Are You Ready For a Tyra Banks Theme Park?

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | February 5, 2019 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | February 5, 2019 |

Tyra Banks is a woman of many talents: Model, TV host, smizer-in-chief, ‘author’, producer, occasional actress, and now she’s coming for Walt Disney’s cryogenically frozen head for the title of theme park maven. That’s right: Tyra Banks is welcoming you all to Modelland.

Described in Variety as a permanent attraction and not a pop-up experience like that weird Museum of Ice Cream you saw all over Instagram, Modelland will bring the ‘spirit of adventure and storytelling’ of Disneyland and Universal Studios ‘to the world of modelling’, according to Banks.

Banks and the company helping her realize her vision haven’t gone into too many details about what this land will look like. In the Variety interview, Banks says that it will ‘be a place where the modeling world meets fantasy, meets entertainment, meets technology, meets retail, meets dining, meets… your fiercest best self you could ever imagine.’ That’s a lot to promise for a modelling themed attraction. Banks hopes that the land will help to define beauty as something for everyone to embrace through the delight of a multi-level ticketed attraction open to all ages. The first location of many (at least Banks hopes) will be at Macerich’s Santa Monica Place.

So, who wants to pay me to go to this thing? Because I’m imagining Country Bear Jamboree with models. Or the Haunted Mansion with the fashion faux pas of decades past. Or the Hall of Presidents but it’s just endless robot Tyras!

If the name Modelland rings a few bells for you, you may remember it as the YA novel Banks wrote. That novel told the story of Tookie De La Crème, who has mismatched eyes and untameable hair and finds herself swept away to Modelland, where a handful of women will become Intoxibellas, who are basically super-powered models. The novel is, to put it mildly, fascinating, and features moments such as the Thigh-High Boot Camp, a hospital for fashion emergencies where the doctors have roller skates instead of feet, and vomiting. Lots and lots of vomiting. It’s also almost 600 pages long. The planned sequel never materialized for some reason. If the real Modelland is anything like this book then we need to start drinking immediately in preparation.