FROM: Communication Around the 'World' A Disney Dispatch Feature
Disney Design: Chicken or the Egg?
In his lecture, David Zanolla asks the students what comes first: a story idea or an attraction idea? It's his Disney version of the chicken or the egg. You won't learn the answer, because not even Disney has figured it out yet.
David Zanolla teaches an advanced honors course at Western Illinois University called Communication Around the "World". Disney World! In addition to standard lectures and projects, students will spend a week at the happiest place on earth. Cool, eh?
You can't come on the trip - sorry! - but we've reserved for you a virtual seat in David's course. There's the (virtual) bell!
As the travel portion of our class approaches (we leave March 9), I'm racing to teach new content to the students.
The last seven weeks have flown by, so it came down to me asking myself the question, "What are the key ideas and concepts that I want every student to know before we arrive in Orlando?" After thinking about it, I realized we'd spent a large portion of our early classes discussing Disney World's organizational culture.
I'm hoping all of that information 'stuck', but we often (and unintentionally) find ourselves involved discussions aroudn the idea of 'story'.
Chicken vs the Egg
Many of the previous articles we'd read, in addition to Hench's book Designing Disney, focused on the concept of stories 'told' through Disney Design and whether a story idea or an attraction idea came first.
Recently, I stumbled upon an intriguing article, The Myth of Story, on a blog called Imagineer Rebirth which seemed to challenge everything I had taught about story up to that point. I assigned it as a class reading.
If you read that article, be careful - at first glance, its title is misleading, but give it a shot. The author makes an intriguing argument.
I also threw in one final reading to conclude the discussion of story. A Disney Parks fan in the UK wrote his dissertation on Disneyland Aesthetics. While Disneyland isn't Disney World, and the connections he makes between film theory and theme park design are not all new, it's still an insightful piece.
Extra Credit Reading
Many (but not all) of the articles written about Disney Design seem to focus too heavily on the visual and mention music only in passing.
Except, however, a 2004 article in the Ethnomusicology Forum, which does just the opposite. The author posits that Disney uses music in the parks to create a reality in which we must believe so as to experience the reality that the Imagineers have 'created'.
Granted, there are some flaws in his argument, but the article deserves our attention because it adds another color often absent from academic discussions of Disney Design.
And with that: class dismissed!
The next time you hear from me, it'll be from Walt Disney World!
