Greg Maletic
Page 6 of 7

How Does The Park Stack Up Against The Competition
…Disney and otherwise? Did Imagineering get it "all right" with DisneySea, and "all wrong" with California Adventure, as has been widely asserted? DisneySea is clearly more elaborate and beautiful than California Adventure--no one would ever dispute that. It fits more closely into the Disney theme park tradition: most of its "lands" could easily slide into one of the Magic Kingdom parks. Is it better than California Adventure? Yes, but it’s not a slam-dunk.

California Adventure’s roller coaster, rapids ride--even its Ferris wheel--are great attractions. I’d rate them all better than the one original E-ticket attraction I rode at DisneySea (20,000 Leagues). Both of California Adventure’s 3-D movies are vastly superior to DisneySea’s Magic Lamp Theater. DisneySea’s StormRider and California Adventure’s Soarin’ Over California come out as a tie. Sinbad trumps Superstar Limo in a landslide. DisneySea does have Indy, and a Journey to the Center of the Earth attraction that I didn’t experience. But whether that attraction is good or bad would make little difference in my assessment: like I said, DisneySea is a better park than California Adventure. (An appropriate question: is it better on a dollars-spent basis than California Adventure? Looking at it from that unfair perspective ("unfair" because as a visitor I shouldn’t care about how much was spent, just whether I’m enjoying myself), considering that DisneySea cost two to three times as much as the new Anaheim park, I think I’d call it a tie.)

Is DisneySea better than Universal’s Islands of Adventure, the best non-Disney themed park in the world? The two are remarkably similar in layout and theming. Universal did a great job with their park’s atmosphere and detail, but in this area, DisneySea is truly the best. In terms of attractions, though, Universal wins out. Nothing here is as stunning as Universal’s Spider-Man. Nothing here is as exciting as Universal’s Dueling Dragons coaster. Again, I’ll make it a "draw," though for very different reasons than I did for California Adventure. (Some good news for Disney on the attraction front: I will say that Pooh’s Hunny Hunt at Tokyo Disneyland comes very, very close to being as good as the revolutionary Spider-Man.)

Finally, is DisneySea better than Disneyland? It’d be easy to claim that nothing could be as good as Disneyland for nostalgia reasons alone, but let’s try and look more deeply.

Suppose Walt Disney had built this park in 1955 rather than Disneyland. Would he have set the world on fire like he did? I’m going to say "no," because DisneySea doesn’t touch as many nerves as Disneyland. It’s not as stirring as Disneyland…not as universal. Disneyland is the canonical theme park, and not just because it was the first.

Why is this so? Hard to say, but for me, Disneyland all feels like one coherent experience, designed by one person (albeit with a lot of assistance). It’s an idealized, physical representation of the 1950s American worldview, delivered in a manner that’s charming rather than condescending, and a place that feels like home the second you step into it. DisneySea is beautifully designed, but by comparison, it feels like a bunch of cool things placed next to each other. This manifests itself in something as simple as the naming of DisneySea’s lands. One of the inspired--and nearly unique--features of Disneyland is that its "lands" don’t describe their content geographically, only qualitatively. "Adventureland" is where adventure lives, and it just so happens that it’s set in a South Seas jungle. (In France, it’s set in Morocco.) "Frontierland" is about exploration, and in the U.S., that means the Wild West. Imagine if Disneyland followed the DisneySea model and Adventureland were called "Bora Bora," and Frontierland became "Tombstone, U.S.A." Maybe it’s me, but that’s not quite as magical. The lands become re-creations, not original places. DisneySea is a re-creation of places, real and imagined. Disneyland is, well, an original.

So if DisneySea isn’t far and away the best theme park in the world, did Disney and the Oriental Land Company do the right thing by spending so much money on it? From a pure fan’s standpoint, the answer of course is "yes," but from an economic standpoint, we’ll have to see. Disney is now in the middle of a defining experiment, having opened its most expensive park ever (DisneySea) within a year of opening two of its least expensive (California Adventure in Anaheim and Disney Studios in Paris). The path that future Disney theme parks will take will largely be decided by the financial success of these two approaches.

Early on, it appears that the premium route is winning: DisneySea attendance seems quite strong (though I haven’t heard any statistics), while California Adventure attendance has been lackluster. However, using Disney-MGM Studios as an example--a park that under whelmed me when it opened, but has since grown into one of my favorites--I think it’s premature to make any real assessments. After each park has been open for four or five years, it’ll be a better time to make a determination about which approach works better.