3. Dinoland, U.S.A.

Image: Disney

Location: Disney's Animal Kingdom

Let's get one thing straight: contrary to popular belief, Dinoland, U.S.A. is a richly detailed and thoughtfully-crafted land. In fact, we explored some of the backstory of Dinoland in a behind-the-ride feature about its headlining E-Ticket – the Modern Marvel: DINOSAUR. Despite the baked-in backstory, Dinoland has always stuck out like a sore thumb in a park whose other themed lands include photorealistic, spectacularly detailed, National Geographic-style lands dedicated to Asia and Africa, and now the immensely scaled and deeply immersive moon of Pandora.

That's because – unlike the park's other lands – Dinoland is rooted right in the U.S.A., telling the story of the small town of Diggs County, which became a roadside wonder when dinosaur fossils were discovered there. Seemingly overnight, we're told, the town was overrun with paleontology students who established the Dino Institute, transforming the town's meager infrastructure into fly-by-night labs and (eventually) the more scholarly Dino Institute museum that houses the anchor attraction. But the other side of the story is of the enterprising locals who opted to cash in on the sudden surge of tourists eager to see the Institute's dig sites and collections.

Image: Disney

Enter Chester and Hester, a married couple and lucky proprietors of a Diggs County gas station who decide to convert their rest stop into a full-blown tourist attraction. So while Disney fans are known to roll their eyes at Chester and Hester's Dino-Rama – a collection of loud, bright, gaudy, off-the-shelf carnival rides seemingly stolen from a traveling fair and set-up on a cracked blacktop parking lot – that's exactly what Imagineers wanted the mini-land to look like!

In a sense, Dinoland is as much about roadside America and family vacations as it is about dinosaurs! But given that the intentionality is lost on most guests, Dinoland is often percieved as distinctly un-Disney cop-out carnival. (And admittedly, the Dinoland expansion was undeniably an inexpensive way to up the park's ride count and provide attractions for families in the park that otherwise offered only Kilimanjaro Safaris and the terrifying DINOSAUR as rides.)

Image: Disney

For those who care to find it, the seemingly "dumb" elements of Dinoland (like Restaurantosaurus, the Dig Site, and Chester and Hester's) are actually packed with detail and placemaking. The problem is that with most guests unable or unwilling to unpack all that backstory, the land feels like an odd-man-out at Animal Kingdom, and will likely remain a punchline for fans no matter how many well-intentioned dissections by theme park enthusiasts valiantly justify its existence. At the end of the day, when people visit Disney Parks, they don't want to be taken to a cheap-looking carnival, no matter how much it might be explained away via story layered under it.

4. Echo Lake

Image: Disney

Location: Disney's Hollywood Studios

When the Disney-MGM Studios opened in 1989, it had only two rides: the Lost Legend: The Great Movie Ride and the Declassified Disaster: Backstage Studio Tour. That's fitting, because each of those epically-sized attractions was meant to headline one of the park's two halves: a theme park celebrating Hollywood history, and a movie studio creating the Hollywood of today, respectively. Pretty quickly, any hopes of having an actual, real, working movie studio in Orlando folded, leaving the Studios' theme park half to expand. Especially after the opening of Animal Kingdom and Universal's Islands of Adventure, "studio" parks like Disney's began to look like cheap cop-outs lacking in immersive environments and attention to detail.

Obviously, the pendulum has swung away from the "studio" style and toward the immersive Wizarding World style lands incarnate in 2018's Toy Story Land, and that will crescendo with the 2019 opening of STAR WARS: Galaxy's Edge. But while the park will soon offer two lands that will let guests step into the movies, it'll also still offer two lands dedicated to historic Hollywood (Hollywood Blvd. and Sunset Blvd.), the unusual Grand Avenue (themed to a gentrified modern district of Los Angeles, but containing a Muppets-themed land styled after Brooklyn, New York), and the unfortunate Echo Lake...

Image: Disney

Currently housing the soundstage-set STAR TOURS and the Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular arena show, you could maybe squint and pretend that the land is somehow themed to Lucasfilm... but then explain the presence of the ABC Commissary, the Sci-Fi Dine-In Restaurant, or the '50s Prime Time Cafe; the presence of For the First Time in Forever: A Frozen Sing-Along Celebration; the call-outs to kitschy roadside attractions in Gertie the Dinosaur.

The fact of the matter is that Echo Lake will probably remain an overtly "studio" stylized land of mis-matched intellectual properties in a non-immersive setting, and that's by design. But in a park shifting to a new model, Hollywood Studios' jumbled lands with an unclear overall message is likely to remain a sticking point for fans of Imagineering.

5. Pixar Pier

Location: Disney California Adventure

Image: Disney

When Disneyland's infamous second gate opened back in 2001, the park was... well... coolly recieved. As we detailed in its own in-depth feature here – Disney's California Adventure: Part I – the underbuilt theme park lacked much to see or do. The exception was its Paradise Pier district, meant to recreate modern California boardwalks. And like real amusement piers along the West Coast, Paradise Pier was outfitted with plenty of "off-the-shelf" thrill rides, stucco walls and neon lights, "carnie" style games of skill, and practically no Disney characters.

Image: Disney

A sweeping, billion-dollar renovation to the park in 2012 saw Paradise Pier reborn in a style more closely aligned with the precedent set by Disneyland's areas, turning back the clock and redressing the land not as a modern boardwalk, but a Victorian leisure pier of strung Edison bulbs, elegant dancehall architecture, ragtime music, bandstand gardens, seaside clapboard exteriors, and the infusion of ultra-classic Disney characters in their pie-eyed form. Far from perfect, the new Paradise Pier at least did a better job of making guests feel transported to a new place and time.

But in 2017, Disney announced that the land would undergo a third facelift, becoming Pixar Pier.

Image: Disney

The good? Pixar Pier doubled down on the incredible Victorian style started in 2012, adding even more fanciful, historic, seaside styling. The bad? Yikes. The Pier underwent a redistricting to create four "neighborhoods" themed to The Incredibles, Toy Story, Inside Out, and... well... "Other," curiously mashing mid-century modern, "giant" props (a la Toy Story Land), and classical Victorian architecture with Pixar characters overlaid on snack stands and souvenir shops.

Nothing on Pixar Pier is strictly a downgrade from its predecessor (except perhaps Mickey's Fun Wheel being renamed the Pixar Pal-a-Round, despite the fact that pie-eyed Mickey remains on the Ferris wheel's face), but there's really no substantial upgrade either, with many of the land's "new" offerings amounting to vinyl stickers, static props, and a swap toward Pixar's primary color scheme.

Image: Disney / Pixar

In Disney's California Adventure: Part II, we argue that the "story" of Pixar Pier (the thing Disney designers continually tell us is most important in Imagineering) appears practically non-existent. At best, the "story" would be that the modern Walt Disney Company owns a historically-preserved Californian boardwalk dating back to the turn-of-the-century and has decided to overlay its high-earning Pixar brand on the carnival rides there. It's not too far off. The story created for the Incredicoaster is that the Incredibles are being honored with the rededication and renaming of an old wooden roller coaster on Pixar Pier...! So... I guess art imitates life?

Image: Disney / Pixar

Though some of the scenery may convince you that you've been transported to an elegant, historic, seaside pier, a Wall-e themed carnival game, Incredibles roller coaster, or giant Poultry Palace food service kiosk will quickly remind you that you're squarely in the present. What's more, it's a shame that emotional, beloved, and heart-wrenching films like Inside Out, Wall•e, and Finding Nemo are relegated to merely being stickered overlays of carnival rides and games... Disney Tourist Blog's Tom Bricker probably put it best: "Pixar is not a theme."