What’s The Next Major Style Of Theme Park Design?
Thank you for reading my book report
I’m finally buckling down and making real progress through the 500-page textbook on theme park design my mother got me as a gift years ago1 called, appropriately, “Theme Park Design” by David Younger. It’s fantastic! If you’re also a lunatic like me, go read it!!
One section that’s grabbed my brain is a breakdown of what Younger classifies as the five major styles of theme park design, and how they’ve evolved from the mid-50s to today. The book is from 2016 though, which is almost 10 years ago, and what he labels the current style has been dominant for at least 15-25 years. No art form lasts in one stylistic mold forever, and it feels to me like we might be on the verge of a paradigm shift. So I want to to make some probably-wrong speculative guesses!
Before that though, what are the five styles? This whole section is basically gonna be entirely paraphrasing Younger, so full credit there, again if you’re a theme park freak this is absolutely the book for you, it’s worth every penny!
Traditional
This is classic Disney Imagineering, basically inventing theme parks as a thing in the mid-1950s, and exporting it to other mid-century parks like Efteling etc. Traditional style is original-flavor Disneyland, and is focused on immersiveness, storytelling, detail, cleanliness, timelessness, and classic adventure and fantasy. It’s gonna be a lot easier to define Traditional once we have some other styles to compare it to, so if that seems vague for now that’s fine.
The main park that embodies Traditional theme park design is, unsurprisingly, Disneyland, and Younger calls out the original Pirates of the Caribbean ride as his high-water mark2 of this style.
Presentational
In the 60s then you start to branch in two different directions. On the Disney side, Walt and the Imagineers start to become less interested with parks as only entertainment and fantasy and start exploring bigger ideas and bigger goals around education, lifestyle, civics, engineering, etc. This first shows up in the attractions built for the 1964 World’s Fair (It’s A Small World, Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln, Carousel of Progress, and Ford’s Magic Skyway) and then really gets into gear in the creation of EPCOT (originally planned as a literal city of the future, but scaled back to a more educational and civic minded theme park.) These rides are less about immersing you in a wondrous story, and more about presenting ideas and information to you. Even the fantasies are fantasies of things like building the future (Carousel of Progress) or world harmony (Small World.) This is the Presentational style.
Also, Walt Disney dies in 1966, and it’s hard to marshal corporate resources without someone as freakishly and idiosyncratically dedicated as Walt at the helm. And Presentational style is often cheaper than the detailed immersion required for Traditional style! So Disney in the 60s and 70s embraces more Presentationalism (even in Magic Kingdom, which for example in Fantasyland uses more murals and flats than the detailed architecture of the Disneyland equivalent) whether that’s via excitement over new possibilities, boredom over the old styles, or cost-cutting, culminating in the 1982 opening of EPCOT.
Unsurprisingly, EPCOT is the poster child for the Presentational style park (though Animal Kingdom also shares a lot of Presentational DNA, as do most other animal parks like SeaWorld.)
Themed Amusement
The other track starting in the 60s was pioneered by Six Flags Over Texas, whose business model:
would not allow expensive deep immersive theming,
but also could benefit from the relatively new creation of companies that can make off-the-shelf rides, most notably roller coasters.
So Six Flags takes some lessons in theming from Disneyland, but applies them much more sparingly, and never with the goal of making you forget you’re in an amusement park, hence Themed Amusement. At the same time, it focuses more on rides than original Disneyland or EPCOT did, and it’s relatively spare theming even works as counter-programming to Disney and its copycats: there is something exciting about seeing a giant steel roller coaster and imagining the thrill you’re about to experience, and you would lose that type of excitement if you cladded it in decoration to hide the beams the way a Traditional park would. Though unlike a classic boardwalk or country fair amusement park, you will have some theming (even if it’s just putting blue and white paint and playing the John Williams score to theme your “Superman” rollercoaster.)
Unsurprisingly, Six Flags is the main example of this style, though Cedar Point and the other Cedar Fair parks are probably the example of “Just because it’s Themed Amusement doesn’t mean it has to be bad and dirty.” It’s a different style serving a different part of the market! It continues to this day as the main counter-programming to the dominant style (coming up.)
Postmodern
In the 70s and 80s then you have two more new styles developing, both of which I link as being the styles created by the first generation of theme park designers who grew up going to theme parks as a kid. On the Universal side, they invent the Postmodern style. Where Traditional tries to immerse you into believing you’re outside of the real world, Postmodern gleefully calls out the artifice, reminding you that you’re in a built environment. In Universal’s case, this was originally done by theming the park around movies and the making of movies. Universal, unsurprising given it started as a literal backlot tram tour, showed you what the sets looked like backstage and let you seeing the wiring and the costuming and the effects. You weren’t going to ET’s home planet, you were hopping on stage to help Spielberg make a sequel to ET. You weren’t being immersed in the fictional world of Jaws, you were visiting the “town” where it was “filmed.” It also often features comedy and commentary on theme parks themselves, such as The Simpsons Ride being an explicit parody of theme park rides.
And it was great! Especially, again, as counter-positioning to the “fakeness” of a Disneyland, in the same sense that postmodern art calls out the “fakeness” of traditional art.
Universal Studios would be the key example of a Postmodern park, though Disney also created their own Postmodern parks in Hollywood Studios and California Adventure (more on that later.)
New Traditional
In contrast, if Postmodern is someone who grew up going to classic Disneyland rebelling against that style, New Traditional is someone deciding to try and do it even bigger and better. And in the 70s, 2nd-generation Imagineers like Tony Baxter started reincorporating Traditional theming elements into the Disney parks (with Big Thunder Mountain Railroad in 1979 being one of the earliest examples.) Like Traditional, New Traditional re-emphasizes immersion and storytelling as its primary goals (as opposed to Presentational’s focus on education and information, Themed Amusement’s emphasis on thrills and low costs, and Postmodern’s emphasis on comedy, “coolness”, and acknowledgement of the reality of unreality.)
But:
Traditional focuses on implicit storytelling (ex: Pirates of the Caribbean being a bunch of mostly unrelated vignettes you pass through), where New Traditional focuses on making the story explicit (ex: adding Johnny Depp as a narrative throughline)
Traditional focuses on what Younger calls “amalgamated”, thematic lands (“Fantasyland”, “Adventureland”) where New Traditional focuses on lands for specific worlds and stories
Traditional values cleanliness and perfection, where New Traditional embraces aging and distressing if it helps the story and immersion
Disneyland Paris when it opened was (to that point) the ultimate expression of New Traditional, especially its deeply themed Frontierland featuring an explicit story weaving together the attractions (for instance making Phantom Manor (their Haunted Mansion) explicitly the manor of the robber baron who owned the titular Big Thunder Mountain mine and referencing each ride in the other.) Unfortunately…… it was a financial disaster that almost bankrupted the company.
That, combined with the wild success of Universal lead Disney to pivot heavily into Postmodern with Hollywood Studios and California Adventure, and with major layoffs of parks and Imagineering talent.
……in that gap, Universal hired a lot of ex-Disney folks, and opened its own New Traditional park in Florida: Islands of Adventure. And it doubled down on it with the incredible success of the Wizarding World Of Harry Potter. Universal also started replacing a lot of the Postmodern elements of the studios parks with New Traditional alternatives (retheming away from movies and backlots, and adding in more fully immersive worlds and rides.)
At the same time, California Adventure flopped and Disney started slowly crawling back to New Traditional (at massive cost), similarly replacing its Postmodern elements with more immersive theming. Disney even tried to beat Universal at its own game, with Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge as a clear attempt to dethrone Wizarding World of Harry Potter at the hyper-specific/hyper-immersive storytelling focused land.
Disney also started New-Traditionalizing across the board, with many of the Presentational elements of EPCOT or Animal Kingdom replaced with immersive ones (swapping Maelstrom for Frozen Ever After, or adding an Avatar land to Animal Kingdom, for instance) and even started New-Traditionalizing some Traditional elements, like the aforementioned addition of an explicit story based around Johnny Depp to Pirates.
To that end, I could say Islands of Adventure is the prototypical New Traditional park…. But basically every park that isn’t Themed Amusement is primarily New Traditional now. It’s absolutely the dominant style, even at parks that got their start in another style (Presentational for EPCOT/Animal Kingdom, Postmodern for Universal Studios/Hollywood Studios/California Adventure, Traditional for Disneyland.)
So, plagiarized history lesson over. New Traditional has been ascendent certainly since ~2000 (Islands of Adventure), and dominant since no later than ~2010 (Wizarding World Of Harry Potter.) That’s 15-25 years. The question is: what comes next?
Caveat that when you’re talking about things as big as “what is the style that will dominate an art form for the next 10-30 years” it’s basically impossible to actually see those shifts while you’re inside of them. This whole thing will only really become clear with hindsight. In fact, we probably are already inside of a shift and just don’t know the exact contours yet. But still, why not make some risky bets?
The biggest thing that makes me feel like a shift is coming (or ongoing) is that New Traditional has started to build up its own cliches. The focus on immersion and explicit storytelling has led to a somewhat predictable scheme for most rides now:
there’s a pre-show that justifies why you, otherwise normal person, are able to do this special thing or visit this special place
And don’t worry, it’ll all be fun and nothing will go wrong
But wait, something went wrong!
And now you have to help the characters save the day/help you escape
Which you do
Yay, thanks for your help, exit through the gift shop!
This is the basic flow of, just off the top of my head, Star Tours, The Amazing Adventures of Spider-man, Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey, Rise of the Resistance, Smugglers Run, Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railway, Tower of Terror, Velocicoaster, Cosmic Rewind, Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure, The Simpsons Ride, Indiana Jones Adventure, Transformers The Ride, ET Adventure, Hagrid’s Magical Creatures Motorbike Adventure, The Incredible Hulk Coaster, Harry Potter and the Escape from Gringotts, Despicable Me Minion Mayhem, Men In Black Alien Attack, Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, and I’m sure many more3
The one that got me when reading the textbook is Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey needing to make clear that “Normally Muggles can’t visit, but Dumbledore decided to open the castle for Muggle visitors” to justify your existence on the ride. As much as I love immersion…. That feels too much for me! I am happy to just ride the ride! The conceit doesn’t need to be that explicit for me to enjoy it!
Now yet another caveat, it’s really hard to predict the future without referencing the past. And so my big predictions are all in some ways a variant of “some other style starts to come into fashion, or at least has a more significant presence.” It may be, however, the next wave is something entirely new that doesn’t reincorporate one of the existing five styles!
1. More Traditionalism
As mentioned above, I don’t necessarily need a super-explicit story that I can perfectly slot into! My favorite ride4 is the Haunted Mansion, and there the conceit is: You walked up into this spooky-ass house. That’s it! That’s all you need!
The other big thing potentially pointing me towards an appetite for more Traditionalism is a lot of the critiques (which I agree with!) of Galaxy’s Edge. This was Disney doing the full New Traditional playbook, and trying to take it even further, creating a new specific fictional world (Batuu) in a specific time (between episodes 8 and 9) with very specific interlocking stories. Disney wanted to prioritize immersion in this explicit story, only having references to things that could fit into that frame, taking Walt’s freakishness over period correct doorknobs on Main Street to a new level. And once people experienced it, you know what a lot of people wanted from it?
To see Darth Vader walk around even though he’s supposed to be dead in this world!
The Doughboys complain a bunch about Galaxy’s Edge and say what they actually wanted was a “Star Wars Land”, meaning it would have a Tatooine section, a Hoth section, an Endor section, etc etc. What they’re describing is a much closer to a Traditional-style amalgamated land with more of a thematic linking5 than the New-Traditional-style land with explicit narrative linking that we got.
I don’t agree with that necessarily (I like the specificity of the land itself) …..but I also want to see Darth Vader and Princess Leia and Obi-wan and Yoda along with Rey and Finn and Kylo Ren!!! They’re my friends!!!!
Galaxy’s Edge may actually be inching close to this, in that they recently added Luke Skywalker as a walkaround character (though the version of Luke that shows up is the period-appropriate version from the Mandalorian show, so they aren’t breaking chronology….. yet.)
But Disney is also adding a new Villains Land to Magic Kingdom, and Tropical Americas land to Animal Kingdom. Villains Land sounds much closer to the thematic linking of classic Fantasyland than the New Traditional hyper-specificity of Wizarding World or Galaxy’s Edge (same to a lesser extent with the Tropical Americas land blending Encanto and Indiana Jones.) And rather than adding a whole specific Cars Land to Magic Kingdom, like they did in California Adventure, Disney is adding a Cars ride into the amalgamated Frontierland.
And Universal is about to open Epic Universe, which does feature lots of what looks like straight-ahead New Traditional theming in its lands themed to Nintendo, How To Train Your Dragon, and Harry Potter/Fantastic Beasts6. But it also has a “Dark Universe” land, blending the narratives of classic Universal Monsters into one amalgamated thematic land (and even an amalgamated ride, best I can tell, in Monsters Unchained.) And its central hub, Celestial Park, is allegedly meant to be a land in and of itself, rather than just a a neutral hub world. Theming is a bit unclear without having done more research, but it smells closer to an amalgamated land than anything as specific as the others.
We might be getting kinda bored with the strictures of New Traditionalism’s style of immersion, and may just want to let loose in stuff that’s fun even if it doesn’t “make sense” narratively. If I had to put money on my bets, this is the one I feel the strongest about.
2. More Postmodernism
The other thing to do if something is getting stale is to point it out and make fun of it, which is quintessential Postmodern theme park design. Guardians of the Galaxy Cosmic Rewind is what got me thinking about this at first, in that it is in many ways a ride that follows the cliched New Traditional story format, but it is Postmodern in being themed around a fictional EPCOT Xandar pavilion. Guardians Mission Breakout I think also has some jokes about theme parks in its pre-show, iirc. Relatedly, while I haven’t seen it myself, I’ve heard that Deadpool has been a hugely successful walkaround character at the Disney parks, with kids and parents alike enjoying his (PG, it’s a park after all) meta theme park jokes.
There are two things on the horizon that I could see, depending on how they go, tilting us towards a more Postmodern future. First, what is Villains Land actually like? A land that is themed around letting the antagonists be the protagonists already is inherently acknowledging story structure in at least a lightly Postmodern way. How much (if at all) does Disney lean into this in its ride designs or walkaround characters? To a lesser extent same could be true of Dark Universe, but that I think will likely function much more as themed around horror, rather than themed around the narrative role of villainy, so it seems unlikely.
The other big thing is that in 2027 or 2028 Universal’s contract for The Simpsons will end, and all the betting money is on Disney refusing to re-up. If that’s true, does Disney bring the Simpsons to its own parks? And if so, how much does Disney lean into the Simpsons’ natural facility for jokes about theme parks? Currently at Universal they play a fascinating blended role of very Postmodern (constant jokes about theme parks being cheap and dangerous and overpriced and boring and whatnot) while also very New Traditional (highly themed land that makes you feel like you actually walked into a Simpsons cartoon) so I’m curious how much of that blend survives a potential Disney transition. But even if it’s just a lift-and-shift of the existing Universal Springfield, the addition of any sort of strong Postmodernism to current Disney would feel more like a statement to me than the existence of nearly two-decade-old Postmodernism in Universal Studios.
Now of course, on the flip side this also has to contend with Disney removing the best piece of Postmodernist theme park design they have in their parks currently, namely Muppet Vision 3D!!!! The bastards!!!!!!!!! And maybe Disney doesn’t bring Simpsons on board, and this is really more of a death knell for Postmodernism.
But if Postmodernism is the thing to play with, a Simpsons/Guardians + Deadpool/Muppets trifecta would be a powerful set of tools in the tool chest.
(I don’t think this is as likely as a return to Traditionalism though.)
3. Keep pushing New Traditionalism even further
What if instead of walking back, we kept going? In particular, what if we now have either the technology, the budgetary willingness, or both to achieve some of the wilder dreams of say Galaxy’s Edge when it was first being promo-ed? At that point, there was talk about how the land would be alive with things to do, puzzles to solve, missions to go on, and those would tie back to a character profile that would influence everything in the land from how cast members talked to you, to what dialogue you got on rides, to how effects in the land would operate.
That is, certainly, not how Galaxy’s Edge turned out. Understandably, because that’s hard and expensive! And the arguable real real high-water mark for New Traditional, the Galactic Starcruiser Star Wars themed hotel, was by all accounts nowhere close to financially sustainable7
But….. Galaxy’s Edge launched almost 6 years ago……. Time and technology moves on…….. and Parks have become only more important to Disney and Comcast’s relative financial pictures as the film and television industry keeps contracting. And on the Universal front, they’ve experimented with games and puzzles in their Nintendo lands (using the “Power band” concept) albeit to mixed success, from what I’ve heard.
I feel reasonably certain that this will be a thing that pushes forward at some point in the next decade or two, but I’m much less sure about it being the next thing.
Overall I’m placing my bets on these in the order I presented them (more Traditionalism > more Postmodernism > technology-enfused ultra-New-Traditionalism) but realistically it’ll probably be some combination all three, as well as some other thing I’m not even thinking of. Maybe we start calling it “Eclecticism” or something, I dunno. But I do think we’re in or on the verge of a shift, and I can’t wait to see in 2040 what it ended up being!!
Raising her eyebrow and saying literally “Are you sure this is what you want?” when seeing it
hah
Also crazy how many of these end in “Adventure”
And, not a joke, probably top five favorite piece of art in any medium, and yes I consider “theme park ride” an artistic medium
Albeit in this case still within one IP
Same with Disney adding a by-all-accounts New Traditional Monsters Inc land to Hollywood Studios, along with the Frozen and Lion King lands to Walt Disney Studios in Paris, and Frozen/Tangled/Peter Pan lands recently to Tokyo Disney Sea
Though for many who experienced it, apparently unbelievably cool!