Now that I understand what they're trying to do with the new colors I don't mind it as much. I mean in their defense, the buildings in Das Festhaus haven't painted that way forever to my knowledge.
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Conceptually, I have no problem with trying to liven up Rhinefeld a bit with some color. German towns today do often utilize some bright colors.
THAT SAID, there's something actual German towns and even the fake buildings in Das Festhaus have that Rhinefeld's buildings don't: detail. In the photo above and in so many of the authentic German reference photos I've been digging through this evening, brightly colored buildings are almost always visually broken up by greenery, flower boxes, murals, trim, elaborate woodwork, other buildings with much more muted colors, and even the dark gray streets over which they tower. Bright colors work in authentic German towns because they don't overwhelm the eye—there are plenty of darker, less vibrate, visual elements in the foreground to tone down colors that, in isolation, are quite bold.
Another thing these real German towns have is scale. Because guests are constantly so close to the buildings in Rhinefeld, a single structure almost always fills a guest's entire field of view. That, alone, is a very good reason to use a toned-down color scheme. Just because the exact color being used is
identical to the real thing doesn't mean that it's
portraying an accurate representation of the real thing to guests.
Similarly, another result of Rhinefeld's size is that its narrow walkways and streets frequently run flush against building walls. While in authentic German towns, there's frequently a stone base on the buildings or similar to divide streets from building walls, there's no such visual divide in Rhinefeld. Now, by itself, this may sounds like a minor deal, but there's a compounding factor at work here too: Rhinefeld, like most of the rest of BGW, uses a yellow/orange-hue aggregate whereas the authentic German villages BGW is referencing typically use gray stone. Because Rhinefeld paths already fill a guest's eye with so much yellow/orange, utilizing more yellow/orange in the buildings that interface directly with the pathway makes the same yellow or orange in Rhinefeld look far more garish than that yellow or orange would look against a gray cobblestone path in Germany proper.
I have more—a lot more probably—but you get my point. Building a theme park representation of something is rarely just a matter of taking the real thing and shrinking it down. Scale, setting, perspective, etc all have a direct and measurable impact on perception. BGW's original buildout was painstakingly designed to capture the essence of the Old Country it was built to reflect. To see BGW decide that Rhinefeld—one of the best preserved, most treasured parts of that initial buildout—needs to just become yet another colorful crayon box is just so goddamn frustrating.
So many aspects of BGW
desperately need thematic investment right now and to see the money go here—to defacing one of the least broken, most effectively immersive and transportive, themed areas of Busch Gardens Williamsburg—I'm just utterly dumbfounded and completely disheartened.
