Source Materials: The Shape of Land

Before we begin, I would like to note that I titled this post before The Shape of Water won Best Picture. That is all.

Let's talk for a bit about theme park layouts.

One of the often-praised aspects of Disneyland, especially in terms of its innovation when it was new, is the hub-and-spoke design plan that makes navigating from theme to theme so intuitive. (It also has potential mystical significance, but that's literally a topic for another post.) This model is so successful that it became iconic and has been re-used for every “Kingdom” park built since.

Of course, it's not the only way to organize a theme park. For example, Epcot's World Showcase and Universal Islands of Adventure both arrange their attractions around a central body of water, with the main pathway a long loop. The result is picturesque, but a bit more tiresome to traverse than a hub-and-spoke since there's (usually) no way to cut across the middle. I don't know of any examples, but a park could be built in a fan shape, with the themed areas radiating directly from the entrance. A park emphasizing exploration and discovery could use winding paths that branch and intersect.

And then there are the parks that are...how to put this nicely...not really organized at all. Universal Studios Hollywood* is a big offender here. There are all kinds of logical ways to subdivide a theme based on the glamor and excitement of the movies, and USH uses none of them, slapping down whatever, wherever. But I can't be too hard on its designers—the place is built into the side of a hill. A steep hill. With major streets and freeways wrapped around the base. They gotta work within the limitations imposed by the local topography.

You know which park's designers I might criticize for their slapdash approach? California Adventure. They had complete freedom to work within a parcel of flat land that was comparable in size to Disneyland itself and preconditioned for construction. And what did they give us with that freedom? An irregular elongated blob, grossly lopsided with the respect to the location of the entrance, with little sense of “flow” between the various themes.

Is there any sense to this layout at all? The strange thing is...there might be. 

Let me put it this way: What else is shaped like an irregular elongated blob?

And no, the two blobs are not remotely congruent, but interestingly, there are certain aspects which roughly line up, geographically speaking. To spot them, we'll have to rotate California 90 degrees—don't worry, we're used to sudden sharp movements of the earth out here.

So what are some of the major features of the Golden State? We've got Hollywood toward the south end, San Francisco and the Sierras in the north, a western coastline, desert in the east, and farmland somewhere in the middle. Like so:

And now let's pull up that map of California Adventure 1.0 again, with corresponding outlines...

Huh. That's...actually not terrible. Far from perfect, obviously, largely due to space requirements for certain types of rides...but in the broad strokes, it all lines up pretty well. It would match even more closely if I could swivel California another 30 degrees or so. Even the location of the entrance makes more sense now—it sits approximately where, in our topologically altered state, Interstate 15—one of the main routes by which people from most of the rest of the country reach California—would cross the state line.

Was it deliberate? There's probably no way to prove it one way or the other, and in any case, after 17 years of development, it doesn't match up even as clumsily as this. But I like to think it was—that the Imagineers, even faced with a stinker of a plan like the original California Adventure, nonetheless attempted to make it make sense.

And if it wasn't deliberate...it's a hell of an interesting coincidence, isn't it?

I guess I can't criticize too hard after all.

* Which is actually the closest theme park to where I live. I should go more often.