Disney theme parks

The article asks how local audience studies are re-framed when seen within a globalisation perspective. Based on a overview of recent theories of media globalisation, I argue for a bottom-up perspective on media globalisation in order to nuance top-down, often normative, approaches. I document the validity of this approach through an audience study of the ways in which 24 Danish children, aged 6-7, and 24 children, aged 11-12, along with their parents articulate and try to understand the complex universe of the Walt Disney Company, one of the oldest and still one of the largest media giants. Key questions addressed are: How do children and adults, respectively, articulate the narrative aspects of the Disney universe in terms of their possible global traits? How do they lay claim to the Disney universe as a a range of imported, material objects? Does language play a part in these negotiations as a discursive identity marker given that Disney’s animated film are among the only media and ICT products in Denmark which are dubbed rather than subtitled? What about audiences’ take on Disneyland Paris as a very tangible example of Disney’s more global extension into lucrative markets? Comparisons between children and adults are discussed in terms of age and in terms of audience perspectives on the Walt Disney Company ’s change of marketing and distribution strategies in view of intensified media globalization.

Even as revenue management practices spread from the travel sector to other industries, the US theme park industry practiced static pricing. Highly visible demand-based pricing introduced by Disney and Universal highlights the relative lack of research on theme park pricing. We surveyed the research and gathered pricing information from 70 different US theme park websites in 2012 and 2016 and found that US theme parks in our sample added online ticket sales, discounts for advance sales and differential daily pricing during that period. We also report the proportion of US theme parks offering queue products and meal plans as ticket add-ons. Characteristics of theme parks may prevent true dynamic pricing, but the US theme park industry has begun moving away from its traditional static pricing model towards demand-based pricing.

Total Landscape, Theme Parks, Public Space, employed the theme park in identifying, dissecting and describing the properties of PROPASt - privately-owned publicly accessible space in a themed mode - a hybrid form of public space emerging in urban environments worldwide. Mitrasinovic does not propose that theme parks and PROPASt are, or will ever become, desirable substitutes for democratic public space, but deliberately cuts across the ‘theme park model’ in order to understand the principle of systematic totality employed when such a model is used to ‘revitalize’ urban public space in the United States, Asia and Europe. In doing so, Mitrasinovic has created compelling and multifaceted inferences out of a plethora of minute details on the design and production of theme parks across continents.

Mitrasinovic’s central argument is that the process of systematic totalization that brings theme parks and PROPASt into the same conceptual framework is not only obvious through formal similarities, but also through systemic and symbolic analogies: through values, conditions and techniques that have been extended upon the entire social realm. By illuminating the relationship between theme parks and public space, this book offers critical insights into the ethos of ‘total landscape,’ a condition that emerges from overpowering convergences of the following three domains: a/globally emerging socio-economic system organized upon the idea of systematic totality; b/material apparatus that establishes its dominance ‘on the ground;’ and c/system of totalizing narratives -designed and operated by the media and entertainment industry- that establish its dominance in social and cultural imaginations across national boundaries. One of the central premises of this book is that theme parks and PROPASt are complex artifacts designed to materialize such convergences and to spatialize corresponding social and environmental relationships. Mitrasinovic builds his compelling narrative by simultaneously studying phenomena, processes, practices, and forms interwoven in the types of spatial production characteristic of the total landscape.


Uploaded here are the introductory chapter as well as Chapter 5, the concluding chapter. The rest of the book, as well as the book blog can be found at: http://thetotallandscape.net/

The Magic Kingdom theme park sits on a series of tunnels called utilidors. According to popular myth, these were built after a visit to Disneyland in which Walt Disney noticed a Frontierland Cowboy walking through Tomorrowland. Unhappy that the cowboy broke the magic of the Tomorrowland theme, he wanted to be sure that his new theme park, The Magic Kingdom, was designed to ensure that it would never happen again.

Even as revenue management practices spread from the travel sector to other industries, the US theme park industry practiced static pricing. Highly visible demand-based pricing introduced by Disney and Universal highlights the relative lack of research on theme park pricing. We surveyed the research and gathered pricing information from 70 different US theme park websites in 2012 and 2016 and found that US theme parks in our sample added online ticket sales, discounts for advance sales and differential daily pricing during that period. We also report the proportion of US theme parks offering queue products and meal plans as ticket add-ons. Characteristics of theme parks may prevent true dynamic pricing, but the US theme park industry has begun moving away from its traditional static pricing model towards demand-based pricing.

Postmodern cities are dreamed, dreamlike places that are not intended to house the individual, but rather to distract society. In this way and in the manner of Augé, they are a "non-place", making them a place of transit and enjoyment through symbols and their own experience. The noise, the lights, and the succession of dark and luminous spaces, distract the visitor, making him wander from one side to the other, without a predetermined course. It will be necessary, in turn, to associate all these representative symbols of Postmodern ideology with the visual materialization itself, in order to meet the basic objective of these constructions, which is to create a city as an image of Postmodern culture and society. Disney World is generally understood as a mere amusement park with the appearance of a fantastic city, however, its meaning goes further. Philosopher Jean Baudrillard considers the utopia of the Postmodern city to be, in fact, Disney World. In this sense, it does not represent the simple fantasy of a theme park since it cannot be false, it cannot be a lie because it is the model of a real idea, it is an idealized model, an image of society itself.