Nintendo's Universal Worlds

I grew up with video games. If you asked me at age seven what my favorite place was, after Walt Disney World I would have told you it was the Mushroom Kingdom. Video games are dreamscapes, fantasy worlds that invite us in to escape. Along with cinema and amusement parks, video games are the third pillar of 20th century escapism - unapologetically popular entertainments which were created to amuse and distract the working classes.

If you dig into game design books, you'll see those links made again and again. The best games are said to aspire to be cinematic, and often are themselves pastiches of popular cinema - Die Hard on a spaceship, James Bond in an ancient pyramid. Disneyland is often brought up by game designers as a key inspirational space, a fully manufactured setting which is also clean, clear, and coherent across generations and cultures. Theme parks are just one other way to achieve immersion and escape.

And so, as a longtime Nintendo kid and a fan of the oeneric dreamscapes of theme parks, one would think that I would be preparing the paper streamers and rolling out the red carpet in advance of the announcement of the wonderfully titled Super Nintendo World - a mouthwatering expansion coming soon to Universal parks. And let's be clear here: I am. Having not been a fan of Cars, or Star Wars, or Harry Potter, I finally feel like here's something elaborate that's aimed at me. As beautifully done as those areas have been or promise to be, my heart did not soar at my first sight of Hogwarts. But put a gold coin on a stick and have it spin around behind somebody's head, and I'm going to need to sit down.

So yes, I'm an easy mark. Super Mario Brothers 3, Super Mario World, Metroid, Mega Man, and Legend of Zelda were my 'galaxy far, far away' growing up, and I'm going to have a strong reaction no matter what ends up getting done. But that doesn't mean I can't have concerns about what's going to happen, and thoughts on the dividing lines between how video games, theme parks, and films create meaning.

So here's our chance to take a quick overview of Nintendo and theme parks. I've stated before on this site that I think Disney has so far failed to do justice to both games and immersive theming at the same time, and perhaps we can dig under that a little. Not a lot. It's a huge topic, and the year is almost up.

Super Mario Disneyland

So what exactly did Universal get themselves into here?

Super Mario is series which as of late has largely confined itself to the Mushroom Kingdom, but in its early years often took bizarre and irrational detours to lands abroad - the middle eastern Sub-Con, the Asian Sarasaland, the expansive Dinosaur Land. The visual style of each game was often totally different than the ones before it - the ghostly, abandoned open planes of Super Mario Brothers that gave way to a landscape strewn with multicolored blocks and checkerboard tile floors in Super Mario Brothers 3. Yoshi's Island, a prequel set in Dinosaur Land, is manifestly lush and tropical in a way no other game is.

Yet the games have a sense of continuity not so much through their settings and gameplay, as their sense of otherworldliness. The Mushroom Kingdom is filled with bizarre and inexplicable threats. In Super Mario Brothers, there is a palpable loneliness and danger to Mario's mission - only compounded if you read the manual and discover that those plants and blocks are supposed to be the transformed citizens of the Mushroom Kingdom! Morbid. No other Mario game feels as lonely and haunted until you get to Super Mario 64, where the echoing, stone clad interior of Princess Peach's castle leads to some truly heart-stopping moments where Mario is suddenly no longer alone.

The Mario series, like all video games of their era, exist in a world of easily comprehensible symbols. Just as nobody needs an explanation of why you're whipping monsters and ghosts in Castlevania, everyone knows to avoid roaming evil-eyed chestnuts, falling rocks, and leaping fire. In the Mushroom Kingdom, anything that can potentially help you has cute eyes, and everything else has a fierce (or at least dumb) expression. You don't need a language to understand these signifiers.

Super Mario, and the Nintendo Entertainment System generally, was a Japanese import which was wildly successful in an era otherwise terrified of Japan's economic ascendancy. Think of the Tokyo-inflected urban decay of Blade Runner, or potboiler crime pictures like Black Rain or Rising Sun. Super Mario crossed a threshold that Godzilla, Speed Racer, Ultraman and Astro-Boy could not. Even today, Godzilla is still made fun of by a certain generation for being a Japanese import. But Super Mario? That guy was an Italian from Brooklyn. He was pure kawaii nonsense delivered in an Americana candy coating.

Mario's world, with its bipedal turtles, swooping clouds, mobile cacti and cheerful hillsides, is a world of symbols not dissimilar to the fevered imagery incubator of Disneyland. Disneyland is also a place of inexplicable dangers, except Walt Disney used ghosts, dinosaurs, pirates and cannibals instead of mushrooms and man eating plants. They come to roughly the same end: we see these things and know that there's danger up ahead.

Magic Kingdom and Disneyland controlled visitor's experiences by intentionally limiting the number of options available at any time; you can either stop in this shop or this attraction, or keep walking. There's usually only one or two options available at any one time. The linearity of the experience is the defining quality of a theme park, compared to the open grid favored by traditional amusement parks like Kennywood or Cedar Point.

This too is basically similar to the structure of many Mario games - levels must be traversed from left to right, and in a specific order, to reach a specific goal. The most logical way to lay out a Super Mario area for a theme park would be on the pattern of Magic Kingdom's Adventureland - a themed corridor leading to a specific destination.

This imagery-heavy abstraction is the key to understanding why both Disneyland and Nintendo worked so well across generations and ages - both the classic theme parks and early video games created a pressure cooker atmosphere of heated symbolic interpretation, and clawed their way into immortality for their efforts.

Disneyland sticks out in America's literal-minded chronology obsessed pop culture, but I don't think it's coincidental that the Japanese recognized this quality in Disneyland and wanted one of their own badly. After years of rejections, Walt Disney Productions finally relented in the mid-70s - and then, only as a way to get a quick cash infusion due to spiraling costs on EPCOT Center. Tokyo Disneyland opened in April 1983 - just three months to the day before the release of the Nintendo Famicom in Japan. There's a family resemblance between the aesthetics of the Famicom and the Tomorrowland section of Tokyo Disneyland, as if one influenced the other.

In the Mario games of my youth, Mario was a cypher, almost mysterious. He wasn't cuddly - his game sprites made him look stoic, serious. It required a certain degree of interpretation if you wanted to know why this Italian guy was murdering large numbers of turtles. What his personality was like was up to your imagination.

On television, as portrayed by wrestler Lou Albano, the New York aspects of Mario were emphasized - his goofy accent, his constant need for pizza. One of the only other American depictions of Mario produced before the current Mario character debuted in Super Mario 64 may be found in the Phillips CDi game Hotel Mario, where Mario is voiced by actor Marc Graue in a style very similar to Albano's Mario.

In this sense it's easy to see how Americans adopted Mario as one of their own, and it's no wonder that many of us were taken aback by the voice and childlike attitude of Mario in Super Mario 64. Until that seminal game, although you played as Mario, there was no insight into what Mario was thinking or how he would sound, if he could speak. This actually isn't all that different than the abstraction of a WED classic like The Jungle Cruise. What does Trader Sam sound like? It's up to you to decide.

And it isn't WED Enterprises that's building Super Nintendo World, nor is it 1983. The Mario of today is as different from the Mario of 1985 as WED Enterprises is different from Walt Disney Imagineering. And therein lies some of my concerns.

The Difficulty of Complexity

Games grew up quick in the 80s. By the time Nintendo had premiered the Famicom Disk System in 1986, a new breed of interactive narrative was being carved out by innovative hybrid games like Castlevania 3 and Metroid. With the move from 8 to 16 bit consoles in 1988 and 1990, hardware and social forces were in place to give rise to the sort of epic adventure stories that Square Soft and Enix were pioneering. Video games began to resemble the sort of lengthy narratives best contained in novels.

But Mario did not change. Super Mario World may justifiably be called one of the most gorgeous video games ever produced, but mechanically it was very much like the 8 bit games which had preceded it. The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past more or less hit reset on the Zelda series, offering up a hugely expanded take on the concepts behind the original game. But if we really want to dig into the strengths and weaknesses of the expanding scope video games, we really don't have to look much further than Sonic the Hedgehog.

A sort of stepping stone between the pared down, symbolic creations seem on the Famicom and the hugely elaborate spectacles offered on the Playstation and Nintendo 64, Sonic oh so briefly stole the crown from Mario. Sonic may have been built for speed, but he wasn't really built to last.

In 1991, Sonic was something new from the world go - his sarcastic expression and waggling finger taunting you from the load screen. But the first game was actually an awkward series of jumps presented in a glossy, promising package. Through 4 subsequent installments, the series improved bit by bit, before coalescing into the exhilarating Sonic 3  / Sonic & Knuckles.

These are games of surface pleasures - the smooth controls, the buzzing rock soundtracks, the cool looks of Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, and Dr. Robotnik. But the release of Sonic & Knuckles in 1995 was also the end: SEGA was never again able to leverage the blue hedgehog to a widely successful game. Part of this is due to the failure of four SEGA hardware launches in a row, but part of it is because Sonic never convincingly adapted to a new kind of game - a game that didn't just zip from left to right.

And it was when Sonic was down for the count that Super Mario 64 landed and went off like a bomb in the industry - reshaping conceptions of what these kinds of video game characters could do. Today, Sonic is a beloved character, but experienced best and most often in games where he races, or jousts, or fights Nintendo characters. More young kids have probably played as Sonic in Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games than they have in Sonic the Hedgehog 2.

There's no longer any kind of brand expectation from Sonic. And the reason is because maybe Sonic never really was about being in excellent games - maybe it always was that Sonic is always just Sonic; a better design, a better idea, than an actual character. Maybe the most compelling Sonic product in years has been the cartoon Sonic Boom, a ludicrous weekly excursion into weird humor and lame puns. People like the idea of Sonic more than they do the phenomenon of Sonic.

Sonic briefly represented the future, but in the end he was no more than a fresh coat of paint on the same old problem: people liked these characters because they were simple and relatable. Sonic and Knuckles exist barely more as figures in a silent serial: the cool guy who taps his foot, the evil guy who laughs. Mario is barely more than an abstract vessel to carry viewers through his games.

But isn't this very close to how theme park operate, too? If we're being rushed through a set at 3 feet a second, we don't have time for anything but clear, unambiguous images. Where Sonic failed is when he had to be more than that - to carry a compelling narrative about anything more than smashing robots and being cool.

We could also look at Capcom's Mega Man. Originally about little more than an Astroboy knockoff defeating a mad scientist, Mega Man presented a surprisingly bright, upbeat future of whimsical but aggressive robots. Being an early game, it was not properly translated and released with little fanfare - leaving the door open for American kids to discover and speculate on what exactly the deal with Mega Man was. Was he a soldier? A police officer? A human on an alien world? Early video games on the NES, PC and Atari were imaginatively stimulating experiences because of what they left out, offering players an opportunity to fill in the gaps in their own way.

Capcom eventually rebooted Mega Man into an elaborate and dystopian technology parable, heavily inflected by Blade Runner and The Terminator. And while several of those games are terrific, the flagship Mega Man series was sputtering out. By the early 2000s it had been rebooted yet again - into a form that little resembled its bright, cheerful, side scrolling roots. Today Mega Man is relegated to cameos and nostalgia pieces, even less relevant than Sonic is.

But compared to SEGA and Capcom's efforts to grow their signature game series, Nintendo went and doubled down on Mario's essential abstraction.

By the time Nintendo was selling copies of Super Mario 64, Mario was up against competitors like Solid Snake and Cloud from Final Fantasy VII - games that could shock or emotionally involve players in ways they had never imagined while pushing buttons on their NES. Mario was an abnormality - a cheerful but basically inaccessible fellow, eternally bubbly, in a world of bright colors and happy endings. And he stayed that way. Like Mickey Mouse, attempts to update Mario inevitably failed - and unlike Disney, Nintendo actually recognized this. Even while they branched Mario out into elaborate new genres like racing and RPG, Mario always was just Mario - he only required that players accept him as himself, a sort of mascot.

The Paper Mario series is an interesting case study in this. Hugely immersive and unapologetically long, Paper Mario expanded the intricacy and mythology of the Mushroom Kingdom in ways impossible to do in 16 bits - and they did it without even requiring Mario to speak. The cheerful, red-hatted avatar was the eye of the storm while his presence allowed Nintendo to draw on larger and larger canvases around him.

And yet, strictly speaking in terms of market share, the Mario series had been on a downslide since 1996. Mario 64 had sold less than Yoshi's Island before it, and Super Mario Sunshine sold less than Mario 64. Reissues of Mario's 2D adventures continued to do well on new formats like the Game Boy Advance, and Nintendo eventually gave up and launched a new series of 2D Mario games: New Super Mario Brothers, which has become the staple of Nintendo's portfolio. New Nintendo systems now tout 2D, retro-style Mario adventures.

Yes, that's right. The buying public voted with their dollars in favor of 1980s style abstractions, and Nintendo gave them what they wanted. Disney would've buried their heads in the sand.

Simple Mario Super Show

Which brings us back to Universal, Disney's greatest competitor. As I've claimed elsewhere on this site, Universal's most salient characteristic is their insistence on constructing their attractions based on actual linear narratives. Disney has copied the attitude, but almost none of the specifics - troweling  elaborate narrative justifications on top of random events. Universal actually sets up plot points in their queues that they expect you to keep track of and understand they're paying off later, down the line.

The thing is that I'm not at all sure that theme parks are actually any good at telling those kind of stories, and audiences don't seem to care. It's nice if they're there for the kind of people who go to blogs like this, but it isn't necessary - the kind of simple storytelling represented by a falling rock in Super Mario Brothers 3 or a floating candle in The Haunted Mansion works just as well.

Directly compare two recent Universal extravaganzas: their Harry Potter rides Forbidden Journey and Escape From Gringotts. Despite a typically elaborate narrative setup, nothing that happens in Forbidden Journey makes any sense at all - what you're doing, why it's happening, or why Harry is tolerating it. He even shouts at you in one scene thanks to your inexplicable adventure through Spiderville. Compared to this, Gringotts actually makes a lot of sense - it's well paced, it has setups and payoffs, it actually rewards an attentive rider.

But none of that matters all that much because Forbidden Journey does things that work in the narrative environment that rides create, whereas Gringotts is telling you the kind of story better told in a movie. The strengths of Forbidden Journey are themed design strengths - crazy action, immediate dangers, weird illusions. People get off Forbidden Journey excited and inspired. The ride where you bop around in a mine car and characters on IMAX screens shout exposition at you cannot compare, and guests leave somewhat underwhelmed.

Nintendo games are about mysteries, things left unexplained, unpredictable explorations of bizarre worlds. They aren't about, and they don't tell, linear, comprehensible narratives in anything but the simplest way. They're about experiences and emotions, not about writing and plot points.

I don't know if the charm of the best Nintendo games will translate to a physical medium. While Nintendo's nostalgic appeals and retro-style product help convince me that the folks at Nintendo at least know where their strengths are, I've got less hope that the American themed design industry, so obsessed with minutae and specific storytelling techniques, will be able to make the jump.

In Super Mario Brothers 3, there's a room in a World 5 fortress that's empty. There's no secrets to discover in it. It's only there for atmosphere - to make you think about where you are and what you're doing, and to feel the dark and lonely atmosphere. To me it signifies all that's compelling about old school video games - the creation of compelling spaces without explanations or finger pointing. These things aren't all jumping and shooting, or at least they don't need to be. That's the magic of Nintendo. That's what Universal needs to aim at.

The eye of the storm.

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Do you enjoy long, carefully written essays on the ideas behind theme parks, like this one? Hop on over to the Passport to Dreams Theme Park Theory Hub Page for even more!

Go Away Green: Three Years Later

About three and a half years ago I published a little essay called Go Away Green, discussing the illusionistic aspects of disguising show buildings inside theme parks.

What are show buildings? They are those big ugly unthemed warehouses which house the sets that the actual attractions take place in.

This doesn't count as spoilers any more, does it?

Quite unexpectedly, Go Away Green turned out to be one of the most consistently popular essays I've ever put out. I think it speaks to the ongoing interest not only in the "backstage" aspect of theme parks, but in the nuts and bolts that go into making a place work. It takes a lot of dedication to care too much about those big featureless walls, so perhaps a followup is in order. Moreover, a lot has changed at Magic Kingdom since 2012. A Fantasyland expansion has come online, previously empty restaurants have been reinvented, and the entire center of the park was demolished and rebuilt. That's a lot of places which previously had very obvious exposed show buildings. What is to be done about them?

The question is not a new one, but the rules about it do change depending on the age of the park we're talking about here. Disneyland has never made much of an effort to wall off its various areas from each other, because everything is so near together it would be almost impossible to do so. Because it's consistent in this approach, it isn't that big of a deal that you can see a Swiss mountain from Frontierland...

...or that the red rocks of Utah are visible from the front lawn of a New Orleans cafe. It's just the way things work there.

Magic Kingdom's designers made a more consistent effort to visually integrate the various areas of Magic Kingdom, but there wasn't much more of an effort to screen the areas off from each other. You can still see parts of Fantasyland from Liberty Square, parts of Adventureland from Frontierland, and so on. There is a move towards subtle visual integration - notice how the shape and size of buildings in Liberty Square subtly echo the shape of Cinderella Castle - but WED Enterprises was still content to allow everything to smush together organically. It's part of the fantasy nature of the park.

Flash forward to 1992, and Disneyland Paris - by far the most integrated effort at a theme park yet - didn't just have a berm around the entire park, but berms separating each themed land from every other one, too. With the traditionally allowable exception of the castle, once inside any of Disneyland Paris' lands, everything is screened off. It's even almost impossible to see Big Thunder from the top of the Swiss Family Treehouse due to very careful positioning. Each "land" in Disneyland Paris is treated as if it is effectively a separate theme park.

WDI carried this quite far. Due to the practicalities of running a theme park, Main Street and Frontierland sit right next to each other. Not to be outdone, the rear of the Frontierland buildings facing Main Street have Victorian false fronts, and the rear of Main Street facing Frontierland is disguised as barns.

Frontierland from Main Street (thanks David G)

Main Street from Frontierland 

It's all very intricate and impressive. My question is: does any of this at the end of the day really matter, or is this just the sort of thing super-fans (and theme park designers) care about? Does anybody except readers (and writers) of blogs like this really care that It's A Small World has nothing to do with the rest of Fantasyland?

In my original post I pointed out that around 50,000 people a day walk under the gigantic unthemed wall in Magic Kingdom's Fantasyland and never give it a second thought. They simply don't see it. I compared this to misdirection in a conjuring trick - real-life stage magic.

In short, I'm still not at all convinced that in the end this matters all this much. Don't get me wrong - disguised infrastructure like the examples above at Disneyland Paris fill me, as a park fan, with delight. They're one of the reasons I got into this in such a heavy way. I stopped my touring of Disneyland Paris to admire them.

So it's in those specific terms of praise that I think the following discussion should be couched. As a fan and admirer of park design, I think it's great that WDI finally addressed some of the lapses in theme which I will single out below. Yet, in the larger sense, I also think it's worth being skeptical about the objective value of such things. In the end, after all, isn't this all to some degree just a game?

Enough preface, let's look at some show building.... camouflage.

In 2015, after a year and a half of on-again, off-again work, Magic Kingdom finally finished up a long-delayed bypass around Main Street. Disneyland built one too, and while Disneyland's is a lot of walls and only used on emergency occasions, Magic Kingdom ended up with a wide open air boulevard that they end up using basically every night. They compensated by filling the whole thing with trees.

It's not much to look at, which is okay in the sense that it's rarely seen in daylight anyway, but what's interesting is how the curtain of trees affects Main Street day-long, Areas which once offered very stark views of the rear of Tomorrowland...

2012

...have been somewhat filled in and give a sense of some remove between areas.

2015

Until the late 90s, large trees were planted behind this wall to block views like this, and even if it's due to a firework crowd flow outlet, it's nice to be able to stand on Main Street and enjoy the illusion of a park just beyond this wall again.

Other rough corners were not exactly removed so much as covered up to the point where only the truly sharp eyed would notice them.

2012

2016

On the Hub side of Main Street, the most visible gap of theming in Magic Kingdom - the entirely visible rear of Main Street - is no more. The rear of the buildings, once painted in Go Away Green, now have painted on brick details, interestingly acknowledging that this is the actual rear of Main Street for any who would bother to look.

The remaining protrusion onto the Hub, the side of the Plaza Restaurant, received a rather simple dimensional facade wrap and a few new trees. This doesn't stand up to close scrutiny, but as I pointed out in my original article, very few will choose to look at this as opposed to the gigantic castle off to the right.

2012

2015

With some extra trees and from a bit of a distance it becomes very hard to distinguish from the more fully realized architecture, which was the point all along:

Over in Fantasyland, so much of the area has been redeveloped that a great deal of modification of sightlines had to take place. New walls have done up to block rooftop AC units (one wonders what modern WDI would make of the endless miles of plain white roofs once visible from the Skyway), and extra paint has been brought in to disguise plain walls.

Previously this was bare walls & exposed infrastructure

One small area of rockwork was rebuilt at least three times, increasing in size each time, to prevent the new show building for the Belle story time attraction from being seen from the Village Haus restrooms. The bizarre result:

To me that looks like a rock floating weirdly in midair, but I guess at least it isn't the view of the back of a corrugated metal shed.

Elsewhere in New Fantasyland, sightlines have been scrupulously maintained. One of the most impressive is this artificial rocky cliff which blocks views of the Little Mermaid show building from every possible vantage point, including the nearby Storybook Circus:

Only in aerial photos can you appreciate how extensive this detail is. It works from all perspectives, including the top of new the roller coaster:

Scott Keating

Yet in other ways the fully-articulated modern theming extravaganzas in New Fantasyland sit weirdly cheek to jowl with the more illusionistic or just plain simple 1971 architecture. My absolute favorite, the west side of the Hall of Presidents show building, is still proudly sitting out in the open:

Depending on the season, Haunted Mansion's show building is no big secret:

Other areas of Magic Kingdom weirdly combine areas you feel you probably shouldn't be seeing with  evocative detail. There's this detailed fence atop the Adventureland Veranda which helps distract from the plain wall behind it:

The side of the Peter Pan's Flight show building can be glimpsed between two Fantasyland structures, simultaneously offering visible pipes and a themed turret:

These wooden logs on the Frontierland side appear to "hold up" an Adventureland facade:

The exact spot where Adventureland (left) becomes Frontierland (right)

It's worth remembering that Disneyland mostly just lets her architectural style smash together like two trains. The concept of transitory architecture was pioneered for Magic Kingdom.

But on the other hand from the train it's very easy to see the stark naked rear of Pirates of the Caribbean, Fantasyland, and the unthemed overpass which I remarked on in Ten Big Design Blunders. Now that the backside of Main Street has been painted over, filled with trees, and basically banished, this is probably the single largest intrusion of the "outside world" into Walt Disney World left.

If we broaden our horizons a bit we could talk about the colossal show building for Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey, which sits out in the open like a shelled peanut:

Or this illusionistic slight of hand on the Disneyland Railroad which passes by so quickly it's easy to forget it's disguising a giant warehouse as... a giant warehouse.

Again, we must ask: does it truly in the end matter?

I think in order to answer that we have to question the extent to which a non-committed audience is likely to respond to the little holes where the illusion slips out. Many guests don't even see obvious details, never mind these weird little gaps where something unintended slips through. You can technically see the Contemporary from Liberty Square, but almost nobody bothers to look to see it.

To what extent does something that's basically subliminal affect the overall perception of the whole?

Tokyo DisneySEA goes to unprecedentedly elaborate means to screen out its back-of-house areas from guest view. If even subliminally, touches like that add to the luster of the park, and make it seem like a more impressive, a complete package. Disneyland Paris and Tokyo DisneySEA enjoy sterling reputations in part because the detail they are built with is staggering. It's possible that even if the majority of audiences don't stop to look at every little thing, the mere fact that it's there impresses on them in some subliminal way.

This is why I think that sweating the small stuff adds up. The measurable difference is played out every day in the park - in reputation, word of mouth, and demand. Mind-boggling spectacles like The Haunted Mansion, Pirates of the Caribbean, Tower of Terror, The Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man, Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey, and Kilimanjaro Safaris still do command long waits because word of mouth has made them into the tentpoles of their respective parks, and audiences respond to them for the crazily elaborate experiences that they are. They may not see everything, but the richness of the experience alone is arresting.

But it's worth remembering that Disneyland and Magic Kingdom are unique. Compared to something like Disneyland Paris, the design of both of the stateside parks is far less intricate. These parks are stepping stones towards the modern extravaganza parks represented by an Islands of Adventure or a Tokyo DisneySEA, and to some extent I think they should stay that way.

Magic Kingdom is the last Disney park to have that sense of naive architecture that you get at Disneyland. Yes, it's bigger, and yes, over the years Disneyland has made the texture of their park much more intricate. But intricacy is different than sophistication, and I wouldn't want to live in a place where weirdo design touches like those logs holding up those Magic Kingdom facades or that too-small-for-people bridge in Disneyland's Adventureland were "sophisticated" out of existence. These places are, after all, historical objects as well.

Al Huffman

Floating around the perimeters of theme parks, show buildings are the white phantoms of the art form - ever present, rarely seen. In a place so full of richly satisfying distractions, isn't it interesting how much we can learn about them by choosing to look at things we aren't supposed to see?

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Do you enjoy long, carefully written essays on the ideas behind theme parks, like this one? Hop on over to the Passport to Dreams Theme Park Theory Hub Page for even more!

Universal's Magnum Opus: Spider-Man

Several weeks ago I spent the better part of a day re-riding what I consider to be the second-best ride in Orlando, right behind the Haunted Mansion: The Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man at Islands of Adventure. This may come as a surprise to some of you and indeed had the 1990s not brought the end of Horizons, Journey into Imagination and World of Motion, it would probably be much lower on the list. In fact, Universal's brilliant Kongfrontation! would probably have knocked it several notches lower, but Kong met his end just a few years after Spidey began his crazy romp through New York, and to my eye Universal Creative has never bettered this dark ride.

The problem is that until the last few weeks I've never really felt I had much to say about Spider-Man. Like Indiana Jones Adventure, it's greatness was so self-evident that there seemed little reason to either pick apart or defend its greatness. However, in mid-2012, Universal Hollywood opened a new take on the Spider-Man ride experience called Transformers: The Ride, an experience re-designed around a new franchise due to Universal's regional control of the Spider-Man character in theme parks. Transformers was such a huge success in Hollywood that Universal brought it over to Orlando, building and opening the east coast version in less than a year. I rode Transformers a lot in Hollywood, and again in Orlando. It's a great ride. But Spider-Man is better.

So, we must ask the question: why? What about Spider-Man makes it inherently better? Looking at it simply on paper, Transformers has an edge in several respects. It's a crazier ride than Spider-Man, taking you directly into a war zone between giant robots. It's got better 3D effects and it makes better sense of some of the gags Spider-Man used. It has Optimus Prime thanking for for saving the world, and I don't care who you are, that's something everyone wants. Its use of flying effects is even more thrilling and convincing than Spider-Man. But it's missing something, too.

Transformers and Spider-Man

Theme Park Insider

First, let's look at Spider-Man alongside its flashy new sister, Transformers: The Ride.

Although Spider-Man's 2012 visual upgrade has helped close the gap between the two rides in many respects, Spidey is still an intentionally cartoonier experience. I often decry tooniness in my articles, but it just works like gangbusters in Spider-Man. Spidey has an immediacy lacking from the usual take-you-inside-the-cartoon visual vocabulary employed successfully by, say, Roger Rabbit's Car-Toon Spin (which it vaguely resembles). Some of this can be attributed to Universal Creative's successful adaptation to the tone of comic books and pulp adventure serials: crazy action with a healthy seasoning of sarcasm. The villains in Spider-Man are absurd: instead of simply trying to kill you for discovering their secret hideout they take time to terrorize you with various objects (electrical plugs, pumpkin bombs, tongues) in a way that makes nearly no sense at all but adds to the sense of lighthearted menace. This same ride wouldn't work with Batman villains.

Transformers, by contrast, almost takes itself too seriously - a trait inherited from the unfortunate Michael Bay movies. Even the fairly likable Transformer we ride in throughout the experience, Evac, could stand to develop a sense of humor. In the preshow video Evac reprimands us: "You can either thank or blame me later!" and on the ride mostly offers helpful advice like "We've gotta get you out of this city!" or "Reverse thrusters! Full power!"

"We've been hit!"

Evac: no Paul Frees, to be sure.

The primary villain of Transformers, Megatron, admittedly not historically noted for being any fun, spends most of the ride playing Rodan to Optimus Prime's Godzilla while occasionally taking time out to swat at scaffolding or pull riders off a building. It's clear that Transformers expects us to take the Megatron threat fairly seriously, and the result is a bit less fun. If anything Transformers makes it clear that Megatron could kill all of the riders very easily, which somewhat undermines the credibility of his threat level when we miraculously survive every encounter. These Decepticons don't seem to be very good at what they do. Because Spider-Man's villains still behave according to the absurd established rules of comic books villains they, paradoxically, seem to pose more of a threat to riders.

And speaking of that threat level, perhaps there's something to be said for rides where we, the riders, are intent on escaping a bad situation rather than charging forward into it. Theme park attractions from the very start have used the "something-goes-horribly-wrong" cliche, and perhaps the theme park default situation of eluding cackling witches, mummies, dinosaurs, snakes, and gorillas is so deeply ingrained that we respond to it warmly but unconsciously. Transformers makes us heroes in a war zone and instead of attempting to escape the Spidey villains we constantly, recklessly endanger ourselves inside Evac. This unconscious lineage perhaps makes is easier to feel invested, and thus alarmed in Spider-Man, which may contribute to the sense of its greater resonance.

I think it's also fair to say that Transformers relies on screens much more than Spider-Man does, which is a difficult thing to try to quantify. Both attractions use 3D screens to drive their narrative, but I think the overall difference has to do with the kind of screens and their staging. Transformers' screen-based scenes tend to involve simulated motion; you careen down a busy street, go through the belly of a robot, and fly sideways through a skyscraper. Spider-Man, largely, uses the 3D screens as extensions of sets to do things that can't be done with sets; exploding walls, endless warehouses, city landscapes. We could call this a "Cinerama" approach vs the "Virtual Back Wall" approach. There are exceptions, of course: Transformers' first few screens are indeed virtual rear walls and Spiderman in its last few minutes as the SCOOP ride vehicle careens through midair is practically entirely screen-based. Yet I think the fact that there is indeed a lot of set-based stuff in Spider-Man is what makes the difference, even if subconsciously. You can still take your glasses off in Spider-Man and still see plenty of stuff.

Transformers is, essentially, a ride through CG action scene where I'm more comfortable calling Spider-Man a dark ride with 3D elements which do things normal rides can't do. Appropriately, Transformers is a far crazier ride experience. When Spider-Man was new it seemed that no ride would ever outdo it for hyperactivity, but both Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey and Transformers are so crazily tightly paced that even modern audiences accustomed to the vomit-cam find them overstimulating.

Along with Transformers' approximation of 2010's cinematic language, it comes with some unique moments which, to me, pose challenges to the "reality" of the theme park experience. Theme parks have always been predicated on the idea that crazy things are happening to you; you survive the burning building, escape the Haunted House, defeat the monster, dodge the rolling boulder. As a result most successful theme park attractions aim for a degree of realism, often manifest as detail. You feel as if you have been transported to exotic environments without the "mediating influence" of a camera lens or motion picture screen.

"I learned this from Hobgoblin!"

Transformers twice violates the "reality" of the theme park experience and emulates the movie experience, and while I can't say that the result "breaks" the illusion, it is a very odd, unique moment in theme park history. Twice the ride goes into slow motion - exactly as it would were we watching an actual Michael Bay movie in our local AMC multiplex. The action and sound slows down to allow us to register a crucial detail, before speeding back up.

In others words, for a few moments we're no longer doing crazy things like we see in movies, we're doing things that only the motion picture camera can do. This is a new level of collusion between dimensional space and cinema space. Of course there's always been a number of Disney attractions which use not just film language, but film itself to carry an effect. Let's point accusing fingers at Soarin' Over California as Disney's most obvious offender here: we start off pretending we're going to be hang gliding (on a bench), but once we're up in the air - surprise! - it's a movie. And not only that, but it has dramatic music and editing which is central to the whole darn effect of the thing. Soarin' allows us to fly through a travelogue. There's no pretense that it's really an accurate hang gliding simulation.

So it's not as if Universal is "guilty" of imposing cinema rules on its patrons while Disney is "innocent". But I must admit that the slow motion segments of Transformers trouble me, as a theme park partisan and as a cinema person, more than I expect they should. To me it seems that these brief segments (and they are brief, a couple seconds each) require us to make a conceptual leap about the limits of our own abilities than I'm unaccustomed to making in a theme park, which further contributes to my sense that the fairly straightforward Spider-Man is a better and more convincing experience.

Spider-Man and the Complexities of Illusion

Wikipedia

Let's start digging a bit deeper into The Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man, and I'd like to begin by talking about its queue.

Islands of Adventure largely has superb queues, and with the addition of Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey is probably the best theme park in the United States for narrative queueing experiences, but it's important here to discuss exactly what having a "great queue" entails. I think the rubric for a great queue is a sliding scale relative to the value and duration of the ride which follows it, and the reason is because an elaborate queue unconsciously signals to a prospective rider that the ride which follows will be a special experience. A simple or crudely themed ride preceded by an elaborate queue will be perceived as a letdown, whereas the best queues link up harmoniously with the ride experience to create a true "first act". Indiana Jones Adventure and Forbidden Journey are two of the biggest, craziest rides ever, so their elaborate queues feel justified. The Little Mermaid ride at Magic Kingdom has a gorgeous facade and queue - better than the ride which follows, in fact. I've spoken to many tourists who felt let down by Mermaid because the queue set them up for an experience far better than the ride delivered. So clearly there is such a thing as "too elaborate a queue".

I think Spider-Man hits the sweet spot exactly. On first blush there isn't too much to it - especially compared to richly textural experiences like the Tower of Terror, but looks are deceiving at Spider-Man. To my eye, this queue is the only area of the "island" the attraction is situated in - Marvel Super Hero Island - where the conceit of "being in a comic book" is successfully carried off. There's a simplicity and directness to the visual treatment of this idea - the slightly weird, flat false doors, exaggerated perspectives, and monochromatic background "details" which convincingly fills in enough of the Daily Bugle to make it seem like a real functioning place while guiding the eye towards the queue video which should be the centerpiece of the experience.

Kongfrontation Queue - Charting UO

Queue videos are something of a dirty idea in Disney circles - just about the best thing I can say about Everest, for example, is that its queue sets up the ride on visuals alone - but overhead videos are a Universal tradition and Universal is especially good at creating them. The reason why Universal rides often (but not always) benefit from queue videos is because of Universal Creative's much more ambitious use of narrative in its attractions.

Disney and Walt Disney Imagineering spill a lot of digital ink about the "storytelling" of their attractions in promotional materials, but the fact is that Disney is just not very good at it. Disney theme park stories tend to break down into two categories of narrative: book report attractions and experiential narratives. Book report attractions are best typified by the new Little Mermaid dark ride at California Adventure and Magic Kingdom, which rely on a sense of participation and closure through familiarity with pop culture texts. Experiential attractions, which can have varying degrees of narrative involvement, are about experiences and places which happen to you as you travel through them, fabricating a new narrative as it unfolds about your experiences. Think of the Jungle Cruise, which can be said to be a story about our experiences in the jungle. Most Disney attractions can be located somewhere on a line that stretches between these two poles.

But when it comes down to the nitty gritty, Disney doesn't tell stories so much as set up situations and build environments, which is a different thing. This is why it's hard to quantify what Disney does so well using the limiting word "story", because most of the actual narrative experiences boil down to "you saw some weird things", or "we went fast".

Universal, on the other hand, has maintained more visible roots as a product of a motion picture company. Their California attraction is less a theme park than a movie studio tour that also has some rides. The vast majority of their attractions are based on some existing property and narrative. They are far more likely to use the "silver screen" as the dominant feature of their attractions. And in a way that Disney largely moved away from in defining their "house style" in the 1950s and 1960s, Universal is far more wed to the ongoing narrative structures of the Institutionalized Mode of Representation in American mainstream film.

It is, after all, a production studio.

Universal attractions use their queueing spaces to set up locations, characters, and ideas which you are then expected to mentally track as you move through the attraction to be able to make any sense of what happens. Some Universal attractions use Hitchcock's beloved "MacGuffin" to drive their events - the Allspark in Transformers, E.T.'s flight home, an ancient curse in The Mummy. If you don't pay attention to what's being said in the various preshow rooms of Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey, then the experience makes literally no sense (to be fair, it only barely makes sense if you do).

Look at the Men in Black attraction at Universal Studios Florida. Taking a cue from the film, it presents itself as a remnant of the 1964 New York World's Fair, drawing on the theme park audience's familiarity with the Carousel of Progress at Magic Kingdom. The introductory room is a ludicrous dusty ugly jumble of stained glass panels complete with a fake attraction entrance to "The Universe and You". As the Sherman Brothers-esque soundtrack swells, then breaks, the attraction is revealed to be a front for a MIB training facility. After an appropriately crazy adventure battling aliens, our memory is "wiped" and the cars return to an unload station... for the fictional "Universe and You" attraction, advocating the idea that aliens, in fact, do not exist. This is all very clever but does not even overshadow or overlap the ride itself, which greatly bests WDI's efforts to create a "ride-thru shooting gallery" attraction. But you can miss the whole thing if you didn't pay attention in the queue and foyer areas.

Spider-Man hits a sweet spot in this case as a great deal of the concepts conveyed in the pre-show are the sort of "narrative housekeeping" that plagues all theme park attractions of its era: the danger of the situation, why "tourists" would be allowed to do this, etc. But the main plot points are conveyed time and again on screen after screen: a group of Super Villains have a green levitation ray and have ransomed the Statue of Liberty. Everything else we need to know is conveyed on the attraction's marquee.

And as for the always-finicky plot point of sending "wet behind the ears tourists" into the seat of danger, Spider-Man here has use of the anti-heroic, absurd J. Jonah Jameson, and his actions are actually in character. We may wonder if Buzz Lightyear would send a group of new recruits into battle against Zurg, but for Jameson it's just another day at the office. Much of the entertainment value generated in the queue comes from the dissonance between his absurd bluster and the obvious danger riders are placed in; at one point he's even seen placing a call for another group of tourists!

Spider-Man queue details with "background fill" paint

I find the rest of the queue to be uncommonly carefully thought out. Ordinarily the "overhead TV screens" method of storytelling grates against the basic situation presented in a theme park, where it rarely makes sense that so many televisions would appear in such an area. Would NEST have quite so many built in video screens as they seem to? But if there's any place where constant narration and visual input of events happening just outside the building in a danger zone make any sense, it's in a news room, and that's where Spider-Man puts us.

Spidey also plays some fun tricks with the state of the Spider-Man "franchise" circa 1999. The queue itself is presented in an elaborated version of the flat facade style of the rest of Marvel Superhero Island, an aesthetic more or less invented (fairly unsuccessfully, let's owe up to it) for the area. The ride itself however has always been presented in a unique CGI look which to me fairly successfully bridges the gap between a flat drawn image and what we would expect to see if we were actually confronted by these comic book characters. In between comes the cartoon.

"Remember me, kids?"

The queue videos are presented in the style of what was then the dominant method most American kids would've been exposed to Spider-Man: through the Saturday morning cartoon. In 1999, this is how we would've expected Spider-Man to look. Because all we see of Spider-Man until he lands on the hood of the SCOOP is through a TV screen, of course he looks the same as he did on TV. When we see drawings of Spider-Man or J. Jonah Jameson in the queue or on the ride, they're drawn in what was then the modern Marvel comic book style, befitting representations of characters in 2D media. The Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man rallies all of these media representations of the same character as a way of preparing us for very aggressive encounters with them in the more immediate environment of the dark ride. All of the "faces" of Spider-Man collapse into one face when we finally come nose-to-nose with him.

Spider-Man's meta-textuality is clever and sets it apart not only from everything else in Islands of Adventure, but practically all of the other "enter a fictional world" attractions. It creates a unique Spider-Man that's related and complimentary to but not identical to any other Spider-Man experience; in this way it's fortunate that Universal got this ride built before the motion picture adaptations began to roll out in 2002. Transformers is greatly hampered by being wed to the style and association with the Michael Bay movies which inspired it, although Universal Creative did go to great lengths to make the ride comprehensible to those only versed in the 80's cartoon. Transformers is still affected and informed by a specific source material in a way that Spider-Man escapes. This may account for the increasing sense that Spider-Man is a more timeless ride experience.

What is it that makes a ride timeless over any of the other exhibits and rattle-around trips that drift through theme and amusement parks over the decades? After all, at first it's hard to tell. Haunted Mansion was met with mediocre reviews, Space Mountain and Indiana Jones Adventure caused enough injuries to require modifications, Back to the Future and Jaws broke down constantly, and Forbidden Journey courted controversy with restrictive seats and over-the-top intensity. At the time it seemed like these public dramas would never go away, but time heals all wounds. What is it that makes a theme park ride a lasting classic as opposed to an attraction of its time?

Or, to turn it around, what makes a ride last longer than, say, a popular film? When it was new the big selling point of Spider-Man was the fact that it was in 3D, but 3D is no longer the selling point it was and the lines continue. We can watch 3D movies at home now if we wish but the market for that product has been steadily imploding.

I think the thing that the great classic theme park experiences provide doesn't have a lot to do with the property or the concept or even the details, since time and again those have shown to be variable and open to endless interpretation and variation: it has to do with providing the concept of a "pleasurable illusion".

It isn't that it's a convincing illusion, although it can be, as in the Hall of Presidents. It's that it has to only be convincing enough for us to suspend our belief and pretend we're fooled. Momentarily, our adult credulity dissolves and we fly over London, or with Harry Potter, or slip amongst pirates unnoticed. The intense emotional reaction that sometimes results is as much from the attraction as it is our recognition and joy at feeling unburdened of rational doubt. We know very well we're not actually flying over London, but we want to feel that we are, and we cry.

Spider-Man is the best example of this dynamic in the Universal canon. We know very well that we're looking at 3D images on huge screens but our awareness of this only heightens our appreciation for the cleverness of the effect. This makes the effects into a sort of mental game, and so when those pleasurable illusions defy our expectations in noticeable accumulations of details the result reinforces and flatters our attention.

In a way, The Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man gets better the more attention you pay to the details that reinforce the "pleasurable illusion". There's the initial projections that create the shadows of scuttling rats or Spidey swinging on the rooftops above us, not 3D projections but ones that extend and reveal space. 3D characters frequently appear to "stand" on dimensional set pieces, to the extent that some riders think there's more screens in the ride than there are. There's fairly complex spatial cues which go by nearly unnoticed but reveal the extent of the care that went into the conception of the ride. At the start of the ride, Electro notices riders and leaps up onto a catwalk; the cars race under the catwalk to escape. Listen and you'll hear Electro running above the car before he drops down in front to threaten the SCOOP with a high power cable. That's the sort of easy to miss detail that is highly fetishized in Disney circles.

The greatest scene in Spider-Man, where the "pleasurable illusions" are at their most convincing, is the Hobgoblin vignette where the flying villain lobs pumpkin bombs at riders. Thanks to careful considerations of perspective and set design, one of the bombs appears to detonate into the support structure of a bridge, resulting in an actual explosion as the bridge begins to collapse on top of riders. The gag is masterpiece of timing and design, and with nowhere else to go from there, the ride immediately proceeds to its aerial climax.

This is why, fifteen years later, there's nothing quite as great as Spidey landing on the hood of our attraction vehicle to warn us, not even the similar moment in Transformers. It's one of those things that seminally breaks the rules of theme park attractions, like seating ghosts beside us or sending our boat unexpectedly backwards. You can only break a rule once, and so Spider-Man immediately sets us up to expect a new and exciting experience. It doesn't let us down. The ride is a masterpiece.