Written by Eve Katz, Images courtesy of Madison Alford
It’s the ultimate form of escapism: walking into an entirely different world. Themed entertainment has grown past the notion of providing a couple thrill rides and food carts for park guests, now it’s all about getting an experience to be as immersive as possible. This involves a great deal of planning, and a great deal of writing.
The themed entertainment industry isn’t just for engineers, it’s all about the story. “I was one of those people [who didn’t know there is writing in themed entertainment], that’s why I started off doing production design,” said former Imagineer and SCAD graduate Madison Alford, B.F.A. dramatic writing 2018, “Even when I was in production design, they really pushed the idea that story was the most important thing. Production design, lighting design, special effects, even animatronics and engineering, that’s all dictated by story.”
Themed entertainment means everything within a space is themed, right down to the smallest details. The recently-opened Super Nintendo World, a part of Universal Studios Japan, even features trash cans decorated with the banana peel from the Mario Kart games. If guests are to fully immerse themselves in the narrative of a park, they have to see that story everywhere.
Attractions created with the singular idea of making a spectacle in mind can’t meet the level of memorability and connection to the guests that narrative-driven experiences can, according to Alford. She cited the Happily Ever After firework show in Magic Kingdom as an example of creating an emotional connection over focusing on the visuals alone. The use of music and the shifts in tone to more emotional songs like “Go the Distance” aims to give the viewer a deeper connection with the show than simply being impressed by the fireworks.
Alford was able to add themed entertainment pieces to her portfolio while she was still at SCAD. “I guess what made me really stand out as a candidate was that I had tried to do theme park writing on my own time,” Alford said, “Scripting and everything is great and writing for journalism and everything is too, but I think what you really have to hone in on is creative writing and being able to write for themed entertainment, which is a much harder task than it than it sounds like because you have to think about the experience, but you can’t [control every part of the experience]. In a script you can dictate what the actors do, what they see, what is happening, whereas when you’re writing for themed entertainment, you can’t dictate what the guests do at all. The guest can walk over and rip something off a wall and you can’t write that down. You can’t dictate what they will and will not see, so you really have to describe environments and experiences without describing what the guests are going to do.”
Getting started with themed entertainment writing can be difficult when the proliferation of nondisclosure agreements surrounding projects in the industry makes publicly available examples few and far between. Aflord keeps her eye on industry trends and how she can make interesting stories surrounding them. “I just start with an idea that I’m interested in. [When] I wrote a rollercoaster treatment, I was very interested in the idea of a drop track because it was brand new at the time when I wrote it,” said Alford, discussing a special feature for roller coasters originally designed by amusement ride company Intamin that causes a section of horizontal track to drop vertically onto a new path, “[I thought] I really want to play with this idea, what is the best way I can do this? So I started doing research on different types of dragons and Chinese folklore, and I was like oh there’s like these underground dragons, what if there was a giant mountain and you could drop down into the mountain? That would be cool. It really started becoming just this research hurricane, where I was thinking about what the best story I could tell was that would emphasize this drop track and make it part of the story.” Alford’s Dragon Hunter attraction concept can be found on her website.
Story is the driving force that makes themed entertainment spaces so memorable, giving them that “magical” feeling that parks like those under the Disney company really push for. Combining writing, design, engineering and the other numerous disciplines that fall under themed entertainment is a huge part of the industry; the level of collaboration among extremely varied areas of work is something both rare and inspiring. Everything comes together to create experiences that go beyond what other mediums can provide, physically surrounding guests with stories they love. “[I want to work in themed entertainment because] I want to create the same type of magic [that I feel in themed entertainment spaces] for other people so they can feel that they’re part of these stories that they’ve grown up with. Or even new stories like Haunted Mansion, where you can just go into this new world that is just so magical and just takes away the blinders on everything. You can put yourself in this new story and just kind of put all your worries away,” said Alford.
