YMMV / Efteling

• Awesome Music: Efteling is widely praised for its beautiful score to many rides, but Villa Volta's epic soundtrack quite possibly tops them all.
  • A close second is "Pardoes Promenade" which is heard as guests leave the park entrance ("The House of the Five Sense") and enter the park's hub. Especially the orchestrated version and a variation heard near the dancing fountains and Polles Keuken.
• Adaptation Displacement: It can be argued that some of the more obscure fairy tales and folk legends that are adapted in the park are more known for their presence at the Efteling than for their literary origins. Characters like Longneck and Holle Bolle Gijs spring to mind.
• Base-Breaking Character: The addition of the Sprookjesboom^note Fairytale Tree from the eponymous media franchise into the park's Fairytale Forest is somewhat contested among fans. While the tree is very popular among park guests, some fans despise the fact that the tree explicitly refers to the fact that he originated in a television series and that he tells stories that make use of the trope Fairy Tale Free-for-All, while the fairy tales depicted in the forest itself are considered as separate entities which do not interfere with one another.
• Cry for the Devil: Villa Volta somewhat invokes this effect. The ride's lead character, Hugo van den Loonsche Duynen, is depicted as a tormented and cursed old man who seeks to find his final rest. His charismatic nature makes it too easy to forget that he was once the leader of a satanic gang of robbers that terrorised the countryside during several years, and that his current state of being is actually the punishment he got for his evil deeds.
• Friendly Fandoms: With the Disney Theme Parks community, due to Efteling and the Disney Parks being family-friendly, intrinsically themed lands that place a big emphasis on atmosphere and telling fantastical stories through their rides and lands over providing simple thrills. It helps that Disney and Efteling are Friendly Rivals who have both taken plenty of inspiration from each other over the years, with Efteling outright helping Disney Imagineers with the development of Disneyland Paris.
• Fridge Brilliance: The curse that torments Hugo van den Loonsche Duynen in Villa Volta can only be broken when his house is entered by 'a gentle person with the unblemished conscience of a newborn child'. As the curse is never broken, it implies that every visitor who has ever been to Villa Volta has at least something on their conscience. And the fact that the ride is not accessible for pregnant women and babies, makes it virtually impossible to find someone who has the clear conscience Hugo needs.
• Spiritual Successor: The park has sometimes closed older attractions and replaced them with new ones, but many attractions that originated as replacements of other rides, still kept some of the aspects of its predecessor:
  • The Water Organ, a classic theatre show with lights and fountains from the 1960s that was located in the Carousel Palace, has been permanently closed since 2010. In the meantime, the park has opened the fountain spectacle Aquanura in 2012, which is essentialy a much more modern and spectacular version of the type of show that the Water Organ was.
    • From another point of view, Aquanura also functions as a Spiritual Successor to the still existing fountain of the Frog Prince in the Fairytale Forest, which was one of the original attractions of the Forest when it opened in 1952. As an homage to the Frog Prince fountain, the fountains of the Aquanura show are set into motion by four large frogs.
  • The wooden roller coaster Pegasus was replaced in 2010 by Joris en de Draak, wich is also a wooden roller coaster, albeit a duelling one.
  • The bobsled coaster Bob was demolished in late 2019 and in its place came a double powered roller coaster for families called Max & Moritz. Although the latter is a very different type of roller coaster and has a different target audience, it kept the essence of the Yodel Land theming of its predecessor.
• Values Dissonance:
  • The teacup ride "Monsieur Cannibale" has frequently been blamed for featuring a stereotypical cannibal African tribesman. The ride closed in late 2021 and got a retheming.
  • "Carnaval Festival" (an indoor ride featuring puppets representing people from different parts of the world — often compared to Disneyworld's ""it's a small world"") previously featured a stereotypical savage tribe as well as East Asian characters portrayed with buck teeth and big glasses like in some 1940s Wartime Cartoons. Both kinds of caricatures were replaced by more mindful portrayals of Africans and East Asians in 2019.

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