when you really think about it amusement parks are really strange human places, a place to forget your troubles and really immerse yourself in that 'fake veneer of danger' (as geraint put it) (danger felt in more extreme rides like roller coasters) and its all decorated and blown up in these colourful shapes and colours.. sort of like Pleasure Island (never noticed how creepy that name was before in the film, in the Italian novel it was called the Land of Toys or Playtime Land or Funland) in Pinocchio. 'an island-sized amusement park.' (this is leading me to a whole trail of ideas surrounding 'island' 'abandoned' 'amusement park' 'pandemic' and 'planet' which I will get to in a blog post after developing some ideas, perhaps these drawings I'm starting is illustrating this supposed narrative of arriving /like in a dream so suddenly/ somewhere where it could be the past or future where things are almost familiar but not really /like avery's island/ .. etc.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_of_Toys
illustration from book, with some boys that play in the Land of Toys
Walt describes pleasure island
this visual reminds me of mark ryden's theatrical production Whipped Cream (and his paintings ofc)
anyway, screenshots from the 1978 version:
the Disney version 1940:
side note it was actually a real place in disney which seems so strange: 'Pleasure Island was an area of the Downtown Disney shopping, dining and entertainment district at Walt Disney World Resort. It officially opened on May 1, 1989. In September 2008, all of its clubs were closed, but its retail stores and restaurants remained open.'
'There was a shopping district at Walt Disney World under the title of Pleasure Island, it also had many night clubs and bars. It is never explicitly stated that the name came from Pinocchio, but due to Disney's animated film it is quite plausible that this is the case. The shopping district's backstory was entirely unrelated to Pinocchio, establishing it as the reclaimed headquarters of an eccentric industrialist and explorer named Merriweather Adam Pleasure that disappeared in the 1940s.'
https://yourmileagemayvary.net/2018/01/09/the-amusement-park-in-china-thats-a-total-disney-ripoff/
fake disneyland in china in Japanese news broadcast
big thunder mountain railroad ride - is a train, of course.. could be collage material
-also, all these 'virtual tours' these places are providing us is quite an interesting concept as well - saw that natural history museum had that too.. thinking about my visual proposal..
-a few months back I was screenshotting from these rides and realized this ride features some taxidermy as well
just dropping some images below in my 'artificial' folder:
(these photographs by martin parr, the seagaia ocean dome I wrote about in my dissertation)
** also thinking of isle of dogs scene of abandoned amusement park but will touch on in next post
*update I found some amusement park/funfair/carnival imagery from the game cuphead
