Alison Flood 

Taking readers for a ride: the Harry Potter theme park

Alison Flood: The Harry Potter theme park sounds great but there are lots of other possibilities for literaryland fun out there
  
  

The Wizarding World of Harry Potter will open next year in Orlando, Florida.
The Wizarding World of Harry Potter will open next year in Orlando, Florida. Photograph: AP Photograph: AP

You can mock but you know that the new Harry Potter theme park is going to be huge: after all, if there are already 200 quidditch teams registered around the US, then just think how excited the Pottermaniacs are going to be to visit a world where they can buy Bertie Bott's Every-Flavour Beans and everything they need to play quidditch, as well as ride the Flight of the Hippogriff rollercoaster and take the Dragon Challenge.

Details revealed yesterday evening make it sound more exciting than Dickens World, where you can "jump on board the Great Expectations Boat Ride for splashing good fun", and "take a trip back in time to a Victorian School complete with nasty schoolmaster" – what a fun day out. Visitors at Potterland (it's actually called Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey) will even be able to buy butterbeer at the Three Broomsticks restaurant: I shall be interested to see how they're planning to make it, as I've always thought it sounded absolutely revolting.

But Potter schmotter and Dickens schmickens: there must be better literary theme park ideas out there. Lindesay Irvine suggested Ballard Towers and Kafka Castle a couple of years ago: both sound much too scary for me (the last theme park I went to was Thorpe Park in 2003, for a friend's birthday, and it was far scarier than I remember it being as a child).

I think I'd prefer to stick to children's fiction – the thought of cockroaches parading around in Kafkaland, or the car crash experience at Ballard World, is giving me shivers. (Although an Austenland might be an excellent new matchmaking venture.)

So how about Alice in Wonderland-land? I think it'd be amazing: there'd have to be a Rabbit Hole Rollercoaster, an Eat Me Drink Me restaurant, croquet games with the Red Queen. There are already a few around – and Disney does that Mad Hatter Tea Cups ride - but pour as much money into it as the Potter park is getting and it could be even better.

Would you (or your children) go for Narnia World, complete with winter wonderland, a lion carousel, and a Tumnus tea party with toast and a roaring fire? Or how a Where the Wild Things Are park? You'd enter in a "private boat" water ride, and there'd have to be some sort of Wild Rumpus Rollercoaster.

I'll bet you anything that someone is already planning a Twilight Adventure (meet your own sparkly vampire hunk!) but are there any other ideas? If we come up with good enough pitches, perhaps we can take them to Universal and make our fortunes...

 

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