Theme Park Review

Amazing photos - again, thanks for sharing!

Excellent photos! I was impressed with Pandora, too--Disney hit the ball out of the park with not only the land itself, but also Flight of Passage.

Tom, your photos continue to show the best of the parks here in Florida! It is rare that you find photos online that truly do justice to the beauty of the rides, characters and theming found in these parks but with each update you've posted, you've highlighted the best of what we have to offer and have done so in a way that truly sells the beauty and charm of our parks. I anxiously look forward to your next update and I often find myself revisiting this thread to go back and look at your previous photos! Thank you so much for sharing!

That are some of the best photos I have seen from Pandora! Thanks for sharing them!

Spectacular photos! Somehow I hadn't seen night shots of Pandora yet and those look amazing. I've heard nothing but good things about Flight of Passage so I'll have to stop in sometime in the next few years.

Thank you for all those great comments (and compliments). I really appreciate the kind feedback. And I see, I still have three more parks to cover, so I better get a move on now…

As the whole world knows “normal” people in Germany read Goethe all day, listen to operas and visit museums every weekend. And because we are all so very educated, Theme Parks are very suspicious places to us, places to ride dangerous rollercoasters, eat bad food and throw up. We even have two words for theme parks: “Freizeitpark” (which is neutral) and “Vergnügungspark” (which carries a rather bad connotation). And while “Freizeitparks” have drastically changed over the last years, these are places where you would rather not see people with college degrees. Or if you do, they would not admit that they went. And if the admit, they did it “for the kids”. Of course they did!

Under very rare circumstances those “good people” visit a Theme Park in Orlando and to their great surprise, especially the Disney Parks are very different from what they would expect. Especially one park, which is undergoing a big transformation right now, did not fit in the common “Theme Park scheme”: Disney’s Hollywood Studios. When I visited the park for the first few times, it felt like a half-day park to me: I did all the rides, had lunch at a quick service restaurant and was basically finished by 1pm. It took me some time to learn, that the park wasn’t built around the rides. The centerpiece of the park was the shows. And compared to the crappy (and boring) performances you can watch in Germany (aside some few exceptions), those shows are quite good. Once I was aware of that, Disney’s Hollywood Studios became the trickiest park to plan, as booking my groups FP+ around the Indiana Jones Adventure, Beauty and the Beast, Lights – Motors – Action! and Fantasmic! proved to be a real challenge. Especially as two of the park’s rides – the Great Movie Ride and the Backlot Tour – had been extremely time-consuming. And I always tried to fit in a performance of the “American Idol Experience” as it is that kind of attraction that would never work in Germany, although we do have a German version of the show called “Deutschland sucht den Superstar” (Germany is looking for the super star, yes, this does sound crappy in German too). And at least two rides on the “good tower” were mandatory on every visit.

A lot of the rides and shows are gone by now. And I’m not going to lie: I’ll miss all of them! I understand that most people did not get the concept of a show-centric park and I can comprehend why Disney had to change the whole concept of the park. I am confident that both Toy Story Land and Star Wars Land will make Disney’s Hollywood Studios a “full day park”, as Animal Kingdom has become recently, again. And with all those new attractions coming to Ecpot and the Magic Kingdom in the next years, those Orlando trips will become pretty exhausting again …

As of today “Disney’s Hollywood Studios” is still an entertaining and relaxing park. Fantasmic! is a beautiful night show and a great ending for a Theme Park day. And you can have a seat (I appreciate that). And I still scream with laughter every time Miss Piggy sings “Dream a little dream”. And I fully understand, that if you work with explosives, it’s dangerous.

Care to see some present and former attractions of the park? I have some pictures:

I just returned from my annual Orlando trip and I brought some photos from Halloween Horror Nights to share with you guys. I have been visiting the event for a couple of years now and I have to say: this thing has become humongous. Shows, several huge scare zones, 10 haunted houses. I was really happy that I booked one of those R.I.P. tours. The tours not only greatly reduce the waiting and walking, but also provide international guests with some background information about the movies the houses are based on, as not all of them make it to Sauerkraut Country (or are even banned here).

Okay, enough bad english for today. Let's look at some pictures, shall we?

Thanks for the great photos of HHN! I thought Rob Zombie's Hillbilly Deluxe was the best of the scare zones.

you really take some amazing photos!

while i don't understand the Video Game "scare zone" either. . I love the costume design and the look of the characters in that area.

thanks again for continuing to share such awesome pics.

These photos are great!

What camera are you using?