Park World - December 06/January 07 - (Page 36)

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Its projects can be found in venues worldwide – everywhere from Disney and Universal Studios to the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Empire State Building. The TEA Themed Entertainment Association has just announced that Bob Rogers will be the recipient of its THEA Lifetime Achievement Award for 2007. Although BRC has picked up 11 THEA awards before, this is the first time Bob has been recognised as an individual, as usually the TEA awards projects not people.With the latest honour, he joins an elite group that includes “Buzz” Price, Marty Sklar, John Hench and Yves Pépin. Here the CEO of BRC Imagination Arts talks to Park World and explains how good story-telling can take audiences to another place – including Mars. Did the themed entertainment industry exist when you started BRC? There certainly was not a themed entertainment association. I think that the original Landmark Enter tainment, which was Gary Goddard and Tony Christopher, star ted a couple of months before we did. It was probably just us and Landmark, there was maybe no other independent in this business that was really credible. Disney Imagineering of course has always been the giant, the monster, with anything from a thousand to two thousand people, sometimes more when they are in the middle of a project.They’ve always been the big one, followed by Universal Creative, but those two generally only do things in-house. Then gradually through the 1980s there was a proliferation as the world suddenly began to realise that they had to be better at creating places and telling stories that transported people to another state of mind. How many people in the themed entertainment industry owe their legacy to Disney? Gar y [Goddard],Tony [Christopher] and I are old school chums and I’m not sure about Tony, but Gary worked for Disney for a while, and so did I. I’ve been fired by Disney three times now, and each time told I’ll never ever work for the company again! There are a tremendous amount of people marketing themselves as former Disney Imagineers. I don’t, because there are also people out their advertising themselves as Imagineer s who worked for three days doing menu graphics or routing air-conditioning ducts or whatever. So by overuse that’s come to mean nothing, besides which there have been some really terrific people that have been at Imagineering for decades and have done amazing wor k but they don’t really take the credit that they deser ve . Was is difficult creating a market for your work in an industry that wasn’t used to hiring outside help for creative concepts? It’s always been difficult. We find internal staff to be out toughest competition, because they are the alternative to using us, but when we are hired we find them to be our greatest ally. We never claim to know their audience or the subject better than they do.The trick is not to replace them but rather accelerate what they do.There is a recurring pattern:The internal designer knows exactly what the park should do, but for whatever reason the management isn’t listening to them or doesn’t under stand them and for validation wants an external source to come in and say that. Is an amusement park with no theming a lesser an attraction than a fully themed park? It’s a different attraction. A ride park, as opposed to a theme park, still has a story though. Although you may not see theming as in sets, the audience walks in with a stor y in their heads that they play out as they go through the park. It goes like this: “Come on dad, you said you’d take us on the rollercoaster!” “No daddy doesn’t want to go on the rollercoaster, you guys go on and I’ll wait here.“ “Oh come on daddy, this one’s not scary.” “No, daddy doesn’t want to,” etc etc. A few minutes later, there’s daddy, and the lap bar comes down and it’s “how the hell did I let them talk me into this?’ Then we get off the ride. “Ha ha, daddy’s not feeling good!” Daddy vows never to do it again but a few minutes later it starts all over again. That’s a theme, and my kids couldn’t get enough of it when they were growing up. Another theme people bring into an amusement park is that of a test:The kid that’s not thought to be worthy but who gets a chance to prove himself and triumph. It’s like a game, and that’s what we’re doing when we dare our selves onto that thrill ride, whether it’s a zipper, a drop, a whirl and puke. It’s this series of tests. It’s the same as we see in video games, you have to beat the level and then you get through to another, scarier level and the ride park is a physical embodiment of that. To go back to the original question, is one a lesser form? There certainly is a value difference at the ticket end. Is there a wide enough variety of themes chosen by parks worldwide? I may be very alone in this feeling, but one thing that as an American I am very sensitive to is the globalisation of our industr y. I think it has some very good points and some extremely bad points. When I see theme parks in Germany, in Italy, in Singapore and Australia all starting to look alike, when we start erasing local culture that’s a terrible thing. Something very impor tant is being lost and we need to have profound respect for local culture wherever we are in the world and try to make sure that there’s something about each project we do that could only be in that city in that par ticular country. That’s one reason why I think I like the Efteling park in Holland for example; it’s very, ver y Dutch and when you go there are some fairytales that even the Dutch cannot explain to outsiders. Well I love that! When I go to Efteling, I really am in Holland, but when I go to some other parks in Europe it could just as easily be St Louis, California. You have been asked to work on the Africa Theme Park Resort near Johannesburg. How will you ensure this project maintains an air of authenticity? Joe Rohde, the guy who designed Disney’s Animal Kingdom, in one of his presentations showed a slide that showed two very tall barbed wire fences. On one side it was the Serengeti, and on the other it was grazing land. What the hell is this? The great game areas of Africa are in fact now a maintained theme park! The game preserve, listen to those words, we are preserving it intentionally. We wor k to eradicate the life forms that we don’t think 36  Warning : Unknown : The session id contains invalid characters, valid characters are only a-z, A-Z and 0-9 in Unknown on line 0 Warning : Unknown : Failed to write session data files . Please verify that the current setting of session.save_path is correct /var/lib/php/session in Unknown on line 0 http://www.parkworld-online.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Park World - December 06/January 07

Park News
Park Hoppin’
Big Question
Spotlight
Networking in Atlanta
Launch Pad
Bob Rogers
Konge Parken
Mondial
WWA Symposium
Technofolies 2006
IAAPA Attractions Expo
Euro Attractions Show
Fun Doctor

Park World - December 06/January 07

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