Attractions Expert Q&A: Mel McGowan

Storyland Studios Founder and Chief Creative Officer Mel McGowan and his team have worked with all the major theme parks and the most popular brands and IPs.

What theme park souvenir might we be surprised to find on your shelf and what’s its story?

I’m a completist but also a minimalist. I only have two collections—a complete collection of Disney Tiki mugs and a complete collection of Disney theme park maps.

I’m pretty confident I have every Disney mug in history, from special Club 33 releases to every edition of all the Trader Sam’s mugs, and I’ve been collecting maps since I was 10 or 11 years old. I actually wrote letters to not just Disney and Imagineering but to every theme park in the world when I was just a little military brat in Germany before the internet. And when I asked them for maps, generously enough, most of the parks sent me their large-scale poster maps. I’ve got quite a collection dating from the seventies.

What theme park have you always wanted to visit but have never been to? 

I think I’ve been to almost every theme park in the U.S., but I haven’t been to Valleyfair (a Cedar Fair park in Minnesota). I’ve been to Minneapolis several times, but I’ve never been there at the right time in the summer. Valleyfair was one of the original parks in that wave, built in the 1970s and developed by local businessmen. There’s some real nostalgia for it. It’s kind of what Disney’s done with Paradise Pier and the BoardWalk area. They actually chose to do that Victorian-style trolley park fairgrounds, but I think that’s been watered down over the years now. It was a charming little park back in the day.

On the international front, there are a few, like Parque Warner Madrid and the Warner Bros. Movie World Park—a bunch of our team members worked on that.

Was there a theme park or attraction that made you want to be in this industry? How did it inspire you?

I would say even more than Disneyland would be the opening of Epcot, even though I didn’t actually go there until I was an adult. I remember seeing it on my little black and white TV screen in Germany in 1982, watching the Monorail cross the lagoon in front of Spaceship Earth. I loved that idea of the aspiration and even the acronym of the words Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, and just hearing about Walt Disney’s kind of dying dream of creating a world and city that could and should be and showing people a better way of life through the power of storytelling and placemaking.

That really inspired me to think about everything from designing future cities and theme parks to this aspiration of designing worlds that could and should be. That was a key seed planted in me at a pretty early age. When I joined Boy Scouts, I earned my first merit badge in architecture and my second merit badge in landscape architecture.

What was your favorite ride or attraction as a child, and why?

I would say Peter Pan’s Flight and the reason for that is two early memories. I was born in Vietnam and grew up in Germany, but I made a trip to Disneyland between Vietnam and Germany, which I still vaguely remember. My earliest memory is bombs going off in Vietnam, and then my second earliest memory is flying out the window of the Darling House, and Peter Pan.

Again, it was a vague early childhood memory. I remember going back to Disneyland as a teenager, and the first thing I wanted to do was make a beeline to Fantasyland and work out how they pulled it off. I wondered if that was even real. I had to figure out how it was done. Even to this day, I think it was all pixie dust and magic with a monorail ride system. Basically, it was the maximum amount of magic with the minimum amount of footprint.

You have all these big, half-billion-dollar attractions like Rise of the Resistance—all these E-tickets. But I still think Peter Pan’s Flight is a wonderful example of packing an enchanting and memory-making experience into a minimum amount of space. And I still think it’s pretty darn magical.

Was there a ride that frightened you as a child?

When I saw Corkscrew, the old looping coaster at Knott’s Berry Farm, that was probably the first time I’d ever seen inversion. It’s funny because if I had to remember what that was like in my mind back then. It looked more like Viper at Magic Mountain, with seven inversions. It was crazy. But it was actually a simple, short little ride, like 1,200 linear feet. You just went up and through these two barrel loops, and boom, you were done. But, man, I was pretty nervous the first time I saw that.

I just went to Six Flags with my teens and my kids. It’s been a kind of Father’s Day and birthday tradition for about ten years, and we hit all the coasters. I’m still up for the challenge, but I have to take Dramamine these days.

What was the oddest or coolest job you’ve had in your career?

I worked at a home for developmentally disabled adults through film school, and it was a lot of hard work. You end up falling in love with people – it’s like family. And so much so that I gave my brother my job when I left, and he stayed there for almost a decade. He loved it. And you’re doing some gnarly cleanup work – it was good, bad, and ugly. We took them on outings to theme parks, Lake Arrowhead, everywhere. But talk about the spectrum of life. A lot of emotions and experiences were packed into that college job. And memorable, for sure.

What ride or attraction do you think everyone needs to experience and why?

I’m going to say The Little Match Girl at Efteling. It’s basically a Pepper’s ghost diorama – you’re just standing in a scene. It’s one of dozens of these kinds of dioramas that they have at Eftling throughout their Fairytale Forest, but it’s one of the first theme park attractions that actually brings a tear to your eye.

It’s so emotionally moving in this little space and very non-Disney and non-American. Spoiler alert: The little girl dies, but it’s just magical and intimate. It uses a hundred-year-old Pepper’s ghost trick, but talk about emotional resonance—one that sticks with you—it’s very powerful.

If you were tasked with creating a new theme park food, what would it be?

One of my good friends runs the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk food concessions, and I’ve been pitching my idea to him, but he hasn’t bought off on it yet.

Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk is where they filmed the vampire movie “The Lost Boys,” and I keep telling them to do a Lost Boys take on a blood orange drink mixed with vanilla ice cream. It would be their version of Butterbeer but with nectar, like a blood orange Creamsicle. The blood orange element ties into the Lost Boys IP and the whole eighties nostalgia business. They could sell that Lost Boys nectar under the Boardwalk.

You’re a walk-around character for a day; who do you choose?

I actually was Br’er Bear when I was at Disney. They do the Disney Way training, where you go through the different roles at the park, so I was Br’er Bear, and it was such a blast being that bear that I’d do it again in a heartbeat. When I came out in that costume, I could have been Bono – I was a rock star.

The ability of adults to just go ahead and play-act and assume that you’re real, is kind of a powerful thing. You realize it’s not just little kids who are too naive or young to understand that it’s not real; you’re seeing full-grown adults play acting and having fun with it. The suspension of disbelief is pretty powerful. They’re willing to play along and not act; they’re just having a good time letting it go.

If you think about it from a leadership training and development perspective, it’s a brilliant idea to have employees actually get into that sweatsuit and really understand both the positives and negatives, the discomfort that those actors go through, but also the visceral reaction by the guests, the magic that they’re creating. It helps to understand that frontline cast member role, through the extreme discomfort and their direct impact, and to develop a level of appreciation that there’s no way they’re going to get just looking at spreadsheets.

What types of attractions would you like to see more of and why?

We’ve been fortunate to have had a chance to play with almost every major IP that we love, like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter. You name it, we’ve been able to work with them. But the stuff I’ve really enjoyed and that I’d love to see more of an opportunity for is what I call soil-specific storytelling.

Having authentic experiences and exploring the rich cultural tapestry of the unique area. If I’m traveling 18 hours, I don’t want to just go somewhere with a Western design, and as much as I enjoy Warner Brothers Abu Dhabi, which our team has worked on, I’d rather go somewhere and feel like I’m in that part of the world and get this rich, immersive, multi-sensory experience that gives me insight into that culture in a fun and inspiring way.

I was just in Singapore and went to Haw Par Villa. Some brothers originally built it in the twenties to teach traditional Chinese values. It was totally fascinating. It was low-tech with statues and dioramas—I love that stuff. There’s a Hell’s Museum that walks you through the Ten Courts of Hell, which are focused on death and the afterlife in Chinese mythology and Buddhism.

In some ways, it is similar to Eftling because a lot of the art style is based on a very specific Dutch storybook author or illustrator in his particular style. It’s kind of like Gustaf Tenggren (chief illustrator for Walt Disney Company in the 1930s) did in the original Snow White movie and the original German stories.

Was there any challenge or surprise in your career?

Well, every day. People. I mean, because you can take whatever experience, brain damage, or paradigms, but it’s about the dynamics of people. They bring all the strength, diversity, and unique gifting, not just to the designers and creatives but also to the clients. And their level of experience or naivete. And I think that when you bring all that fusion together, everyone’s different personalities and life experiences and contexts and emotional frailties and emotional health and unhealth, and you throw that all together, you just never know what you’ll get in the outcome. You can have the best-funded, most qualified team, but if you’ve got some unhealthy leader ego, they can throw the whole thing onto the flip side.

But then you have people who lack experience but make a great, healthy team. It’s amazing to see what people can do when they’re synced up and working towards the same goal.

Can you talk about what you are working on these days?

Yes and no. A couple of U.S. parks have been announced, like Libertyland, USA, near Mount Rushmore, and Storyville Garden, the replacement for Opryland in Nashville. Efteling and Tivoli Gardens inspired that. We’ve got numerous projects for all the chains, from SeaWorld to Cedar Fair. Plus, we’ve got a new park in Portugal on an island between Spain and Portugal called Porto Boega Island.

We also have a lot of work in the Middle East that we can’t reveal yet. We’re allowed to talk about a gaming district that Mark Hamill announced in a promo video as part of Qiddiya (Saudi Arabia), which is described as the world’s first dedicated gaming and esports district. 

This gaming district is unique in that it combines large arenas and stadiums with vertical, mixed-use, live-work-play spaces in themed environments based on gaming genres. It’s pretty cool because it blurs the lines between urban planning, theme park design, lifestyle, retail, and hospitality. There’s an entire large urban district that’s kind of like LA Live, plus you’ve got a number of stadiums, including a World Cup stadium and numerous gaming stadiums. And then you’ve also got a kind of cyberpunk Blade Runner zone and an acid-rain Tokyo district. That’s all been announced on YouTube. Mark Hamill will help roll that out. So we’re allowed to say that we’ve been actively leading and working on those.

That’s in the Qiddiya development outside of Riyadh, where Six Flags is under construction as the first gated park. But there are multiple parks – it’s going to be the Orlando of the Middle East, basically – the biggest cluster of theme parks and entertainment experiences outside of Florida. They’re building multiple new cities from the ground up, but Qiddiya is definitely the one that’s the most traditional themed entertainment – what I would say is a kind of welcome mat to the world.

They’re developing these really high-end resort areas off the Red Sea, and you’ve got Neom and The Line, a future city, Buck Rogers kind of stuff. But Qiddiya is going to be a resort city with multiple theme parks. They have announced the biggest water park in the world, or at least the most expensive. Their Six Flags park will have the biggest coaster in the world, Falcons Flight. I’ve been out to the site a few times. It’s under construction, but it’s going to happen. So yeah, fun stuff!

You are going to your favorite theme park; which people (dead or alive) are you taking with you?

Well, that’s definitely going to be Lori, my plus one, my soulmate, my best friend, the love of my life. It’ll be us plus eight. We’ve got eight kids, so yeah, I’m going to need the Grand Villa for sure.

Writer Kendall Wolf is a long-time consultant in the themed entertainment industry. She has worked with designers, producers, and fabricators to help developers create unique and successful projects around the world. In 2017, she introduced Merlin Entertainments to a development group in Sichuan province for the first Legoland park in China. Kendall continues to consult for the developer to open more themed resorts in China.