Starcruiser, coming in for a landing
On paper, Disney’s Star Wars Galactic Starcuiser—aka “the Star Wars Hotel”—should have been right up my alley, being that I’m a massive fan of Disney Parks, Star Wars, and role playing. Instead, I was more bemused than intrigued, intending to think about going if the price went down and the plague died back a little more. Instead, it’s shutting down after just over a year and a half in operation.
Disney’s marketing was always vague about what the actual experience was—is it a hotel with a lot of theming and meet and greets? An attraction in it’s own right? Larp summer camp? Did they really build a hotel in Florida without a pool or windows that open?
Therefore, I absolutely devoured Adrian Hon’s detailed writeup of his stay, and Jason Snell’s additional comments and links over at Six Colors.. This is by far the clearest description I’ve read of the experience; and while I wasn’t that interested in going before reading this, having read it, I’m still disinterested, but for totally different reasons.
I agree with one point in his writeup wholeheartedly: the marking on this was strange.. Disney advertised it as a deeply themed hotel connected to the Star Wars section of the park. Essentially the next level up in theming their park-connected hotels; the Grand Californian’s side door into California Adventure but without breaking character.
Instead, it’s a deeply themed 2-day full immersion live role playing experience, where you get to take a break and go on some Disney rides in the middle of the day.
It’s hard to know if this is really a “failure”, so much as an experiment that came to a conclusion.
Some thoughts!
First, and I say this with all the love in the world, if I’m going to be locked in a windowless bunker for two days, “Star Wars fans with too much money” is not the demographic I want to be locked in with.
And, look. The key word in “windowless bunker” is “windowless”. Covid is still real; in the world after March 2020, spending two days in such a place with a bunch of strangers is a whole different cost-benefit analysis.
I was going to make a crack here about how a trip for a family of four to the Starcruiser including the airfare to Florida cost more than my college education, but you know what? That’s probably about the right price. Not just because of the clearly high operating costs, but any lower than that, and the temptation to show up dressed as a Star Trek away team, or Doctor Who, or Corben Dallas, would become overwhelming. For six hundred bucks, you might be willing to mess around, but for six grand the buy-in is high enough to make sure everyone is there to actually play as intended.
And, not to go too far down the Trilogy Wars path, but, GenX-er here. The fact that it’s set at some poorly-defined point between the Sequels is fine, makes sense. It has Rey in it, that’s great! She’s a great character, my kids love Rey. But man, if instead that was two days at Echo Base on Hoth, helping Luke trap Wampas and blow up Probe Droids I’d have slapped that credit card down without a moment’s hesitation.
(But, Star Wars Land—excuse me, Galaxy’s Edge—has this same challenge throughout, though. Stars Wars is at least 4 different distinct audiences now, depending on which one was the one you saw when you were nine, and it’s only going to become more so. There’s a reason it’s “Fantasy Land” and not “Sleeping Beauty Land.” It’ll be interesting to see if the more Sequel-specific parts of the park get sanded down to a more “evergreen” median value Star Wars. Or if they retool to be more oriented towards the Disney+ shows, instead of a movie that’s now almost a decade old.)
Speaking of Corben Dallas, I’d probably also have dropped five grand to spend two nights at the Fhloston Paradise?
And maybe this is just me, but I’m deeply weirded out by the number of people who took the First Order path—are there really people who want to pay that much money for the privilege of ratting out beloved characters to space fascists? I feel the same way about the storm troopers who “occupy” sections of the park. Maybe throwing the largest marketing department in the world behind making fascists fun and cuddly isn’t the best possible move here in the Twenties?
Anyway. It sure sounds like for a specific demographic they built the perfect attraction. I usually think of myself as an Extrovert, but personally that all sounds exhausting.
I _am_ looking forward to seeing what they do with what they learned from all this. If nothing else, I really want to wander around that thing they built without the commitment. I’d happily stand in line to get “shuttled up to orbit” to do that bridge training co-op game. I hope the building ends up something like an Epcot pavilion, where you can pop in and wander around for a couple hours in the middle of the afternoon.