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@johnholdun
I built a new spooky walkthrough for Halloween this year! There's also a behind-the-scenes tour wherein I show how everything works and how I assembled all the parts.
I think it's the best themed attraction I've created yet, and I'm really excited to get started on the next one. Happy belated Halloween!
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Playing with a mockup for my next art installation. Similar to Bobby's Birthday in the sense that it's a story written for a dark ride but realized as a gallery piece. Unlike Bobby, it aims to be slightly more immersive by revealing the story through peepholes. I'm imagining the whole "stage" being about four feet wide? We'll see!
Hypothesis: best way to adapt animated musicals into rides is to focus on one key element and one key song and restrict yourself to telling the story with that framework more or less. Tbh this is probably the best approach when adapting any piece of media, but especially musicals.
Examples:
7 Dwarves Mine Train (Heigh Ho, mining)
Peter Pan (You can Fly, Flying pirate ship)
Mr. Toad (merrily on our way, crazy taxi)
It was at this moment she realized just how few animated musicals have been turned into rides. Sorry for the mr. toad stretch.
Not to say that the retell the story thing can't work. Tbh frozen and Alice manage to do it pretty well. But as I pointed out in the mermaid essay, the whole purpose of songs in musicals is to elongate time and story beats. They take something that would last 10-15 seconds in real life and turn it into a 5 minute number. But most rides are at best 5 minutes long. And so if you want to feature a half dozen songs in your ride to relive all the moments, you're stuck with like 45 seconds at most per song and tbh probably less than that. It's hard to make anything that actually feels cohesive with that pace.
But if you only focus on one song (maybe two) and use that to tell your story then you actually have ample time to marinate in the mood. I've said this before but rides and songs are actually VERY closely related to each other. They're similar lengths and tell stories in ways that are predominately visceral and emotional. One of the best ways to create a ride is to focus on the one emotion it represents and a journey through that emotion.
So what does Peter Pan do? It uses the you can fly song and does theme and variations on it while focusing on the experience of flight and tells the entire story from that lens. Same for mine train.
All this is to say on the ask that was going around a while ago, that I think the best way to adapt the little mermaid into an attraction would probably be to make it entirely based on under the sea or entirely based on part of your world. Maybe at most use part of your world as bookends on under the sea.
And with all the fuss about encanto being prime fodder for a ride I would offer the same advice. Casita, a magical house, is the biggest character in the film. Tour the house and the family solely through the lens of one or two songs and desperately avoid the temptation to dive too deep into the plot.
Totally agree, great framing! I feel like this ties in with what Marc Davis said about Pirate of the Caribbean being about "the idea of piracy." It's more effective in this medium to dig into the details of one precise concept than to try to gloss over many of them in rapid succession.
Those musical numbers are often written with this precision and exploration in mind as well. I can't remember who I'm quoting, but there's the idea that a character only breaks into song when they're too emotionally charged to do anything else. That kind of heightened emotion often comes with a kind of tunnel vision; Belle wanting to get out her boring little town is a single thought, but dwelling on it for a whole song reinforces how intensely she's thinking about it.
There's a lot of talk about trying to create truly interactive attractions (I'll put aside for the moment whether that's actually as good an idea as people think for the moment) but not a lot a talk about the true scale of the difficulties involved in making that happen.
If you want interactivity that's more than just some variation of a shooter, where the guest has agency and there's branching narratives - that a real challenge to do in a dark ride. Even if there's only one decision point - suddenly now you're left with two different paths that must be built. If that decision point comes halfway through the ride then you essentially have to two different rides for the second half. And this quickly grows exponentially to the point where even a small number of choices would create a show building the size of half the park.
Not only that, but in order to keep up the TRHC each branch of the ride would have to be able to maintain the full THRC just in case every guest made the same decision (or a bunch in the row). Which means most of the ride would be drastically overbuilt. And let's not even get into how you a group of multiple people makes decisions on a story in a satisfying way in a couple seconds.
The only way you get around these challenges is through a simulator or heavy use of screens and projection mapping (and maybe having the vehicle only face one direction so different scenes can be on different sides) so that there really is only one or two vehicle paths, but every scene can do triple or quadruple duty. Which like....it would be cool to see play out, but really challenging.
I feel like if there is to be a truly interactive dark ride it would make a lot more sense to make something less narrative/plot oriented and move back to a more concept musical type attraction. I can definitely imagine a haunted mansion esque attraction or scooby doo that's essentially bumper cars (groups of one or two guests drive their own vehicle) but in a giant mansion themed show building with lots of alcoves and hidden passages. And a central computer that manages traffic so that no one area gets backed up. So perhaps the scenes don't change all that much, but guests have agency over where to visit. It still brings up the challenge of how to craft a satisfying emotional arc, but you could probably guarantee that every journey has the same "cut scenes". I think that if we are to see a truly interactive dark ride it'll look more like that than a choose your own adventure book.
Then She Fell (RIP) did something interesting here. It was an immersive theater piece "on rails," meaning that the audience was split up at the start and came together at times throughout, but each scene transition was guided by a staff member. Contrast this with Sleep No More, where everyone is on their own from the beginning to go where they please. This quickly leads to imbalance across the space, where some scenes might be totally desolate and others will be absolutely clogged with people.
The genius of TSF is that everyone saw basically the same show, but in a completely different order. There were some rooms you might skip based on your "track," but most rooms always had one slice of the audience in it at all times, and everyone was generally ushered from one scene to the next at the same points throughout.
Adding just a little bit of agency here might look like the ability at any given point to go from room A to room B or to room C, but with the operational understanding that eventually that guest (or ride vehicle) will also see the room they skipped. This way, there may still be clogs, but they'll be fairly constrained, and some potential choices could be forced if things are getting too unbalanced.
Presenting things out-of-order becomes a storytelling challenge, but a really interesting one, I think.
Alternatively, consider this ride layout:
A is load/unload and vehicles generally move clockwise. From room B, you could go to C or D, based on some action you take in room B. Either way, you'll always go to E next, and get another choice. From there, content in F or G that's easy to swap dynamically—dialogue, projections—could even be changed based on whether you saw C or D. This means creating a few extra rooms, but it keeps things streamlined and means that each scene's capacity is kept under control.
Happy Halloween! Here's a preview of something I've been working on for a few years that I think will be done in time for next Halloween. It's a Tin Pan Alley-style song I wrote (and performed!) about some cats in Brooklyn who are granted the power to sing and dance by the moon on Halloween night.
I originally planned to stage this as an animatronic show in the style of the Enchanted Tiki Room, but this year decided an homage to Fleischer Studios might be fun instead. Enjoy!
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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Here's the Thing...
I miss Disneyland. I miss it so much. You have no idea. (Actually, I take that back, if anyone has an idea, it's you guys.)
But it seems like every time Disney in general, and the theme parks in particular, make the news these days, it's something terrible. Someone else they're grossly mistreating. Some more past misdeeds coming to light. Some further plans to dilute the magic of the parks in the name of brand integration and money money money.
I don't know if I want Disneyland anymore if this is what it has become and is becoming.
I don't know if I can have Disneyland anymore at this rate. Admission prices keep going up and the reservation system makes it impossible to plan a trip on short notice (and who has anything besides short notice nowadays?). The AP program was unceremoniously dumped and who knows what, if anything, will ever replace it, but whatever they come up with is sure to be out of my price range.
And if I do sometimes decide it's worth it to drop a couple hundred bucks just to get in the gate and feed myself while I'm there...is it really? Worth it? With the Bobs hellbent on shaving off everything that makes the place unique in order to make room for more IP content, more branding, more upselling, more homogenization of their product? Would I be spending the cost of 10-15 museum visits just to be advertised to all day?
Maybe "Disneyland"--as in the place I always loved--doesn't even exist anymore.
Maybe it actually went away a long time ago and I didn't notice until I had over a year off to think about it.
IMHO traditional story forms (plays, books, perhaps movies) best tell the stories of individual characters: their feelings, quests, and lives.
Experiences though? They best tell the stories of places, societies, or events: what they feel like and the spectrum of stories within.
The five-act structure of a themed attraction, as illustrated by @theme-park-concepts. Including the entrance, queue, and exit in the arc is a revelation!
Some real-but-not-finished props and some unreal-and-unfinished generic setpieces are making this into an almost-understandable story!
Haha this is extremely gratifying. Complicated the track and started dropping in placeholder assets for the story I’m still piecing together!
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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I spent hours and hours trying to work out the math to calculate the arc of a circle with a given radius that is tangent to two intersecting line segments, so I could parametrically build a track. I realized that just importing a track and walls from an SVG is so much easier and probably a better authoring experience too.
Now it’s time to actually design the dark ride that inspired this project!
Working on a tool for prototyping dark rides. Just, uh, just the one asset is plenty for now.
In which theme parks are like jazz
I wrote another essay pondering the narrative structure of a satisfying dark ride. It happens to have a lot in common with the music structure of Tin Pan Alley era-pop songs, which I care about almost as much as a I care about dark rides. Coincidence???
It’s very important that you all know that Don Carson is designing a dark ride in real time on Instagram
“I’m about to get kicked out of this supermarket”
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Rough Storyboard and Animatic for a Mr. Toad's Wild Ride style classic dark ride. Music from the Gershwin's Porgy and Bess.
You know that idea for a jazz age Mr. Toad? I made a thing…
Come take the controls of a streetcar as you make a mad dash through a jazzy city on the move! An experiment in abstract storytelling…or whatever the hell it should be called.
This is so good! Everybody design more dark rides, quick!
Anyone find it interesting that like art schools, theatre and movie and animation people are kind of famous for being filled with all sorts of weird, quirky, gay people of all sorts and historically nearly all the people who have been leadership and the public face of themed entertainment have been presumably straight, white, suit-wearing, crew-cut men with (at least public) personas resembling sheet metal?
You can produce a painting, a play, a movie, or a cartoon in your mom’s basement
But producing a theme park — even a dinky theme park — is expensive
It’s an artform that requires real estate and engineering
Which basically requires corporate funding
And, y’know, capitalism is designed to keep the playing field uneven
It’s wild to imagine how different theme parks would be today if the artform was shaped by more diverse perspectives!
Like, what if the theme park design pantheon had its own version of Margaret Atwood? Or Spike Lee? Or Stephen Sondheim?
That costliness has knock-on effects too. In order to make your money back you basically need everyone under the sun to be your target market, which results in a flattening of personality. The investors need reassurance that you are a Serious Suit-Wearing Money Person, and your customers need reassurance that you are comfortably mainstream and not part of some threatening subculture.
THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS
For example, let’s pick a safe choice
The Rocky Horror Picture Show could be a theme park attraction
It would be reeeeally easy to adapt it into a dark ride, a hilarious meet-and-greet, (and / or) a dinner show in the style of a raunchier Hoop-Dee-Doo
The franchise is enduringly profitable; that gift shop could print money
And the material is so beloved that it’s kinda been de-fanged. It’s even performed in high schools!
By all measures, this would be a home run
But can you imagine a park like Universal – which allegedly caters to adult audiences – building an attraction full of bisexuals in fishnet stockings?
Because I can’t
Since this post first popped up, I’ve actually been thinking…could there be a cottage-industry level of themed entertainment? What if some ordinary person got ahold of a couple acres of land at the edge of the suburbs and decided to make a mini-theme park? Rides would almost certainly be off the table, but I bet they could take out a small business loan to build a few sweet walk-through attractions, hire a tiny staff, make some cheesy tee-shirts and coffee mugs and open it to the public for a modest fee. Isn’t that what we see every Halloween when the spook houses and elaborate pumpkin displays open up?
I mean, to varying degrees, this essentially what meow wolf, evermore, immersive theatre companies, and that one guy I follow on twitter but can’t remember his name (so sorry) are experimenting with.
I absolutely believe there is a market for this - people kill for fun decent quality entertainment experiences. There’s a thirst there for sure. And I’m not a business expert - but my strong hunch is that if done carefully even rides might not need as much cash as you’d expect.
I mean, piece of sheet metal Walt Disney himself started with a model train ride for little kids in his backyard, and knotts berry farm started with one of those gold panning things (and then a similar train ride. its what the kids love) the cottage level theme park industry is what made our success stories today
And I think we’re seeing a version of that with the escape room boom
(When / If) escape room designers finally learn how to tell effective, thematically nuanced interactive stories…
…and if those effective, thematically nuanced interactive stories are financially successful…
…then maybe those storytelling techniques (and the diverse perspectives that fuel them) will perhaps eventually someday be utilized by theme park designers, if we’re lucky
But it’s worth emphasizing: this is a Rube Goldberg strategy
I’m holding my breath that it happens, but I probably shouldn’t
To bring this back to the comparison with film, literature, etc., reaching the audience is another issue. If you’re a writer who manages to get published, your book comes to its readers, wherever they live. Either they find it in one of the six remaining bookstores or they order it on Amazon, but in any case, distance from you, the writer, is no barrier. Ditto film–even a low-budget film can be disseminated easily.
Themed entertainment, however–location-based entertainment–is obviously tied to its location. People need to not only be interested in what you have to say, but able to come see it. And the more “niche” your voice, the smaller that slice of Venn diagram gets.
Unless you figured out a way to make themed experiences traveling….which like i don’t think solves the problem of local communities having places to gather….but most towns have a fairgrounds or arena that might be able to be used for traveling themed entertainment
Oh this conversation is highly relevant to my interests! For the past few years I’ve been trying to build extremely cheap, extremely portable, and extremely personal themed attractions. My most recent one was the most experimental—in the sense that it was much more of an art gallery show than a theme park ride—but also, by some measures, the most successful, in the sense that materials totaled something like $150 and I transported the whole thing in two cab rides and I installed it by myself in half a day.
I think there’s absolutely a market and a means for small-scale themed attractions that can be built by tiny teams on tiny budgets. I haven’t cracked this nut yet, but it’s a nut that is waiting to be cracked. I’m slowly collecting the lessons I learn into a book because I want these things to be everywhere.
Also, I’ve been sitting on the walkthrough video of Bobby’s Birthday for months and really need to get it on the internet soon.
