Why Disney Demolished Dinoland USA: An Imagineering Failure

Comments · 207

• LI

  @LiAkahi · 1 year ago

  I find it simultaneously hilarious and fascinating that Dinorama is actually one of the best “themed” areas in any theme park: it was designed to look like a cheap and tacky carnival and they absolutely nailed the theming. The problem is that it’s a theme that people have little to no interest seeing in a theme park. <br><br>Ironically it’s very similar to the “movie studio” theming. It’s very easy to pull off, but making the theming perfect means a lot of plain brown box buildings

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• A-

  @a-totally-random-person · 1 year ago

  Animal Kingdom feels like it was never finished.

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• CO

  @confuseray1230 · 1 year ago

  Turns out, if you come up with a really cool reason for your themepark land too look cheap and run down, you&apos;ll just end up with a themepark land that looks cheap and run down. <br>Especially if you fail to tell people about your cool reason. 😆

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• FI

  @FigmentJedi · 1 year ago

  The problem with Dino-Rama&apos;s backstory is that a roadside dinosaur attraction is typically a &quot;walk/drive through a forest full of concrete dinosaurs&quot; experience and not a tacky carnival. This should have been more &quot;Jungle Cruise but its fake and bad on purpose&quot; then County Fair.

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• AN

  @andrewrettig319 · 1 year ago

  Why didn’t anyone tell us the backstory years ago? &nbsp;Seems like Disney wasted an opportunity.

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• CO

  @cometcat5728 · 1 year ago (edited)

  In all fairness, it really wasn&apos;t up to Disney standards. Here I think the concept from the very beginning was doomed to fail due to the context of everything else going around. Sure, the backstory is cute but when competing against everything else in the parks it would never have worked for the general public. Framing it as people &quot;not getting it&quot; being at fault I think is not really it.

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• GR

  @gregcurling9318 · 1 year ago

  I&apos;m going to be the cynic here and suggest that the &quot;cheap-out&quot; approach to creating Dinoland was facilitated by the fabrication of a detailed back story that provided a convenient vehicle for adding &quot;money grab&quot; carnival games, yet another spinner, and a State Fair Wild Mouse coaster while lauding it as &quot;creatively woven storytelling&quot;.

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• MI

  @micheleosullivan3122 · 1 year ago

  I’ll have a soft spot for Primeval Whirl for a specific reason: the ride operator my family encounteed when we rode together in 2001. &nbsp;My very profoundly disabled brother (19) was given a special pass to allow us to skip to the front of attraction lines (this was something still come back then, before a lot of people faked it). &nbsp;We got on the attraction and planned to exit after it ended. &nbsp;Then, the young woman who was playing attendant at the time asked if we’d like to stay on. &nbsp;There was a line for the ride, which we pointed out…we didn’t want her to get in trouble. &nbsp;She just smiled and said “hey, stay on, no problem.” She didn’t just do this once. &nbsp;She did it twice. &nbsp;I’m full view of other employees and guests. &nbsp;There was no way someone didn’t say anything to her, but she showed empathy anyway. &nbsp;After three rides on it, we got off, and my parents and I figured that she HAD to have a similar disability in her family to account for that level of care, so we asked. &nbsp;She just smiled and winked and told us to have a great day. &nbsp;We immediately went to guest relations to talk to them about her, because in a world where people will assist the disabled but will do it begrudgingly, she did it without any expectation of praise or accolades - she did it to be kind and make our family trip memorable for my brother. &nbsp;I won’t deny that the land was tacky and low budget, some on purpose, some because of money, but that experience made a huge impact on our family, and while Primeval Whirl was no longer there when I visited with my own family, I did tell them and my husband about the experience when we were on line for Dinosaur. &nbsp;More people like this young woman, please - not just at Disney World, but everywhere!

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• MI

  @MilesTailsProwe · 1 year ago

  The story was overly complicated, &nbsp;it looked cheap and with the cost of Disney land it makes no sense to have area equal to a cheap states fair

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• DA

  @david_walker_esq · 1 year ago

  It&apos;s funny how guests can accept, appreciate and even expect Harambe Village to be rundown and tacky, but think Disney failed on the theming of Diggs County, calling it rundown and tacky.

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• MM

  @MmeCShadow · 1 year ago

  One of the other problems with Dinoland (and it&apos;s a problem with bulldozing the Rivers of America and installing Carsland, too) is that &apos;rinky-dink roadside attraction&apos;... is not a Florida thing. We have those, sure, but not the way they do in the Midwest or California, where seeing this nonsense off of Route 66 is just part of the culture. We have too many trees and swamps to really facilitate the feeling of driving down an endless expanse of desert and then having man-made dinosaurs trying to catch your attention as you speed by. (And if you do want that experience, Dinosaur World is a ninety-minute dive out of Orlando, and way cheaper.)<br><br>Locals didn&apos;t get the joke, and visitors weren&apos;t primed for it the way they would be if they went to California, so it just reads as a weird low-budget state fair rather than a piece of culture.<br><br>It&apos;s clever, but it&apos;s NOT the right place for it. If this had been built in Disneyland it might&apos;ve had a better chance.<br><br>That said, I did really enjoy the Dinosaur ride and nothing at Disney made me fear for my life more than Primeval Whirl. Dinoland will be missed.

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• MA

  @manchuFoo · 1 year ago

  here&apos;s the thing: kids take dinosaurs much more seriously than adults do. animals are cute and cudly. dinosaurs are strictly business. this was one of those cases where it would have been better to treat the kids as adults.

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