Featured Image Courtesy: Bioreconstruct
For attempting to moderate the company and get Disney out of politics, even if it has been unsuccessful thus far, CEO Bob Chapek deserves praise. When it comes to his philosophy for the theme parks and the rise of show buildings being seen out in the open, it’s a far different story. Whereas Disney Imagineering had always tried to either hide the warehouses where attractions reside or, if that was impossible, make the buildings themselves beautiful, Chapek’s Disney Parks team has a different thought process. Cheap is in when it comes to big buildings with big rides. They’re not decorated, they’re just fully visible, greatly damaging the sight lines inside parks. They really do damage the beauty of Disney Parks.
Perhaps the worst offender of this new approach to Disney Park theming is Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind at Epcot. From both the parking lot and inside most areas of the theme park, the Cosmic Rewind warehouse dominates the horizon. Spaceship Earth, the iconic geodesic dome, is dwarfed in size. Epcot is forever a little bit uglier because of Cosmic Rewind. Perhaps if it had been prettied up a bit with eighties décor, maybe the impact could have been lessened — but as is, the park is dominated not by the beauty of park icons, but instead by a giant light-blue box.
A similar impact is now being felt at Magic Kingdom where directly beside Space Mountain, the absolutely-average Tron from Shanghai Disney is being finished up. I say absolutely average because overall, the coaster is just that: average. The canopy is absolutely fantastic, the lighting in the evening is wonderous, but the ride experience itself is just ho-hum. It needs more track length and a longer ride time, but Disney wasn’t willing to deviate from the original blueprints at Shanghai, so that’s what we’re getting. Still, I would be overall pleased if that was the totality of the story. It isn’t.
Unfortunately, from many angles in Magic Kingdom, an eyesore is sitting there once more. As Tron nears exterior completion, guests are beginning to realize that there are currently no plans to hide the show building for Tron from the many angles that it now dominates the Magic Kingdom skyline. Although the building peaks out above the canopy from guests’ viewpoints in Tomorrowland, it’s so small that I have no problem with it. It’s when guests are in Storybook Circus and Fantasyland that we have a really big problem.
Image Courtesy: Bioreconstruct
Ignoring for a moment that the building already is suffering from algae problems, a giant warehouse commanding your view inside the parks is just… ugly. There are no amount of trees that can hide this thing from all the different angles. But it can be fixed.
The ETFE cushion that makes the canopy could be brought in to hide the rest of the building for a manageable cost. Because it would need to hide only two of the walls of the building, and because those walls are fully vertical, Disney could simply pay to have nearly vertical steel vertex walls installed that could then hold the same material… but rather than those walls flowing like the entrance of Tron, they could be nearly straight down. That would hide the show building, it would be more attractive, and it would greatly assist with theming in Magic Kingdom.
Whether Disney is willing to pay the money needed to maintain their prior quality inside the parks is a question we have yet to see answered. But if we don’t call out the rising warehouse structures around Disney Parks that diminish their beauty, why else would they ever stop?
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