Bumping...
...and replying to
a post in another thread:
dr.jones1986 said:
I wouldn't want an entire Indiana Jones or Star Wars land, it would be too much.
Well, there's two reasons that it would be too much, one of which is particular to these two franchises and another that would be true of any land based on a single franchise.
1)
A Consistently Themed Environment
This is why I feel it's important that any conceptualization of an Indiana Jones-based theme park must work on a geographical organization principle, rather than one organized by sections pertaining to each individual property. You know how many different desert environments you'd need if you give each film it's own section of a park? Four. One for Raiders, two for Crusade, one for Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. If you do things on a more geographical basis, either in the more literal form Rocket proposes or in the rougher way I advocate, you need two - a Middle Eastern desert and the American one.
The Indiana Jones films take place all over the globe. The beauty of the old
Indiana Jones and the Lost Expedition concept is that it combined multiple Indiana Jones-based attractions (different vehicles, that is) in a single environment that was inspired by, though not derived from, the films. It wasn't trying to smash together a desert and a jungle all in one. Ironically, this is just what a refitting of the shop adjacent to the Star Tours attraction at Disney's Hollywood Studios did when it was renamed from Endor Vendors to Tatooine Traders, alongside an Endorian landscape. (That particular park is an odd case, in that it's never quite sure whether it's trying to be a movie studio or the world of a film itself.)
The beauty of Indiana Jones is that he ostensibly exists in our own world. There are clear variants of fact, physics, and folklore, but most things in our world can be treated in an Indiana Jones framework. A land at some other theme park that was explicitly "Indyland" would be downright silly, because it would, if done properly, only be representing a single place. Now, that single place could be rather broad either in geography or thematic treatment. The Liberty Square/Frontierland swath at Disney World in Florida moves through both space and time from East Coast colonization to West Coast expansion. Adventureland at the Disney theme parks has Polynesian, Indian, African, and South American influences, but they're all jungle or island landscapes, not desert. (Well, in Paris they do an Arabian-infused rendition, and there are thematically disastrous Aladdin spinners at the Stateside parks, but those are added on, and are not internal to the concept.) When they put in the Indiana Jones Adventure at Disneyland, they had, for awhile, a mandated spiel on the Jungle Cruise that was explicitly set in the 1930s. They've moved away from that, but the rest of the land still exists in the same world as Indiana Jones because the land was already a variant on our own notions of what real world adventure in far-flung places would be like. You don't want something to be Indyland, because then everything must directly relate to him or his adventures. But things that thematically "rhyme" with Indiana Jones are entirely appropriate. This gives us the second reason:
2)
Limiting Your Horizons
Disneyland's California Adventure theme park is in the middle of a huge addition called Cars Land. Apart from the fact that the film it is based on doesn't take place in California, the mistake, as I see it, is that you can never really do anything in that land that expands beyond the world presented in the Cars films, a world that is decidedly not our own. This is, of course, also true of the new Avatar development planned for the Animal Kingdom theme park, which has been, up until now, the most realistic and least fanciful of the Disney theme parks, for good or ill. Here's a couple of photographs suggesting some of what I mean, which also isn't too far off from the sorts of things that could happen in an immersive Indiana Jones theme park.
Things are rough, things are aged, things take place in an Africa that is a theme park-friendly rendition of a real place. They are not in a universe wherein cars are sentient and humans are absent or in which there are fanciful beasts on some planet in the future. Such real world-inspired environments can invite an awful lot of thematic and experiential material that does not need to be derived from or operate on the rules of some fictional franchise.
I know my genre biases come into play here. Indiana Jones is about as fanciful as my usual tastes in fiction get, a world that is roughly ours infused with some additional elements. I do lose interest once a story asks me to accept some other world or planet or something that I decidedly do not recognize as akin to the world we live in. I know this is also why I find an Indiana Jones-inspired theme park much easier to conceive of than a Star Wars one, even though there's more material and more characters to draw upon for a Star Wars park: Star Wars needs to suggest you are traveling from planet to planet, while the theme park vocabulary is already quite adept at moving the audience from place to place with the scale of this transportation and the realms involved being the biggest piece of the suspension of disbelief.
As much as anything else, what is fascinating about Indiana Jones is that the idea of that type of adventure has staying power. Clearly, earlier figures from the works of Jules Verne and H. Rider Haggard and Joseph Conrad and the producers of the Republic serials and, yes, Carl Barks were predecessors to Indiana Jones, and he has had his own successors, but it is nearly impossible to disassociate these ideas from those birthed from the work of Lucas, Spielberg, and their collaborators from 1981 onward. This remains a large portion of why I feel the Indiana Jones Adventure attractions are valid as additions to both the world of Disney, because doing it without the Jones name would be an imitation on some level. But not everything with that thematic component, once the Jones connection is established, needs to have direct involvement from Indiana Jones himself.