003. The Wonderland Issue

Wonderland Entertainment has been throwing events at Wet 'n Wild, the old Hawaiian Waters Adventure Park, for a couple years now. I've been to a Winter and a Digital Wonderland. The two main problems with these events are that they're all the way in Kapolei, which is pretty damn far from UH Manoa, and they're the same thing every time.  

I for one was already getting tired of the events themselves, and that was before Wonderland Entertainment scheduled Afrojack for the same weekend as Porter Robinson, started posting entitled-sounding Facebook posts, and started bringing down bullshit for their main acts. Now, they'd need to bring down someone incredibly awesome for me to still bother going to any of their events anymore. Otherwise, I'm just plain over it and I'd rather support cooler groups like Eightball Hawaii with fresh, innovative ideas. (Edit: thanks to Stanley for reminding me about Livewire too).

But maybe I'm the only one - I've still heard excited kidsos talking about the raving prospects in the weeks leading up to Wonderland's last couple events (though I've heard that the whole Afrojack/Porter thing ended up costing them  money).  Once January gets closer it'll be interesting to see if the hype surrounding the second Winter Wonderland is as big as it was last year for the first (which was awesome because they picked someone dope for it).

(Edit: Dec. 17): Wonderland posted their promotion video from the footage they got at the Afrojack show here in Honolulu. It's a mediocre video and it certainly doesn't reverse my assertions that they're going downhill already. It's only 2 minutes long, the song is alright at best, the "babe factor" (let's face it, an important part of selling future tickets for events like this is showcasing the amount of attractive females that attended your previous events - like it or not) is 'meh', and - despite the videographer's valiant attempts to prevent us from noticing - there, frankly, just aren't that many people at the damn thing. 

Nowhere in this video do we see the typical promo shot - an establishing shot, from as high above as possible, that tries to show the maximum amount of bodies possible.  Based on what I understand to be the capacity of Wet N' Wild during events like this, and based off what we can see in the video, there looks to be no more than a few hundred people in attendance.  

Love Fest Hawaii 2011 (From Go Ventures), I believe, filled capacity, meaning 10,000 tickets sold. 

Considering the costs of bringing an artist like Afrojack down to Hawaii ($60,000 minimum, plus costs for the venue, equipment, staff etc. and with ticket prices ranging from $35 - $50) I'd guess that they only broke even, or certainly didn't make what they intended. Hopefully it'll be a wake up call, and they'll rethink their style and their event strategy.

Like I said on Facebook, my first rave was a Wonderland event with Skrillex as the headliner. It was truly awesome. I wish they'd head back in that direction - or that I could reverse time and re-experience that first night - which is out of Wonderland's control, I'm afraid.