When you think of the Disney theme parks, the word “scary” probably doesn’t immediately spring to mind. After all, while Universal is hosting Halloween Horror Nights, Disney is literally hosting a spooky-season event called ‘Mickey’s Not-So-Scary Halloween Party.’ And yet, despite this, horror remains intrinsic both to the legacy of Disney and to the theme parks themselves.
This is what makes it strange that the Walt Disney Company is apparently testing out new technology that will allow guests at the theme parks to input their own personal fears so as to receive in-the-moment notifications from the corresponding app on their mobile devices to warn them if they are preparing to encounter said fears.
To put this in simpler terms, if you input that you’re afraid of the dark, then the app would warn you immediately prior to you boarding Space Mountain. Or if you input that you’re afraid of big drops, it would warn you just before Tower of Terror drops. Or if you’re afraid of creepy dolls, it will warn you to steer clear of It’s a Small World, etc. And while I suppose I can see the logic behind this, this idea can’t come across as anything but asinine for a number of reasons.
First and most importantly, if guests aren’t capable of discerning for themselves that Space Mountain is dark, Tower of Terror has drops, or that It’s a Small World is going to be packed to the gills with those creepy little dolls, then that’s a them problem, not a Disney problem. These elements of the rides are self-evident from the time a guest enters the queue. But beyond that, the rides all already have such potential deal-breakers for any and all guests posted outside the rides themselves as warnings of what lies ahead. So the idea of coddling guests in this way, bringing these personalized notifications to them in the moment just as the thing they are scared of is about to happen, is just a bizarre way to go about this.
But furthermore, this just sucks a huge amount of fun out of the experience, does it not? If you are on the Tower of Terror, that means you walked all the way through Disney’s Hollywood Studios, with the ride looming over you. You got in line, hearing the screams from guests above as the elevators visibly dropped through the windows of the attraction. You sat through the Joe Dante-directed Twilight Zone-themed pre-show, entirely about how your elevator is going to fall. You know that this thing is going to subject you to a big drop, so does receiving a notification on your phone while you’re on the ride, just before it drops, actually do anything to help anyone in any kind of substantial way?
This feels like just another extension of the over-digitalization of the Disney parks experience, intent on keeping guests on their phones rather than, you know, actually enjoying the larger-than-life theme park that they paid hundreds of dollars to go to.
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