The news has traveled pretty quickly around the interweb: the Disney-MGM Studios will officially be re-named the Disney Hollywood Studios as of January 2008.
I love this change for several reasons:
- It harkens to the early days of filmmaking. Not only historic Hollywood, but early Disney animated films. There is a certain glamour associated with the name.
- Hollywood Boulevard, Sunset Boulevard and Echo Lake are already perfectly themed for the name change.
- Choosing this name over the Pixar and ABC compilations that have been bandied about makes a lot more sense. After all, Pixar and ABC are both owned by Disney. Would choosing Pixar be regarded as calling the park The Disney-Disney Studios? Choosing Pixar as a name would have branded the park a little too narrow-ly. Especially since Pixar characters (which are actually Disney characters) have made it into all of the parks.
So, what do you think about the change? I think that this re-aligns the park. Sort of like what they did to Tomorrowland in the late 1990’s. The Hollywood that never was. Disney can move away from the idea of the park as an actual working production studio and into the theming of a movie and television theme park.
Photographs courtesy of the ETM Photo Explorer.
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