Why don't our local Imagineers have a freaking clue??





That said, exterior design is one thing .... if the attraction is as bare-bones as the DCA version, it won't matter how cool it looks from the outside.

I would not blame the Imagineers, I'd blame the budget. This thing is going to cost a LOT of money.

I thought much of this and the rest of the park was done by our local imagineers

The Oriental Land Company exports their theme park attractions to our local imagineering deptartments for designing with a huge or sometimes unlimited budget. The estimated budget for this version of TOT is $181 million. The imagineers that designed TOT for DCA had a budget of (at the most, and a bit unlikely) $100 million thanks to Paul Pressler & Cynthia Harris. Our imagineers are their imagineers too. So it's not the imagineers that are to blame. They can make anything good, if you give them the money to bring their ideas to life.


Ride-wise, it will follow the same basic operating layout as DCA. The elevator moves backwards into the shaft, up to the show scenes & effects, then drops, and forward into the loading area again. The elevator moving forward during the ride will remain a Floridian exclusive, mainly cause it's so problematic. I'm sure the japanese version will have a few nice surprises that'll more than make up for this.

You could have the same ride pattern like zapp says and have incredible visuals inside. I'm willing to bet it'll be incredible, like everything else at TDS.

Says the person who's never been there but drools over reports

The exterior is not what costs a lot of money. Bad architechture, design and construction costs about as much as excellent architecture, design and construction.

Perhaps it was just a poor choice of artistic direction. But our Imagineering Department CHOSE a craptacular design, and I do not think budget constraints had very much to do with it. (The actual attraction that I grew tired of quickly? Well, that's another story and money probably played a large part.)

I'm willing to stick my neck out and say that Number 1 cost a whole lot less than Number 2:

Sad, really. I still don't get the purple on DCA's.

Not to be an appologist for DCA, but Tokyo's tower is themed to fit into an East Coast architecture, where DCA's is more Spanish/Moorish design refelctive of early 20th century Hollywood.

A comparison with WDW's tower is probably more appropriate

And I wonder how DLP's tower will look?

Yes, better to compare DCA's with the original Tower at DisneyWorld (which, btw, is technically No. 1, while DCA's is appropriately No. 2).

While not as grandly excentric gothic as No. 3 in Japan, the original has a 20's Hollywood styling that is much more appealing and creepy than the design chosen for California. If you look at the level of detail in the original, you'll see that it's about as ornate as the DCA version, but in a different architectural style. The price tag for the exteriors would, I suspect, be similar.

I'm willing to concede that the luxurious detail of the Tokyo DisneySeas version comes with a higher cost, but I remain convinced that the exterior work represents a small fraction of the overall attraction cost. The descriptions on the page that mousepod linked to above sound like the same old, quickly boring show scenes that we have in DCA. What a shame.