Disneyland Shanghai Review
I recently visited Disneyland Shanghai for the first time. I’ve visited both the Orlando and California parks multiple times, and the comparisons are interesting enough to merit a post.
Before we dive in to the real meat, one thing which is not very different: general culture. Sure, English isn’t the default language, the bathrooms include squat-toilets, there’s actual Chinese food here and there… but at the end of the day, the cultural differences are pretty minor.
The bigger difference: Disneyland Shanghai is brand spankin’ new. It was built from scratch just a couple years ago. One consequence: fewer rides overall, and more open space. Room was left to grow over time.
But “new” doesn’t just mean “fewer accumulated rides”. Disney got the chance to re-do everything using today’s tech, re-thinking every little piece along the way, and that’s exactly what they did.
Let’s start with Tron.
Tron Coaster
The Tron Coaster is the main headliner roller coaster at the Shanghai park, filling a niche similar to Space Mountain at the US parks. On the surface, it looks like a fairly straightforward coaster, but underneath is a new and different beast.
The main gimmick of the Tron coaster is the seat. It’s styled to look like a bike, and you ride it hunched over forward. There is no seat belt.
At first glance, it looks like the back support is the main safety mechanism to keep you from falling off. It isn’t — that support is mostly decorative. As far as I can tell, its only functional role is to prevent rebellious riders from climbing around.
The real safety mechanism is the track itself.
On a typical roller coaster, you experience accelerations in all directions over the course of the ride. On the Tron coaster, the track is laid out so that you always feel a force *down*, toward the bike.
Think about the beginning of a typical roller coaster: you get pulled slowly up a big hill, cross the summit, and then there’s the big drop. If you want the forces to constantly push riders into their seats, then that whole concept is out from the get-go: there’s no seatward force during a big drop. So, Tron’s designers needed some other way to build up speed. Their answer: linear accelerators. Disney has used them in other coasters over the past couple decades, but the linear accelerator is much more central in Tron’s design.
The track is laid out as a series of horizontal accelerations, each followed by an upward curve going into the next section of turns. Throughout the turns themselves, the riders are always on the inside of the curve, and the speed is always enough that there’s at least one g (and usually more) pushing the rider down into the seat. There is never a sensation of free-fall, there’s never a hard jerk to either side, your butt never leaves the bike.
Pirates of the Carribean
In the US parks, pirates is a typical Disney-style log ride: you float through a story line with animatronics and the occasional small waterfall. The basic setup hasn’t changed in decades.
In Shanghai, they took one look at that and said “Animatronics? What is this, 1970?”. To be fair, there are still plenty of animatronics — Davey “tentacle face” Jones is particularly impressive. But now, they’re just one tool in a much-expanded toolbox. That toolbox includes plenty of projectors, smoke-and-mirror trickery in the most literal sense of the phrase, and three or four full imax screens.
From a design standpoint, one pervasive change is that the boat rotates over the course of the ride. That lets the designers steer riders’ attention and perspective to a much greater degree than the old rides, and it’s a key enabler for many of the tricks. When passing the big screens, the boat turns sideways to face the screen as it moves along parallel to the surface. Another rotation lines up the perspective for some half-silvered mirror trickery. Near the end, we drop down the waterfall backwards, in the dark — making it hard to notice that there isn’t actually any water on this “waterfall”, so splashing is minimized.
One potentially-interesting implication of diversifying out of animatronics: things like imax projectors, half-silvered mirrors, and rotating logs require a lot less custom hardware. That presumably means they’re cheaper. And that, in turn, means they could be within reach of smaller parks. Disney-style rides don’t show up at Six Flags or Cedar Fair parks because the capital outlays are huge, but if animatronics go out of style… that could rejigger the industry substantially.
Ropes Course
One of the main things I dislike about theme parks is that they’re too passive: most rides, you sit on your ass and watch things or grin under acceleration. There’s no active involvement, minimal interaction, no element of challenge. It’s fun-theoretically suboptimal. If I were designing a theme park, this is one of the primary problems I’d try to tackle (more on that below).
So when I saw that Disneyland Shanghai had a ropes course, that immediately became the most interesting feature of the park. This is exactly the sort of thing I’d put in a theme park, and it was tons of fun: running, jumping, clinging and climbing over obstacles, set against a Disney-worthy backdrop. There’s a movie-style decaying rope bridge to cross. There’s a waterfall to climb around. And of course, there’s an Indiana Jones-esque background plot.
On to the obvious question: why don’t US theme parks have ropes courses? Obvious answer: the fuckin’ lawyers.
But even in a less-litigious locale, a ropes course presents an interesting logistical challenge as a theme park attraction. The capital outlay may be smaller than a ride, but the footprint and staffing requirements are comparable. In order to make sense, it needs to have throughput on par with a ride — i.e. at least 10 people per minute, and preferably more. Significant tradeoffs had to happen to make that feasible: this is not a typical ropes course. There’s no zipline, no climbing wall, no dedicated person on belay. It’s basically just an obstacle course with large drops below the obstacles.
The belay system is the real key: it’s a system of overhead steel bars, running the whole length of the course. The bars have channels in them, and the harness connects into the channel. At the beginning and end, the channels open up so an employee can hook/unhook you (video). Over the rest of the course, you just run around as you like, within the limits of the rope. Each obstacle has several parallel tracks, and a clever interconnect system lets you move around between tracks, so you’re rarely stuck behind slow-movers.
I don’t know if this kind of belay system is new or I’ve just never seen one before, but it’s brilliant. Combine that with an assembly line to get people in and out of harnesses, and you’ve got a highly satisfying attraction capable of moving at least 10 people per minute.
General Theme Park Thoughts
I’ll wrap up with some general thoughts on how I’d design a theme park.
I’ve already mentioned that theme parks are way too passive; that’s one of the two main shortcomings I see. The other is lines (of course). 60 minute line for a 60-second roller coaster? You’ll spend more than 50 times as much time in lines as on rides.
That’s not to say we can just get rid of lines. We can’t keep people on rides all day; the cost would be prohibitive. You could maybe use a supermarket-deli-style take-a-number system; that’s basically the “fastpass” concept, which plenty of parks are already adopting. But there’s still a fundamental scarcity problem: it would be prohibitively expensive for everyone to ride whatever they want without some sort of rationing mechanism. Fastpass can make the rationing system a bit less terrible, but it’s still not actively fun, and it still doesn’t create anything else to do while waiting.
What I’d really like to see is the line problem and the passivity problem solved at the same time: give people something to do while they wait for the rides. Make the line the interesting part.
One simple starting point: put a game in the line. Why not stick the whole line on a moving walkway, and set up a shooting gallery? Or make the whole line an obstacle course? Or make an escape room-style line, with dynamically-generated puzzles along the way to unlock each checkpoint for your group? Or go full Nickelodeon: combine the puzzle and obstacle course concepts by optioning a physical challenge.
Once we start thinking along these lines, the next step is to do away with the line altogether and make the game itself the primary rationing mechanism. To get on a rollercoaster, you need a ticket. To get a ticket, you need to complete the associated game. The game itself is dynamically generated, with difficulty adjusted based on how many other people are trying to get a ticket for the same ride. For instance, make a scavenger hunt: players have to go around the park taking snapshots of particular places on their phone. The length of the hunt can be adjusted to ration the corresponding ride. As an added bonus, it drives people into the park’s app — which means notifications when December rolls around and it’s time to renew season passes. Throw in some AR elements, and you’ve got an attraction potentially as hot as the ride itself (and remember, it’s a theme park, so we have a large degree of control over the environment). Throw in some premium game features, and you’ve got a new cash source. Possibilities abound.