3. THE TOURIST

How you know if you're "the tourist": There's an in-universe explanation for the gift shop.

The Good

Ah, the tourist. The tried-and-true theme park ride role is masterful in that art truly does imitate life. Pretty much everyone visiting a theme park, after all, really is a tourist, who's traveled to a place to see a thing. So it's practically brilliant to repurpose and repackage that role for in-universe purposes. In fact, Animal Kingdom practically makes this its de facto role, whisking guests between Disney versions of real-world locales and cultures to (respectively) see something new.

One of our favorite uses of the trope has to be the incredible story concocted for Disneyland's INDIANA JONES ADVENTURE. Set in Indy's pulpy 1930s time frame, the ride casts guests as nouveau riche Europeans drawn to the lost river deltas of Southeast Asia by the era's sensationalized black and whites news reels covering the discovery of the Temple of the Forbidden Eye. Lured by a chance at visions of the future, eternal youth, or endless riches, we instead arrive in the remote jungle to find... it's a tourist trap. Cleverly, the rusted, tattered, generator-fueled frame story was actually spread across all of Adventureland – one of Disney's earliest U.S. attempts at an immersive, interconnected land!

Another clever use must be Tokyo DisneySea's TOWER OF TERROR, wherein the dilapidated Hightower Hotel is baked right into the mythology of the park's turn-of-the-century New York-themed American Waterfront. There, guests join the line with the explicit intent of touring the hotel's run-down remains and the abandoned artifact collection of its one-time owner (a S.E.A. staple). Even the name "Tower of Terror" is, in the land's mythology, an intentionally sensationalized name invented by the non-profit New York Preservation Society to sell tour tickets to finance the hotel's preservation. Phew!

Increasingly, Disney and Universal's "Living Lands" rely on this formula, too. STAR WARS: GALAXY'S EDGE, CARS LAND, and THE WIZARDING WORLD OF HARRY POTTER may have IP-friendly names on park maps, but they're brought to life as the in-universe worlds of Batuu, Radiator Springs, and Hogsmeade – worlds with their own story-specific dining and shopping, often with massive, original mythologies baked into every square foot. Guests enter these worlds not as insiders, but as tourists. Having the mindset of having landed in a last-stop village on a remote planet, a revived Route 66 town, or a hidden Scottish village briefly opened to Muggles lends itself to an atmosphere of exploration, celebration, and discovery. 

Still, the epitome of the "tourist" trope being used right must be PANDORA: THE WORLD OF AVATAR. There, Disney Imagineers smartly severed the immersive land from the 2009 Avatar film entirely, ensuring guests need not know anything about the film's plot or characters to feel at home. Rather than rehashing the movie (wherein humans lead an assault on the peaceful planet to strip its minerals... oops...), the land is set decades after the events of the film with guests cast as eco-tourists sent to Pandora by the Alpha Centauri Expeditions company to gaze in awe at its flora and fauna and to tour the collapsing remains of humanity's long-abandoned assault, laughing at some anonymous ancestors of our own whose greed and corruption were so obviously wrong.

The Bad

Being the "tourist" can be incredible when it means visiting other worlds, dense jungles, long-lost times, or fantastic places. But it can be dangerous when it veers too closely to another of our telltale signs of a bad story – being "too close to home."

It's also the thing that still makes DINOLAND, U.S.A. at Disney's Animal Kingdom feel like an odd man out. Although we've argued that Dinoland is technically just as story-infused as the park's Asia or Africa, the fact is that the underlying story just doesn't matter much when the exterior is a nondescript small town with a parking lot carnival. It feels too close to home, sapping the excitement inherent in the "tourist" role.

When DISNEY CALIFORNIA ADVENTURE opened in 2001, the entire premise of the park was that its four "districts" replaced the need to see the rest of California. Its exaggerated, comic book style lands didn't bother to transport guests to idealized, romanticized times and places in the history of California; instead, it invited them to step into spoofs of California like a Hollywood set of modern Hollywood, a rusted and abandoned National Park, and a modern boardwalk of unthemed carnival rides. Frankly, those are all things people can find in the real world, so visiting a Disney Park's version of them wasn't exactly a must-see... hence why the park's billion-dollar reimagining focused on resetting each land's timeline and layered on some of that historic, fantasy-infused Disney detail.

4. THE HERO

How you know if you're "the hero": If you fail, we all fail

The Good

Perhaps a subset of the "trainee" role, the difference with the "hero" role is that it's often an emergency recruit that skips... well... the training. The "hero," "savior," or "emergency recruit" role often jumps out in connection with the tried-and-true "something goes horribly wrong" storyline. It's what happens when – in an instant – guests are propelled from observers, trainees, or tourists into the only thing standing between good and evil.

Both STAR TOURS and STAR WARS: RISE OF THE RESISTANCE do this well by casting guests as members of the series' Rebel and Resistance underdogs. Guests are recruited into the anti-space-fascism movements in each ride (in STAR TOURS by unknowingly having a Rebel allegiant spy on board an otherwise standard domestic flight; in Rise of the Resistance by being captured, detained, and questioned while leaving Batuu's secret Resistance base) and suddenly find themselves as the movement's only hope. On STAR TOURS, guests save the day by escaping. On Rise of the Resistance, they do so by keeping quiet in interrogation, then finding their way off the Star Destroyer and back to Batuu.

While California Adventure's Web-Slingers will likely stall out at the "trainee" level, we expect further Marvel rides in Anaheim, Paris, and Hong Kong to cast guests as authentic "heroes." For example, the Avengers Campus' in-production mega-sized AVENGERS E-TICKET will transcend the "trainee" role and send guests on a mission where they'll actually team up with Thor, Iron Man, Captain America, Captain Marvel, and more to save Wakanda from a villainous invasion. 

The Bad

The "hero" role is one of the toughest to get right because it requires that guests fully suspend their disbelief and "believe" in the story's high stakes. To get to that level, the ride has to have high stakes that feel authentic and a story and world that guests want to participate in.

Frankly, we explored the fine tuning needed to get this role right in our in-depth look at the loveably messy POSEIDON'S FURY. Theoretically, the attraction opened with a narrative scale to match its massive exterior, with guests witnessing a seismic battle between good and evil. But that word "witnessing" was the issue. Guests were unceremoniously dragged from chamber to chamber, then to the bottom of the sea with practically no actual "role" in the story, firmly placing Poseidon's Fury visitors in the "Observer" role. Which was, like, a very odd bit of cognitive dissonance for an attraction that theoretically had such an epic story.

A quick-fix rewrite in 2001 was meant to revise the foundational flaws of Poseidon's Fury by giving guests a "hero" role. However, while the current production has its "heroic" moments, it's hard to say that it ever elevates guests past "tourist." Why? Because the stakes don't feel real (thanks to an antagonist who ends up being an actor in a spandex suit and armor filmed in front of a green screen) and it the world itself just isn't a super compelling one that guests are willing to suspend their disbelief for. To that end, "tourist" seems to be where even the revised Poseidon's Fury maxes out.