I bought a ticket for the Galactic Starcruiser, Disney’s big multi-day immersive experience in the Star Wars universe, so I ended up flying into Miami a little over a week ago. I even stayed a few extra days afterwards.¹ I’ve never properly been to Miami, and after all the intensity of Disney I figured I could use a couple days to cool off, maybe see what’s up with Miami.

And maybe it’s Miami, or maybe it’s the fact I was staying in South Beach, but the city was almost exactly the way I imagined it would be. It’s hot,² it’s filled with mansions going for obscene amounts of money,³ and it’s filled with an odd mix of beach bums and fashionistas and party girls and Latin American immigrants. There were a few “Bikini Lives Matter” signs scattered around the Miami Beach Marina which gives you a pretty good vibe of the place, although if you seen the concept art for Grand Theft Auto: Vice City you’ve got the idea. It’s a city that dreams of being itself in an almost solipsistic way.

I kind of dug it, but it’s really not my scene, and I’m glad I was moving on after a couple days. It’s probably the place I’ve liked the most but was still grateful to be leaving. I don’t like the heat, I don’t like the sticker shock,⁴ I don’t like clubbing, I don’t like sports, and I don’t like rich people. I do like the art deco architecture all over South Beach, and I do like how friendly everyone is.⁵ If I were more into beaches I could see coming here on vacation.

I’m glad I saw it. I’ll probably be back — there’s a lot of cheap flights to and from Europe to Miami — and I’m looking forward to seeing the city proper, as well as checking out some of the museums those obscenely wealthy rich people have paid for. But I’m really only here, this trip, for the Starcruiser.

The Galactic Starcruiser wasn’t really on my radar. I had heard about it, even talked about it a bit with friends trying to figure out what it might entail, but I was a little surprised when tickets went on sale back in October. I wasn’t aware it was getting ready to launch. I had considered going, but I certainly wasn’t planning on rushing to be one of the first to attend. I’m neither a Star Wars superfan nor a Disney superfan, and it is a ridiculous amount of money.

But I was hanging out with a friend and fellow larper at the time, and they had also been thinking about going, and it didn’t take a lot of effort to convince each other to sign up. The ticket rush was bad⁶ but we did get through after a couple days of trying on and off. Six months later, we were standing in front of the hotel, dropping off our luggage and waiting to board.

The actual Starcruiser itself is possibly the ugliest building Disney has ever built, a concrete hunk of a structure on the side of a parking lot a surprising distance away from everywhere else in Disney.⁷ That’s not entirely a knock; the loading bay does look like a grimy Star Wars spaceport⁸ and you shouldn’t be spending more than 10 minutes outside before or after the experience.⁹ The rest of the time you’ll be inside or planetside, so you’ll never see the outside.

You’re asked to arrive at 1:00¹⁰ and after some messing around with MagicBands and the Disney Play phone app our luggage was taken away and we were allowed to board. You’re escorted down a cement hallway, shown a short video, and then directed into a shuttle¹¹ to launch up to the Halcyon, an “MPO-1500 Purrgil-class passenger starcruiser” and your home for the next couple days.

You enter directly into the main lobby of the Halcyon, and it absolutely feels like you’re walking into a movie set. There’s large windows where you can see various spacecraft flying by,¹² cylindrical holographic projectors running the full height of the lobby on both sides, and a walkway surrounding the upper area suitable for speeches and grandstanding.¹³ It also led off to the bridge, the bar, and a gift shop.¹⁴

The first thing we did was check out our room, which was nice and appropriately themed. There was a big “window” showing stars and spacecraft drifting by¹⁵ and a comms unit instead of a phone and the appropriate greebles decorating everything. It seems like all the rooms have a full-sized bed and bunk beds for kids built into the wall.¹⁶ The rooms are nice but not amazing; they’re small¹⁷ and they feel a little plasticy. But the bed is comfortable and you probably shouldn’t be spending a lot of time in the room anyway.

At this point, we got lunch. It’s important to understand the Galactic Starcruiser is modeled as a cruise ship and that’s how the event is structured. There’s breakfast and lunch buffets, formal sit-down dinners, talks and tours scheduled throughout the day, and even a shore excursion the second day.¹⁸ The food is all-inclusive¹⁹ and generally good-to-great. The buffets could have maybe done with more options²⁰ but the theming of the meals was just incredibly impressive — it’s very, very hard to create food that looks alien while remaining not only edible but tasty.²¹ There was a roll filled with sunflower butter and fruit paste, which was an impressive way to serve a PB&J without serving a PB&J. The bakers got a lot of mileage out of purple ube-dyed bread and cakes. I ate a weird cold white egg thing molded into a square and covered with some pickled radish and savory cream that took me a few minutes to realize was actually effectively just a deviled egg. And of course the Starcruiser featured unlimited blue and green milk on tap.²² There were limits — the snacks provided between meals included goldfish crackers²³ — but it was overall quite effective.

The Captain’s Toast late afternoon kicked off the main plot, and that’s when it became clear how the event would run. There was an introduction to some of the important NPCs: the captain, the cruise director, the ship’s engineer, the tour manager for the entertainment.²⁴ Then the First Order officer arrived and announced there were reports of Resistance activity and they were assigned to root it out.²⁵

Before the event we had to install a Datapad app on our phone. Previously it had a list of public cruise events along with mealtimes and the shore excursion. Now it lit up with a bunch of communications from the NPCs. You could click through some short dialog — the First Order Lieutenant might demand you track down some suspicious luggage, or the ship’s engineer might want you to fiddle with one of the computers and hide some schematics — and you could agree or refuse. Agreeing would typically send you somewhere on the ship to scan something on your phone, and might pop up a invitation to meet the NPC later on the bridge or in the engine room to continue the quest line.²⁶

It was an offline MMO, in other words. I’m not saying that as a bad thing. In retrospect, given their design constraints, it’s hard to imagine it turning out any other way. To start with, you need to design an experience which entertains diehard fortysomething fans with disposable income, manic eight-year-olds, and exhausted parents. And none of those groups seems to agree on what the event is intended to be. Costumes weren’t required²⁷ and while most of those who dressed up had reasonable outfits a lot of people seem to have thought it was a cosplay convention. There was the expected mix of Leias and Reys and Kylo Rens — all reasonably generic and Star-Warsy and easy to overlook — but there have been reports of people rocking up in Star Fleet uniforms, and our run featured two people who for some bizarre reason decided to wear full Bluntman and Chronic costumes the whole time.²⁸

That points to the second issue: it’s clear very few of the attendees had any interest in role-playing. There were a few people who were willing to chat about how the First Order was menacing their homeworld or whether you could trust the Jedis on board, but most people were content to limit their role play to the NPCs. That’s not surprising; there’s literally nothing any of the other players can offer you. You can’t advance quests by talking with anybody except NPCs. In most larps, interacting with everybody else is the experience. Here, it’s clear everyone else is mostly engaging in parallel play. Maybe you band together with everyone else who showed up to defeat a bridge simulation, but you’re not going to use that as a bonding experience. Everyone’s quest chain is simply going to pop the next step in the sequence and you’re going to wander off to dinner.

And that’s the final issue: your choices might matter to you, but they don’t matter to anybody else. Larps give a huge amount of power to the players. You can make or break someone else’s game. You have to have that power, because the organizers can’t create meaningful individualized experiences for all the participants. Since Disney can’t or won’t trust the other players to provide that, they’re only able to offer interaction which scales. The comm messages you get? They’re unidirectional. You can’t initiate a conversation. You’ll never discover a secret rebel base or steal engineering plans without being prompted by an NPC.²⁹ I really wanted to do some of the First Order missions and then turn double agent and sell them out to the Resistance, but I didn’t because I couldn’t trust that option would come up. You’re never given the opportunity to be the hero; you’re not even given an opportunity to be a sidekick. You get to be one of the people scurrying around in the background when the rebel base gets attacked.

I suppose this is only disappointing if you’re a larper. You can’t really change any of the outcomes.³⁰ You might tell yourself your nerf herder is now on the path to become a Jedi, but that’s not going to be something that’s supported or reinforced by the other guests. Disney made a big deal about how all the cast members, even the ones working the bar or the gift shop, were encouraged to come up with their own backstories. And you can ask them about it, and they’ll delightedly tell you they they’re from Coruscant or Bespin. But a friend pointed out something odd — they rarely ask you where you’re from. Most of the guests don’t have anything to say.

So it’s an MMO, complete with fetch quests and missions. And to be perfectly fair, the interactive events were a lot of fun. The bridge was great, with huge windows to look out of and separate stations for shields and weapons and cargo loading and repair, all with the old school controls you’d expect in the Star Wars universe.³¹ Similarly, the engine room had a lot of tubes³² which you needed to grab and twist to activate while coordinating with others. Doing so would light up different stations and sometimes vent steam in ways that were surprisingly satisfying.

All of this is to say it’s a good experience, albeit not a very good larp. But it’s not trying to be a larp. It’s trying to be an immersive Disney experience, just a slightly more intimate one than the rides and the shows already featured at the parks. I had fun. I’m not sure I had enough fun to make up for the extravagant price tag³³ but I can easily imagine people who would. If it still sounds great to you and you’ve got the scratch, by all means sign up. For anybody on the fence — if you want to go but aren’t sure it’s worth the money — I’d suggest just spending three or four days going to Disney World in general. You can find all the theming and all the weird food in Galaxy’s Edge, plus you’d get to see a whole lot of the parks beyond that. There’s a lot more to see.

The good news³⁴ is that Disney is clearly just starting to explore the space. There’s plenty of ways they could improve the experience.³⁵ If it were me, I’d push it more towards larp: increase the number of NPCs, set some minimal costume requirements, encourage playing as a character,³⁶ create quests which required more collaboration with other guests. I doubt that’s the way they’re going to go. But it’s clear they’re going to tweak the experience — they’ve promised to switch up the plotlines on a regular basis, for replayability — and they’re already introducing additional elements.³⁷ I’m curious where they go with it, and I have no doubt they’ll take what they learn and launch something even more ambitious down the line.

And as a larp designer, you can rest easy. Disney isn’t even close to being able to steal your player base. Now go out and steal theirs.

My friend and I checked out of the Starcruiser Saturday morning,³⁸ and checked into the Disney Wilderness Lodge for the next few days, to give ourselves a chance to spend time in the parks. The Wilderness Lodge is a good example of Disney’s project in general; it’s a deliberate reproduction of the fancy lodges scattered throughout the National Parks, although it’s built on a significantly larger scale.³⁹ I’d recommend just spending a day relaxing around the place, but I can understand the urge not to. We didn’t, and ended up spending nearly a day at the Magic Kingdom, a day at the Animal Kingdom, and a day at EPCOT.⁴⁰ It was exhausting. We spent nearly the whole day we checked out just sitting in the lobby and recovering.⁴¹

I’m reasonably ambivalent about Disney in general. I don’t think their control over such a large amount of entertainment is healthy, but on the other hand I’m apparently more than willing to watch all the Marvel movies and television shows⁴² so maybe take my ambivalence with a grain of salt. They control so much of the media landscape it’s nearly impossible to cut out everything they’ve got a finger in and remain tuned in to pop culture.

Walt Disney World is on my list of essential places to visit in the world, not because I think you’ll have fun — you probably will, they’re very good at what they do — but because I think understanding it is essential to understanding the world we’re living in. Walt Disney was a very odd man, in much the same way Lewis Carroll and J. M. Barrie and A. A. Milne were very odd men,⁴³ and the fantasy worlds they created have occupied quite a lot of childhoods.

Childhood extends longer than it used to, of course; much of the postmodern world doesn’t put a lot of value into growing up in the first place.⁴⁴ And the acquisitions of Star Wars and Marvel seem downright brilliant in retrospect, providing worlds which appeal to more diverse fan bases than Disney princesses do.

Walt Disney was always pushing for increasingly immersive experiences, right from the start. Everything — the animatronics, the theming, the transitions from one ride to the next, the integration of animation and actors and video and voice overs and robotics — was obsessed over. Amusement parks existed long before Disney, of course, but Disney really put an effort on how they worked beyond the rides. It’s hard to understate the influence Walt Disney had on entertainment, even now, as we’re moving to more direct and intimate interactions.

The first park we visited was the Magic Kingdom. It’s surprising how little it’s changed. There’s a new roller coaster based on Snow White⁴⁵ but they’ve still got things like the Swiss Family Robinson treehouse.⁴⁶ So I got to ride the Pirates of the Carribean and the Jungle Cruise and Space Mountain and the Tiki Room and the Haunted Mansion, all favorites from the first time I visited the park as a kid decades ago.⁴⁷

As the first park and the only one opened while Walt Disney was alive⁴⁸ it remains the clearest expression of Walt’s vision. It’s aging a little oddly — the 1900s small town which Main Street, USA is supposed to invoke can’t even be a touchstone for the grandparents visiting the park any more, let alone their kids or grandkids,⁴⁹ and the Imagineers famously had to rework Tomorrowland to be a ’60s retro vision of the future once it was overcome by the timeline — but you can still clearly see the vision Walt pushed for, from the adventure novels and boy scout manuals of Disney’s youth.

There’s been a rearguard action over the years to update a lot of the rides for modern sensibilities, with mixed results. They’re finally removing the characters from Song of the South and retheming Splash Mountain to The Princess and the Frog.⁵⁰ Pirates of the Caribbean had to add a female pirate and cut the scenes of pirates chasing women.⁵¹ They added multiethnic explorers on the Jungle Cruise.

But the real issue is a myopia that’s buried deep in the DNA of those stories. What does a “Frontierland” or an “Adventureland” even mean in the present day? Those are myths built on ideas like Manifest Destiny and the White Man’s Burden. Those are deeply offensive premises to start from. I’m not sure you can excise them from the stories without making the stories unrecognizable.

But, I mean, those are the contradictions the United States is built upon. I insisted on visiting the Carousel of Progress and the Hall of Presidents before we left the park, and to me both really encapsulate the best and the worst of Disney’s impulses. The Carousel of Progress is an aggressively upbeat vision of the unceasing wonders technology will bring, all set to a relentlessly catchy song. The Hall of Presidents is a somber tribute to the burdens and greatness of the United States Presidency, featuring animatronic versions of all the presidents.⁵² Both are horribly dated by today’s standards; beyond nostalgia or historical interest I can only recommend them as an air-conditioned option to get out of the oppressive midday heat. But for me the Carousel of Progress reminds me of the best of that gee-whiz can-do attitude Disney embodied, while the Hall of Presidents embraces the worst of the nationalism and willful blindness to the history of the United States. They’re the heart of Disney. I can’t imagine they’ll last for very long.

The second park we hit was the Animal Kingdom, and to give the Disney Imagineers credit they managed to capture all the brilliance and weirdness of the original Magic Kingdom, updated for the ’90s. It’s gotten a lot of flack for the treatment of live animals throughout the park, although I doubt they’re treated any worse than most zoos.⁵³ That may explain why they’re leaning in so heavily towards extinct or fantasy creatures.

The parts which got the most attention after opening were “Africa” and “Asia.” Africa is built around the fictional village of Harambe, while Asia is set in the fictional kingdom of Anandapur. Whether you find the theming charming or disturbing probably depends on whether the nonspecificity of the setting bothers you; Anandapur features both a maharaja and borders Mount Everest, so good luck figuring out how that works. There’s a very good rollercoaster there⁵⁴ and a safari ride,⁵⁵ and two walkthrough exhibits where you can see the animals in natural habitats, if an ersatz ruined Indian temple is a natural habitat for tigers. The experience of the walkthrough is memorably described by Neal Stevenson in one of my favorite essays, In the Beginning Was the Command Line,⁵⁶ and so it has sentimental value for me from that.

But the new hotness in the Animal Kingdom is Pandora, the world from James Cameron’s Avatar movie. And that is bonkers. Because Avatar has got to be one of the least loved blockbusters of the past 20 years. I can see the appeal for Disney; it’s a richly detailed world with minimal corporate minders and carries a strong conservation message without having any pesky real-world problems lurking behind the issues. I just can’t imagine anyone who was excited to step into an immersive Avatar experience the way they are for Star Wars or Harry Potter or even Avatar: The Last Airbender.⁵⁷

But it’s here, and it’s as impressive in its own way as Galaxy’s Edge. The big ride is Avatar Flight of Passage, where you straddle a kind of bicycle seat and strap on 3D goggles and have an incredibly effective simulation of riding a flying mountain banshee from the film for a full 4½ minutes, soaring through the foliage and skimming waterfalls and diving off the floating rocks before catching yourself on an updraft and coasting. It’ll trigger your vertigo, if you’re susceptible to that.⁵⁸

Animal Kingdom opens early and closes early as well, so we planned on leaving in the afternoon and returning back to the hotel for a pool break, then left for Disney Springs to catch a movie — Everything Everywhere All the Time was playing at the AMC at Disney Springs.⁵⁹ Disney Springs is an adult entertainment complex, which is really just a bunch of upscale restaurants and shops a short ride away from the parks, and a reasonable break from the constantly aggressive Disney branding.⁶⁰ Unfortunately we missed our 9:20 dinner reservation by 15 minutes⁶¹ and found out the kitchen closed at 9:30, despite calling ahead and telling them we’d be late. Disney’s still recovering from the end of COVID and the ongoing staffing shortages, it seems.

Our final park was EPCOT, the most bizarrely conceived of the parks and the one most in need of a drastic rethink and makeover. Walt Disney’s plans were ambitious and impractical: a futuristic company town with hundreds of high-tech little houses dotting a campus where businesses would run showcase offices, R&D divisions they would be happy to have the public tour as part of some vague PR initiative. This was a terrible idea from start to finish, and never got very far off the ground.

By the time it got launched, long after Walt passed away, it had turned into a weird series of rides celebrating various abstract concepts — Communication! The Land! Energy! Imagination! The Sea! — all sponsored by multinational corporations. I can remember the Energy ride sponsored by Exxon patiently explaining how great oil was, and how hard at work Exxon scientists were getting ready to pivot to renewable energy once that was practical.⁶² The Land had a deal with Kraft and leaned in to the potential of GMOs and chemicals, as I recall. The whole place was entirely fitting with Walt Disney’s faith in corporations but a lot of people found it somewhat uncomfortable in the ’80s. It was untenable enough by the ’90s to have forced them to strip all the branding out of the rides.

We largely skipped that part of the park to head for the second half, the World Showcase. This is a series of small areas themed as different countries: Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Morocco, Italy, the United States,⁶³ Japan, China, Norway, and Mexico. Maybe it made sense in a world where people in the United States rarely traveled overseas, but even then the choices strike me as bizarre. Canada and Mexico get a lot of United States visitors. Why exclude South America entirely? Do we really need quite so many central European countries?⁶⁴

These days it’s just an opportunity to sell dubiously authentic food⁶⁵ and provide a place to stick themed rides.⁶⁶ They did just open a new Ratatouille ride in the French pavilion, using some of the newest technology, trackless cars. The ride vehicles are no longer tied to a single path or limited in the directions they can go. They’re computer guided, and can glide around independently from one another. The Ratatouille ride has you as a rat, scampering around underfoot in a French kitchen, and I loved it. You scurry from table to table, duck under ovens and into pantries, get knocked sideways by brooms and scamper into vents and pantries. I loved it, and if the wait for the ride wasn’t over 75 minutes when we rode it the first time I would have gone back to ride it again and again.

But by the time we made it all the way around the World Showcase it was time to meet some friends for dinner — one of the perks of an annual pass is you can just drop in to the park for dinner on a whim — and it was a really nice way to end the trip, watching the fireworks over the lagoon before filing out of the park.

My friend’s flight left late the next day and mine left early the morning after that, and both our feet were dead from walking in the parks for days and standing in lines for literally hours. We slept in late, ran some laundry at the hotel, then grabbed lunch at the Wilderness Lodge before crashing in the lobby. I met friends in the evening, then crashed in the hotel before my early flight to Miami.

I’ll be back eventually. There’s a lot I didn’t get to do, and I have nieces and nephews who are going to age into it in about five years. Maybe by then I’ll be recovered from this trip, and ready for another go around. Here’s hoping.

Next: Brussels (BRU) to Berlin (BER)
Prev: Paris (ORY) to Miami (MIA)

Footnotes

¹ There’s a super-cheap flight heading from Miami to Brussels but it only leaves twice I week, so I scheduled my travel around it.

² I’ve been to Florida before so it’s not a total shock, but it’s been multiple fry-an-egg-on-the-sidewalk days in a row, and I am not a multiple fry-an-egg-on-the-sidewalk kind of guy.

³ I took a boat tour which provided a great view of the skyscrapers in Miami proper and the mansions all around the bay and even the cruise terminals, since by some coincidence there weren’t any cruise ships docked.

⁴ I lived in New York City for a good long while. It takes a lot to unsettle me about how much food costs. I even came here directly from Disney World, which knows how to jack up the cost of restaurant meals. Miami is still a little shocking in how much it costs to eat around here.

⁵ My Lyft driver from the airport turned out to be from Colombia, and gave me an entirely uncalled for amount of crap for visiting Bogotá instead of Cartagena. Apparently I visited Colombia wrong.

⁶ Spots weren’t available over the internet, so you had to call to reserve one, and the phone lines were mobbed so you had to keep calling back trying to get through, like it was a radio sweepstakes.

⁷ There’s literally no Disney shuttles or buses running to or from the location. If you catch a cab from one of the other Disney properties they’ll comp you the cost if you show your receipt.

⁸ Albeit one with a gift shop along one wall

⁹ Although that wasn’t true in my experience

¹⁰ We arrived around 1:30, to avoid the rush directly at 1:00.

¹¹ An elevator — I think it was an elevator, I’m still a little confused how the interior mapped to the outside — with recorded voice acting and small “windows” along the top which let you see outside while you lifted off.

¹² One of the really great parts of the experience was that these were integrated into the ongoing plot — I was standing with my friend near the back during the Captain’s toast, and we happened to notice a First Order shuttle approach and head towards one of our docking bays. Right at this time our ship’s engineer rushed over to one of the access points and worriedly punched some buttons. We asked if that ship was what we thought it was, they said yes it absolutely was, and slipped out to deal with it.

I’m not sure any of the other passengers even noticed. Five minutes later a First Order officer stormed on board and interrupted the captain.

¹³ Sadly, off-limits to passengers. It was effectively the stage for some of the set pieces among the NPCs.

¹⁴ Duh

¹⁵ The screen would show the appropriate scene when you jumped, and occasionally the ship would land in an asteroid field or be surrounded by star destroyers, when the relevant events were happening on the bridge.

¹⁶ Our options for signing up were two adults, two adults and a child, and two adults and two children. I’ve since heard there are rooms which sleep up to eight and maybe they’re now letting different compositions of groups sign up.

¹⁷ It is supposed to be a cruise ship.

¹⁸ To Galaxy’s Edge, the Star Wars themed part of Disney’s Hollywood Studios park. You get entry and lunch in the park included as part of your ticket for the Starcruiser, and there’s a bunch of quests integrated with what’s going on back on the ship. But you have to catch the shuttle back by 4pm.

¹⁹ Alcohol is extra

²⁰ One difficultly the Galactic Starcruiser has, compared to real cruise ships, is that’s it’s tiny — based on the number of rooms you’re probably looking at about 200 guests at a time, and even small cruises in the real world tend to be between 500 and 1,000 passengers.

Obviously, more passengers means money and necessitates more space and more options for entertainment/relaxation/dining. But since this isn’t really a cruise and scaling up leads to obvious challenges with plots and quests and things — it was already tricky sneaking into the cargo hold given how many other passengers were sneaking into the cargo hold — so there are limits on what they can do.

²¹ And then consider how to do the same, but also appetizing to an army of six-year-olds.

²² A glass of either cost $8 in the park. I drank a lot of it.

²³ Couldn’t Pepperidge Farm have been convinced to do a special run in the shape of a mynock? You’d think they could have sold packs of it in the parks at a steep markup.

²⁴ The entertainment was a Twi’lek named Gaia, accompanied by a Rodian instrumentalist. The alien costumes were outstanding, by the way, with impressive prosthetics and outfits. The Rodian in particular was done with a mask which covered their head, containing a voice box which was wired up to the month so when they spoke the lips moved. Sadly, they only spoke Rodian.

²⁵ During this speech a seven-year-old girl near me softly and absentmindedly began singing the Imperial March. It was fantastic.

²⁶ Alongside 20-30 other guests, of course.

²⁷ I wasn’t wearing one, because it’s a real pain-in-the-ass to arrange one you’re going to wear once after a transatlantic flight.

²⁸ I simply cannot fathom someone being so utterly clueless as to not realize how bizarrely inappropriate that is, but the alternative is to assume they did know and are just being deliberately assholes, which makes me unreasonable angry. I’m being charitable by assuming they’re merely dipshits.

²⁹ This doesn’t have to be true. You could kick off quest lines if you scanned the right items around the ship. Maybe there even are some like that. But you’re still limited to the paths which have been built into the design; there’s no going off the rails.

³⁰ At least, it doesn’t seem like your actions can seriously affect the plot lines.

³¹ I particularly liked the repair station, which played a little like Spaceteam, only without the yelling at your partner. Various patterns would pop up on the screen and you’d have to twiddle physical switches or hit buttons or twist dials to match and clear them. I could have spent a couple hours playing that thing. You get about five minutes in two different shifts.

³² It was, indeed, a series of tubes

³³ I was really deeply curious what the experience was going to be like, and justified going on those grounds. From that perspective, for me, it was money well spent.

³⁴ Or maybe the ominous news

³⁵ Weirdly, there’s no actual physical sensation you’re on a spaceship rather than in a building that’s firmly planted on the ground. I’d have thought they’d have placed subwoofers or something to give you the sensation of engines running, or at least when you jumped to lightspeed.

³⁶ My idea: build a bunch of archetypes online, so before you arrive you can choose an archetype — smuggler, scholar, farmer, pilot, etc — and answer a few questions like homeworld and why you’re on the Starcruiser. Tie those answers to a personal plotline on the ship, ready when you board. It’d be optional, but would help people think of themselves as a participant rather than an observer, and reward them when they did.

³⁷ I just saw they’re adding, for an additional charge, someone who’ll come by your cabin in the morning and paint you as your favorite alien species. Expect more Zabraks.

³⁸ Further evidence that the Starcruiser experience has some rough edges: you can’t just have your bags transferred to another hotel, like you could at any other Disney property. I had assumed we could just hand over our bags and head for the Magic Kingdom for the day, checking in after we were done in the evening, but it’s just not an option. You get to pick up your bag, wait a half hour in the heat for a cab, drag everything over to another hotel, then dump it all on the bell desk.

It’s a real pain in the ass to waste an hour when you’re really trying to reach the park when it opens so you can ride a couple rides before the crowds get bad. We didn’t make it.

³⁹ Although at seven stories tall and with 727 guest rooms it’s far larger than any of them are.

⁴⁰ We had already seen the better part of Hollywood Studios as part of the Starcruiser, so it didn’t seem like it was worth repeating.

⁴¹ In retrospect, spending a day in the middle of the trip doing nothing and booking tickets for a park the day we checked out would have been a much smarter plan. Such is life.

⁴² To say nothing of dropping thousands of dollars visiting the parks

⁴³ It’s not a coincidence Disney licensed their works.

⁴⁴ Just take a look at how the CEO of Tesla acts in public.

⁴⁵ Regularly over an hour’s wait; we didn’t bother.

⁴⁶ It’s been rethemed at Disneyland to Tarzan.

⁴⁷ The Haunted Mansion remains one of the best rides in the park in my opinion, creepy and nutty and largely still driven by practical effects.

⁴⁸ In its Disneyland incarnation, at least

⁴⁹ How long before it’s all rethemed to the 1950s?

⁵⁰ Splash Mountain opened in 1989, when they really should have known better.

⁵¹ Although the animatronic Johnny Depp is still haunting it, for the time being.

⁵² Mercifully, the only ones with voice lines are currently Washington, Lincoln, and Biden. The rest just kind of solemnly stand in place and gravely nod their head when their name is rattled off.

⁵³ If you want to argue most zoos are mistreating animals, that’s a discussion I’m open to having. I just don’t think Disney is much of an outlier, and I suspect they’re doing better than most.

⁵⁴ Expedition Everest. We managed to hit it right when the park opened, and rode it twice in a row with barely a five minute wait.

⁵⁵ Think the Jungle Cruise but with far, far fewer corny jokes and real animals instead of animatronics. Although when it opened there was this whole thing where poachers had captured some elephants and you had to race to try and save them.

⁵⁶ And honestly, if you aren’t familiar with it you should probably be killing time reading that rather than my unfocused musings. It’s long (36,000 words) and the technology it talks about is twenty years out-of-date, but it remains one of the most insightful things I’ve ever read on mediated vs. unmediated experiences. There’s a plausible argument I don’t end up traveling the world if I hadn’t read it all those many years ago.

⁵⁷ Let’s be honest, I would play the shit out of an ATLA larp.

⁵⁸ It turns out I am unpleasantly affected by drops and acceleration, but only real drops and acceleration. The sort this featured, where it looks like you’re in freefall for 10 seconds but you’re really strapped to a ride platform that’s only swinging you around a little, doesn’t bother me much at all.

⁵⁹ This time not subtitled in Croatian.

⁶⁰ If aggressive Planet Hollywood branding is a change of pace, anyway.

⁶¹ The parks are sufficiently distant from one another that it can take 45 minutes to get from one to another on the bus lines

⁶² Spoiler alert: they were lying.

⁶³ Yes, the United States took a huge space in the middle of the World Showcase to celebrate how great it was, I guess to calm any wayward US citizens bewildered by the slightest contact with foreign cultures.

⁶⁴ A fun thought experience for me is figuring out how I’d do it differently. The broader solution would be to combine them into regions: Northern Europe, Southern Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Pacific, Latin America. Each one could cover 2-3 different countries, and would let you expand into other countries by adding a small square or street.

But that’s a massive reconfiguration. In a more limited do-over, I’d tear down the United States pavilion — it’s just embarrassing giving yourself pride of place. I’d add someplace from Central or South Africa, like Nigeria or Kenya. I’d swap out Canada, which really only has a decent steakhouse in their pavilion, for Argentina. A couple of years ago I’d have added Russia, but with recent events and the rise of authoritarian dictatorships I’m more tempted to drop China. Maybe replace it with South Korea? And I’d probably jam at least one more South American country in like Colombia (there’s surely room for an Encanto ride) and maybe find the room for an Eastern Bloc country. I bet Ukraine would love a spot.

⁶⁵ Germany went in big for caramel popcorn, which I’m not convinced is even a thing in Germany. But Werther’s Original is, and so you get a whole range of caramel covered snacks.

⁶⁶ Want to know why they set Frozen in Norway? It’s because Norway’s in the showcase, and they reskinned the flume ride to feature Elsa and Anna. It now features hour-long waits and is far too short to really deserve it. Skip it unless the line’s under 15 minutes.

⁶⁷ If you’re staying on a Disney property you are allowed into the park early. We never managed to get there early enough to take advantage of it.