Souvenir Land - Television Tropes & Idioms

"Don't forget to experience the fury of... our gift shooop."

"Foolish Earthlings! Don't you know all rides must end near the gift shop?"

- Kang/Kodos, The Simpsons Ride

In the real world, one thing every kid wants to do someday is go to Disneyland, or Walt Disney World. Or maybe Universal Studios or Six Flags, the natural rivals of the Disney parks. Whichever you choose, going there is a fantastic experience for a kid (or even an adult), with a plethora of amazingly themed attractions (and a truly generous guerilla web marketing campaign!)

In cartoon land, kids want to go to Souvenir Land. This experience is... less amazing. While Souvenir Land is almost always treated as if it was the world's equivalent of the Disney parks, it tends to be noticeably less impressive than anything Disney or Universal has built, usually more on the level of, at most, Busch Gardens or the Paramount parks, or more likely the smaller regional theme parks that mushroomed in The Fifties but started fading out in The Eighties because of the previous decade's low birthrate coupled with cheap airfares to Florida. Basically, The Theme Park Version of theme parks.

Other than the almost-mandatory monorail and the occasional train ride, there are usually exactly three types of rides:

Roller coaster. Sometimes steel, but usually wooden. Always completely outdoors with the track supports obvious (i.e. from a distance, it is immediately recognizable as a roller coaster). This doesn't quite fit Universal or Disney— Universal coasters nearly all feature inversions (which are impossible on wooden coasters), while Disney parks almost (but not quite) always hide the track in some way, whether by putting it inside a building (Space Mountain) or by theming (Big Thunder Mountain Railroad). Six Flags does use this sort of coaster at its parks, often playing up the nostalgia angle, but typically has steel coasters alongside them.
Boat rides. In real life, these take two forms: rides that keep trying to splash you, usually with a big drop at the end, and rides that just use the boat as a form of transportation to show you scenery (Pirates of the Caribbean is one of these). Souvenir Land boat rides look like the latter for most of the ride, then suddenly throw in a big drop at the end (possibly the result of misremembering Splash Mountain). Jungle Cruise is frequently parodied. Oddly, the inevitable "It's a Small World" parody (which usually features incredibly low-quality puppets that Walt probably would have fired you for trying to put in his park, or super-high-quality puppets that turn out to be enslaved children) is rarely one of these, usually just happening out in the open.
Fair-type circling rides (like Dumbo The Flying Elephant or Astro Orbiter in the real Disney parks). These usually will be depicted as a huge deal, a major attraction on par with the roller coasters, and everyone in the group will want to ride, except for the people who get squeamish on thrill rides. This is the most obvious sign of the underlying difficulty, which is that the writers have probably not been to Disneyland or Disney World or whichever since they were little kids, at which point these probably seemed legitimately impressive. (Indeed, Dumbo is notorious for being so popular with little kids that its small per-ride capacity ensures looooong waits.)

There will generally be no shows or novelty format movies in theaters, though there will occasionally be street entertainment. There will be no restaurants — all food comes from little carts (and characters will sometimes comment that it is expensive, which is Truth In Television).

To amuse yourself sometime, take out some maps of the Walt Disney World theme parks (there are 4 on the property, and beyond that 2 water parks and more besides) and cross out every restaurant, every theater, and every ride that isn't a roller coaster, boat ride, or Dumbo-type ride.

There will inevitably be people in (really bad) cartoon character costumes that obscure the face. They will be free to wander aimlessly around the park without getting mobbed by little kids and disturbingly determined parents. (Nowadays, real characters have to appear at specific "greeting areas" with attendants and well-defined paths for approaching and leaving, because not all guests are all that well-behaved, and even those who are can be very dangerous to a cast member in one of these costumes. "Wandering" characters have not been seen with any reliable frequency since the beginning of the last decade.) There will usually be no sign of "face characters", who are actors/actresses portraying characters who look enough like normal humans that they don't need masks or anything along those lines (think of Aladdin, for instance, or the various Disney Princesses).

If there are any specific ride parodies, they will almost always be of older rides — you'll rarely see a parody of, for instance, Epcot's Test Track. (This has the side effect that, sometimes, the show will parody something that isn't actually there anymore.) Again, this is probably because the writers are working not from a recent guidemap but from their childhood memories. Such parodies will typically be fitted into one of the aforementioned three ride types — if there was a parody of Test Track, for instance, it'd probably be a roller coaster.

Frequently, rides (specific parodies or not) will empty into a gift shop. This is Truth In Television for both Disney and Universal, where any ride of any significance has its own gift shop which is usually conveniently located right where you exit the ride (although some rides built before the concept took hold, such as The Haunted Mansion, have to make do with keeping a merchandise cart nearby).

If there is a parade, it will probably be a) in the daytime and b) clearly based on the Main Street Electrical Parade (which is at night, thus the lights that make it "Electrical"; It has undergone a complete update, with a name change to the Laser Light parade, at WDW, as well ).

Typically avoided in live action, since it's easier to get permission to use an existing theme park than to build your own for the sake of what's usually just one episode. For a time in the mid-1990s, after ABC was bought by Disney, virtually every sitcom on the network did at least one episode at one of the Disney Theme Parks (some were two-parters).

Remember where you're parked, and turn down your sunvisor or they WILL paste a bumper sticker on your car.