Remembering Pleasure Island

[felinefan]

It's like that at Knott's Berry Farm/Nazi Fairy Farm; ever since the Knott family sold the park to Cedar Fair, it's been on a downhill slide. Mr. Knott hoped that his park would educate people about our Western Heritage and history, as well as being unique in its own right. Now it's slowly being turned into a clone of every Cedar Fair park, and its uniqueness has been lost. It's disgusting. And the psychos who run it don't care about anything, they're just on one big power trip. If amusement parks would stop trying to imitate other parks, and maintain their unique features that made them attractive to people before, maybe they could save their skins, and everyone else's.

[drcorey]

snots berry farm

[shugotenchi]

It's like that at Knott's Berry Farm/Nazi Fairy Farm; ever since the Knott family sold the park to Cedar Fair, it's been on a downhill slide. Mr. Knott hoped that his park would educate people about our Western Heritage and history, as well as being unique in its own right. Now it's slowly being turned into a clone of every Cedar Fair park, and its uniqueness has been lost. It's disgusting. And the psychos who run it don't care about anything, they're just on one big power trip. If amusement parks would stop trying to imitate other parks, and maintain their unique features that made them attractive to people before, maybe they could save their skins, and everyone else's.

There's a shift you can kind of feel in your bones when terms like "flow control", "directed sales channel opportunity", and "net value opportunity per guest" start to dominate in park design meetings over very, very basic things like, "would any reasonable human being want to do this twice?"

Point of fact, the same valuation metrics aren't being used now by the people running the parks as the ones who built them. You see this in online game design too when an experience goes live - it's common in that industry for the designers to melt away to other projects a year or two after launch, leaving what we'll charitably call the "B Team" to impress their vision on the tableau. Generally they do not have "a grip" or "experience", and immediately steer for the nearest iceberg; best-case they invoke a jarring audience shift by suddenly catering to a new, sexier demographic because someone else moved into that market space and they want them some of that.

Rather than carve unique identity, a "B Team" will almost always jump any bandwagon they can find to starve the rest of the market in the name of short-term gain. The product suffers for it, and will start to resemble crazy paving, but hey, who cares? If it folds, they can always get other jobs, right?

You can see why I draw a lot of comparisons sometimes.

I think, in my heart of hearts, that the root of this is an ingrained business-school mistake: mis-identifying your competition. Disney Parks considers its direct peers Six Flags and Cedar Fair. The appropriate attitude, which used to carry the day and colour operations, was that Disney Parks didn't have any peers; the experiences you had at Disneyland and WDW were unique, reproducible nowhere else. If you want them, you have to come here. Current management now believes that non-portable investment isn't what draws people to a location. They've put themselves in the position where they emulate or duplicate other parks experiences, and so now have "competition" from those content originators.

Success is now not being the leader, and innovator, in a class by yourself, and the #1 vacation destination. Now it's beating Cedar Fair's value-to-EBITDA multiple.

You do what you care about. Directorship cares about stock price. Innovation - to say nothing of Safety, Courtesy, and Show - aren't perceived as feeding that.

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Also, thank you all for the warm welcome! ^_^ So much pretty sort of awesome in one place!