Category Archives: Theme parks

Taking the Mickey: is a Melbourne Disneyland anything more than a fantasy?

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Many locations – from Frankston to Fishermans Bend – have been proposed as sites for the famous theme park. But will the dream ever become reality?

In what has become a recurring theme in many Disney films, Jiminy Cricket sang “When you wish upon a star, your dreams come true” in the 1940 film of Pinocchio.

Pinocchio wishes to be a real boy, Peter Pan wishes to never grow up, Ariel, the Little Mermaid, wishes to become human. And – in what can also be described as a fairytale desire – Melbourne, Australia, wishes to host the next Disney theme park.

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One killed and several injured in Stockholm as rollercoaster derails

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Witnesses say Jetline ride, which reaches 55mph and heights of 30 metres, partly left the tracks

One person has been killed and nine injured, including children, in a rollercoaster accident at an amusement park in Stockholm.

Witnesses said the Jetline ride at the Gröna Lund theme park had partly derailed during a ride on Sunday, sending people crashing to the ground.

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California man sets world record after visiting Disneyland for 2,995 days

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Jeff Reitz started visiting the theme park in Anaheim in 2012, when he was unemployed, as an excuse to leave his house and exercise

There are Disney adults – who are obsessed with the animation giant’s products despite being grownups – and then there’s Jeff Reitz.

Reitz’s fascination with Disney drove him to visit the company’s world-famous theme park in Anaheim, California, daily for eight years, three months and 13 days.

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Hogging the limelight: how Peppa Pig became a global phenomenon

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Boris Johnson threw spotlight on show that has run for 17 years and been exported to 118 countries

To many families taking their excited children to Peppa Pig World, the most surreal aspect isn’t the pastel-hued streets or the giant cartoon animals milling around; it’s the soundtrack. Piped from speakers spread around the park, the can’t-get-it-out-of-your-head theme tune plays on a continuous loop, and parents could be forgiven for feeling they’ve entered a nightmare rather than a toddler’s dreamscape.

Not so for Boris Johnson. The prime minister was so buoyed by his Sunday enjoying delights such an egg-shaped boat ride overlooked by Grampy Rabbit, where he was photographed grinning alongside his one-year-old son Wilfred and wife Carrie, that he was moved to praise the New Forest amusement park effusively in a speech to business leaders on Monday.

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Jungle Cruise review – the Rock’s Disney theme-park actioner takes predictable turns

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Emily Blunt and Dwayne Johnson are romancing riverboat adventurers in a ride-turned-film that quickly becomes bland

The Jungle Cruise theme-park ride is a riverboat trip that Disneyland visitors have been queuing up for since the 1950s: an old-timey craft travelling down an artificial jungle river, with a jolly captain pointing out animatronic animals lurching out of the artificial undergrowth. Now it’s been adapted into a blandly inoffensive piece of generic entertainment: screenwriters Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (who once gave us Bad Santa and I Love You Phillip Morris) have mashed up The African Queen with Raiders of the Lost Ark, and with what I admit is a surreal splash of Aguirre, Wrath of God.

It’s lively enough for the first 20 minutes. The year is 1916, and Emily Blunt plays Lily Houghton, a haughty yet idealistic British scientist, much patronised by the male establishment in London. She imperiously hires a riverboat in Brazil to find the much-rumoured “Tree of Life” somewhere in the jungle. Its captain is a cynical-with-a-heart-of-gold rogue called Frank Wolff, man-mountainishly played by Dwayne Johnson. After the traditional meet-cute, their growing romance plays off the comedy turn provided by Jack Whitehall, playing the other passenger: Lily’s foppish, neurotic younger brother MacGregor. At one stage, Whitehall’s prissy, wussy Englishman explains to Dwayne Johnson that he is gay – or rather, he says something indirect about being not as other men, and the subject is never raised again, Edwardian reticence dovetailing nicely with Disney family values. It is a stereotype that Walt himself might have recognised, while also approving of the obvious heterosexuality of Frank with his muscles, boots and sailor’s cap.

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Brexit with rollercoasters: the £3.5bn London Resort fantasy theme park

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With its rickety rides, fire-breathing dragons and Arthurian castle, the enchanted realms proposed for the Thames Estuary park are little Britain writ large. Will its High Street have a closed down library?

A circular building topped with a union jack dome rises from the trees on the Swanscombe peninsula in Kent. With its flag tightly wrapped around a glass bubble, it looks like a little Brexit capsule, safely sealed off from the free movement and free markets of the outside world.

This is the proposed entrance pavilion to the London Resort, a £3.5bn theme park planned for the Thames estuary. This walled kingdom of themed “lands” would rise from the muddy marshes by 2024, just as Boris Johnson nears the end of this term as PM. The first images of this planned dreamland were unveiled a few days before the election and the project now seems like a fitting metaphor for the result. Why elect a government that would address social welfare, tackle rising homelessness and fix the NHS, when you can build a parallel fantasy world instead?

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Rulantica, Europa-Park’s new indoor water world

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In Germany’s Black Forest, the country’s largest theme park is making a splash with a vast indoor complex of 17 water slides, plus a ‘mythical’ island, ‘rivers’ and ‘caves’ open year-round

I’m ushered into what looks like an upright glass coffin, told to fold my hands across my chest in the classic corpse position – and then push a green button. I’m wondering exactly what I’ve got myself into when the trapdoor falls open and I plummet into a tube of fast-flowing water. It’s up my nose, in my mouth; I can’t see and can hardly breathe for a few tumultuous seconds before the gradient of the water slide reduces from vertical to merely steep and I’m propelled around more bends and spat out at the bottom. I feel like I’ve been flushed down a toilet.

The Vildfål is one of the more extreme experiences at the new Rulantica indoor water park, which opened on 28 November. Half an hour’s drive north of Freiburg im Breisgau in south-west Germany, it’s next to Europa-Park, the country’s largest theme park. Both are owned by the Mack family, a dynasty of entrepreneurs who have been enticing visitors to this corner of the Black Forest since 1975. In building the €180m Rulantica, the family has made its biggest single investment to date.

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