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Heather Lea Birdsall explores the Disney theme parks as a branded franchise space through a number of its video game appearances, including Kinect Disneyland Adventures (Microsoft Studios, 2011) and its 2017 re-release Disneyland Adventures. Her essay makes clear that franchise management unites multiple physical and digital spaces in its strategic global expansion. She argues that tracing the history of Disney park-based games and apps, and considering other ways that the parks have been ‘gamified,’ reveals an ever-deepening trend of using digital game modalities to expand the Disney parks beyond their physical limitations as a means by which to establish and further them as a super-media franchise.

This chapter focuses on Lotte World, billed by its giant parent conglomerate as the world's largest indoor amusement park and shopping mall. Lotte World embraces both the inauthentic and the unoriginal. Its theme parks borrow, perhaps even steal, design features from other parks, and its shopping mall draws frequent attention to the supporting role it had in a television drama. The “photo spots” that pop up throughout the complex insist on the built nature of the environment and seem to comment on its glaring inauthenticity. The consumer is not only aware of but cares little about the purely manufactured nature of the world. Visitors do not perceive Lotte World as anything other than what it is. Because of their diminutive size, the gestures toward the natural world, toward historical experience, and toward other built environments are both seen and consumed as miniature models of something else that might well not exist. It does not matter to the visitor.

Explicitly artificial “nature” (animals, trees, mountains, the colour green) proliferates intensely in contemporary India, notably in peri-urban theme parks. While this could be seen as post-liberalization “Disneyfication” or as a symptom of modernity more broadly, this chapter argues that there are other aesthetico-moral economies at work alongside such universalizing formulations of a hegemonic capitalist modernity and its “nature-culture.” It does so through a focus on the Lakshminarayan Temple or Birla Mandir, built in the 1930s as a “native” addendum to colonial New Delhi. The temple’s innovative architecture, and particularly its theme park-like garden, inaugurated a new, inclusive public (sarvajanik) religious space at the nexus of colonial planning, momentous debates on caste, religious patronage in the late colonial economy, and resignifications of nature and the sacred through new visual forms. This genealogy of the post-reform theme park illuminates the nature of “nature” on an uneven postcolonial terrain that both discursively negotiates and performatively refutes the separation of culture, religion and the social from “nature” and from political economy.

Chapter 3 explores Walt Disney’s desire to create his own Garden of Eden while aligning this urge with examples of landscape tourism. Landscape tourism is when one visits a place where natural elements were “corrected,” mapped, and marketed as respites from daily existence. Rising from the swamps near Orlando, Florida, Disney World enjoys a warm climate and an ample buffer zone, setting it apart from the everyday world’s imperfections. First, this chapter contains brief introductions to literary and artistic prototypes that established and propagated images of Paradise. Then, the chapter considers how the landscape has been cultivated throughout history to accommodate varying visions of paradise, such as formal gardens and ideal cities. These models for Paradise were designed to foster communities of like-minded people, improve upon daily existence, and intensify feelings of aesthetic pleasure and moral fulfilment. Disney World sits well alongside these models of paradise because Walt intended his theme park to prescribe and reinforce “proper” behavior, thus imbuing Disney World with utopian, if often unattainable, ambitions.

The contemporary period of globalisation involves various economic and other ‘global shifts’ from Western to non-Western societies. This chapter explores the idea that these deeper social changes are reflected in the world of mega-events, notably in the ‘global shift’ in mega-event locations away from the West to increasingly include non-Western world regions. The chapter views contemporary mega-events as ‘multi-theme legacy park’ projects for their host cities. Their shift to new non-Western contexts is illustrated by reviewing mega-events in contemporary China, particularly the cases of the Beijing 2008 Olympics, the Guangzhou 2010 Asian Game and the Shanghai 2010 Expo 2010. The chapter shows that, in spite of many differences, at least one notable commonality between the Sydney 200O Olympic model and event legacies in Beijing and Shanghai in particular is the construction of major new urban green spaces. These urban park-building and park-renewing projects have typically aimed to embody, on a permanent basis, environmental and recreational (rather than sporting) values and vision of urbanism. In addition these mega-event projects all aimed, in comparable ways (even if to greater or lesser extents), to use these new urban parks as hubs and catalysts from which other (social and economic) mega-event legacy influences might also be developed.

The discussion shows how Diane Johnson’s novel, Le Divorce, is a rewriting of James’ The American. In this version the hero becomes the heroine, yet many of the dichotomies between the French and the Americans are maintained. EuroDisney, the symbol of American popular culture in France is paralleled by the quartier Saint-Germain-Des-Prés which has become a more highbrow French theme park, vaunting the glories of post-war French culture in the midst of upscale boutiques offering luxury items to wealthy American tourists. This is the only time in the novels discussed that an American makes a sustained effort to integrate herself into French society.

The chapter compares two New York’s Little Italies—the “Little Italy” on Lower Manhattan’s Mulberry Street, and the “Real Little Italy” of Arthur Avenue in the Bronx. The historical trajectories of the neighborhoods—from immigrant enclaves to popular ethnic theme parks for international tourists—is framed within postindustrial urban change and the turn of cultural production into most profitable investment for financial capital. Confronted with the loss of their residents of Italian origin, both neighborhoods owe their continued significance as “Italian” spaces to the construction of commodified versions of their ethnic pasts for consumption by a variegated clientele. However, their commercial ethnicities have emerged in particular ways that reflect the geographic, economic, demographic, and ethnic and racial conditions of their local histories.

The introductory Prologue defines four separate eras for the evolution of stereoscopic cinema. A prior volume examined the Novelty Period for 3D films. The present volume considers the three subsequent epochs of stereo cinema with 1) the Era of Convergence, 2) the Age of Immersion and 3) Digital 3D cinema.

This chapter examines representations in museums and theme parks of what in the PRC are called “ethnic minorities” (shaoshu minzu). Historically oppressed, non-Han ethnic groups in China came to occupy important places in political and cultural discourse and to constitute a central trope in the construction of national identity. After 1949, the Chinese communist government surveyed and classified ethnic minorities and then used images of ethnic diversity to promote the imagination of a polity unified by a shared political ideology. Ethnographic museums and exhibitionary sites in the PRC have been central to this political appropriation of non-Han peoples. The chapter considers how and why such exhibitionary spaces display the cultures of China's ethnic minorities. What are the political and ideological ramifications of displaying the cultures of ethnic groups to visitors who are mostly Han Chinese?

This chapter analyzes Disney films and theme parks, which are taken as “texts” that can be examined or “read.” The analysis challenges the view that religion and popular culture are top-down power structures inflicting their agendas on passive individuals. Instead, it imagines Disney “texts” as places where that dialogue might be taking place. It focuses on two significant tensions revealed in Disney texts. The first tension is between the sacralization of futuristic technological progress and the idealized return to nature religion. The second tension is between initiatives to empower girls and women and the ambivalences and anxieties caused by dismantling “traditional” gender norms and systems.

This chapter focuses on the massive Akshardham Temple complex on the banks of the Yamuna river, completed in November 2005. Surrounded by a network of flyovers, highways, toll-ways, and new suburban developments that are home to the new middle-classes, the complex is designed in a manner of a high-tech religious theme park. It is a space that brings together new practices of consumption and urban space. It is also a site of the making of new middle-class identities that are engaged in a dialogue between being a modern consuming citizen, and yet remaining ‘Indian’ through adherence to religious practice. The complex is an urban site that that signals the making of a ‘moral’ middle-class located in the various processes of globalization.

This conclusion examines the potential use of municipal swimming pools in the United States as public spaces that foster a vibrant community life and offer an informal social space where people from all walks of life can interact and communicate face to face. It reflects on how municipal pools can humanize relationships between people by promoting friendship and a sense of shared interest and identity, as well as provide an opportunity for ordinary and even marginalized citizens such as African Americans and the working class to contribute to the production of public culture. The chapter also argues that municipal pools have failed to deliver on this promise by enforcing racial discrimination and social segregation by dividing swimmers on the basis of class, gender, and generational lines that reflected the prevailing public social divisions in industrial America. Finally, it considers the dwindling number of municipal swimming pools in the country as more and more suburban communities show preference for “water theme parks” over traditional pools.

A cognitive map is, as Jameson indicated, a postmodern subject’s representation of her place in the world. Alienation happens when the postmodern subject is no longer able to map her position. The author produces a map of the themed landscapes of the Akshardham temples in India for which tickets are sold. Just like capitalism, she argues, accumulation in religion is fraught with contradictions: religion needs worldly wealth to survive, but it must preach the need for alienation from worldly wealth. The production of spectacle through themed landscapes provides resolution to these contradictions. Capital produces Vedic boat rides, mystique India dioramas, and laser show that allow accumulation, and, at the same time, these spaces are programmed to teach alienation from capital accumulation. In ‘acting out’ this consumptive ideology, we may one day develop disalienation producing alternative maps and, hence, alternative globalization.

With his emphasis on a factual background in his stories, Verne offered the first analysis, in fictional form, of the challenges of the scientific age, but his stories also were set in his own time, limiting them primarily to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, making them increasingly remote to modern audiences. By the late 1930s, however, adaptations of Verne novels began to be heard over the radio, becoming widespread by the end of the 1940s, reversing the decline in Verne readership and publication. The initial cinematic reflection was a movie serial in 1951, and the next year television broadcasts of Verne stories began. The spark that had been lit might easily have dimmed had not Walt Disney realized how Verne could be the source for a modern movie spectacular. His 1954 film 20,000 Leagues under the Sea is undoubtedly the most influential Verne movie ever made, achieving a level of critical, commercial, and artistic success that launched a seventeen-year cycle of live-action filmmaking of Verne’s work. Moreover, Disney also situated the work to echo for residual benefit, exploited through books, records, associated television shows, and theme park attractions.

This chapter examine the interaction of roots and routes, tradition and mobility, in contemporary Galician audiovisual culture, focusing on the cultural resignification of the ancient pilgrim’s Road to Saint James (Camino de Santiago) in the global age, and the transformation of Santiago de Compostela into a global theme park of Galicianness. It examines several audiovisual productions by Chano Piñeiro, The Chieftains, and Carlos Núñez that metaphorically travel in time and space, where experimentation with cinema and Celtic music merges old and modern forms and transcends spatiotemporal barriers, repositioning Galician culture on the global map.

The chapter examines what it calls the Shoah business, in which the Holocaust is being trivialized, merchandised, and—through feel-good Hollywood films and theme-parked museums—Americanized. There’s no business like Shoah business, to borrow the Jewish historian Yaffa Eliach’s mordant one-liner. In Selling the Holocaust, Tim Cole’s critique of the branding and blockbustering of the unspeakable, Eliach argues that “at the end of the twentieth century, the Holocaust is being consumed.” Evidence that the Holocaust is being trivialized, merchandised, and Americanized is all around us, from the revisionist happy endings of Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful and the Robin Williams starrer Jakob the Liar to Holocaust-related toys, postcards, and games. Holocaust museums do a brisk business, and death-camp tourism is a common feature of the Grand Tour for Jews and Gentiles alike. More than half a century after the Nazis industrialized genocide, the theme-parking and gift-shopping of the inferno is well under way; at times, it seems as if the Holocaust is becoming an Atrocity Exhibition.

By way of a conclusion, the book closes with an excursion to Miniatürk, a theme park in Istanbul that features miniature replicas of many of the city’s, nation’s, and empire’s most famous sites. It lingers on the miniatures of several of the sites that have already appeared in the narrative. Against the backdrop of the tensions that define the neo-Ottoman chronotope of Istanbul, Miniatürk offers a provocative and evocative occasion to ponder the lessons and themes of the book in retrospect.