There's not much I dislike about Animal Kingdom, but I'll submit a few minor quibbles:
- I wish it opened earlier so you'd have a better chance of seeing the animals on the trails awake and about before the day gets hot.
- It is indeed hot.
- I wish we'd gotten the land devoted to mythical creatures that had been proposed back in its inception; I think that would have been really cool. Pandora has won me over, but a land of dragons and that sort of thing would have had more inherent interest for me.
- The parade being gone is kind of a bummer.
I'm with you Brian. I don't get all the animosity. Especially from folks who know the backstory. Imagineers never intended for it to have a "Disney" theme. That's like saying why didn't they give Pandora a Disney theme? The section offers one major ride, a couple of kid rides, a couple eating spots, a gift shop, and a play area for kids to run around in. Restaurantosaurus has a pretty decent menu and is one of the few QS places that has a topping station and free drink refills. Quite honestly it's very comfortable in there and plenty of things to look at inside. We like Dinoland too!
DinoLand USA
It's kind of funny to me and kind of sad to read all the hate for Chester & Hester's Dino-Rama. A photo of one of the big, goofy dinosaurs holding up the sign at the entrance to the carnival area has been my phone wallpaper for...shoot, over a year now, since I took it on my January 2018 trip. I remember taking a picture at the entrance of Dino-Rama and just being so happy to be in WDW.
For me, even before I knew how the backstory linked up, I always loved the Dino-Rama. I love it because it's the flip side of the coin represented by the Dino Institute. Dinosaurs are, culturally speaking, this great scientific mystery we've slowly been solving for centuries--but they're also these nearly mythical creatures that have found their way into popular culture. They're monsters, dragons, children's cartoons, art, entertainment. I've always gotten a lot of joy out of roadside dinosaur statues wherever they crop up (there are a surprising number of them throughout America; there's something about dinosaurs that just speaks to us). Exiting the more serious Dino Institute area and finding yourself in the Dino-Rama always made me think about the dichotomy of the different concepts and meanings we assign to dinosaurs, and I always took it to be an exploration of how we relate to dinosaurs both as real animals and as a cultural concept.
That being said, I could take or leave the games. Not sure what else they'd put there, though, since taking out the games wouldn't really make room for another attraction.
what is the backstory of Dinoland - like others, I never have figured out how it fit in Disney
The wiki link in the post I quoted from
@Bullseye has an explanation of the backstory. I never caught it until it was explained to me, tbh.
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