Are theme parks still popular?

With the way that home entertainment is changing the way that we live I wondered the other day about how theme parks were coping.  I mean most of these parks aren’t cheap to go to, from what I can tell a ticket to Disneyland is around $72 which is interesting as our own Warner Bros Movieworld tickets are $69.95 for what I can only imagine is a lot less (I’ve never been to Disneyland).

So if you are taking a few people to the park it is going to add up in cost and in the current economic climate I’m surprised that theme parks are still a popular choice.  Certainly not for repeat business, you can only go to Movieworld so many times before it get’s old and in my case it only takes two visits.

But as you may have seen on the interwebs spreading like wildfire the concept illustrations from the proposed Marvel Super Heroes theme park in Dubai.  I do wonder whether this is something I would be interested in, i mean I assume I would but some of these images don’t inspire me THAT much.

This is possibly the most interesting of the images, I like how they’ve captured an average day in the Marvel New York day.  I can really see this working, it would be awesome for photos!  I’m going to assume that that’s Iron Man way off in the background standing (or flying) on top of that building.

Obviously my bias to Iron Man being featured heavily will affect my judgement.

So this gives an idea of the break up of the mini-worlds of Marvel World (this is the name that I’ve dubbed on it not the official name). I personally would have made it more location driven, Avengers HQ, The Baxter Building, Asgard, Stark Enterprises etc.

But it looks like most of the bases have been covered.

Where’s Iron Man??  Why is Magneto so big?  There is one member of the audience that I instantly dislike.  This is only a concept image… pfft.

Now this is a really interesting idea, one of those tower drop rides as part of some sort of Spider-Man story.  I dislike themed rides that are in name only, you know like a roller coaster named after Superman and that’s all.  It’s not creative.  So I like the concept of taking part in a storyline that eventually has you stuck in one of those tower drops or even some sort of train carriage.

Finally!! A Stark Enterprises themed section of the park. I dunno about the giant Iron Man head or how interesting SE would actually be but at least he’s being acknowledged.

There are a bunch more images floating around in the interweb tubes, I guess Dubai is pretty much the only place that has the money to build something like this right now which is a shame because I doubt I’ll get a chance to check it out.  I suspect though with the purchase of Marvel by Disney that we can expect to see more rides showing up with a Marvel theme.

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2. Comic books for n00bs: Five Marvel comics to get you started
3. Comic book Thursday
4. Comic Book Questionnaire
5. Comic book Thursday