Monday, October 1, 2018

Armchair Imagineering: Halloween Adventure

Many moons ago, I outlined a vision for a Disneyland Park going as hard (if not harder) for Halloween as it typically does for Christmas—unique decorations throughout every land, seasonal area music loops, nighttime attraction overlays, live entertainment, the works. None of it has actually come to pass, of course, but Halloween remains a highlight of the year, both at the Disneyland Resort and in the larger culture.
So now it’s the other park’s turn.
Like its older sister, California Adventure does a fair amount for Spoopy Day already, but there is tons of room for improvement, in terms of both refining what is there and adding more. One interesting aspect here is that the Halloween offerings only really kick in at nightfall, which is...certainly thematically appropriate! I might just let that stand.
Conversely, the one thing I find pretty irritating is the designation of Oogie Boogie as the park's official Halloween mascot. There's nothing wrong with a Halloween mascot per se,* but not only are there no specific links between California Adventure and The Nightmare Before Christmas or its characters, they don't actually do anything with this supposed mascot. His silhouette appears over the entrance gates and there are occasionally booming announcements in Ken Page's fabulous voice. That's it. There's no Oogie meet-and-greet tucked into an unassuming corner, no Oogie-based attraction overlay or stage skit.
So if we must have a mascot, then a) it should be a character with some legitimate connection to the park (such as perhaps?) and b) you should be able to tell that they're the mascot.
Anyway, let's get to the land-by-land breakdown. I admittedly have fewer solid ideas for this park than for the other one, mostly because...I was already an adult when California Adventure opened. I didn't grow up thinking about it; it doesn't live in my bones the way Disneyland does.
But let's see what I can do.



Buena Vista Street

This is one of the key areas for Halloween as it is, even if it doesn't really get going until it's dark enough for the purple lights to turn on.


Unfortunately, the Halloween décor, including the music loop, is at odds with the regular 1920s theming. Here's what I'd use to make it pop:
  • Vintage Halloween decorations, including lots of Art Deco influences. Stuff like this. There's some of that in use already, but I think it gets overshadowed by the purple lights, bat silhouettes, and Headless Horseman statue (which is, by the way, too cool to get rid of).
  • Plenty of references to vintage spooky cartoons such as “Skeleton Dance,” “The Haunted House,” and “The Mad Doctor.”
  • An area music loop consisting of vintage Halloween songs. I mentioned last year that there are far more of these than you might assume.
  • Building on the Carthay Circle Restaurant and its connection to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, I'd like to see the area planters filled with “haunted forest” trees, and possibly a meet-and-greet with the Evil Witch!


Hollywood Land

The method for mixing a Hollywood theme with Halloween is pretty obvious, isn't it? Go hard with the scary movies. The main problem is that Disney doesn't have much of a portfolio of successful scary movies, and even if they did, Universal Studios beat them to the punch by, like, decades.
So what do they have? Well, as it stands, they have a continuation of the Buena Vista Street decorating scheme—simple bat silhouettes and the same nighttime music loop. Said loop, consisting of score tracks from various spooky movies, actually fits Hollywood Land pretty well, because, y'know, movies. Oddly enough, only one of them (I think) is a Disney movie, that being Frankenweenie—yeah, they couldn't even manage to tap The Nightmare Before Christmas for this—and I think if it were up to me, I might try harder to showcase the brand.**
They also have Guardians of the Galaxy—Monsters After Dark, which is...fine, I guess. I mean, it's kind of clever that they frame it as a literal sequel to Mission: Breakout, but it's still unpredictable drops combined with intermittent images of ferocious space creatures, so...yay? Don't mind me, I'm still salty over the fact that they ditched the Tower of Terror. Now there was the perfect Halloween ride for Hollywood Land, and you didn't even have to wait for fall to ride it.
You know what else they have in this area that often gets overlooked when people draw the Venn diagram of Disney and Halloween? Monsters, Inc. If they really wanted to go for broke, they could probably come up with a Halloween overlay for the dark ride. There's a good chance it would even make it more interesting than the version that's there now.


Marvel Land

It's coming. The Stark Industries construction barriers have gone up. Might as well start factoring it into these sorts of calculations.
We can start with what we know. The land boundaries will be redrawn, which will put the Tower of Terrible Galaxy Guardians here, instead of in Hollywood Land. Beyond that...who knows?
Would “decorations by Peter Parker” be too obvious?
More seriously, the Hulk is a bona-fide monster. In fact, Bruce Banner/Hulk has a real Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde vibe, doesn't he?***
Beyond that, I can't really offer suggestions until I know what the place is going to look like.


Cars Land

This is another major hub of Halloween theming in California Adventure...only they call it “Haul-O-Ween,” because lol, car pun! There are car-themed decorations such as monster faces with traffic cone teeth, the two smaller rides have Halloween overlays with original songs, nothing too special. There are also references to “Trunk or Treat,” which is the actual name of a recently established tradition wherein communities who find it unsafe or unsavory to send their kids door-to-door for candy all get together in some parking lot and send them car-to-car instead. Whatever, weirdos, you do you...but in this context it does call up uncomfortable images of being served candy out of the characters' rear ends.
It's awkward, but I'm not sure I can improve on it. Cars Land is already such a specific idea that there's not much for me to work with. Maybe do something with the Ghost Light? Unless they do already and I'm just not aware of it? I'm always willing to admit that Cars Land looks great, but I try not to pay attention when it gets “cute.”


Pacific Wharf

It's the food court. It could sell Halloween snacks. It probably does already. We didn't go through there on our recent trip.


Pixar Pier

Ugh, where do I even start? Pixar Pier is such a shoddy concept to begin with.
See, here's the dirty secret about designing any sort of holiday overlay for a themed area: you are basically attempting to narrow the theme—zeroing in on those aspects of the overall theme that also suit the holiday. With a broad enough overall theme (and a bit of luck), you can find enough links to keep things interesting, but it gets progressively harder the more specific the original theme is.
And it doesn't get much more specific (and nonsensical) than “seaside amusement park owned and operated by narcissistic Pixar characters.”
The sad thing is that it did not have to be this way. If they had just left it as Paradise Pier, they could have gone all in on the “creepy carnival” concept that comprises a Halloween aesthetic all on its own. As it is, they've painted themselves into a corner where they have to use “spooky Pixar,” which is honestly even less of a thing than spooky Disney.
What do they really have in that corner that people will recognize? There's “Toy Story of Terror” (perhaps the basis for a temporary variation on Midway Mania?), the character Fear from Inside Out, and...
Well, there's always Coco.
For quite a while now, the stage in the pier area has been the usual focus of California Adventure's Mexican cultural entertainments. That's where you get the Elena of Avalor skits and where you get ¡Viva Navidad! during the Christmas season. And naturally, that's where you get Dia de Los Muertos performances in the fall—an ideal use of Coco even before they Pixared up the joint. No complaints from me on that score.


Grizzly Peak

I feel I'm on firmer ground here. Wilderness camping + Halloween = scary stories told around the campfire. There is no shortage of spooks that work well in a woodsy setting, and many of them are even specific to California, such as Sasquatch and other Native legends. Decorations could include tin cans with cut-out jack-o-lantern faces and witch's brooms made from twigs and twine. The Redwood Creek Challenge Trail could have the lights turned down (not off) or color-filtered and lots of eerie sounds playing in the bushes.
Bonus: Install a nighttime version of Soarin' Around the World that takes guests on a world tour of famous haunted or supernatural locations.


Miscellaneous

I came up with a pretty spiffy idea for a Halloween parade in Disneyland, but I don't think I'm up to the same here. On the other hand, a Halloween-themed version of World of Color could work. Disney may not have many scary movies, but it has enough scary imagery from movies to fill out a 25-minute show.

Aaaaand...that's about it. Like I said, California Adventure isn't a part of me the way Disneyland is.
And wow, does that sound creepy or what? How appropriate!


* Although I would note that Disneyland itself manages without one.
** Which is not to say that I'm not aware of what they were going for with the existing loop. A solid majority of the score tracks used were composed by Danny Elfman, giving the whole a nice stylistic consistency that sits well within the “eerie” aesthetic.
*** They?

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