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Is Your Theme Losing Steam?
What to do when a park’s, ride’s, or show’s popularity fades
by Lisa Anderson Mann
 REGULAR MAINTENANCE—keeping an attraction clean, freshly painted, and in good working order—is essential, but sometimes all the spit and polish in the world can’t keep an attraction from looking dated and losing popularity. Sometimes a little artful renovation can refresh an attraction enough to regain—or even increase—its popularity. Sometimes it takes a major renovation. And sometimes you just have to know when it’s time to pull the plug.
Bob McTyre, founding partner of Apogee Attractions, has a background in theming, spectaculars, and theater. Here, he gives FUNWORLD insight into what to do when an attraction’s luster starts to fade.
How can you tell if a theme is losing steam?
That’s a good question. If it’s a park, your attendance is falling off; if it’s an attraction people aren’t going to it, or they’re going to it less and less. It’s certainly not a mystery, if you are paying attention. If you aren’t sure about it, you can find out from guest surveys, which the big operators do.
But the theme itself doesn’t always have to be new. There are only so many stories that have to be told and retold. The creative, while a challenge, is not really the issue. If you get the right creative people, you can do anything. Look at “The Amazing Adventures of Spider- Man” at Universal’s Islands of Adventure. “Spider-Man” by itself has been around for a long time; it’s been done. And yet, they produced an incredible attraction that has done great business for them. The creative is wonderful, and the audience loves it.
Is there a sweet spot—a time before revenues start to drop—when you can add or renovate attractions to avoid an attendance dip?
Any park has to add new attractions periodically. If you don’t, you’re in deep trouble. Some people who don’t know our industry well think they can build a good park and walk away and they’re done. No, they’re not done. You have to add new attractions on a regular basis. If you’re an amusement park, and you don’t have big-ticket attractions like the theme park operators do, you may have to add a new attraction every year; regardless of who you are, you need something for marketing to talk about every year. After you open, your attendance will build for a certain number of years, then it will level off, then after a few years it will nose dive if you don’t have something new to talk about.
This is an ongoing, daily issue. A good operator or owner isn’t going to wait until the public tells them something is tired before they deal with it. Is it clean, is it freshly painted? Does it work properly? How’s the sound system? How’s the lighting? If you’ve satisfied all that, and time is starting to pass it by, then you need decide, “Do I spend the money to refresh it or do I take this out and put something new in?”
Are there ways to alter a theme and capture new interest without a major overhaul?
Can you revive an attraction? Sure, you can always refresh an attraction. If it’s an animatronic attraction you can add new figures, add new costumes, add a scene, update the lighting, and replace the music. Is the technology acceptable to today’s audience, or does it need to be updated? If it’s just a roller coaster, there’s not a lot you can do. You can change the theme, change the costumes, but changing the track is not too practical and not too meaningful. You may be better off just building a new one.
Some changes will have a bigger effect than others—Disney recently added a Johnny Depp figure to “Pirates of the Caribbean,” and they played around with rock ’n roll music in “Space Mountain.” Those are good things to do. They help entertain the audience, but they’re not going to change your attendance.
You have to make major changes; you can’t make subtle changes. I was at Disney for 15 years, and we discussed this many times in many ways. If you are going to market it, if it’s going to help your attendance, it has to be done in such a way that the public sees it as something totally new. I can’t think of an example where you took an existing attraction and just changed the film or changed the cars or repainted it and increased attendance, because the public has to get excited.
How can you choose a theme for a park, attraction, or show that will have lasting appeal?
That’s the $64,000 question. No, that’s the $64 million question! You want to make the biggest splash possible, so you need to have something that’s clearly marketable. “Splash Mountain,” as an example, is a flume ride, but it was around “Song of the South.” From a marketing point of view, the characters weren’t as important as the fact that it was a huge, exciting, steep, scary, new mountain ride at Disney. So the film that Disney tied it to, in that case, wasn’t that important.
If you go the film route, which is always good because you have the media impact, you have to pick the right thing if you don’t want it to die over a period of time. Because any given film is going to be tired after a while, so you want to look for a film or television series that is already a franchise. If it’s just one film that is popular and goes away, it’s not going to have the marketing legs.
If it’s a great attraction, it can work for a very long time. “Pirates of the Caribbean” was put in by Disney in 1967, and to this day it’s one of the most popular attractions in Disneyland. But Disney has done some things to refresh it. You can’t sit on your laurels, because if you do that you’re going to be out of business.
Lisa Anderson Mann is a freelance writer specializing in travel/hospitality, marketing, technology, and food and wine. She is based in Northern California and can be reached at lisa_mann@comcast.net.
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