Unlike the cup that Jesus drank at The Last Supper, these cups are (theoretically) obtainable thanks to increasingly advanced technologies and powerful creative minds. Throughout theme park history, consistent trends have emerged as to what guests want, and what designers have delivered. They have generally all pointed to one goal: to make the illusion real.
The Perfected IP Park
Disneyland was the first “IP” park. Its areas were inspired by the popular culture subjects of the day, which included far off civilizations, the old west, Walt Disney’s animated characters, and dreams of the future. Other IP parks include the Islands of Adventure and Disney’s Hollywood Studios, but none so far have been able to solve the two problems that face every IP park: how to stay relevant and meet the modern standards of immersion set by The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. Disneyland was made well before this bar was set, but there is no need to change Disneyland’s lands dramatically since the lands are classics. However, with the Islands of Adventure, many of its lands, such as Toon Lagoon, Marvel Super Hero Island and the mythically themed Lost Continent have been subject to a severe decrease in relevancy (including Marvel, because the face of Marvel today is Disney’s MCU and Sony’s Spider Verse more recently). Disney’s Hollywood Studios suffers from a more noticeable inconsistency in quality, due to its studio park past, in which beige soundstages dominated the park skyline, not the hyper-realistic spires of Black Spire Outpost like today. Universal may be on to cracking this formula by opening a from-scratch IP park: Epic Universe, which will have timeless characters such as 1931’s Frankenstein and Dracula alongside Harry Potter, Super Mario Bros., and How to Train your Dragon. This park may solve the IP park issue of meeting new standards and staying relevant thanks to characters that have fared decently in history, but only time will tell about this one.
Westworld
While this one may seem a tad far-fetched, we are closer than ever thanks to the development of hardware and AI that can create animatronics that can bring your favorite characters to life as mechanical marvels that all behave like them and appear to be living and breathing people. With the introduction of Project Kiwi to the public (a free roaming animatronic of child-aged Groot that can do some dancing), a new era in theme parks has begun, with Disney parks leading the way with free-roaming animatronic characters. Given the current development of this hardware and how advanced AI has become, I think we could start having conversations with the “real” Snow White or Iron Man within our lifetimes. Eventually, we could see entire theme parks designed just to feature this technology, albeit more family friendly and affordable than Westworld. However, given the potential dangers with AI, this Holy Grail of theme park design might as well be a grave, which leads us into yet another Holy Grail that many see as dangerous, as well as unobtainable.
Jurassic Park
While this one may seem impossible to achieve at first glance, a mountain of research has been done on this topic, which suggests that one may be able to create a dinosaur in some form. Dr. James Horner in 2015 first announced that he and his team at the University of Montana had been able to make a chicken embryo that had physical traits similar to that of its dinosaur ancestors. While this had set the dinosaur and genetics community ablaze at the time, the research had slowed due to a lack of progress on the tail, since the team had to learn how the tail evolved, as reported in early 2020. There has been no word on the project since then. But, if one were able to reverse engineer multiple modern animals into their dinosaur ancestors, say a tortoise into a Brachiosaurus, a Jackson’s Chameleon into a Triceratops, a chicken into a Tyrannosaurus Rex, another bird into a Velociraptor, and an ostrich into a Gallimimus, we would have quite the dinosaur section of a theme park, themed zoo, or Jurassic Park. However, there are multiple barriers that need to be overcome, and there are considerable ethical and moral considerations that may keep a sort of Jurassic Park from coming to fruition. However, it would be quite spectacular if Jurassic Park could materialize.
Comentarios