Greg Maletic
Page 5 of 7
Step Back For A Moment
…and instead of focusing on the execution, let’s discuss the park from a
conceptual standpoint. I had a great time soaking in DisneySea, but it’s inevitable
that questions would pop into my head as I walked around Imagineering’s newest
creation. Was this the right park to build in Tokyo? Did the Imagineers fill it with the
proper sights and attractions? Does DisneySea advance our idea of what a theme park is
supposed to be?
In my "Disney Returns To Its Roots" column, I stated before I’d visited that "Tokyo DisneySea…illustrates that Walt Disney Imagineering has finally remembered what an amusement park is supposed to be like." Well, now that I’ve been there, does DisneySea show that Imagineering knows what it’s doing? I think it does. DisneySea is the first park where Imagineering has tried to create another Disneyland. Not a copy of Disneyland--they’ve done that already in Orlando, Tokyo, and Paris--but another Disneyland.
New York Harbor
Disney’s other parks are about wildlife, movies, even California, but it’s been a long time since Imagineers created a park based completely on fantasy, capable of holding virtually any attraction they could think up. DisneySea’s "lands" are thinly veiled recreations of Disneyland’s: instead of Tomorrowland, we get Port Discovery. Instead of Adventureland, we get the Lost River Delta and the Arabian Coast. Fantasyland is replaced by Mermaid Lagoon and Mysterious Island. Main Street exists in the form of New York Harbor. Modeling the park after Disneyland serves the newer park well: like Disneyland, DisneySea’s concept isn’t so lofty that it will drown in its ambitions, as Epcot and Animal Kingdom do.
But making the park conceptually so much like its sibling has its drawbacks as well. If you look at Tokyo Disney Resort’s two parks as a whole, would a $3 billion version of California Adventure (or something similarly different) have been a better complement to Tokyo Disneyland? (And wouldn’t it make a lot more sense to have a park called "California Adventure" somewhere else besides California?) As it stands, you could almost swap the names of Disneyland and DisneySea, and if you didn’t know any better, you wouldn’t care. Though I can hardly fault Disney for wanting to build DisneySea as is, going the California Adventure route certainly would have provided a better-differentiated experience.
DisneySea’s name troubles me a little. I’m necessarily speaking from a U.S. perspective, but it’s loaded with marketing challenges. Talking to a friend in Tokyo asking questions about the park, she repeatedly referred to it as "Sea World." I think this will be a common misperception. If someone goes there expecting a killer whale show, they’re going to be sorely disappointed. And if they’re like me and a killer whale show isn’t that exciting to them in the first place, they’re not going to go at all.
Spelling the name is a challenge: you have to capitalize the "s" in DisneySea to be able to read the word. (The uncapitalized "Disneysea" is just a little too confusing to try to pronounce.) The name only really makes sense if you understand the land/sea analogy it’s playing off of, and that’s a tad obscure. I know it took me over a year before I figured out that the name "DisneySea" was playing off of "Disneyland." (Land/Sea…get it?) That made me think I was stupid until I realized that this correlation was news to everyone I mentioned this to, even while we were standing in the park. Furthermore, it’s kind of a false analogy: the "land" in Disneyland’s name doesn’t exactly refer to "land masses" or "continents," it’s just a generic term for a "place." Using the term "sea" in the new park is taking original park’s name too literally.
Given these issues, to go out on a limb for the name "DisneySea" seems strange since the park is themed around the sea in only the loosest possible sense. The word "sea" will pop into your head walking about DisneySea about as often as the term "land" does when visiting Disneyland (that is to say, not very frequently at all.)