Riverboat Resonance Remapped: Exploring ‘Jungle Cruise’ through Intertextual Storytelling Media
Start Date
10-5-2024 12:00 AM
About the Presenters
James Ellis is a PhD Research Student at Royal Holloway University of London. His recent publication in the Journal of Sound and Music in Games is entitled “On the Trail of a Nostalgic Adventure: Identifying and Analyzing the Nostalgic Potential of Video Game Music in the Context of the Pokémon Franchise.” James’s research centres around ludomusicology and musical analysis with a focus on player interaction, identity and engagement with audiovisual texts and the development of gestural theories of music to illuminate concepts of immersion. James is also an active pianist who teaches and regularly performs.
Description
The multi-sensory nature of theme park rides involves participants in the adventures they conjure. Putting transmedial adaptations which have used a theme park ride as their template in dialogue, this paper will outline how music enhances this involvement, revealing how multimedia examples both embellish the original ride experience through new musical stimuli whilst reshaping the initial audiovisual framework.
The riverboat ride Jungle Cruise featured in Disneyland’s grand opening in 1955. It has since spawned further installations whilst inspiring two intertextual, audiovisual media examples: the videogame Disneyland Adventures (2011) and the film Jungle Cruise (2021). Both latter examples feature heightened, and often swashbuckling, charged musical features in comparison to primarily relaxed soundscape environments heard on the ride attraction. By drawing on theme park music analysis (Carson, 2004; DeAngelis 1997), film studies (Donnelly, 2001), park experience scholarship (Mauch, 2024) and ludomusicology (Moseley, 2016; Isbister, 2017), this paper seeks to illuminate the juxtapositional musical soundtracks and soundscapes utilised by Jungle Cruise ride and media examples, leading to potentially contradicting emotional outcomes for participants, players and viewers respectively.
It will be revealed that the gamified musical soundtracks of the audiovisual examples seek to imbue Jungle Cruise’s original ride attraction concept with a sense of peril and thrill, emotions seldom present when aboard the riverboat ride experience. The result is a semiotic remapping of the musical text of the theme park ride, creating intriguing intertextual examples, both engaging their audience but potentially creating a schism between the original text and their audiovisual media counterpart.
Recommended Citation
Ellis, James, "Riverboat Resonance Remapped: Exploring ‘Jungle Cruise’ through Intertextual Storytelling Media" (2024). Theme Park Music and Sound. 3.
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/tpms/2024/asynchronous/3
Riverboat Resonance Remapped: Exploring ‘Jungle Cruise’ through Intertextual Storytelling Media
The multi-sensory nature of theme park rides involves participants in the adventures they conjure. Putting transmedial adaptations which have used a theme park ride as their template in dialogue, this paper will outline how music enhances this involvement, revealing how multimedia examples both embellish the original ride experience through new musical stimuli whilst reshaping the initial audiovisual framework.
The riverboat ride Jungle Cruise featured in Disneyland’s grand opening in 1955. It has since spawned further installations whilst inspiring two intertextual, audiovisual media examples: the videogame Disneyland Adventures (2011) and the film Jungle Cruise (2021). Both latter examples feature heightened, and often swashbuckling, charged musical features in comparison to primarily relaxed soundscape environments heard on the ride attraction. By drawing on theme park music analysis (Carson, 2004; DeAngelis 1997), film studies (Donnelly, 2001), park experience scholarship (Mauch, 2024) and ludomusicology (Moseley, 2016; Isbister, 2017), this paper seeks to illuminate the juxtapositional musical soundtracks and soundscapes utilised by Jungle Cruise ride and media examples, leading to potentially contradicting emotional outcomes for participants, players and viewers respectively.
It will be revealed that the gamified musical soundtracks of the audiovisual examples seek to imbue Jungle Cruise’s original ride attraction concept with a sense of peril and thrill, emotions seldom present when aboard the riverboat ride experience. The result is a semiotic remapping of the musical text of the theme park ride, creating intriguing intertextual examples, both engaging their audience but potentially creating a schism between the original text and their audiovisual media counterpart.