What I try to say is that you never try to please or focus on any specific group but on what is best for the business (I'm talking about IT). For theme parks it's best to serve every single group. In a talk at iaapa a Universal Creative explained they serve 3 types, the super fan of the ip (well known location, expanding on the ip with the maker of ip etc.), the guests who know and maybe like the ip and the guest who doesn't know or care. The super fan group is smaller but spends more, the middle group will spend regular and because of how good the end result should be the guests who don't care at least like what they saw and experienced and will come back to the park. Financial wise all 3 are as important for a park. As an addition is that you can get great blue sky ideas from your super fans and they will tell you when you frack up because they care, all for free and although you not always should act you always should listen.
Super fans
of the IP. Creative wants to make sure a F&F super fan believes an attraction’s aesthetic-from facade to exit-fits into their expectations of a narrative and experience. A super fan of the park is an entirely different thing, and isn’t something the theme park caters to when they’re developing attractions. Events, and to a degree Entertainment and Operations are the ones who care about
theme park super fans.
Creative, Imagineering, can’t get wrapped up in what their most zealous fans want for the park because, typically, what those fans want aren’t feasible to the reality of theme park design—it’s takes up too much room, costs too much money, or interferes too much with the park itself. Theme park super fans tend to only be concerned with their micro, personal view and expectations. Designers consider a macro combination of guests experience (including sight lines), ROI, available technology, backstage impact, employee requirements, long-term costs such as maintenance and repair, etc. Plus, they’re trying to look at how it jives with everything else.
That’s the difference. We have theme park fans requesting airtime-focused hyper coasters with little regard to how it would have to go through multiple lands of a park while being nearly impossible to theme. Theme park fans want a Test Track-style F&F when there’s no room without ripping out massive swaths of backstage infrastructure.
F&F: Supercharged has issues. No doubt. But the ride system, within the Studios itself, actually isn’t one of them. It’s something completely different than an a coaster (Studios has 4) or a simulator (4). Transformers is the closest comparable thing, and it’s still a completely different ride experience. Based on the available space, the F&F attraction theme park fans want would either be a 5th coaster or simulator.
So, they took they’re available technology and available space and made something true to the IP. It hasn’t been received well, but Creative tried with what they had. And the theme park fans who think they could have done better can bugger off, because they wouldn’t dare sacrifice what needed to sacrificed to get what they “want.”
