Amusement Today: The year 2025 marks an extraordinary milestone for Gardaland Resort, as it celebrates half a century of magic, adventure and fun with a new and symbolic commemorative logo. In elegant gold, the new logo (created for this year) includes the two key dates for the park – 1975, the year of opening, and 2025, the anniversary year – with a design that combines tradition and innovation.
4 comments:
I always find it interesting just how much amusement parks and resorts have in common with theatre. Both often aim to convey a feeling of wonder into the audience who have chosen to come. I have heard of several people with technical theatre background going to work at amusement parks. Both for the design of the parks and for the building of them. It makes sense a scenic designer would translate well into the field of resort or amusement park design, but people who have the more production based skills would also excel. Lighting is something that is always needed everywhere, sound is very important for setting the different area themes, and people who build sets are very skilled at building stuff that looks like something, when really it's something else. I also think that amusement park and resort areas like the one at Gardaland Resort really push the question that's been asked a lot recently: What is theatre? I think that attractions like this are really where the line blurs.
I’ve always been fascinated by amusement park design and construction. Theme parks are really interesting combinations of art, branding, theater, civil engineering, and countless other niches. Every time I hear about some weird specific detail Disney has in the design of one of their places, I’m astounded that anybody even thought of that. I’ve never heard of Gardaland before, and I wish the article mentioned where it was and why it’s popular, but basically, it’s an amusement park in Italy that is the eighth-largest amusement park in Europe (in 2011) and in 2005, was fifth on Forbes Magazine’s list of the ten best amusement parks in the world. Highlights include Legoland Waterpark and Peppa Pig Land, which sounds awesome. Upon reading about the rides at Gardaland, I think that Animal Treasure Island and Dragon Empire will be pretty good additions to the lineup. My biggest issue with this article was that it spent so much time explaining the special 50th anniversary logo, and then never included a photo of it. The actual logo looks pretty nice (very disney-esque in style I felt), but what I was picturing based on the article’s description was very different from what the actual logo is.
I've always found amusement park renovations extremely interesting because many of the established parks need to tear something down in order to incorporate a new section to the park. That means many people will have conflicting emotions when a new section is added because their favorite part of the park may have just been bulldozed. I think part of this constrained space that many park experiences is because the entire park needs to be an immersive experience. Places like Disney specifically manufacturing a color that humans ignore to hide electoral and safety needs is the park that they don't want seen is a great example of this. This is where the world of theater has a very interesting overlap with amusement parks because we are constantly trying to create an illusion of a new and completely separate world. Overall I think that amusement parks are almost an example of a “real world” theatrical interactive experience.
I have not been to Gardaland, which makes sense as I live nowhere near Italy, but it seems like a fun place to be. This article has made me realize that there are so many more amusement parks and places of live entertainment outside of the circle where I live. I had heard of several international entertainment places and some theme parks before this article, but the article has encouraged me to research more about international parks and theaters to learn more. It will also be interesting to see the differences between American live entertainment standards and of other countries’ standards and procedures. Both standards of safety and regulation and that of popular design choices and layout as I can imagine those being vastly different country to country as I remember things like safety railings and barriers being less prominent abroad than they are in America.
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