When I got the idea to start blogging about problematic issues at theme parks, the whole “JK Rowling is a transphobe” was already a few months old and, even though she is definitely transphobic and we should not forget that, the discourse more or less demands that content be timely.
Imagine my relief when I turned on the Internet today.
When I first drafted this essay, I had several paragraphs dedicated to why JK Rowling’s recent, er, content is transphobic, but the Wifi at my apartment is shoddy and it wasn’t saved. Which is good, because the topic has been covered already by much more eloquent folks than myself.
I encourage you to do your own research before coming to a conclusion, but here’s where I stand: JK Rowling, who wrote a series of books that I loved as a child and teenager, has, in the last few years, made deeply harmful, bigoted statements about trans people. As an ally to the trans community and as someone with trans people in my life that I love, respect, and admire, I don’t feel that it’s appropriate to continue to support her or her work. This is because doing so will, in one way or another, support her platform, and she is using her platform to hurt trans people.
So we could discuss the books and the films and why they aren’t good, but I’m someone who loves theme parks and theme park attractions. For the last ten years, some of the most recognized and lauded attractions have been in the Wizarding World of Harry Potter in several of Universal’s parks around the globe. Is the quality of the theming and excellence of the rides really so significant that it’s still worth going to, just to be immersed? In spite of its creator’s prejudices, is the Wizarding World of Harry Potter good, actually?
So: What is the Wizarding World of Harry Potter?
The Harry Potter series was a blockbuster franchise: books, films, merchandise, video games, etc. As early as 2004, Rowling had started negotiations with Disney to establish a foothold in their theme parks. As the story goes, Rowling was notoriously controlling of her property, and was dissatisfied that Disney’s offer was to have a small area with a few attractions and one restaurant, whereas Rowling (again, reportedly) wanted nothing less than a full-scale replica of the Hogwarts castle and the Hogwarts express – which would not be very feasible in the Magic Kingdom, a park already flush with castles and trains.
Enter Universal Parks, which had been active in Orlando since the early 1990s but had never really created anything to rival Disney Imagineering’s excellence (more on that later). Seizing the opportunity left by the soured talks between Disney and Rowling, Universal offered much more than their competitor, agreeing to all of Rowling’s demands and dedicating a significant amount of their second Orlando park, Islands of Adventure, to the (now named) Wizarding World.
Ironically, the area that was designated for the Wizarding World had been called the Lost Continent, an original land on Islands of Adventure that was reportedly built by several Imagineers who had failed to build a similar land in Disney’s Animal Kingdom, called Beastly Kingdom.
The land opened in 2010 to exceptionally high reviews, and was lauded as the first thing that Universal had done that truly put it in competition with Disney. in 2014, Universal bulldozed their original Jaws attraction and created a second Wizarding World land and a train to take passengers between both. The original Wizarding World has been replicated several times worldwide for Universal, including in California and Japan. Through it all Rowling has maintained creative control, having say over everything from the look of the land to the menus in its restaurants.
Why it’s Bad, Actually
1. The Food
Speaking of restaurants, Rowling allegedly balked at the idea that Universal would be serving “theme park food;” i.e. burgers, fries, and chicken nuggets. This would be par for the course at Universal, which has never been very exotic with its fare (Mythos, the restaurant at Islands of Adventure that has always hung a gaudy “#1 Theme Park Restaurant in the World” banner at its entrance, has a shockingly basic menu), though that isn’t necessarily a bad thing – theme parks are visited by people from all over the world, and often they find safety in providing food that appeals to the least common denominator.
Instead of American fast food, the restaurants at the Wizarding World serve English and Scottish food: bangers and mash, toad in the hole, fish and chips, scotch eggs. While this fare might be comforting and filling for a cold, foggy afternoon in the United Kingdom, in Orlando Florida, well… it might be a bit heavy. Additionally, the menu is not kind to dietary restrictions, being heavy on meat, sugar, and gluten.
Speaking of sugar: the signature beverage in the area is, of course, Butterbeer. This is actually a thing that existed, which is made by combining butter and, er, beer. The Universal version – which can be purchased at nearly every retail location in the Harry Potter section of the parks – is non-alcoholic, served iced or frozen, and is essentially cream soda with a sweet whipped cream on top. It costs $6.99 and is saccharine enough to make your teeth hurt.
“Sweet” is a common flavor profile at the Wizarding World: from pumpkin juice to cauldron cakes to candy to ice cream, nearly everything you can eat there outside of the restaurants is packed with sugar. Not that sugar is a bad thing – Disney parks are known for their confectionaries – it’s just rote. You could say that choosing to serve food that is either heavy in carbs or heavy in sugar is a safe bet for a theme park – but great things don’t come from playing it safe.
2. The Rides
Confession: I’m an armchair nerd when it comes to rides systems, so for your sake I will try and keep this as short and sweet as possible.
When Islands of Adventure opened in 1999, its biggest draw was that, unlike Walt Disney World or Universal Studios, it had thrills: roller coasters and drop towers, intense water rides, the works. This was intentional, and when I was a teenager it was a massive draw: the Incredible Hulk Coaster is one of my favorite rides of all time, and the first inverted coaster I ever rode was Dueling Dragons, a dueling inverted coaster that was so frightening and fast and brilliant to ride that it became a standard against which I’ve judged all roller coasters.
Intense rides (and intense ride systems) are a part of the philosophy for Universal that is not shared by Disney. Where Islands of Adventure opened with two looping roller coasters, Disney World only opened their first (and so far only) looping coaster two months later. The obvious reason for this is that Disney is for families while Islands is for adults and teens, but I think there’s more to it than that – roller coasters, if they’re outdoors, are eye-catching, and are not easy to convincingly immerse into a themed land. Think about Disney coasters: Space Mountain and Rock n Roller Coaster are completely inside (and in the dark), the Matterhorn Bobsleds and Big Thunder Mountain have rock work around the tracks to keep them hidden. Even TRON is partially indoors and set in Tommorowland, where a high-speed bike coaster is slightly more believable than, say, next to a fairy-tale castle.
Do you see where I’m going with this?
Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey, the first ride to open with the new land in 2010, is a technically complex ride that is intense, fast-paced, motion-sickness inducing, claustrophobic, and absolutely confusing. Set inside Hogwarts, the ride contains moments from nearly every film, mostly shown on screens, highlighting the participation of actors from the original films and at least four gigantic monster animatronics – all in under four minutes. It is – and I know I’m using 2018 lingo here – astonishingly extra. In the California and Japan versions, they even added 3D effects, which were quickly removed due to massive negative feedback from nauseated guests.
I know that this sort of attraction is appealing to some, but much like the Butterbeer, the ride is simply oversaturated, more like a three-minute supercut of the entire film franchise than something that actually makes you feel like you’re there. In fact, most people who go don’t even talk about the ride at all, but the queue for the ride, which winds through the castle itself.
There are two other rides near Forbidden Journey: Flight of the Hippogriff, which is a re-skinned children’s coaster, and Hagrid’s Magical Creatures Motorbike Adventure, which I haven’t ridden and therefore can’t judge completely, aside from the fact that it took the place of my beloved Dueling Dragons. The ride itself is a multi-launch coaster with some interesting elements thrown in (such as a switched track and a vertical drop), and was praised for having the most realistic animatronic Universal had made. From watching ride videos, though, you only see the animatronic for a few moments in the ride, but good for them. There’s also a ride at the other park called Escape from Gringotts, which seems fine – it too uses roller coaster technology, screens, and 3D effects.
Am I saying that rides should not use technological advancements to succeed? Absolutely not. But these elements should be hidden, leaving the rider in awe of what happened. A good themed ride is a transcendental experience, and it doesn’t always need tech to accomplish this: look at The Haunted Mansion. Hell, look at Jaws.
3. Immersion
The fundamental difference between an amusement park and a theme park is immersion. When you go to Six Flags, you don’t feel like you’ve been transported to a different world: you’re walking past advertisements for candy bars between giant roller coasters, surrounded by the smell of gravel and fried food. Contrast this with entering Disneyland: once you’re through the gates, you see nothing but Main Street, the castle, you hear the sounds and smell the smells of the park. It doesn’t feel like you’re only a few hundred feet away from a city.
I will say this: the Wizarding World of Harry Potter is the most immersive thing that Universal Parks has ever created. But even this has its failings; poorly designed details that are just one more reason to feel okay avoiding the parks now that JK Rowling has shown her cards as someone who is hateful towards trans people.
Rowling is notorious for having her fingers deeply imbedded in everything her IP touches. She writes the new movies and supervised the new play, and she gives approval for everything that happens in the Wizarding World: there isn’t a single ride or merchandise shop or item on the menu that hasn’t crossed her desk. One of her initial requests was that everything in the park be replicas of the filming locations. This isn’t Hogwarts but Movie Hogwarts and Movie Hogsmeade, every attraction has at least one character from the films played by the actors from the films, the souvenirs match film props, et cetera.
You might think this is great, that you get to essentially re-live the movies, but I feel that is missing one key element of immersion: customization. In this Wizarding World you aren’t living your own adventure, you’re stepping (and riding) in the footsteps of Harry Potter. When you ride the Hogwarts express you don’t look out a window, but onto screens that play out a story for you, with cameos from the protagonists of the film. This isn’t being transported to a different world, it’s stepping onto a movie set.
Many gums have been flapped about how realistic the lands are, and though they’re done with a great amount of detail and seem to be the result of years of skilled work, there’s something about them that jumped the shark, as it were, when it comes to realism. For example: in the original land, the roofs of Hogsmeade are coated in a layer of fake snow, a photogenic touch that is outlandishly plasticine in the Florida heat. Over in Diagon Alley, the winding, movie-realistic street is crowned with an unmoving statue of a dragon from the film that breathes a ball of fire every 15 minutes, despite none of the employees or other aspects of the experience responding to it. Yes, this is cool and yes, it’s great for the ‘gram, but does it make you feel like you just stepped through a brick wall into an ancient, winding magical street?
4. What Could Have Been
So Disney didn’t get Harry Potter in 2004, and six years later they watched crowds stream into Universal Studios in Orlando to go to the Wizarding World. How did they respond?
If you want to make a comparison between the Wizarding World and somewhere at Disney, your first inclination is probably Galaxy’s Edge, the Star Wars lands that Disney has recently built on both American coasts. But I think we should look at Pandora: The World of Avatar.
This land, built after Disney secured the theme park rights to James Cameron’s 2009 film Avatar, took six years to develop and build at Disney’s Animal Kingdom (it was actually built in the part of the park where Beastly Kingdom was meant to be, so there’s a strange harmony to this story). By the time it was released, Avatar was more or less gone from the public imagination, and the park itself seemed like a wasted gamble. There were millions of children who wanted to fly on a broomstick with Harry Potter, how many cared to run through the jungles of Pandora with Jake Sully and Neytiri, two characters whose names I just looked up? The film was an incredible experience in theaters with 3D glasses and CGI effects, how can you replicate that in the mundane world with sets and animatronics? And how can you do so and be half as good as the Wizarding World, with its authentic butterbeer and wands and state-of-the-art attractions?
I said before that nothing good can come from playing it safe, and Pandora: The World of Avatar is almost entirely risks. The land is not set in the film, but many years after the fact, meaning that you won’t encounter a screen version of Sigourney Weaver in a familiar environment. You’re on a different part of Pandora, unfamiliar and strange, surrounded by bioluminescent plants and mountains that seem to float above your head with waterfalls pouring down from them. The food is not standard theme park fare nor British cuisine, but tofu and veggie bowls topped with boba, dome cheesecakes, green beer, and egg rolls filled with pineapple. Almost nothing in the land is familiar, and thus everything is surprising: you feel like you’re on an alien world, you can explore the various pathways through flora and fauna you’ve never seen before. You can go there and have an adventure.
The land has two rides, and neither is particularly intense. One is a short dark ride that happens to include the best animatronic Imagineering has ever produced (they even used it in one of their ads and, I’m sorry, tell me that face isn’t real). The other is Flight of Passage, a ride that – like Forbidden Journey – uses screens, but this time it’s to take riders on a thrilling yet gentle flight through the titular planet on the back of a Banshee (the dragon bird animals from the movie) that you can feel breathing between your legs. Despite the ride being a simulator, it’s known to bring tears of joy and amazement to riders (not me, since I haven’t had the chance to go on the attraction yet), and has boasted the longest lines in the parks ever since it opened.
Of course, Pandora has its failings: it’s still based on a film most people have forgotten, so the merchandising isn’t as lucrative as Harry Potter and the land’s existence alone isn’t as much of a draw as the Wizarding World, and probably never will be.
What if Universal had been so bold? What if, instead of being under the thumb of a megalomaniacal author, they had decided to write their own version of a Wizarding World story? Would it have felt like stepping into the movies, or into the world itself? Would they have created different attractions, experimented with different food? Used different technology and emphasized different experiences?
5. Conclusion
When I started to draft this piece, it was because I knew that, at some point, I would need to face the fact that my convictions about JK Rowling (who, remember, has said and done things that are extremely harmful to a vulnerable group of good people without apology) would need to extend beyond words into choices. Should I read the books ever again? Watch the films? Next time I get the chance to ride the Incredible Hulk, should I pop across the park for a pint of Butterbeer and a ride though Hogwarts? Will that be a hard choice, since the parks are just too good to miss?
I concluded, of course, that they’re not, but I needed to get through all 3,000+ words of this to convince myself. I hope it’s given you a few thoughts, too.
If Rowling didn’t so obviously benefit from the theme park rights, if her teeth and fingerprints weren’t on every aspect of them, maybe I could remove myself a little bit from her atrocious personality and still be able to enjoy something that meant so much to me in my youth. But I can’t. JK Rowling isn’t a long-dead author whose work belongs to the masses, she’s a living, breathing, rich-as-God woman who imbeds her wants and preferences into everything she’s created so that none of it belongs to her readers. The Wizarding World of Harry Potter isn’t a place to live your own adventure, it’s a place to walk through the adventure she created, on her terms.
And right now, her terms are also hateful. And there isn’t anything about the Wizarding World of Harry Potter that’s good enough to help me overlook that. It’s just… bad, actually.
…
Thanks for reading all of that! It was an act of love and passion, and I hope you enjoyed it. If you’ve made it this far, and if you can, consider donating to Mermaids UK, an organization that supports gender diverse children, young adults, and their families in Rowling’s native country. Transphobia is a different (and darker) shade of hatred in the UK, so supporting the most vulnerable victims of it is a worthy endeavor. I just sent them £50, because the second-richest woman in the UK never will.
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