Disney’s Media Parks: The Convergence of Theme Parks, Film, Television, and Game Space

This dissertation traces the relationships between screen media, including film, television, and digital games, and the modern American theme park. Taking the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim as a prototypical case study, I explore the flexible boundaries between physical parks and virtual media on different scales of immersion (attraction/ride, land, and park) and across different media (film, television, and video games). Beginning with Disneyland’s early history and continuing through today, an ever-growing interpenetration of screen media and physical park space has challenged older concepts about screen media and theme parks as discrete types of experiences. I call the emerging new configuration of these two elements a “media park.” This dissertation considers media parks as a distinct media form characterized by permeable screen space and spectator experiences that are distinctly corporeal, sensory, and integrated into the narrative, and explores how media parks are reconfiguring our subjective and embodied relationships to screen media.My goal is to define the media park with respect to its unique relationship to and roots in screen media. I develop a typology of how we can read Disney’s parks relative to the broader field of Disney’s transmedia production. This dissertation considers both how screen media has been adapted to park spaces, by looking at media-based attractions and park lands, as well as the reciprocal movement, as these physical spaces have been translated back onto movie, television, and computer screens. This dissertation adapts traditional media studies analysis to three- dimensional built environments, while it also foregrounds interdisciplinary approaches to spatial, experiential, industrial, and narrative analyses of media parks. Toward this end, I draw upon political, social, economic, and industrial histories of Disneyland, cultural histories of entertainment in public space, and both spatial theory and media phenomenology. Finally, in- depth observational fieldwork offers a sustained mapping of the narrative and sensory experiences generated by these convergent media forms