A Twitter user this morning posted what he said was a Disney Parks survey testing proposed new names for the park, which originally was known as the Disney-MGM Studios.
This will be the retheming of Hollywood Studios and possibly new name, via Disney Parks survey. pic.twitter.com/4ENXr72tPs
— DisCounselor Dan (@DisCounselor) August 26, 2017
[Update: Just heard from a YouTuber who said he is the original source of the survey info. You can watch that video here.]
In addition to Disney's Hollywood Studios, the reported survey listed as possibilities:
But it did not include Disney Hollywood Adventure, which widely has been tipped to be the likely new name for the park. Swapping the word "Studios" for "Adventure" would reflect the shut-down of all media production at the park while providing a parallel branding element with Disneyland's second gate, Disney California Adventure, which shares the same front-gate design with DHS, modeled after Los Angeles' old Pan Pacific Auditorium.
Some Disney fans on Twitter have been mocking the proposed names, which include some real head-scratchers. Coincidentally, yesterday we'd just had a new thread on our Discussion Board asking people to suggest new names for the park.
Now, I don't have any reason to suspect that what was posted is not actually part of a Disney Parks survey. Theme parks survey a wild variety of topics all the time. But it would be interesting to see more context from the rest of this survey.
Is Disney surveying other names to other survey respondents? Were these names even the real subject of the survey, or just some diversion to prompt what Disney might hope to be more honest and thoughtful answers on something else later in the survey? (Survey designers pull some creative tricks to get people to stop censoring themselves and provide unguarded answers.) Or is this some Disney executive's angle to build a market research case for leaving the name as is, despite what Iger said two years ago?
Your guess is as good as anyone's, at this point. So... what do you think?
Rate and Review:
Tweet
"C'mon kids! We're going to Kaleidoscope!"
I can see, if all the rides and theming are going to be from Disney's intellectual property, that the title "Hollywood" doesn't make much sense (as Disney has never been based in the community of Hollywood), and "Disney's Burbank Adventure" really doesn't have a great ring to it either.
How about Disney Studio's Adventure? All the rides and properties in the park belong to Disney Studios (Twilight Zone and Aerosmith as exceptions), and it encompasses a name that people already associate to the park. By simply moving around an apostrophe and an "s", it becomes the adventures of the Disney Studio (and its subsidiary rights holdings).
"We're going to Disney Studio's today" as opposed to "We're going to Disney's Studio today".
Throw in the word "Adventure", and there you have it!
Also, they might want to pick something that would be easy for non English Speakers to say or read. Cinemagic is an imaginary word so everybody would be on the same level reading it.
They could steal from Universal again: Disney Studios Escape.
How about Disney's Magic Studios?
One thing that appears to be clear is Disney wants to move away from both the "Hollywood" and "Studios" parts of the name, hence why Hollywood Adventure, (blank) Studios, or anything similar are not present. Honestly, it makes a lot more sense to completely discard the old name rather than just replacing part of it, especially since very little of the original park remains.
DEADPOOL Park
Perfect!
Start printing the brochures.
One is themed to Star Wars. The other Toy Story. And the other regular Hollywood. These themes are about as different as you can get. And somehow they're all supposed to exist in the same park.
Seriously, what do you even call a park with that kind of concept?!
I know Magic Kingdom has extremely different themes trying to coexist within the same park as well, but there's two reasons why they were able to get away with that.
Reason #1: the whole idea of the park is that it's the magical world where all the Disney characters live. So these four distinct themes were specifically chosen so that each Disney property has a place where it could fit in. So this way, you could be flying through Neverland with Peter Pan and fighting Zurg with Buzz Lightyear in the same park. And it wouldn't seem mismatched at all!
Unfortunately for Disney's Hollywood Studios/Hollywood Adventure/Cinemagic/Cinemagine/Storyverse/Hyperia/Kaleidoscope Park/Deadpool Park, since it's part of the same resort as MK, it can't use that same excuse. Otherwise it'll just seem like a much smaller version of MK. In fact, now that I think about it, this park really just feels like MK's table scraps. Like these were all ideas that that the imagineers really wanted to do but MK just didn't have the space. So unless the imagineers can come up with a better way of tying all these themes together, the park's gonna lose it's distinct identity, and thus will be much harder to market. Right down to simply finding a name!
I know that DHS has always been far from perfect. But at the very least it had one big unifying theme and stuck to it. The name was a perfect description of the park:
Disney's Hollywood Studios.
The entire park was themed to be like a real movie studio. It featured attractions that showed how Hollywood films were made, while other attractions actually put you into those movies themselves. But of course, it was all done with a little Disney twist to it.
To be fair, it did feel a little too similar to Universal Studios. And yes, it's most likely that Disney and Eisner probably stole that idea from them. But let's be honest; Universal has probably ripped off more things from Disney than vice versa. Hell, where do you think Universal got the idea of building a theme park in the first place?
But regardless if it was a rip-off or not, DHS still had enough of that Disney touch to still make it feel very distinct from Universal. But not too much to also make it feel very distinct from all the other WDW parks. Again, even though it always had a truckload of problems, it was still it's own unique thing.
I guess you could argue they're still keeping the whole movie theme, but that leads me to reason #2 of why MK works:
They don't put too much focus on one individual franchise.
Fantasyland isn't entirely focused on Little Mermaid or Snow White. Adventureland isn't entirely focused on Lion King or Pirates of the Carribean (though I wouldn't be surprised if they actually considered that at one point).Because of this, tons more other Disney properties have their own space. And there's also space for original attractions as well (Haunted Mansion, Space Mountain etc).
Now don't get me wrong. I am a huge Star Wars geek. But if Disney got drunk off of Frozen's popularity, then they are getting absolutely wasted off of Star Wars's. On my last visit, I couldn't believe how much Star Wars completely dominated the park. It felt like no matter what corner of the park you were in, there was something related to Star Wars going on. It was crazy!
But even when their complete over-obsession with Star Wars inevitably dies down, there's still the fact that it has it's own section taking up about half of the park. As impressive as the Wizarding World is, Universal knew to keep enough space for other franchises. Thus keeping the movie theme as a whole intact. Quite frankly, I feel Disney's Still-Not-Yet-Named Park will not represent enough franchises for it to be considered a full-on "movie park." Especially now that The Great Movie Ride's gone.
Plus, how cool would it be if the amount of franchises in Deadpool Park (yep, I'm just gonna keep calling it that for now) wasn't just limited to one land with Star Wars, one mini-land with Toy Story, one ride for Twilight Zone, and one ride for Mickey Mouse? What if we could fit other franchises as well? Maybe we could have finally had East Coast versions of Indiana Jones Adventure or Radiator Springs Racers! Maybe we could have an awesome Gaurdians of the Galaxy ride without putting it in a weird place like Future World but also without having to get rid of Tower of Terror!
Best of all, we could actually settle down on names like Disney's Cinemagic or Disney's MovieWorld!
Now, I'm not saying that these new attractions for Deadpool Park are gonna be bad or anything. Even though I think people have been giving WDW too much crap, it is nice to see them building big E-tickets again. I'm especially intrigued by the new Mickey Mouse ride! It just really bugs me how inconsistent the theming will be. Even at their lowest point, WDW has always been very meticulous about consistency with it's theming. Have they ever been 100% perfect on this? Of course not. But they were always pretty damn close! So it physically hurts me to see them throwing all that out the window just so that they can push out new stuff faster in order to please a bunch of internet trolls who won't leave them alone. They're so desperate to push out new stuff, that they put a Fantasyland ride in World Showcase and they're gonna put a Tomorrowland ride in Future World.
I'm sorry everyone. I really didn't mean for this to evolve into a full-on tangent, but I guess I just needed to let it out of my system.
Can someone get a screenshot or a cell phone photo of this list to confirm it's actually real? Because the names are terrible.
Also, why change it to "Disney" from "Disney's"?
I think it's a ruse.
Disney's Hollywood Adventure is still hands-down the best name, and I hope they go with something like that.
This article has been archived and is no longer accepting comments.
