CMU School of Drama


Thursday, April 26, 2012

Spring Carnival booths need more variety every year

The Tartan Online: Booth is one of the most noticeable and celebrated events of Spring Carnival. It is the only festivity that is truly affected by the overarching theme of Carnival every year; no other activity, such as Sweepstakes or the annual Scotch’n’Soda show, depends on an interpretation of the Spring Carnival theme.

5 comments:

Rachael S said...

While I do agree with this article, I'd like to bring up the point that a lot of the people who come to the carnival--and probably those that take the most pleasure from it--are children. While manning a booth, I saw SO many children walking around. The booths that I would think are the most awesome, in any category, aren't G rated, and these have to be. Also, a college student might get tired of seeing Blues Clues and Spongebob, but a little kid wouldn't really "get" a Dr. Who booth. I do agree that it would be fun to see more variety in the booths, but I don't have a problem with them being childlike. The children can enjoy them, and we enjoy remembering the days of Loony Tunes, too.

Pia Marchetti said...

Maybe I'm getting soft in my old age but I think this article was a little nit-picky. Booth is supposed to be fun. It doesn't have to be the most innovative thing in the world. Going into booth with no expectations, I was totally blown away. I thought it was really cool. Everything seemed to fit the theme well enough.
The fact that Carnegie Mellon students are even able to organize themselves to make something like Booth is awesome. I don't really think it matters if the booths get a little bit repetitive; you're only really going to be seeing them or building them for 4 years anyway.

Anonymous said...

I don't think this article placed enough focus on the issue of the over-all Carnival themes being similar and thus prompting similar Booth themes. While there were a lot of similarities between this year's and last year's booths, non of them were the same. They were all fun and geared toward kids. Booth is supposed to be a place for creativity, and I think all of the booths this year really showcased that. The theme is not what makes or breaks a booth, it is the creative ideas and hard work that go into making the booth that make the difference. I don't really know how else we were all supposed to interpret "As Seen on TV", and I don't think there was anything boring about this year's booth themes. As Pia said, Booth is about having fun and not really about having the most outrageous or earth-shatteringly innovative ideas.

ZoeW said...

Whoever wrote this article needs to calm down. Whether the booths are the same each year is not really what carnival is about. The point of booth is to cater to children and so the content will most likely be repetitious.Booth is about organizations being able to bond over making this thing that they can then share with the community. If the booths were really about how creative people could be or how entertaining they can be, the set up of booth and even the people participating would be very different.

Daniel L said...

Disagree. Plus, it always devalues opinion articles when the author uses improper grammar. Regarding carnival themes, they are suggested and chosen in an egalitarian manner that invites contributions from the entire carnival committee. There may be some overlap between themes from year to year, but the more specific themes get, the booths will become more like each other as opposed to more like booths from previous years. The author points to specific examples that could have come from last year or this year, but, notwithstanding that they met both criteria, they only occurred once.

I spent a lot of time looking at the plans for the booths and going through them, and the similarities between them have little to do with the Spring Carnival theme.