The
construction walls have been up at California Adventure for several
months at this point, as “a bug's land” is torn out and replaced
with...I hesitate to say a Marvel land, since I don't know yet what
all will be there. Let's go with Marvel stuff.
“a bug's land” is being torn out and replaced with Marvel stuff.
WDI is being pretty tight-lipped about the details, but apparently we
have an Avengers attraction and a Spider-Man attraction on the way,
which in combination with the Guardians Tower of Galactic
Terror—Mission: Breaktime!
Breakneck!
Breakout! amounts to...one heck of a missed opportunity.
There
are two problems with IP-mania, as I see it. There's the simple fact
of it, the trend of attractions and entire lands based on popular
film properties completely overtaking original concepts. I've been
over the reasons this is a problem on multiple occasions, so I won't
go into it now. The second problem is that IP-based attractions are
rarely executed in a way that does justice to either the source
material or the larger themes of the park/land where they are placed.
We see a lot of “book report” rides, as well as attractions that
literally just put character images on otherwise unexceptional
rides.* There tends to be too much emphasis on popular characters,
rather than on making guests feel like part of an exciting world.
And
that's what I'm worried about with the new Marvel stuff. Mission:
Brakepads! is already a subpar execution, because they forced it to
occupy infrastructure designed for another ride entirely. There's
almost certainly a good
Guardians of the Galaxy ride out there in the realm of possibility,
but deciding to make one where the premise is that the Collector
literally took a traveling exhibit of his stuff to the literal
California Adventure, simply because there was a convenient tower
there to squeeze it into...well, it's not what I would have done.
(For the record, this
is what I would have done.) A GotG attraction should
take advantage of the exotic interplanetary setting and make us feel
as if we, like young Peter Quill, have been abducted by aliens and
introduced into this hyper-advanced, multi-species society. To
the extent that a Guardians of the Galaxy ride needs to focus on its
wacky stars, we should at least get to see them guarding
the freaking Galaxy,
yeah?
Getting
back to the upcoming additions...I don't have high hopes. The
Avengers and Spider-Man are certainly fun characters,
but their “standard” adventures take place in...ordinary cities
in the real, modern world. You don't watch an Avengers movie to see
what fantastic realm they're going to visit, because they (generally)
won't. You do it to see what sort of over-the-top baddie they have to
face this time, and how they'll use their over-the-top powers to win
the day.
I
don't know about you, but I live
in an ordinary city in the real, modern world, and it's boring as
hell. Which is why I go to theme parks.
The
sad irony is that there are several MCU properties that could
provide that sense of wonder and participatory adventure that the
Avengers and Spider-Man are (probably) not quite up to. Let me throw
out some ideas.
(Just
as a note before we begin, I haven't actually seen all of the Marvel
movies. I should probably get around to it one of these days, but it
would be something like 40+ hours of cinema to sit through. So I'm
going off what I have seen.)
Wakanda
This
is the really big one. The story of King T'challa of Wakanda, AKA the
Black Panther, is certainly a compelling one, but the real star of
the movie named after him is probably the setting itself: the
fictional Sub-Saharan African nation of Wakanda, which successfully
resisted colonialism by secretly being way more technologically
advanced than the colonizers. Look at this place:
In
Disney terms, this is like a wonderful mashup of Adventureland,
Tomorrowland, and the World Showcase. Imagine how gratifying it would
be to explore such a place, from the dense jungles, to the pastoral
regions, to the various levels of the capital city with its bazaar
and futuristic skyscrapers, to the eerie vibranium mines.
 |
| Paging the designers of Journey to the Center of the Earth... |
Wakanda
would be a fantastic
theme park setting. And speaking of fantasy...
Asgard
Although
Thor is one of the core Avengers, his vibe is completely different
from the other members of the team. Sure, technically
Marvel!Asgard is a distant world somewhere out in space and the
Asgardians are aliens who “inspired” Norse mythology, but let's
be real. They're gods, and Asgard is a fantasy realm, a bit sleeker
and more chromed than a standard fantasy realm, perhaps, but it's got
castles and winged horses and a rainbow you can walk on. If Wakanda is the MCU's answer
to both Adventureland and Tomorrowland, then Asgard is its answer to
Fantasyland.
Micro-verse/Quantum
Realm
In
case you weren't previously aware, I was and am a fervent fan of the
lost and lamented Adventure
Thru Inner Space. I'd seen off-handed proposals that it be
brought back—in spirit, anyway—as an Ant-Man attraction, but I
never thought much of them until I actually got to see Ant-Man
for myself. Say what you will about that movie, the climactic
sequence where Scott shrinks uncontrollably has some intriguingly
freakish visuals. Check
it out for yourself. He does, basically, experience the “plot”
of Inner Space over the course of a couple minutes, right down to
details like a disembodied voice warning of the prospect of eternal
shrinking. It would be child's play to frame a scenario like this
such that you
are doing the super-shrinking instead of merely watching Ant-Man
and/or the Wasp do the super-shrinking. Yes, this would
be a worthy successor to my favorite ever ride, especially if it
included an alarming close encounter with a tardigrade:
And
in case it needs to be said, I would want this to be a ride,
with proper sets and sculptures, not a motion-simulator or whatever.
Adventure Thru Inner Space was already replaced with a
motion-simulator once and I wasn't too happy about it, so don't mess
me about.
Doctor
Strange
This
is one of the MCU movies I haven't actually seen (yet), but I gather
it features several exotic locales, both in the real world and in
various mystical dimensions. I have of course seen images and short
clips of the folding cityscape—a terrific challenge for any
Imagineering team!
TL;DR
version: If Disney must
put Marvel stuff in the parks, they should at least tap the most
imaginative concepts, not the least.
* Looking at you, Pixar Pier.
Wakanda is definitely the one that screams theme park, and it could have worked well in Animal Kingdom instead of Pandora/Avatar Land, with a more spiritual connection to the animals and stuff. But in general all of these ideas seem much better than what we're getting. And how have I never seen anything about Ant-Man/Adventures Through Inner Space?! That's brilliant I say, brilliant!
ReplyDeleteThe problem is that the ones giving WDI their marching orders think the only thing guests want out of a Disney theme park is *characters.* And theme park attractions are not a good medium for telling a character-driven story, because the main character of your theme park trip is always going to be *you*.
DeleteYou basically hit up all the places that sprang to mind as soon as I read the concept for this particular post.
ReplyDeleteSuperheroes are necessarily a bad idea for a theme park because they are antithetical to good theme park design. As you pointed out, the centre of a theme park attraction's story is supposed to be the guest as you experience this fantastic world. A superhero movie is about watching this other person who is not you do all these amazing things. In a theme park attraction, that translates to you maybe being the terrified normie getting rescued by the hero, if not just passively watching his story. Not exactly compelling stuff.
ReplyDeleteThen yeah, compound that with the fact that Marvel movies take place in the modern world, in the modern day... Even their more fantastic settings are ugly and uncompelling. And I can't get over the fact that Wakanda - American's conceptual heir to Liberia - is the opposite of anything that actually happened in real history (Japan resisted Western colonialism through modernization exactly BY opening their borders and hiring Westerners to modernize them, after falling behind exactly BECAUSE of isolationism... But who am I to get in the way of American fantasies of ethno-states with absolute monarchies where black people hoot like gorillas?).
Trust me, if I had my way, the Marvel stuff would be left in the movies where pure third-party spectacle like that belongs. But as long as they're doing it, I feel very strongly that they *could* do something more inspiring and interesting than "Hey, look, it's Iron Man!"
DeleteAs for Wakanda...well, I haven't heard of any major complaints on the part of either African-Americans or black Africans about the portrayal of its society. On the whole, they seem ecstatic that someone made an entire superhero movie about people who look like them, *and* it acknowledges the history of colonialism and the plight of black people around the world to this day, without descending into grim realism. Besides, you can wring your hands over our monarchy fantasies just as soon as you take HRM off your money, a'ight? ;)
Oh, I get why African-Americans would be cool with it, because it writes them overtop of Africa. What baffles me is Africans being cool about it. But most of the complaints I heard actually came from the anti-SJW sphere, where they were asking "So your anti-colonialist fantasy society where warlords settle politics through violent duels and black people hoot like apes was supposed to prove what, exactly?" It's like everyone was so obsessed with "representation" that they didn't pay attention to how it was self-inflicted racism.
DeleteAnd it's not the monarchy itself that's the problem, by the by... Here in Canada, we also have these things called "elections" and we are not, at present, anticipating that Prince William and Prince Harry will settle succession with armed combat to the death. It's like Americans don't understand how constitutional monarchy works or something ;)