Prop Collector
Sr Member
I hope George sold his Disney shares.
Disney wants more 'Star Wars' in its theme parks
- Thread starter GotWookiee
- Start date
I agree that I don't think setting it during the OT or PT would've have made a difference either because the concept itself is flawed. I do disagree with the strategy of promoting the Disney era movies though. It sounds practical to cross promote the current slate of media with the park experience but this philosophy suggests that fans will automatically invest in it simply because it's associated with a brand they love. In other words, you create the experience and build an enthusiasm for it. In reality, the opposite is true. You should take what fans are enthusiastic about and build an experience around that. What Disney did is akin to if Universal made the Wizarding World about Fantastic Beasts and not Harry Potter. People want to see Darth Vader and Boba Fett and R2, not random spy lady we have no history with that sneaks around hiding from the troopers. If they were thinking that kids were going to be the target demographic, they were sorely mistaken. Kids do not care about Star Wars they way we did and the ones that do I guarantee most of them care more about the original & prequel characters than the newer ones. Just walk through a walmart or target and you'll notice the Disney era merch doesn't sell. Even the original characters struggle to compete against Nintendo or Marvel.
Galaxy's edge is full of high-end merchandise. CLEARLY they were intending to cater to adults and yet they set it in the sequel era. It's actually kind of astounding how much of a blunder it was for Disney to go this direction.
Right there with everyone saying promising concept with poor execution. If they were going to charge what they did, they needed to step up what was delivered. The exterior needed to sell the immersion. Something like a proper spaceport similar to this one in AOTC would've been a good place to start:
Many/most of the ships we know have features that point to lateral docking, rather than going up a boarding ramp as the main ingress. Even if it were all indoors, the illusion could be created to sell it. Anyone who's been to an Ikea store has seen some of their display rooms set up with brightly lit cityscapes visible through the windows. With things like the Volume, with forced-perspective, with wraparound screens... A convincing experience could be created of leaving a terminal through a boarding tube to the starliner, with something like the above visible through the windows in the gantry.
This would also allow the Imagineers to change out what planet, spaceport, and vessel people were experiencing -- at minimal expense. The Star Tours ride did that with various ride experiences visible through the front viewport (helped by the simulator pistons), and that was 1980s technology! If they had multiple boarding tubes made, they could swap those out, too, to further sell it. With the universal docking ports on many of the Star Wars ships (Millennium Falcon, Tantive IV, Radiant VII, etc.), you could create a wide variety of traveling experiences inside a single building.
Or, to tie it in to Black Spire, leave through their spaceport, and -- thanks to Disney magic -- the facility slowly rotates away from that boarding tube to one or another to -- like a proper cruise -- "land" on other planets for the passengers to disembark and look around a bit. Could create vignettes of Coruscant, Cloud City, Canto Bight, Kamino, or a variety of others, depending on what you book.
Then there's the shipboard experience... They've known since Star Tours that, if the content remains the same forever, the ride will lose appeal. If the program on something like the Galactic Starcruiser remains immutably set, the return appeal is minimal (some people will want to re-experience the same thing, yes, but many more won't). Escape room companies run into this. Once you know the solution, you can't re-do the same room. So they are constantly coming up with new scenarios and new puzzles and swapping things out periodically to keep people coming in the doors. One of the best I've ever heard of is an entire house, each room of which has its own puzzle to get out of, and, like a murder-mystery dinner theater, there are actors around who are more NPCs to give the players hints and to be asked questions...
Rather than a set program, a more immersive experience might be to have it be customer-driven. Side quests, mysteries to unravel, fetch quests -- something to make people feel more directly involved, and not like they're just watching something they can't impact. Pirates attack and passengers are taken hostage, until they're freed by whomever. There's a power failure and some of the passengers are sealed in a section and need to find a way to restore power to get out. Big luxury starliners, small chartered transports, High Republic, Prequel Era, OT era, ST era...
A bit more effort and engineering would've made something that could have been a legit draw for more than a generation. We've seen with things like the Wizarding World that these companies need to step up their game. What wowed crowds in the '60s, '80s, or '00s no longer cuts it. They have to compete with VR becoming more mainstream. They have to sell the whole experience, not just the visual of it. And they have to make it affordable enough to get the numbers coming in. As more and more details of this rolled in, as we got firsthand accounts of what it was like... it sounded neat, I wanted to do it, but for the price they were asking, I could think of at least a dozen things I'd rather do with that money before this. Something like I describe above is well within Disney's technical capability, and would have pushed the attraction way, way up to something like third or fourth place on my priority list. Which is saying more than it might sound like.
Many/most of the ships we know have features that point to lateral docking, rather than going up a boarding ramp as the main ingress. Even if it were all indoors, the illusion could be created to sell it. Anyone who's been to an Ikea store has seen some of their display rooms set up with brightly lit cityscapes visible through the windows. With things like the Volume, with forced-perspective, with wraparound screens... A convincing experience could be created of leaving a terminal through a boarding tube to the starliner, with something like the above visible through the windows in the gantry.
This would also allow the Imagineers to change out what planet, spaceport, and vessel people were experiencing -- at minimal expense. The Star Tours ride did that with various ride experiences visible through the front viewport (helped by the simulator pistons), and that was 1980s technology! If they had multiple boarding tubes made, they could swap those out, too, to further sell it. With the universal docking ports on many of the Star Wars ships (Millennium Falcon, Tantive IV, Radiant VII, etc.), you could create a wide variety of traveling experiences inside a single building.
Or, to tie it in to Black Spire, leave through their spaceport, and -- thanks to Disney magic -- the facility slowly rotates away from that boarding tube to one or another to -- like a proper cruise -- "land" on other planets for the passengers to disembark and look around a bit. Could create vignettes of Coruscant, Cloud City, Canto Bight, Kamino, or a variety of others, depending on what you book.
Then there's the shipboard experience... They've known since Star Tours that, if the content remains the same forever, the ride will lose appeal. If the program on something like the Galactic Starcruiser remains immutably set, the return appeal is minimal (some people will want to re-experience the same thing, yes, but many more won't). Escape room companies run into this. Once you know the solution, you can't re-do the same room. So they are constantly coming up with new scenarios and new puzzles and swapping things out periodically to keep people coming in the doors. One of the best I've ever heard of is an entire house, each room of which has its own puzzle to get out of, and, like a murder-mystery dinner theater, there are actors around who are more NPCs to give the players hints and to be asked questions...
Rather than a set program, a more immersive experience might be to have it be customer-driven. Side quests, mysteries to unravel, fetch quests -- something to make people feel more directly involved, and not like they're just watching something they can't impact. Pirates attack and passengers are taken hostage, until they're freed by whomever. There's a power failure and some of the passengers are sealed in a section and need to find a way to restore power to get out. Big luxury starliners, small chartered transports, High Republic, Prequel Era, OT era, ST era...
A bit more effort and engineering would've made something that could have been a legit draw for more than a generation. We've seen with things like the Wizarding World that these companies need to step up their game. What wowed crowds in the '60s, '80s, or '00s no longer cuts it. They have to compete with VR becoming more mainstream. They have to sell the whole experience, not just the visual of it. And they have to make it affordable enough to get the numbers coming in. As more and more details of this rolled in, as we got firsthand accounts of what it was like... it sounded neat, I wanted to do it, but for the price they were asking, I could think of at least a dozen things I'd rather do with that money before this. Something like I describe above is well within Disney's technical capability, and would have pushed the attraction way, way up to something like third or fourth place on my priority list. Which is saying more than it might sound like.
Riceball
Master Member
What you say makes a lot of sense, the only problem with doing this with the Starcruiser are the interactive elements and the fact that a visit to Galaxy's Edge is part of the package. The windows and announcements are easy enough, but there are all of the interactive elements which would require some downtime to reconfigure everything even if the app based aspects wouldn't need that. Then there's the show element, which would be the most difficult and take the longest to develop and change. It's definitely doable but it would require either a second cast that would rehearse the new show while the current one is "playing" or significant downtime for the existing cast to learn a whole new show. B both would be costly and something the suits wouldn't like and would probably not allow, thus either nixing the idea of a changing show experience or lesser experience because the cast has minimal time to learn each new show.
OddballFett
Active Member
"Now, you too can experience the luxury of a prison cell immediately prior to imminent destruction!"
"Now, you too can experience the luxury of a prison cell immediately prior to imminent destruction!"
Now there’s a great idea for a hotel with a themed attraction;
Guests get to interact with the characters from the Shawshank-verse, including fleeing from “the sisters” in the laundry room (remember to throw the lye into their eyes!), taking beatings from the guards who “turn over their cells” (guest rooms) to find contraband, and having to crawl through an actual sewer system in order to escape…I mean “exit” the hotel experience.
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TazMan2000
Master Member
NakedMoleRat
Master Member
They probably gave away more free trips to Youtubers then they had actual paying guests.
What you're talking about is more reconfiguring the existing attraction, where I'm talking about how it could have been executed differently from the concept stage on. Taking into account branching stories, multiple "ships" and casts, routine-resettable (and custom-configurable) interactive/animatronic setpieces, etc.
The conceit would/could have been "you've been on a stopover at Black Spire on Batuu, and it's time to return to your ship, which is a:
• Chartered tramp freighter you and a few others have booked passage on. It's not glamorous, but it's cheap. Unfortunately, it's also meant having to go along with the owners' scheduled stops along the way to your eventual destination.
• Moderately-appointed starliner that's a bit past her heyday, but still reflects the luxury built into her a couple generations ago. You took an early retirement from your Corporate Sector job and are determined to see a bit of the Outer Rim before you went mad behind a deck.
• A brand-new Mon Cal starliner, the first since the declaration of a New Republic. With the civil war now ended and peace returning to the galaxy, you and your family felt the time was long overdue to make a fresh start of it.
And so on, and so on. People could scroll through the options before booking. They'd be given a day and time to report to the spaceport to board their ship. Different people booking on different ships would be given other times to embark. The ship they then got on and the experience they had would never be exactly the same twice, even if they book the same scenario on the same ship, because of the impact other guests can have on the way things go and end up. What you're talking about above wouldn't even be a factor if they'd planned for something like this from the start.
And it all could've been done with a handful of rotating (literally and figuratively) mini-hotels contained within a larger, camouflaged building, and the rest conveyed with smoke, mirrors, and Disney magic.
NakedMoleRat
Master Member
Now you’re talking about at $10,000 trip.
"Now, you too can experience the luxury of a prison cell immediately prior to imminent destruction!"
"Many Bothans died, as prisoners in detention cell block 1138 on both Death Stars, when the Rebel Alliance destroyed the reactor core(s)"
Inquisitor Peregrinus said:
What you're talking about is more reconfiguring the existing attraction, where I'm talking about how it could have been executed differently from the concept stage on. Taking into account branching stories, multiple "ships" and casts, routine-resettable (and custom-configurable) interactive/animatronic setpieces, etc.
The conceit would/could have been "you've been on a stopover at Black Spire on Batuu, and it's time to return to your ship, which is a:
• Chartered tramp freighter you and a few others have booked passage on. It's not glamorous, but it's cheap. Unfortunately, it's also meant having to go along with the owners' scheduled stops along the way to your eventual destination.
• Moderately-appointed starliner that's a bit past her heyday, but still reflects the luxury built into her a couple generations ago. You took an early retirement from your Corporate Sector job and are determined to see a bit of the Outer Rim before you went mad behind a deck.
• A brand-new Mon Cal starliner, the first since the declaration of a New Republic. With the civil war now ended and peace returning to the galaxy, you and your family felt the time was long overdue to make a fresh start of it.
And so on, and so on. People could scroll through the options before booking. They'd be given a day and time to report to the spaceport to board their ship. Different people booking on different ships would be given other times to embark. The ship they then got on and the experience they had would never be exactly the same twice, even if they book the same scenario on the same ship, because of the impact other guests can have on the way things go and end up. What you're talking about above wouldn't even be a factor if they'd planned for something like this from the start.
And it all could've been done with a handful of rotating (literally and figuratively) mini-hotels contained within a larger, camouflaged building, and the rest conveyed with smoke, mirrors, and Disney magic.
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Look, the minute you two start bringing common sense into this, we're just going to get frustrated...
What you're talking about is more reconfiguring the existing attraction, where I'm talking about how it could have been executed differently from the concept stage on. Taking into account branching stories, multiple "ships" and casts, routine-resettable (and custom-configurable) interactive/animatronic setpieces, etc.
The conceit would/could have been "you've been on a stopover at Black Spire on Batuu, and it's time to return to your ship, which is a:
• Chartered tramp freighter you and a few others have booked passage on. It's not glamorous, but it's cheap. Unfortunately, it's also meant having to go along with the owners' scheduled stops along the way to your eventual destination.
• Moderately-appointed starliner that's a bit past her heyday, but still reflects the luxury built into her a couple generations ago. You took an early retirement from your Corporate Sector job and are determined to see a bit of the Outer Rim before you went mad behind a deck.
• A brand-new Mon Cal starliner, the first since the declaration of a New Republic. With the civil war now ended and peace returning to the galaxy, you and your family felt the time was long overdue to make a fresh start of it.
And so on, and so on. People could scroll through the options before booking. They'd be given a day and time to report to the spaceport to board their ship. Different people booking on different ships would be given other times to embark. The ship they then got on and the experience they had would never be exactly the same twice, even if they book the same scenario on the same ship, because of the impact other guests can have on the way things go and end up. What you're talking about above wouldn't even be a factor if they'd planned for something like this from the start.
And it all could've been done with a handful of rotating (literally and figuratively) mini-hotels contained within a larger, camouflaged building, and the rest conveyed with smoke, mirrors, and Disney magic.
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Look, the minute you two start bringing common sense into this, we're just going to get frustrated...
I saw zero OT connection
OT connection.... hmmmm...
Chewie was there. You could choose to help him, or turn him in to the First Order.
Technically speaking, the Skywalker saber was there. Ray used it.
So, basically, if you showed up expecting a steak dinner, all that you would find on your plate were ketchup and mustard packets…
Riceball
Master Member
But they were upfront about it being set in the ST. So basically, you would have gone in expecting a steak dinner and got a steak dinner. There was not sleight of hand involved, no suggesting or even implying that it was set in the OT. And even if it were set in the OT, would that have really made you that much more willing to plop down up to 6K for this? Keeping with the steak analogy, to me, this is like going to a fancy steak house where you pay a premium for your steak and you have to pay for any and all sides separately. But there's also the choice of another steak house with equally good steaks, that cost a fraction of the fancy steak house and include side dishes in the price.
Chewie is only there because he’s Rey’s pet in the ST…
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