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Post by Lizuka #BLM on May 19, 2024 6:02:37 GMT -5
Always good to see when Jenny puts out a new one, and this four hour look at a failed pricey as hell Star Wars hotel's certainly a fun one.
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Post by Cyno on May 19, 2024 13:53:54 GMT -5
I don't think anything really encapsulates everything that went wrong with Bob Chapek's stewardship of Disney Parks, and later Disney as a whole, than the Galactic Starcruiser. Shame, too, because it was an amazing concept in theory. But so ridiculously expensive. That and with how cool it looked on the inside, you had really dumb immersion-breaking stuff like the exterior of the hotel looking like a nondescript warehouse with nothing remotely Star Wars themed. And the "space shuttles" that would take you to the parks were white panel trucks.
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Post by eJm on May 19, 2024 16:22:20 GMT -5
I don't think anything really encapsulates everything that went wrong with Bob Chapek's stewardship of Disney Parks, and later Disney as a whole, than the Galactic Starcruiser. Shame, too, because it was an amazing concept in theory. But so ridiculously expensive. That and with how cool it looked on the inside, you had really dumb immersion-breaking stuff like the exterior of the hotel looking like a nondescript warehouse with nothing remotely Star Wars themed. And the "space shuttles" that would take you to the parks were white panel trucks. I was just thinking watching it, this and pissing off Scarlett Johansson are basically what Chapek’s Disney legacy is. Like, say what you will about Michael Eisner and the stumbles he made (and Defunctland has made most of their money from him), you can at least tie the Disney Renaissance to him. Iger steered the ship and repaired some of the mistakes Eisner made and kept Disney as a powerhouse. Chapek…probably earned Jenny Nicholson another million views 4 hour+ video. That’s basically his time as Disney CEO in a nutshell. |
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Post by Cyno on May 19, 2024 16:43:06 GMT -5
I don't think anything really encapsulates everything that went wrong with Bob Chapek's stewardship of Disney Parks, and later Disney as a whole, than the Galactic Starcruiser. Shame, too, because it was an amazing concept in theory. But so ridiculously expensive. That and with how cool it looked on the inside, you had really dumb immersion-breaking stuff like the exterior of the hotel looking like a nondescript warehouse with nothing remotely Star Wars themed. And the "space shuttles" that would take you to the parks were white panel trucks. I was just thinking watching it, this and pissing off Scarlett Johansson are basically what Chapek’s Disney legacy is. Like, say what you will about Michael Eisner and the stumbles he made (and Defunctland has made most of their money from him), you can at least tie the Disney Renaissance to him. Iger steered the ship and repaired some of the mistakes Eisner made and kept Disney as a powerhouse. Chapek…probably earned Jenny Nicholson another million views 4 hour+ video. That’s basically his time as Disney CEO in a nutshell. The funny thing is Iger's biggest mistakes during his first run are directly related to Chapek. Appointing him as the leader of Disney Parks and then his successor as CEO.
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Post by eJm on May 19, 2024 17:10:24 GMT -5
The funny thing is Iger's biggest mistakes during his first run are directly related to Chapek. Appointing him as the leader of Disney Parks and then his successor as CEO. [/div][/quote] I remember reading a lot of Jim Hill Media articles about Chapek being Iger’s successor and how much he was being prepped into taking over as Iger was getting closer to leaving and possibly retiring and then he left, Chapek basically stumbled out of the blocks and Iger sprinted back in basically saying “I’m back everyone, no need to panic!” And then Iger proceeded to barely undo any of the mistakes Chapek did which just makes it seem like the theme park stuff was intentional and like…what? Like, at least when Michael Ovitz became Disney President, everyone knew he was a goober appointment from the off, even the guy who appointed him but how does probably the most important Disney boss since Walt himself stumble that much on a successor? |
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Post by eJm on May 20, 2024 3:10:21 GMT -5
Twitter still has its moments even with what it has become.
10/10, no notes.
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Post by "Gizzark" Mike Wronglevenay on May 21, 2024 7:45:02 GMT -5
Jenny's going to have to work pretty hard for me to beat her Church Cinematic Universe video, but this runs it close. Not a wasted minute in all the four hours. Loved it.
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Post by G✇JI☈A on May 21, 2024 7:57:35 GMT -5
Sometimes you would get the question “if you could have dinner with anyone living or dead, who would it be?”
I can't answer that, but if the question was “if you could spend the day with anyone at a random theme park?”... You better believe I'm picking Jenny.
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Post by "Gizzark" Mike Wronglevenay on May 21, 2024 8:01:33 GMT -5
Sometimes you would get the question “if you could have dinner with anyone living or dead, who would it be?” I can't answer that, but if the question was “if you could spend the day with anyone at a random theme park?”... You better believe I'm picking Jenny. You're thinking too small. I am absolutely taking Teddy Roosevelt to Blackpool Pleasure Beach. |
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Post by eJm on May 21, 2024 8:13:07 GMT -5
I think what also got to me is, like...for how straight voiced she is in her videos, Jenny's absolutely willing to dive into a park experience or even small experiences. She travelled miles to pick up a giant spider and stopped by a Western town and the deserted Flintstones park and got such a big kick out of it. She walked around Evermore trying to buy a t-shirt, even to the company CEO, and got told "Nah" (and now Evermore is dead. Coincidence? I mean, no it's more surprising it's closing in the year of our lord 2024 but anyway).
Like, she wants to enjoy stuff. She doesn't go somewhere to be snide and cynical, she wants to enjoy the experience so if you can't get someone willing to invest in your experience to actually be invested, that's just a failing on the experience. And it makes the rant at the end hit harder because Disney used to be the King of that sort of thing.
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Post by HMARK Center on May 21, 2024 9:06:34 GMT -5
As someone with deep childhood memories and connections with WDW, the last 15 minutes or so of this video are highly cathartic.
What a lot of people don't realize is just how out there old school Disney Imagineering (especially during the WED Enterprises days) could be, but ultimately how committed they were to putting on the best possible show and trying to make the guest experience as pleasant as possible. It's why they went all-out with high-capacity, people-eating attractions, especially with Omnimover technology - such a setup enables you to control crowds, keep lines shorter, and allow people to do more activities over the course of a day. Classic EPCOT Center was filled with pavilions that could pleasantly fill anywhere from about 20 minutes of your time (Horizons, which was just the ride) to literally hours of your day (the original Journey Into Imagination was laid out so you did the 12 minute Omnimover ride, got moved toward the Image Works play area, then moved towards the 3D theater to see Magic Journeys or Captain EO). All of this with most of the rides being highly original concepts that you couldn't experience anywhere else.
Current Disney can't be bothered with any of that; they're committed to only making attractions based on pre-existing movies and shows because they want to use the parks to get Disney+ subscriptions up, and the rides they do make now rarely go beyond 3 minutes in length, typically with fairly low riders-per-hours numbers, because as Jenny says at the end of this video, they've learned they can monetize waiting longer in line - the longer the waits, the more you're encouraged to spend additional money on Genie+ and Lightning Lanes. It's ghoulish...and, of course, once the new ride is over, you're immediately dumped into a gift shop almost every damn time.
None of that means old school Disney didn't want your money; they obviously did, and they charged like they did. But you felt like you were getting your money's worth when you went, like every dollar they made was going back into the parks, and that makes a big difference. And, make no mistake, this isn't mainly on Chapek, though he was a huge problem - this shit's been going on since Iger's first go-round. The "Bobs Era" represented Disney management fully moving away from being run by creative types (for all of Eisner's legitimate flaws, he was, ultimately, a guy who lived to make movies) and fully embracing the modern MBA style of management - nothing matters except pleasing the shareholders, the only way to do that is to make sure the next two quarters have the arrow pointing up, screw the future, screw the fans and consumers, screw your employees, etc.
Also, good lord, I'm glad she called out the overuse of "IMMERSIVE!". I once read a great analysis of what makes most of the best all-time theme park attractions tick, and the answer was that, typically, they're based around experiences rather than narratives. The Haunted Mansion doesn't have some super dense overarching story to it, it's mainly the experience of "you enter a haunted house, things get more chaotic as you move forward." The original Journey Into Imagination wasn't about arriving at a destination, it was about an experience of how far-reaching the human imagination can be in different areas of arts and study. But under Eisner they started moving more into making it about narratives (usually "you're part of a group observing a demonstration...but SOMETHING goes WRONG!"), which can work sometimes but gets overbearing after awhile, and under the Bobs it's been "we'll IMMERSE you in your favorite intellectual properties!", even if the properties they're using don't lend themselves to the medium of theme parks.
In the end, it's mainly that Harry Potter did so well for Universal, and Disney's been trying to play catchup ever since by forcing square pegs into round holes (e.g. an "immersive" Star Wars land doesn't work as well as an immersive space based on a book series, and it never will) and forgetting what made them the industry standard in the first place. It sucks.
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Post by G✇JI☈A on May 23, 2024 8:50:06 GMT -5
I wonder what Scrooge McDuck style penny-pinching they will do next at the parks.
I think they will have guards hang around those screens at the end of rides that previews the ride photo, and put up large signs saying “Taking external photos of these screens will result in park ejection”
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Post by eJm on May 23, 2024 12:25:14 GMT -5
It’s probably all nonsense and spin but even the implication of such an idea when you had an entire abridged influencer day is buckwild to me.
EDIT: Also, why are these people trying to defend a bad experience someone had? The park closed. Jenny Nicholson wasn’t a factor in why that happened, especially when the video came out almost a year after her visit.
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Bang Bang Bart
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Post by Bang Bang Bart on May 23, 2024 20:29:11 GMT -5
It’s probably all nonsense and spin but even the implication of such an idea when you had an entire abridged influencer day is buckwild to me. EDIT: Also, why are these people trying to defend a bad experience someone had? The park closed. Jenny Nicholson wasn’t a factor in why that happened, especially when the video came out almost a year after her visit. At the end of the day, the hotel’s closure wasn’t because Jenny forced them to make everything expensive just so she cna make a video about it. It falls on Disney’s corporate overlords overestimating the amount of people that would pay over $3,000 for a Star Wars hotel LARP adventure. |
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Post by A Platypus Rave on May 23, 2024 20:45:41 GMT -5
me and my friends went to Disney World last year.
It started off with us debating going to the Starcruiser first because me and my friends are massive Star Wars nerds.
We did the math... and had a Disney planner help us out too...
spending an entire WEEK at Disney world was... less expensive than the 2 days we would have spent at the cruiser.
I saw workers there complaining that people were calling this a hotel and not an interactive experience which is what it was!
But... it's a hotel... you are at Disney World you want to go to Disney world...
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Post by Alice Syndrome on May 24, 2024 15:13:59 GMT -5
It genuinely sucks how much this sucked.
Disney dropped the ball and the whole court
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Post by Cyno on May 24, 2024 15:25:08 GMT -5
I think the thing might have worked better as a themed LARP cruise than as a hotel that takes you to Galaxy's Edge for a day. You could've easily wrote going ashore in the Bahamas or wherever as a leisure planet or whatever. Plus you can justify the price if it's more in line with what cruises cost than a $5000 two night stay in a Disney World hotel where you can barely go to Disney World.
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Kalmia
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Post by Kalmia on May 24, 2024 19:11:47 GMT -5
I was the prime target for Galactic Starcruiser. I'm a huge Star Wars fan. I've been to Star Wars conventions on two different continents (make it three next year) and I queued up overnight in the middle of a cold December in London to go to a Star Wars movie premier.
I'm not afraid to spend money, waste time, or travel long distances for Star Wars but I had zero interest in this.
If it had been a themed hotel with the staff playing along the same way they do in the parks, I'd have been interested if the price was right. Disney already does themed hotels and rooms that are hugely successful without being fully immersive. Let me make my own experience out of it, don't force one on me.
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Post by Cyno on May 24, 2024 19:16:24 GMT -5
I was the prime target for Galactic Starcruiser. I'm a huge Star Wars fan. I've been to Star Wars conventions on two different continents (make it three next year) and I queued up overnight in the middle of a cold December in London to go to a Star Wars movie premier. I'm not afraid to spend money, waste time, or travel long distances for Star Wars but I had zero interest in this. If it had been a themed hotel with the staff playing along the same way they do in the parks, I'd have been interested if the price was right. Disney already does themed hotels and rooms that are hugely successful without being fully immersive. Let me make my own experience out of it, don't force one on me. If you're going to Celebration Japan I'm very jealous lol. |
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Post by A Platypus Rave on May 24, 2024 20:23:08 GMT -5
I think the thing might have worked better as a themed LARP cruise than as a hotel that takes you to Galaxy's Edge for a day. You could've easily wrote going ashore in the Bahamas or wherever as a leisure planet or whatever. Plus you can justify the price if it's more in line with what cruises cost than a $5000 two night stay in a Disney World hotel where you can barely go to Disney World. didn't even take you to Galaxy's edge for a day... it took you there for like 4 hours in the morning of the second day. where you got to do like 1 or 2 things. |
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