We just released the latest episode of the Themed Attraction Podcast featuring Danusia Rogacki, Creative Services Manager at Canada’s Wonderland. It’s a fascinating interview that clearly reveals Danusia’s total love and dedication to the park. Go listen to that first…I’ll wait right here… …Ok, it was amazing, right? Such joy for going the extra mile…
We’ll wrap up our trip down memory lane with a short post-Marriott summary. You can find the first two parts here and here, and more regional park history can be found at www.rivershorecreative.com (along with an abundant supply of tissues). Thanks for reading. Unfortunately for the Marriott company, attendance figures didn’t meet their expectations and…
This series is taken from a chapter in my regional park history book, Imagineering an American Dreamscape. Let’s look at the design of these magnificent parks and take a tour from that first year. If you missed the first part, here it is. The Santa Clara property had originally been conceived of by Fess Parker,…
As we digest the tragic news of yet another beloved playground closing for good, I thought I’d share the story behind the Marriott parks. Excerpting from my regional park history book, Imagineering an American Dreamscape, I’m going to post the Marriott chapter in a series of three articles here on the site. Tissues will be…
Everybody knows pretty much everything about Disneyland—how it got started, how the Imagineers do their thing, and so on. But nobody hardly ever talks about the parks that most of us across the country enjoy far more often. The regional theme parks, different from amusement parks, owe their existence to the magical land Walt built…
In 1972, one of America’s favorite playgrounds opened with great fanfare. Inspired by the post-Disneyland theme park boom, operators of a small amusement enterprise near Cincinnati realized they needed to go bigger—or go home. They chose big, and so they proceeded to design and build a magnificent property in conjunction with Taft Broadcasting, owners of…
The regional theme park history book keeps pushing right along toward completion (hint…it’s close). To hold you over in the meantime, I’ll be sharing bits and pieces from the book and my research while tossing in other interesting items along the way. Three of them, in fact. I’m extremely pleased to have some wonderful folks…
One major chapter of my upcoming regional park history book deals with how these parks lost their original design intent along the way. Decades of ownership turnover, corporate management, current trends for IP overlays, and so on rendered most of these parks nearly unrecognizable from when they were first built. Carowinds opened in 1973 as…