be the first attraction movie where references to the corporate sponsors could be a decent in-joke. The resort could serve pineapple “fresh from the Dole plantation,” for example—heck, a loving camera shot of Dole Whips being prepared would be fanservice all on its own. To tickle the fans of theme park history, the family could fly to Hawaii on United Airlines. The best part about these sorts of in-jokes is their subtlety—those not in on it probably won't even realize that they're witnessing a joke which they don't get.
• In a film whose entire point is reveling in traditional Hawaiian culture, it would be inappropriate to give the bird characters their familiar multi-national names. Instead, perhaps the resort has some pet parrots in a small aviary on the grounds, and has named them Jose, Michael, Pierre, and Fritz in order to appeal to customers from a variety of places. As a bonus, this could be part of the “artificial vs. genuine” theme.
• For something everyone can chuckle at, not just the theme park fans, how about references to Lilo and Stitch and/or Moana?

Possible Pitfalls

With any movie—with any work of art—there is the potential to fall into certain traps. There is always the risk of coming across as sociopolitically insensitive, in bad taste, or just trite and uninteresting, and thus offending or alienating the audience. But the risk can be reduced with a little forethought and consideration of the specific traps associated with your film's genre and tropes. I'll try to suss out a couple of those now, but this is by no means meant to be exhaustive.

First of all, we absolutely do not want this to be a case where the native culture of Hawaii serves as nothing but a glorified vehicle for some middle-class white kids from the mainland to build character. The native kid should be every bit as central a character as the other two—in fact, make them the viewpoint character when the family arrives at the resort, taking an interest because hey, peers, and they look bored and might appreciate being shown the lost Tiki hut. Make it clear that the native kid is not a Magical Native American or trickster figure, but a local who knows of some points of interest that aren't included in the brochures, just as you would get in every location with a significant tourist economy. They will be just as surprised as the mainland kids when the Tiki Room lifts off, and the quest will belong equally to them.

Even better...make the tourist kids part native themselves. Let's say their parents, one native Hawaiian and one...not,* met as students at the University of Hawaii, fell in love, and got married, but settled down back on the mainland where jobs were more plentiful. Maybe there will be another phase of the vacation where the kids meet their Hawaiian grandparents in person for the first time.These details don't have to be made explicit in the movie itself, but can be part of “the book,” as they call it, so the writers can keep these backstory facts in mind when developing the plot and characters.

Another major concern has more to do with story structure than politics. Quests are tricky—they're such a common feature of fantasy stories that they automatically come across a bit cliché. It can be a real challenge to avoid making the quest so episodic that entire sections of it could be removed without affecting the plot, or to avoid giving the impression that the writers had Campbell's The Hero of a Thousand Faces open under the table during the story sessions.

Unfortunately, I don't have any solid suggestions for this one, as the solutions would depend on the details of the quest, which I am not going into. This is all just spitballing in service to the cause of getting the sputtering train that is Disney theme park attraction films back on track.

And speaking of getting back on track, it's good to be at the helm of the blog again! Hopefully this time it will stick!

* Imagine, if you will, a portrayal of a biracial couple, with children, where neither parent is white. How wild would that be?