Armchair Imagineering: Alternate Universe Castles

Sleeping Beauty Castle. Cinderella's Castle. Cinderella's Castle again. Sleeping Beauty's Castle en français. Generic Castle! If there's one thing that defines a Disneyland-style theme park, it's that gorgeous central castle. Fans even lump together the various Disneylands and Magic Kingdoms around the world under the umbrella name of “castle parks,” understood to mean not just that they contain a castle, but that they consist of several themed lands arranged radially around said castle. One of the first details many Armchair Imagineers hammer down when doing something like this is the identity and basic design of the castle: Which Princess has her name attached to it? How big is it? What (if anything) is inside it? Obviously, you can't envision such a park without a castle...

...or can you?

Years before the announcement of a Star Wars themed area dropped, fans would sometimes spitball ideas for an entire Star Wars theme park. I actually think such a park could work really well,* but the interesting thing is that more than one person defaulted to the “castle park” template in their design, with lands themed to various planets and other concepts in the Star Wars continuity, arranged around a central palace-like structure. Obviously this wasn't a storybook castle—it was the palace on Naboo, or the Galactic Senate meeting hall, or a grand Jedi temple.

So now I'm thinking...what else could the castle be, besides a castle? Part of the reason it's always a castle, of course, is that it doubles as the entrance to Fantasyland, where all the fairy tales get charmingly mashed together. So what if a different themed land claimed that place of honor? Let's try a few:

• Adventureland: The village has been built in the shadow of a massive ruined temple, constructed so long ago that no one now remembers the identity of its builders, or even how they built it! The structure is entirely overgrown with weeds and creepers but still materially sound, and you can take a look around part of the inside if you like. If you discover anything new, please inform someone at the Jungle Cruise dispatch office so that they can pass it along to the Archaeological Society.
• Frontierland: Did you know that this area is prone to flash flooding in the springtime? Neither did the first batch of settlers, which is why the original iteration of the town is just a few water-beaten foundations and heaps of rubble. After that first year, they got smart and rebuilt the main part of town on top of this mesa, out of reach of the floodwaters. Sometime before the town was built, prospectors blasted a tunnel straight through the mesa looking for gold, which makes for a convenient walkway into the settlement.
• Tomorrowland: Welcome to the City of the Future! SpacePort 77 is your landing point: a glorious transportation super-station with Monorail and PeopleMover boarding on the upper floors. At ground level, the wings of the building house museum exhibits about outer space and cutting-edge speculative science (read: science-fiction).

There, wasn't that interesting? Did you notice how it potentially changes the tone of the entire park to have a different land due north of Main Street, and something other than a castle as its entrance? Disneyland as we know it is many things, but it has a reputation for total whimsy, and I can't help but think that having a candy-colored fairytale castle as its central landmark and main symbol has a lot to do with that. Surely having something else there instead would give the park a different reputation—for mystery, or ruggedness, or ultramodernism.

Now let's take it a bit further, by looking outside Disneyland and its siblings. I got started on this particular flight of fancy by remembering some castle alternatives proposed for a hypothetical Star Wars park—but Star Wars is far from the only thing that Armchair Imagineers have suggested as the basis for their pet projects. What other castle-equivalents might be possible? Note that I don't necessarily approve of all of these as themes, but it's a good exercise for gaining insight into the function of the various castles.

• Pixarland: You could, technically, go right back to a castle with this one and make Castle DunBroch** the centerpiece, but I would want something with broader application. Pixar movies don't feature many iconic structures, do they? At least not on a castle-like scale. There's what—Gusteau's Restaurant, the Scaring School from Monsters University, and I think that's it? So rather than a building, how about an artificial hill topped with the Pixar Tree? Thanks to the magic of re-using digital models, this same twisty tree appears conspicuously in no less than three Pixar films (a bug's life, Toy Story 2, and Up), and knowing these animators, is probably less prominently tucked into the background of others.
• Marvelland: There's no getting around it. Whether Marvel was the theme for an entire park or just the most beloved section of a more varied hub-and-spoke park, the iconic structure would have to be Avengers Tower. The Avengers are the axis around which the MCU spins.
• Mythia: For the uninitiated, Disney Mythia is a never-built park (or maybe just land) focusing on world mythology, folklore, and legends—you know, the sort of thing Disney used to do before IP became the altar upon which they would sacrifice any remaining shreds of originality.*** Some fans, when doing their own take on Mythia, get cold feet and use a castle as its centerpiece, but a theme like that offers so many more possibilities! An Egyptian pyramid, a Grecian temple, a wizard's tower, a troll-shaped mountain...and each one paints a different picture of how the overall concept treats its subject matter.

Disney itself has experimented with using non-castles as landmarks in its non-Kingdom parks, with mixed results. Epcot's Spaceship Earth probably comes closet to “the castle experience” in terms of a) being instantly recognizable as the signature structure of its park, b) doing a reasonable job of symbolically summing up the park's mission statement, and c) serving as a physical gateway to what it symbolizes. About the only thing missing is the hub-and-spoke design—Spaceship Earth stands right at Epcot's entrance instead of in its literal center. Animal Kingdom's Tree of Life is another strong example, and it actually is in the middle of its park.

On the other hand, California Adventure's Grizzly Peak failed so badly at being a memorable iconic landmark that the job was handed to the Carthay Circle Restaurant instead...but I'm not so sure the restaurant really works either. It's an attractive enough building, but there's nothing magical about it—nothing that suggests a magnificent Otherworld to explore. It's probably just as well that it has no “gateway” function, because: gateway to where? The exotic world of...Depression-era Los Angeles? It's the same problem, in other words, that continues to plague California Adventure as a whole.

So what would have made for a decent castle-equivalent for DCA? One possible route would have been an updated version of the Great Movie Ride—not an exact copy of the one in Orlando, but a variant, housed in a building that was to the Chinese Theater as Sleeping Beauty Castle is to Neuchwanstein. This would have enabled the park to suggest not only the romance of the Golden Age of Hollywood but the majestic fantasy of Chinese architecture, while (hopefully) not competing directly with the actual Chinese Theater in the actual Hollywood.

Grizzly Peak itself might have had more success with better placement. The one thing the successful theme park landmarks have in common is high visibility from the entrance, or soon after the entrance. You walk in, face straight ahead, and there's your iconic structure. California Adventure's original layout made its own kind of sense, but it did no one any favors in the area of creating memorable visuals.

Now I'm kind of tempted to design a speculative version of California Adventure that fixes all the issues wrong with it when it opened, including the wonky layout.

Maybe later. Focus, Dilettante.

I started this post thinking about what sorts of centerpieces the Kingdom-style parks could use instead of castles, and drifted off into a bit of discussion about iconic theme park landmarks in general. I guess I'll bring things full circle and talk for a bit about thus-far unused castles. Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty are both very dreamy, romantic movies, heavy on the art. Even though none of the Disney theme park castles are exact replicas of the structures portrayed in either film, invoking their names sets a certain tone for the fantasy. Other Disney fairy tales strike very different tones, and just as the use of a non-castle in a Disneyland-style park changes the overall image of the park, so might a different sort of castle. Then, too, some castles might potentially be used as the inspiration to “reverse-engineer” a new kind of park altogether:

• Snow White Castle: Snow White may be considered one of the most saccharine of the Princesses, but her movie is rather somber and Gothic, and the various versions of her ride have generally been played for scares. Snow White Castle would probably make for a darker take on Fantasyland. Perhaps the Villains would feature more prominently, implicitly led by the Evil Queen.
• Ariel's Castle: This suggests a park along the lines of Tokyo DisneySea, with adventures based around different facets of the ocean and coastal areas. A really intriguing possibility here is to evoke both of the castles in The Little Mermaid by having a Mediterranean-style palace on the edge of a lagoon, with small towers extending down into the water with an increasingly coral-sculpted appearance, merging with an underwater castle in the style of King Triton's. This second castle would be visible from the surface, but could only be fully appreciated via an underwater ride in the lagoon, or perhaps an underwater walkway with large aquarium-style windows.
• Belle's Castle: I think it would be more appropriate to call this Beauty and the Beast Castle—a dualistic name hinting at a dualistic nature. Just as we see the Beast's castle in the film change from dark and monstrous to bright and lovely, it would be fascinating to see a theme park centerpiece that somehow embodies both aspects while still presenting a unified, picturesque design.
• Jasmine's Palace: This is one case where directly copying the structure in the movie would be in order: the Sultan's palace in Aladdin is definitely iconic the way it is. A park with this as its main landmark would have to be based around themes of exoticism, mysticism, and fantasy.
• Pocahontas's Castle: Yyyyyeeeaaaaahhhhhh, I'm not touching a concept this absurd.
• Mulan Palace: A Chinese-style palace would make an excellent centerpiece for a theme park focusing on international cultures a là World Showcase. Talking miniature dragon aside, the story of Mulan is considerably more grounded in reality than that of Aladdin, so this would work for a more grown-up, intellectual park.
• Tiana's Palace: This is of course the name of the restaurant Tiana founds at the end of The Princess and the Frog, and many fans would like to see it turned into a real restaurant in Disney's parks. But it also boasts a unique design, based on the shape of a riverboat, that could make for a memorable centerpiece...but not necessarily of a theme park! Rather, imagine Tiana's Palace as the centerpiece of a shopping/dining district!
• Rapunzel's Tower: She winds up living in a castle at the end of the movie, but the tower is Rapunzel's more famous residence, both in the Disney film and in the original story. Tangled is a very emotionally driven story, so having the tower (or its grounds) as the Fantasyland entrance might be a sign that this Fantasyland focuses more on character arcs and drama.
• Elsa's Castle: I have mixed feelings about Frozen as a movie—and fairly negative ones about the overblown phenomenon that it has become—but I can't deny that it looks great, especially in the ice effects. The elaborate ice castle that Elsa constructs for herself during her show-stopping musical number is one of the most gorgeous film setpieces I have ever seen. As the iconic centerpiece of a theme park, it would be absolutely top-notch—perhaps the park itself could focus on four-seasons imagery, or extreme conditions in the natural world, with Elsa's castle as the entrance to the winter/blizzard “land.”

That's a whole lotta castle.

I might still have to do that alternate DCA idea though. Maybe next week!

* Best part? I wouldn't have to visit it if I didn't want to.

** Fun fact! “Dun” and “Broch” are both words that can refer to a fortress in Scots and/or Old Gaelic...making the name of the place, in fact, “Castle CastleCastle.”

*** Sorry, I've got some creative writing open in another tab.