More Musings on the Starcruiser

Over the various overlapping illnesses and convalescences of the last two months I finally caught up with the rest of the western hemisphere and made my way though Jenny Nicholson’s remarkable four-hour review/port-mortem of Disney’s “Galactic Starcruiser”—The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel.

It’s a outstanding piece of work, not only reviewing her own trip, but also providing context and some attempted root-cause analysis for the whole misbegotten project. Go carve out some time to watch it if you haven’t already. It’s the definitive work on the subject.

We’ve covered the Star Wars Hotel on Icecano before, but that was based on a trip report from someone whose trip went well. Nicholson’s trip didn’t go so well, and the ways systems fail often shed a lot more light on how they really function then when they work as intended.

The thing that has always stuck me about the Starcruiser is that it was so clearly three different attractions:

• A heavily-themed hotel with a direct “side-door” connection to the park
• A collection of low-barrier-to-entry interactive “games” somewhere between an arcade and an escape room
• A 2-day LARP summer camp with a stage show at the end

Those are all pretty good ideas, but why did they do them as one thing? All those ideas would have been so much cooler as an actual fancy hotel connected to the park, and then separately an EPCOT-style “Star Wars Pavillion”, in the style of the current space restaurant or the old The Living Seas “submarine base” you got into via the “Hydrolater”.

I thought Nicholson’s sharpest insight about the whole debacle was that all the “features” of the hotel were things originally promoted as being part of the main Star Wars Land, but the hotel allowed them to put them behind an extra paywall.

I maintain my belief I alluded to last summer that I don’t think the hotel was ever meant to last very long, it really does feel like a short-term experiment to try out a bunch of ideas and tech in a way where they can charge through the nose for access to the “beta”. So many strange decisions make more sense if you assume it was never meant to last for more than about 2 years. (But still! Why build it way out there instead of something you could turn into a more-permanent fixture?)

But that’s all old news; that was stuff we were speculating on before the thing even opened. No, what I’ve been stewing on since I watched this video was the LARP aspect. Nicholson’s video was the first thing I’d seen or read that really dug into what the “role play” aspect of the experience was like and how that worked—or didn’t. And I can’t believe how amateur-hour it was.

Credit where credit was due, Disney was going for something interesting: an open-to-the-public Diet LARP that still had actual NPC characters played by paid actors with storylines and semi-scripted events. Complexity-wise, not all the way up to a “real” LARP, but certainly up above an escape room or a murder mystery party or a ren faire or something of those ilk. Plus, you have to assume basically everyone who will every play it is doing so for the first time, no veteran players. And at a premium price.

One would think this would come with a fairly straightforward set of rules or guidelines; I imagined an email with a title along the lines of “To ensure you have the best possible experience…” And instead, they just… didn’t?

For example, the marketing made a big deal about “starring in your own story” and guests were strongly encouraged to dress up. But they really didn’t want guests to use character names. That seems mostly logistical, with guest profiles and whatnot tied to their real names. That’s the sort of obvious-in-retrospect but not-so-much ahead of time detail that is the reason Session Zero exists! This isn’t Paranoia, it’s not cheating to tell the players how to play the game, just tell them! For $6000, I’d expect to be told ahead of time “please wear costumes but please don’t use a fake name.”

But it’s the lack of any sort of GameMaster/StoryTeller that stunned me. The just-shy of 40-year DM in me kept watching those video clips going “no, no, no, someone put your thumb on the scale there.” The interaction that really got me is the part of the video where she’s trying and failing to get pulled into the First Order story, and is attempting to have a conversation with the Officer actor to make this happen, and they are just talking past each other. And this made my skin crawl, because this is perfect example of a moment where you need to be able to make the “out of game” hand sign and just tell someone what’s happening. I can’t believe there wasn’t a way to break out of kayfabe and ask for help. Again, this is basic session zero safety tools shit. This is shit my 12 year old figured out on his own with his friends. Metaphorically, and maybe literally, there should always be a giant handle you can pull that means “this isn’t working for me”.

Look, this is not an original view, but for 6 grand, you should be able to do everything wrong and still get a killer experience. You shouldn’t be begging an underpaid SoCal improv actor to let you play the game you paid for halfway though your trip.

I get that they were trying to do something new for Disney, but The Mind's Eye Theatre for Vampire came out in 1993. Running a safe and fun LARP is a solved problem.

I get wanting to make something that’s as mainstream and rookie-friendly as possible, and that you don’t want to just appeal to the sort of folks that can tell you who the seven founding clans of the Camarilla were. But something we talk about a lot in tabletop RPGs is “calling for buy-in”, and holy shit clicking CONFIRM ORDER on a screen with a juicy four digit number of dollars on it is the most extreme RPG buy-in I’ve ever heard of.

I know I keep coming back to the price, and that’s partly because for a price that premium you should get an equivalently premium experience, but more importantly: there was no-one casual at this thing. No one “impulse-bought” a trip on the Starcruiser. Everyone there was as bought-in as anyone ever has been, and they couldn’t figure out how to deliver an experience as good as any random night in the park with the other vampires in the sleepy NorCal farming town I went to college in.

It’s tempting to attribute all that to general Disney arrogance, but I don’t think so. It all feels so much stupider than that. Arrogance would be ignoring the prior art, this feels more like no-one could be bothered to find out if there was any? The most expensive piece of half-ass work I have ever seen. This all could have worked? Beyond the obvious budget cuts and trying to scale down, this could have worked. It’s wild to me that they’d spend that much money, and energy, and marketing mindshare, and then not make sure it did. I mean, really, no one employed by Imagineering used to be the Prince of Glendale or something? Unlikely. I don’t think anyone intentionally sandbagged this project, but it sure doesn’t look like anyone involved cared if it was successful.

Weird.

Doctor Who and the Star Beast (2023)

Beep the Meep on Disney+. What a time to be alive.

Spoilers Ahoy

Kicking off the 60th anniversary proper, we have first of 3 specials with Tennant back as the Tenth, excuse me Fourteenth Doctor.

It was great! Perfect execution of what it was there to do, put Tennant and Tate back on screen having a throwback adventure. It’s the big anniversary party! Let’s replay some of the greatest hits!

On paper, this is a classic Russell T Davies season opener; funny, exciting, big feelings, but mostly about setting the table for what comes next. It looks great, and Rachel Talalay directs the hell out of it, making sure every penny of that Disney money is up on the screen¹. And after the last couple of seasons (and disappointments like Loki), it was a breath of fresh air to watch something so confidently competent.

I’d love to know how this played to a new audience, which presumably the Disney+ deal brought in. The opening narration does, I think, about as good a job as you could of spinning up a new audience on what they missed. And I dearly love the juxtaposition of the gorgeous 4k shots of Tennant in space cutting back to the blatantly standard definition “previously on” clips. Let the new kids know that this is a show with more enthusiasm than budget and that’s whats so great about it right from the start.

Everyone slides back into their old roles immediately. In a lot of ways, it’s as if no time has passed at all, one could easily imagine a version of this kicking off season 5 in 2010.

But both Tennant and Tate have visibly spent some time thinking about how to play older versions of their characters, both the characters are slightly different, changed by the experiences of the last decade and a half. Tate especially does some really nice work with “Donna, but a mom now”, where all that energy now has a place to focus, and informed by her relationship with her own mom. Speaking of Donna’s mom, Jacqueline King’s Sylvia, who was the third and least interesting of RTD’s “companion’s moms as bad mother-n-laws” is a million miles better here than she ever was before; here her objections have merit rather than just being obstructionist or cruel, all that energy redirected into a woman desperately trying to keep her daughter safe. And in addition, she gets to be the voice of the audience, saying “wait a minute, you said if this happened it would be bad!”

Finally, I had some initial qualms with Tennant coming back as a new incarnation, as opposed to “just” reprising the Tenth. But a few minutes in, it becomes obvious why RTD made this choice. Both the Doctor and Donna are older now, and emotionally the same amount older; all “that” was years ago now, they’ve both moved on, done other things, lived their lives, and now both older characters have come back together to deal with unfinished business. You couldn’t make that work with a version of Tennant’s Doctor from somewhere in that gap between Ood Sigma’s warning and his arrival on the Ood Sphere. This is a version of the character who’s past River Song, who spent some time with a hole in his memory where² Clara should be, and was a woman for a while. They’re older, and like the author, has a very different take on what happened in the 2008 season finale than they had at the time.

On that point, though: More artists should get the chance to go back and revisit their previous work.6 As much as this was a big reunion special, this was also very much an older author in conversation with his younger self, and handling some unfinished business. Specifically: It’s pretty clear RTD has been thinking about Donna’s end ever since 2008.

RTD always enjoyed giving his companions tragic endings; nearly everyone who travled with the Doctor between 2005 and 2010 came away worse for the experience. Donna though—I’m not sure that was supposed to be as tragic as it landed. I suspect RTD was going for “the grownup in the room doing something unfortunate but necessary”, and then Tennant and Tate played it as the assault that it really was. It’s clear that stuck with him, and it’s also clear that the fairly stinging rebuke of the story from the end of “Hell Bent/Heaven Sent” also landed.

RTD is—obviously—a very strong, very talented writer, but in his time with Doctor Who he had a bad habit of writing very compelling characters with complex emotional journeys, and then at the climax of their story, taking all their agency away and making it a story about The Doctor’s lack of good choices. Very few characters ever got a say in what happened to them, they would get backed into a corner and then the Doctor would just choose which of their bad choices they would get.

It’s a mistake to read too much into this I think? I always suspected this was less of a statement of purpose and more a factor of the fact that they made a whole lot of Doctor Who very quickly. The production schedule didn’t leave a whole lot of room for “rethinking ideas”. “Lonely God” was a very successful note for the show to play, and it makes sense to focus a finale on the character who’ll still be around to deal with the fallout next year, so it makes sense that in a pinch they’d head towards “David Tennant crying in the rain” as fast as possible.³

With The Star Beast, RTD goes out of his way to fix both issues. The plot is carefully constructed to give Donna the choice she never got back in ’08 to either get her memories back and die or live as she has been. And then, having made the choice she would have made then, but for reasons that are new, the show lets her (and her daughter) figure out the solution themselves, reminding the Doctor that just because he can’t think of a solution, that doesn’t mean there is one. You can almost hear RTD muttering to himself “see, this was how you should have done it!”

But speaking of unfinished business, The Star Beast itself feels like one too. The comic story this special is based on was a very successful, well regarded entry from the 80s, and it’s on the obvious short-list of spin-off media that could be adapted for the Main Show. It’s impossible to believe that the RTD that was adapting or recycling Jubilee, Spare Parts, and Human Nature wasn’t thinking about Beep the Meep. Heck, _”Smith and Jones”, the opening of Series 3, has a seemingly friendly old woman being chased by alien troopers, only for it to turn out that the Judoon are really the police and the old woman a criminal. I’d be very surprised if that didn’t start as a Star Beast adaptation, just continually rounded down to something the show could afford until it was two rhino-men costumes in a hospital. But now, goosed by Disney’s investment and a decade of computer graphics advancements, we get the real article.

Anyway, I loved it. Perfect job resolving the left-over business, now on to things to come. As I write this, we still don’t know anything of substance about that second special, which they’ve kept almost totally under wraps. What are they hiding for next week? Can’t wait to find out.

— Because I couldn’t help myself, I went and checked the tops of the waves of the reactions on the ‘net. And, as you might imagine, all the folks that were hoping for the end of “Woke Dr. Who” are all losing their minds, and: good.

But, one of the other criticisms I saw was that The Star Beast wasn’t very subtle. As if subtlety automatically meant high-quality! And look, subtle is great when it’s Hemmingway dancing around what really happened to Jake in the margins of The Sun Also Rises, but not when you have something to say. Subtle isn’t always a virtue. Sometimes “Subtle” is just “Cowardice.” Whispering when you should be shouting.

When it was announced that RTD was coming back to do more Doctor Who, the obvious question was: why? He already had a tremendously successul run, he can clearly do whatever he wants, why come back? What’s the upside?

In interviews, he always says something like he’s always been a fan, and never stopped thinking up ideas, and was excited to do more when given the chance—and I think that’s true. It also seems likely that the show wasn’t doing as well as anyone wanted, and with the transition to being make by Julie Gardner and Jane Trantor’s Bad Wolf productions that there was some strong desire to get RTD back to relaunch the show the same way he did in ’05.

But I think there was something else. He’s been a busy guy the last couple of years, between Years and Years and It’s a Sin, and he’s had plenty of time to be out talking into microphones, and it’s been clear that he’s angry. The last decade or so have provided plenty to be angry about! It seemed to me the reason to come back and do a show like Who now, on top of those other things, was the size of platform. A man with nothing left to prove but plenty to say.

I was going to bury this in a link, but no: go watch this acceptance speech he gave for one of the awards won by It’s a Sin. That’s not a guy who’s coming back to Doctor Who to do a series of interchangeable Base-Under-Siege stories. He’s got things to say.

And after The Star Beast, I’m pretty sure I was right. It’s a very angry show, but focused. It’s determined to show a world where diversity is a good thing, where UNIT officers wear turbans, where wheelchairs are an advantage5, where the secret to saving the day is being Trans, where surface readings based on appearance are wrong. It’s perfect that they waited until now to use The Star Beast—at the time it was calling out the parent show for constantly using disfigurement as a shorthand for evil, and now they get to use the same story to do the same thing again.

It’s a bold, brave statement of what progressive Doctor Who should actually look like (as opposed to what we’ve been getting the last half-decade.)

There’s always a portion of the audience—any audience—that would rather “whatever this is about” be stuffed down under the covers, hidden far enough away that they don’t have to notice or think about it. The kind of people who think art should “soothe, not distract.”

But fundamentally, art is about things. If you have things to say, subtle isn’t the way to go.

We’re in an age where we don’t need “subtle”, we need people to stand up and speak clearly. And if you can use Disney’s money to do it to a wide audience on BBC One, so much the better.

---

1. There were a couple of beats that seemed specifically built around the team giggling “look what we can do with this extra cash!” The holographic UI on the sonic screwdriver was one. But I thought the biggest was the opening credits, that had real “we always wanted to do it like this but couldn’t afford it” energy. Those drone shots of the battle between the Wraith Warriors and UNIT! And, of course, that new Console Room.

2. That is what happened at the end of Twice Upon a Time, right? Twelve got his memory back?

3. There’s a quote from RTD somewhere⁴ bemoaning that it’s the Doctor in balloon at the end of “The Next Doctor” instead of David Morrissey’s Jackson Lake. And he’s right, it’s Lake’s story, and Lake should be the one to resolve it. But this plays into what we’re talking about—in a pinch, go with a closeup of Tennant looking serious.

4. I could have sworn this was in The The Writer’s Tale, but a cursory exam didn’t turn it up. Maybe one of the DVD commentaries that used to be on the BBC website?

5. Ruth Madeley’s characer—the wheelchair using UNIT scientific advisor Shirley Anne Bingham—is a great character on their own, but represents something extra coming a week or two after RTD refused to keep Davros in a wheelchair.

6. The thing I kept thinking of while watching this was Fury Road. Very different content, obviously, but the same air of a creator looking back at his past work and disagreeing with his past self.

Doctor Who @ 60

And, squeaking in just before midnight, the best show of all time turned 60 years old today.

There’s a whole bunch of exciting stuff coming up, very much looking forward to seeing what this next iteration of the show is going to be like. There’s probably going to be a real spike of Doctor Who related content around these parts over the next few weeks?

(And, Beep the Meep is in the “Coming Soon” section of Disney+. What a time to be alive.)

Wait, Which Hundred?

The Disney Corp turned 100, and as a company thats never willing to let a good “limited time” logo go to waste, we’re fully in the thick of “Disney 100” merch. To wit: this week’s announcement of a 100-film “Legacy Animation” box set for fifteen hudred bucks. That is a lot of money, but in that way where you stop and go, “well, fifteen bucks a movie isn’t that bad, really,” but still never consider buying the thing.

That said, in a world where Disney seemed to be moving away from physical media over the last few years, between this containing several titles that hadn’t previously gotten a widely-available blu-ray, and the new remaster of Cinderella, we might finally be moving past the “streaming only” era.

The contents are pretty great, though. Because: which 100 movies? There’s only sixty-one “Disney Animated Movies” in the way most people mean it. Okay, throw in the Pixar movies, thats another 27. Add Henry Selick’s Nightmare before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach and we’re up to…. 90?

Imagine the meeting! “The box says 100, we need ten more!”

You can’t just add all the DisneyToon direct-to-video sequels, because then we’d be up near to 150. The remit is “fully animated,” so you really can’t throw in Mary Poppins, Bedknobs and Broomsticks , or Roger Rabbit.

So which ten do you pick?

I’d love to have been a fly on the wall the day they gritted their teeth and picked the last ten:

“Goody Movie!”

Yes!”

“DuckTales Movie!”

“No!”

“First TinkerBell movie!”

“Yes!”

“Tinkerbell sequels?”

“No!”

“Beauty and the beast mid-quel?”

“No!”

“That piglet movie?”

“Yes!”

You can almost smell the flop sweat from here.

—

And, two asides:

First, as always when Disney releases something from the Deep Vault, the usual suspects show up and demand to know where Song of the South is, like it’s some kind of gotcha. These people always tell on themselves because it’s Song they bring up, instead of Victory Through Airpower, or So Dear to my Heart, or any other movie that’s slipped into the freezer section of the Vault. And look, if you can read the web, you can scare up a copy of Song, it’s not that hard to find. But let me save you the time: not only is it crazy racist, it’s also just a a bad movie. It’s not good. If you really need to watch some vintage Disney racism, this box set does include Saludos Amigos, so go nuts.

Second, there was a weird tone in a lot of the coverage along the lines of “physical media? How quaint!”. And, man, that would have been a great take in 2021, but unless you can show me where to watch the episodes I missed of Jeff Goldblum’s show, maybe that’s not the best angle anymore?

Conspiracies Confirmed

One of my absolute favorite little unimportant conspiracy theories of the last few years was that the Trump animatronic in the Disney World Hall of Presidents was actually a Clinton animatronic that was reworked at the last second.

It was certainly a weird-looking robot, below the usual standard Disney Imagineering holds themselves to. And you could see how they might have been so confident in how the election would go that they got a jump on the new robot, only to realize they had it wrong, and then maybe weren’t too inspired to do it well the second time? And then, when they rolled out the Biden robot, the new background-player Trump looked much more accurate. So, maybe? It was one of those persistant rumors since early 2017. Over the years, it sorta faded away, one of the those strange Disney urban legends.

And then Alex Goldman goes and gets is more or less confirmed in My Favorite Conspiracy Theory Confirmed.

(Turns out, this was a lot of people’s favorite conspiracy theory.

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.