What have the Hermosans ever given us?

On the 71^st anniversary of the opening of Disneyland, we take a candyfloss-free stroll through some of ways that Theme Parks have revolutionised live entertainment

In 1865, the fifteen-year-old Griffith Jenkins Griffith left Wales for the United States. The American Civil War had just ended and the nation was beginning its long westward expansion. The young immigrant taught himself journalism, became a mining specialist and, with an eye for real estate, amassed a considerable fortune. In 1896 he donated 3,015 acres of his Rancho Los Feliz estate to the City of Los Angeles for the creation of a public park, declaring:

“It must be made a place of rest and relaxation for the masses, a resort for the rank and file, for the plain people.”

Flash Forward Fifty Years

One sunny Saturday afternoon a cartoonist from Chicago’s Hermosa district sits watching his daughters on the Griffith Park Merry Go Round and thinks to himself:

“There should be something built where the parents and children could have fun together.”

It takes him six years.  On the 17^th of July 1955 Disneyland opens.

Flash Forward Seventy-One Years

As of 17^th July 2026, the world’s theme parks are attracting around 800 million visits per year… or roughly one visit per every ten people currently enjoying the ride of a lifetime in the most exciting theme park in the known universe, Planet Earth.

And it’s not just roller coasters and revolving teacups, as one 2018 research paper** noted in its introduction:

'The rise and consolidation of the theme park industry in the last decades symbolizes the increasing role that leisure and entertainment have played in the development of world economies from the second half of the twentieth century onwards.  Within this period, theme parks have become consolidated as significant economic cultural phenomena, which have had an extraordinary impact on tourism, territorial development, consumption, employment, and research and development, as well as on human behaviour, crowd control, spatial and art design, management, security, environment, technology and marketing. These ‘cathedrals of consumption,’ “synthetic sites,” or “time-compression spaces,” as they have also been called, are responsible for the emergence and consolidation of a postmodern conception of “themed entertainment,” which is characterised by the theatrical design and production of “emotional experiences.”  For this reason, theme parks have been described as ‘truly pioneers of the emerging experience economy.’ Moreover, theme parks have also been considered paradigmatic and representative examples of emotional spaces, that is, spaces in which emotions play a crucial role in the understanding of the material and symbolic features of that space, as well as the (inter)individual practices deployed within them.'**

Unlike most people, I came to theme parks late in life and for business rather than pleasure.*** The company I was working for back then provided ticketing software for attractions, including Disney World and the brilliant Paulton’s Park, and coming from a West End perspective I was frequently impressed by the theme parks' level of dialogue with their audiences.

For example:

Pre-Trip

The breadth and depth of communications theme parks designed to build up event anticipation and/or guest budget allocation; including countdown emails, personalised itineraries, ride recommends, dining reservations.

In-Trip

The forensically detailed activity monitoring that enabled capacity and ancillary-spend optimisation; including location-aware communications, real-time messaging, virtual queues and virtual wallets …and how this amassed data then contributed to future planning and helped increase operational efficiencies.

Post-Trip

Ensuring maximum repeat custom and advocacy via a raft of measures including memory curation (automatic photo delivery and UGC promotion) birthday and anniversary marketing, lifetime customer value modelling, etc.

But here’s a thought. 

Maybe the Theme Parks’ contributions to The Business of Pleasure are cultural as well as commercial, influencing the way we actually go about constructing experiences rather than just how we cash in on them -whether consciously or not. 

For instance:

 1)     Future-Proofing The Estate

Back in 1956, Disney told a journalist:

“The park means a lot to me in that it’s something that will never be finished.  Something that I can keep developing, keep plussing and adding to -it’s alive.  It will be a live, breathing thing that will need changes.”

This is an approach which is just as essential for replenishing audiences for a superhero cinema franchise, a multi-season streaming sensation, a long-running theatrical production or a visitor attraction, aka how the @%&! do we get them back next year?

2)    Setting The Rule Book Ablaze

I remember the legendary Disney Imagineer, Joe Rohde, telling us that a huge part of his team’s work was “getting engineers to stop thinking like engineers,” i.e. convincing them to stretch the envelope think beyond the generally accepted limitations of what is achievable. When you’re working on a ride that will cost up to a billion dollars to develop, the guiding principle is that it has to deliver an experience that goes significantly beyond what’s already out there.

3)     All The Stages Are Worlds

Theme parks didn’t invent immersive experiences, they’ve probably been around since the ancient Greek Eleusinian Mysteries of 600 BCE, but they did blaze a trail for the creation of coherent fictional worlds that ticket-buyers could inhabit, body and soul, for a few hours or days. And very lucrative worlds at that, should your novel, movie or TV series be lucky enough to make it back out there to the ‘real’ world of bricks, mortar and gift-shops. But while we may not all fancy the idea of our beloved creations having a second life as a roller coaster or log flume, the idea of our readers and audiences maybe one day wanting to physically live within the conjecturing of our little grey cells and caffeine-fueled revisions …well that’s got to warm the cockles surely?

DT 17 July 2026

 *Griffith also bequeathed funds for the construction of the iconic LA landmark, The Griffith Observatory, believing that “If all mankind could look through that telescope, it would change the world.” 

**Experiencing designs and designing experiences: Emotions and theme parks from a symbolic interactionist perspective,Edgar Cabanas, Journal of Destination Marketing and Management, December 2018 

***This may have been in part due to the Big Dipper tragedy that occurred in Battersea Park in 1972, three miles down the road from my childhood home.