Popular New Orleans by Florian Freitag

Author:Florian Freitag [Freitag, Florian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, 19th Century, 20th Century, 21st Century, Modern, General, Social History
ISBN: 9781000196955
Google: NVLzDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-10-01T16:00:50+00:00

Autotheming: From Disney’s New Orleans to Disney’s Disney’s New Orleans

Disney’s return to external and internal brands in New Orleans Square’s lessee outlets and “attraction stores,” respectively, can not only be seen as the result of a switch in managerial strategies at the park’s Merchandise department, however. Especially the addition of “attraction stores” also illustrates the growing thematic self-referentiality of theme parks in general and New Orleans Square in particular. Elsewhere, I have argued that for at least two decades, “theme parks have increasingly relied on theme parks and their historic antecedents (trolley parks, amusement piers, and county fairs) as themes for rides, shops, restaurants, and entire themed areas” (Freitag, “Autotheming” 141; see also Clavé 79). Such cases of “autotheming,” as I have called them, can be regarded as subsets of what Beardsworth and Bryman have termed “reflexive” theming, a trend in which “the thematic elements are internally generated and then continuously reproduced” (Bryman, Disneyization 18).58 While reflexively themed and/or autothemed spaces can be found in many theme parks all over the world (see Freitag, “Autotheming” for examples from North American, European, and Asian parks), they seem to be especially popular in parks owned by multimedia entertainment corporations such as Disney and NBCUniversal, where they are often used to cross-promote the companies’ various media franchises (e.g., movies, TV shows, or, indeed, theme park rides).

Yet reflexive theming and autotheming are more than just effective marketing tools. Drawing on “internally generated” brands, franchises, and images, as well as – in the most extreme cases – exclusively on themselves rather than on external thematic sources, reflexively themed and especially autothemed spaces raise today’s theme parks to a level of hyperreality or simulation that the original proponents of these concepts, Umberto Eco and Jean Baudrillard, had imagined either only in theory or in jest. Baudrillard, for instance, had originally considered Disneyland a “simulation of the third order” (“it masks the absence of a profound reality”; Simulacra 12; and 6; emphases original). Roughly ten years later, he saw the opening of the movie-themed Disney-MGM Studios theme park at Walt Disney World as “[o]ne more spiral in the simulacrum” and jokingly added: “One day they will rebuild Disneyland at Disneyworld” (Cool Memories II 42). One can only wonder what Baudrillard would say now that his prediction has, in a way, come true: to be sure, there is no Disneyland at Walt Disney World (or vice versa), but both parks feature rides, shops, restaurants, shows, and parades whose theming refers to nothing but the parks themselves, either directly or via Disney’s representations of the parks in other media. These spaces are indeed “pure simulacra,” having “no relation to any reality whatsoever” (Baudrillard, Simulacra 6). And many of them can be found in New Orleans Square.

Indeed, there are numerous examples for how, like the city of New Orleans, New Orleans Square has become “nostalgic for itself” (Dawdy 110). Among the earliest are the “attraction stores” “Pieces of Eight,” “Le Bat en Rouge,” and “Port Royal,” opened in 1980, 2001, and 2006, respectively.

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