A More Civilized Age: A Star Wars Podcast - 71: Back Up On These Corners, Yoda Is (ACMA Goes to the Galactic Starcrusier)

Episode Date: September 20, 2023

Welp. We did it. We went to space. Thanks to your support, a favor from a friend in Disney's gaming department, and our realization that our rainy day fund had finally found a storm worth being spent on, we flew down to Orlando and took in the sights, sounds, tastes, smells and stories of the Galactic Starcruiser.  This episode, recorded about a week after our visit to the Halcyon, is just one of two episodes we're releasing on our experience. The other will be a combined episode, exclusive for Patrons, that we recorded on Natalie's phone on nights 1 and 2 of the visit, which will drop next Wednesday, along with some photos from our trip! We've now made that post free for all listeners, over here on Patreon. Enjoy!  Hosted by Rob Zacny (@RobZacny) Featuring Alicia Acampora (@ali_west), Austin Walker (@austin_walker), and Natalie Watson (@nataliewatson) Produced by Ricardo Contreras (@a_cado_appears) Music by Jack de Quidt (@notquitereal) Cover art by Xeecee (@xeeceevevo)

Let us return once more to a more civilized age, a Star Wars podcast. I'm Rob Zakening, joined by Ali Akampura, Austin Walker, and Natalie Watson. We are, as always, supported by you, our listeners, by patreon.com slash civilized. So head our way. Never has that been more true. Oh, boy. Folks, you won't believe. well you will because most of you probably already know

how the money is being spent but anyway that also gives you access to all our Q&A episodes and gives us access to some of the silliest and weirdest experiences of our lives or at least did in this case because as many folks have probably

already seen and heard we took the Star Wars Galactic Star Cruiser last week which is a soon to be shuttered attraction at Disney World that I think we have discussed on the podcast or on one of the Patreon shows before. I can't recall those conversations exactly,

but I'm pretty sure they were along the lines of, this looks cool, but it's so ridiculously expensive. There's no way we'd ever do that. And yet, here we are. So let's just sit the table here. On the off chance, you're not familiar with what is this thing? What is the Galactic Star Cruiser? Well, the Star Cruiser is a hotel decorated and equipped

to look like a luxury passenger. ship in the Star Wars universe. The primary way they arrive at this is there are no windows inside. Instead, every window looks into a display showing star fields and spaceships flying past as the Star Cruiser Halcyon goes on its trip around the Star Wars universe. But while you are aboard, you also take part in an immersive theater experience. Everything aboard ship is in universe and that is supposed to extend to the passengers who are encouraged to roleplay as a character in the Star Wars universe. On the first night, I don't mean like roleplay like your Han Solo, but roleplay yourself is just a character who might exist in the world of Star Wars,

someone who might show up on a passenger cruiser like the Halcyon. On the first night, what is presented as an ordinary trip aboard a historic and storied luxury liner is disrupted by the arrival of a first order search party sniffing out resistance activity connected to the Halcyon. And that sets off. a crisis and intrigue that resolves on the second and final night of the cruise. Along the way, passengers have the option to join multiple factions that exist aboard the ship and help them by performing little quests and interacting with the major characters who pop up aboard the ship as part of the story. In between the, you know, the first night

and the resolution of all the plot stuff on the second night, a shuttle takes everyone down to Batu, a.k.a. the Galaxy's Edge area of the Disney World Park. And then after a surprisingly brief amount of time, the cruise is over. The second night has this big finale. And everyone packs up and moves out and returns to the real world on the final morning of the cruise. And so that was how we spent a good chunk of last week. We'll get into a lot more details as we go. I think some people have. The Patreon listeners already heard some of our more drunken reactions. No one's heard anything yet. As of this recording and probably as of this posting. I think this goes up first and then what we should do is, I don't know. There's different ways to think about it, but we recorded at the end of night one and the end of night two are in progress thoughts and reactions. At the end of the night.

Yeah. At the end of the night. When we were sleepy. More than sleepy. Okay. When we were drunk. Yeah, we're all that right. There's not much else to do but drink.

What is, well, I mean, it is a cruise. It is, it is, that is the cruise. That is the most cruise aspect of, uh, the, the experience that we shared. I'm looking at a list of phrases and, and, yeah, what is being drunk in Star Wars? Uh, this says, Taz, Elrude Sector slang for seemingly referring to Taz, a grain plant, brewed into an alcoholic beverage called U-Taz. You could get tased. I don't see anything else here. We had too many PZ-Pizos.

We really did. Nicillin and tonic? Mycelin bubbles. My cell in bubbles. Yeah. Had a Dagaba swamp water drink. We had a... The crate reactor was a mistake.

The crate reactor was a mistake. Yeah, that is a mistake. I mean, I do think it's funny that I do truly have a favorite drink in the world of Star Wars now. I think I just say this really quick So we did those those They were like little diaries We recorded them off my phone Yeah

We lost one of them for like A day Two days because my phone exploded Yeah And it was really upsetting I didn't sleep It was it was highs and lows Highs and lows

The epic highs and lows of Star Wars Yeah I had to go through a data recovery It was like its own little quest. Yeah, it was, its own little mission for me. The First Order didn't want

to have that recording. Because I didn't do any Jedi missions. I got my, I made my own little mission. So the thing I'm trying to set up is those are our in progress, uh, uh, thoughts and feelings.

Uh, we are drunk and tired. I think really more drunk the second night because we stayed up a little bit later after all the events to, to chop it up with some, some other passengers. To be honest. I stand by everything I said on that.

I'm not saying we stand by everything I said. I'm saying that we were a little rambling. And we had hot takes, you know, coming off of it. And my instinct is that this is what people should hear first. And then if they want to hear us go through it, truly go through it. Secondly, the Mujah twist. That's what I like. I like the Mujah twist.

Add a little nicillin in there, add a little gin in there. And that turned out to be the drink for me because everything else was like a little too sweet or like saccharine in other ways. So just the other part of this, and I think we outlined this before, but I actually, this is probably the place to begin the conversation. We do cover this on the Patreon shows, but I think it's worth repeating. When we first heard about this attraction, we looked at it and we seriously considered it because it was like what a funny and goofy thing this would be to do as a group on this podcast. And the thing you immediately encountered was the price was prohibitive for the accommodations because aboard the Star Cruiser, all the rooms are the same, and they presume you are traveling with kids effectively.

Every room has a single, like, full-sized bed, big enough to sleep too. And then there's bunks, more fit for smaller folks or kids. But that's it. Those are the accommodations. And so we would have all had to pile into a room. The one, like, giant suite has two big beds, and that one is, like, 10K or whatever. And still, it's a lot of bunks rounding out. Yeah, and then it's, like, eight bunks or whatever, yeah.

Yeah, it's not like there's a sleeper couch that we could have rolled out. And, you know, so, you know, immediately we sort of run into the fact that for a bunch of grown-up friends to travel to a thing like this, who are not like romantic partners, this thing gets expensive because the, logistics get hard to figure out. Basically, you need a separate birth for every single person. And these are expensive out of the gate. And then having individual rooms gets really, really expensive. So we were like, this is never going to happen. And we were going to stand strong on that until word came down that this thing is shutting down.

The Star Cruiser will not be sailing much longer. I don't know when the last cruise is, but it's imminent. And so suddenly we were sort of in a bit of. a panic. Like, can we, can we really go the rest of our lives without knowing, without knowing what the galactic Star Cruiser experience would have been? And fortuitously, we always had a very aggressive strategy, I guess you could call it, of setting money aside for podcast expenses. And we never had expenses, really, that were very large. And so we had a, we consistently for about two years. We built up, we built up a lot of money that we forgot existed.

Yeah, you build that money up for things like, oh, my God, my computer exploded or, oh, my God, my mic stopped working. We used it for small stuff like that. We have. Patreon is broken. Right. You know, who knows? Like, the banks, like, emergency funds. When we thought about, like, okay, well, how much are we allowed to spend from this? One of the things that Allie brought up to me was like, well, if Patreon decides to do some fuck shit and we have to like get off Patreon for a month and we literally don't have this income to count on for a month. It'd be nice to have a month buffer for each of us, you know, which is about what this cost, frankly, more than that actually. Definitely more. Definitely

more than that because of how fucking, like truly that's the thing that's wild to think about is just it was a fucking fortune for what is basically two days. Like, and it's certainly only two days of events and it's not even, it, yeah, ugh, who, it. It's, It's such a small amount of time, and it's so expensive. And we definitely could not have done it without stumbling into saving this much money by mistake. Yeah. Any time, there are a few times we, like, you know, kind of got to know some of the other passengers on the Star Cruiser. We'd found out that some of them, this was like their fourth or fifth voyage, which just blows my mind.

And the one thing that people always, like, found a way to say is like, oh, but, you know, you really see where your dollar, like, your dollar goes. You see, like, how far, you know, like, it's worth it. It's so worth it. You see where it. And I just could not disagree more. Have you been to an all-inclusive hotel? you get food. I mean, this is the thing.

It basically is the premise of an all-inclusive hotel where your food is included. You know, you're like, that's it. In other all-pricist hotels, alcohol is also included. But here it is not. Ideally, too. Yeah, amenities, like a pool or gym or, you know. And in some ways, I understand why

those kinds of amenities weren't included because theoretically your time should be taken up doing all these like immersive things doing in my mind I thought our our schedules were going to be just like jam packed there's always going to be something to do and I think they think that's also going to be the case but at the same time with what Rob said in the design of the rooms being kind of designed for kids there is a lot of there are a lot of aspects of the experience itself that feel kind of designed for kids who are like keen to repeat things or repeat missions or repeat like exploring or do little kind of kid oriented activities for adults there is literally the bar and you get like a couple of notifications. vacations throughout the day of like events to go to. And then maybe you happen upon one of the actors in the middle of something and you get to have like kind of a one-on-one or a small group experience with an actor. Which lasts five to ten minutes at the most, right? If you're in

between scenes, you're not going to get a 30 minute break. I mean, unless you're in the bar, I guess, and Lieutenant Croy comes over for your, to drink with you, like that happened to those people we saw, right? Where he's even just bunker down with them. He's like, I don't know. I got nothing else going on for an hour, shit. I'm on my ledge break. Pass the Nicillan. So really quick from that high level, because I want to make sure it's super clear

what happens in the, not narratively even, but like you get there on an afternoon. That afternoon becomes the first story day. You do a big muster. There's hundreds of people here. There are not always hundreds of people here. A fact that we heard from, or a piece of trivia we heard. from someone was that maybe a rumor that we heard from someone was that over the last year before this had had, or the last two years, before the big announcement came that they were shutting

it down, the average capacity was at like 30% of max capacity, whereas we were at like much closer to 100%. And so, you know, a third of what the people were that we had. This is a point I feel like we should come back to it when we kind of talk about our personal experience because I think it's very key. Yeah. And I actually kind of go both ways it for different things. But, so there are hundreds of people in this big atrium, not big enough, but an atrium. You get introduced to some of the main characters, the captain, the cruise director, the, you know, you meet these people called the Saja who are descendants of the guardians of the wills from Jeddah from Rogue One, supposedly. We'll talk more

about them, I promise. And after that muster, you, it's clear that. that something, during that muster be clear that something is going on. You know, this new engineer guy, Sammy is running around and reporting that some weird stuff is happening. And oh, my God, would you believe it? As Rob said, the first order shows up and is looking for resistance spies. And then that first night, you're kind of getting very high level introduced to the data pad, an app on your phone. That is how you kind of check in for missions around the ship or hack into the console. You do a little bit of that.

And that gives you your schedule and stuff like that. You have a big dinner and performance by this woman, this Twilic woman, Gaya, who's the superstar, a galactic superstar. Wild, I think that that's night one in retrospect, by the way. There's no build for that, right? You meet some of the other characters already talked about Gaya. Guy's managers on the ship, Rath Cole, who is a smuggler guy. He's like a slime ball.

He's great. shallace to Wraith, the homie. Was the Chewbacca stuff day one, too? Chubaca shows up on, on, a lot happens in this first. You get there in the afternoon, and then that afternoon and evening are one big, long, you know, string of narrative events. And you start to do a handful of small things around the ship. You know, I had a task to go move some plugs around inside of engineering in order to, I don't know, deactivate the sensor array for a second so that Wraith could do something, some fuckboy shit.

Like, you know, whatever it was that he was getting up to. Everybody has, like, one thing there. And then you theoretically could do some other bigger events with groups. So I think day one, we did lightsaber training, is that right? Yeah. And then day two, we did bridge crew training. And those are these, like, big 30-person events that are guided by members of the cast, et cetera. Then you have the big meal.

And again, the big meal is, I mean, there was a starter meal also. that's just like a buffet style meal and those are, there's kind of two, there's three buffet style meals or four, I guess, because there's lunch. There's lunch you get there. There's breakfast the next day. There's lunch the next day, which I skipped the lunch buffet the second day. And then there's an outro breakfast

than the final morning. There's no story events on that final day at all. There's just, all right, everybody, bye. You also have a, you learn on the first day, you also have a droid you can talk to via comms array in your, via not a touchscreen, a video screen in your bedroom and there's a little mini story happening there

and that's kind of where's Day 1 end Day 1 ends after the Gaia concert Nope no it ends after The big emotional highlight is putting the restraining Bolt on the Astromack Right, right right right I got Chubaca out of this out of it I helped Shubaka escape

I did We did that raised hands things There's video evidence of me being right there Shubaka escapes It all worked out But yes, I can't believe I forgot about SK, one of the other many characters is a droid. They are a wonderful droid. They them, droid.

Finally, there's a non-binary character. In Star Wars, it's a robot. Of course. And they're great chance to S.K. There's some other side characters you meet that first day, too. Sandro, who is an aspiring musician, who wants to, like, have his big shot. Uwani, who is a backup musician for Gaia. Umani is

Awani and Sandro forever I mean I would have thought Awani and me forever But I see Yeah I meant individually But yeah I guess together now That's how that goes

They are literally together now Right And then day two is more of The same Except you go down to Batu For like four to six hours You do Galaxy's Edge How long was it

Was it four hours at six I don't know We got there At I want to say like 930-ish because we got there right before our ogas so yeah

and then we got back around one-ish I think we got back later I think we were there for like five no it's not five it closes at four it closes at four so I think we left at three it was like one sorry it closes meaning the route we had to get back by four the last transport was at four

and the events kicked back up at four Rob you stayed later than anybody else so I wouldn't be surprised if it was closer to 3.34 for you. But Natalie and I think got back at two. Yeah. Because I was aimed for one. I was like, I don't know. No, because we tried to get back for that Saja thing in the simulator.

Can I describe what rooms there are on the ship? Like what you're available places to go are? Please. Okay. So there is the atrium. There is, and just off of the atrium, I think we say this in the diaries, but just off of the atrium, there's the sublight lounge

which is the bar then there's a gift shop off the atrium that has like Galaxy Star Cruiser specific only can get on the Star Cruiser

merch and random stuff then there's three decks with there's like a deck upstairs that has just rooms

downstairs There's just rooms. And then on the final floor below, there's rooms and the banquet, like the food area is there. There's a room that is the Saja lightsaber training room. There's an engineering room where, as Austin mentioned, you do some little quest. There's the brig, which is basically just another way to get into the engineering. room if you are on a particular quest line and then there's the cargo hold um and and uh the bridge and the simulator and the simulator climate simulator the climate simulator which is

has been programmed to be uh to simulate the weather on batu um and this is basically the outdoor area which is like a tiny little slice of of outdoors. It's like the smoker's lounge, except you're not allowed to smoke there. It feels like the smoker's area. Like, it feels like, yeah. And that is it.

That is, you can't leave the ship except for going to Batu. Like, I didn't think about that, but you can't, I mean, you don't leave the ship. The fact that there are no windows, as I think about it more, like, it is a wild conceit. Like, you are in a windowless cement warehouse for, like, two days.

So. They should have made the climate simulator big and put a pool in it. Yeah, they should have. I agree with you. I would have probably been less sad. Or just did a nice indoor, like, heated pool and, like, had a screen above that looked like the stars. Yeah. That would be fun.

That would be fun. Anyway. I don't know. So then you leave that space to go to Baton. and Galaxy's Edge, it's big, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's the Galaxy's Edge. It's exact same as Disneyland. It is, yeah, sure, right, right. The Disney World and Disneyland ones are the same is what you're saying.

Virtually the same. Is it like one-to-one, like you could navigate identically? It is basically one-to-one except for the entrances. The, I will say the Disneyland entrances are cooler than the Disney World ones. That was a percent. Yeah, y'all were describing it either Allie or Natalie is like knowing your way around a neighborhood. And, like, maybe something's changed since the last time you were there, but, like,

it's the same neighborhood. You turn left here to go. It was, it was, it is exactly the same. It is, like, unbelievable. It was especially weird as someone who I've, I've gone to Disneyland a lot. I'm a Disneyland fan. And then being able to navigate that area without a map, like, I just knew where everything was. It was useful for me.

Let me tell you. When I was like, I don't, this map they gave us. I don't know. I'm trying to open up. I'm trying to hack into the antenna array. I'm at an antenna array, but it's telling me it ain't this one. I don't know. And you were like, oh, yeah, it's behind the droid depot that's over there, you know.

Yeah, it's wild. It's super trippy to be across the world or across the country and know where you are. Right, right. Yes, that is wild. That is very strange. What's wild is you end up doing, you end up doing missions down there. And it's, there's, it's overlaid on a place that already has other people doing their own thing, including their own little mini missions on their own data pad that have nothing to do with the Halcyon. So there's like, yeah, because there's a Bautou.

And, right. There's there, if, if you go to the Galaxy's Edge, there's, like a mini game that you can play in Batu, that's like a bounty hunter mini game. And you could, there's like these little, like, I don't know what to call them. They're like little... QR codes. Well, those are just for us. The QR codes are not for... Right, Allie?

No, you can use them. I mean, they don't do anything. Because you already have them all, Allie. They unlock outfits that you can wear in your galaxy's edge thing or whatever. So that's like, when we say there's like missions to do, what it is is there's... You have QR codes that you can scan. You have a place that the phone tells you to go... like two physically so you could press a button on your phone and then do a mini game on your phone

that is like a little connect the dots situation or like tilt it this way but like that's it yeah and i will say that uh doing that in in batu weather in in in humid unrelenting florida heat was gnarly it was it was rough it was But I did But we did do it So yeah You go to Batu Everyone

Each of us We're following Different paths For what it's worth There was a lot of overlap Let me just finish this high level Really quick Which is like

You do the two rides there Those connect to the main story You scan some stuff on the planet You go back to the ship You have a second big dinner night Where there are less important events Actually by dinner before dinner happens, the first order comes and blockades the ship. You do your follow-on event,

which is like, hey, did you do bridge training? Well, guess what? The bridge is under attack in the middle of another event where you're already there. Use that bridge training. You already did. Hey, you do the engineering thing yesterday. Well, guess what? There's a big thing down in the engineering hall that you go do. Hey, you're theoretically on the Jedi path or the first order path, go to this room and watch Yoda show up. Six times. We'll get there. And then there's a big final confrontation that is a stage show, effectively the style of stage show where like Indiana Jones fights the Nazis and you're like, whoa! This is the one that I saw when I was a kid. And so that's what my stage show, the internal stage show in my mind is. But instead of being a stage, it's in the

atrium up on these, the higher level walkways that you can look up to but can't go up to. And so there's a big final confrontation, you know, there's a Jedi duel. Kylo Ren and Ray fight it out with lightsabers. And the heroes win the day. And S.K. escapes with the information. And Sammy becomes a real member of the crew. And Sandro gets a record deal and starts dating Wani. And Gaya gets to escape to her people earlier that day. She just left. She just leaves before all the real shit pops off at the very end, which is kind of funny. She's like, I got what I need. I got what I need, bye. She's trying to help the twilight people on Ryloth, actually.

She's also, she's like post-resistance. She's doing her own shit. And the end, right? And then we eat one more meal. I guess, know, the meal comes, then we get snacks, we get desserts, we get victory desserts, we hang out in the bar a little bit, we record our final diary entry, we go to sleep, you wake up, you have breakfast the next day you leave. That's it.

That's the overall thing, right? And I make that accounting because it's like, there is no. hanging by the pool for three hours. There is no, you know, okay, then we just, like, had three hours to kill. So we, like, left Batu and went to another park. Or it's not the other thing, right? Where it's like, God, I couldn't even give you the high level because it was just like, boom, event, event, event, event.

It's two fairly packed days that also have bits of downtime that feel extensive that you don't really know what to do with or they're not extensive. They're like, that really awkward amount of downtime. We're like, well, I have an event in 45 minutes, so I can't go to to sleep. Like, I can't go take a nap, you know? But, uh, but it's not, but it's also not 20 minutes. So it's like, I kind of have to find something to do. I guess you guys want to go to the bar, you know? Yeah. Um, even events like there's like, bingo is happening sometimes. And it's like, well, I didn't get there for the beginning of it. So like I feel like that's a weird thing or like,

also I don't feel like I paid all this money to go play bingo in a VFW hall type situation. Yes. I think that that's, that's also true. Yeah. I kind of have a high-level question, which is we all have our initial reactions to all of what we just said on the diary, second day, because we were coming off of the end of the thing. And so we had kind of big final feelings in some ways. We kind of went through topics on that episode. But I'm curious if your overall feelings about the Star Cruiser have changed a week removed from it. I want Allie go first. Yeah, Allie go first.

Sure. Yeah. So it's funny because the last night. of the Star Cruiser, the thought that kept being in my head was this is what I expected it to be. I've come here and I know that I knew that it was going to be horribly expensive and sort of not worth it and that it would be fun but there would be like Disney couldn't do all of the things at once to make it the experience that it felt like it could have been.

And I still mostly feel that way, but I feel like I have this, this thing of like, if I could do it again, I would do it better, right? Like I would, like, I would, like, try to find the, like, Star Cruiser Reddit or, like, a Discord channel for people who were going on my cruiser and, like, see who wanted to be a part of the role-playing thing. Right. Right. or I yeah I don't know it's like part of part of what we said in that diary was like

it would have been better if there were other opportunities to be in character and with other people aside from big scripted story events where you're with 30 people and you have 15 minutes to like do a mini game anyway or like an aerobics lesson or like super involved thing or you're in the cafeteria or you're in a bar and like that's it yeah there's no prompts for scenes in the bar or the cafeteria to be clear it's not like like a cast member can walk up to you right a waitress can ask you like where you're from and who you are but there's no like i noticed in the batu in the galaxy's edge one of the things that you could do is trade items that you found to other people in order to like complete a set or like oh i have a quest to find

some moisture find, what are the things called? The moisture collectors, moisture collectors, and you have extra moisture collectors. You could trade those to me on the app as part of the Galaxy's Edge experience, which like, who cares? It's not. It's like a real weird, I've been there 30 times. I'm going to do all the mini games. Like, why not?

I like being there. But it's not. But there's nothing like that in the Halcyon. There's nothing like that. And the Star Cruiser where there's like a reason for you to talk to a random person to try to like, oh, do you? have a red, a red five, I'm trying to get, you know, red number five. And like, okay, well, what's it worth to you? You know what I mean? There's none of that, like, there's no, there's no mechanism

for prompting interaction between players. I'm constantly thinking about this, by the way, just in relation to general interactive theater or immersive theater, larping, and how larping has structured reasons for people to break off and do scenes because they have character needs that need to be met, for instance. And like, that character need might be, I'm trying to find a source of blank or something like that. And another character might be like, I'm trying to sell blank or I'm trying to, or I'm trying to trick someone into doing blah, blah, blah. Like, there's lots of character scaffolding, like, that systemically pushes people together.

And also just more space for it. And then also think about megagames, like Watch the Skies, where, like, a hundred people will play a complex game together with an open-ended outcome where they can totally change how the events go that also has a bunch of design around how that stuff goes. We ran a story back on Waypoint about Watch the Skies, I want to say. Is that true, Rod? We ran a mega game story. Am I making this up?

Maybe it predates me. Maybe it was in a initial run. This was in, you know, this might be, right. God, I can't find it. I'll, I'll, yes, 2017. How I, this is from John Brindle, wrote, how I survived a zombie apocalypse only to wind up in federal prison, prison, which is a, I think this is a technically, yeah, it is. This is a mega game.

Mega games are, as John Brindle described, a combination of LARP and board game, which in this case was played across five countries with hundreds of players. And it's like, this design work exists. Like the design work for, I have 300 people. In this case, the John Brindle wrote about was 600 people who have, who play roles in an open-ended game that have consequences, decisions have consequences, and outcomes can change. Because that's the thing neither of us, Rob nor I said, was the end of the story is the end of the story. You might, every event ends the way it's going to event. It's going to end. Every,

and then the overall outcome of everything is also completely written. There's still time for the last sailing of the Halcyon to end differently. God, there still is. I really want to. What if they do the menu? They just fucking kill everyone. It's next weekend. It's next weekend. It'll be tomorrow. What a way to go. If this goes out on the 27th, it'll be the 28th.

So the people go in. So this is, we are spoiled. Don't listen to this. Spoilers. You're on your way. Or listen to it right now very quickly. And then strategy, strategize around what we say. So anyway, Allie, you, so does it say that you would do it?

You wouldn't do it again, but you have that urge. Yeah, I feel like I, well, because we, and we can talk about sort of the structure that we set up for ourselves before we went. And then also like some of our like character stuff if we want. But like I felt like I wanted to go in spoiler free, so to speak, right? So I didn't like, you know, look up any of the plot details. I didn't watch any of the walkthroughs or listen to like other podcasts about it. I just wanted to like go there and see what was up. but like I feel like it would have been a richer experience if there was more of like a community

experience or like a fandom experience and I had made those connections beforehand. If we had known Swoop was going to be there, I'm like, oh, yeah, Swoop, let's make sure we grab a drink on day one or like let's do a scene in the climate simulator where you talk to me about your racing history. There's like, you know, because there's no structure when you get there in terms of like you know, some people are going to wear a pin to say that they're in character. Or, like, you know, there are structured events where, like, this is the bingo game for people who are, you know, 100% are peeing, and this is the bingo game for people with their

kids. Yeah. And, like, there's, you know. Those muster groups were going to end up being, because at the beginning, you're like, okay, you're going to be in muster group, A, B, C, or D, or whatever, the Star Wars, a Tesh, Besh, and, it's one of those, yeah, one of those is wrong. But it's mostly like that. And that's not the case.

That's just like where you need to stand during the finale. But, you know, go back to that place that you were yesterday. But yeah, there's no subdivisions of players in the way that you're talking about. Yeah. And for it being like, I mean, there was a definite gradient of our peers in our group. There were people who were like cosplay the fuck out. out and like came with like came with their best and it was amazing to see and then there were people who were like I'm from the planet Brooklyn or I'm from Indiana Indiana and we're

just like okay and sometimes the cosplay wasn't even enough to know someone was role playing because someone would be like oh yeah hey I'm Dan but like you're dressed the fuck up like a Jedi Dan I guess Dan could be a Jedi name but like you know like it's Dan and Dan's little kid And, like, Dan is not role-playing. Dan is being a dad. But Dan wanted to come and, like, be part of the fun and, like, be dressed up like Luke, you know. Like, that's cool. I'm happy for Dan.

But that's the, you can't even tell just based on who is dressed. I mean, sometimes you could. Sometimes you could. There was one person who was like, my name is Ray in rural. And it is an odd thing when, like, you get an email before, like, two weeks before. I think it was like a month before we set sale and it was like, hey, if you want to buy some clothes to wear on the Galactic Star Cruiser, we got this email from Disney, like, go to this exclusive website and you can buy like Ray's clothes or Leah's clothes or like some like more nondescript clothes to fit in. But then it's really weird when you see people like dressed up in like very iconic Princess Leia outfits and you're like. outfit, but this isn't a costume party.

Yeah, but yeah, it's, and it's caught between being a costume party, being like a kind of more dinner. Didn't someone say they were Mon Mothma? Somebody did say their name was Mothma. They were their descendant Mothma, yeah.

They said Mon Mothma because I remember being like, Mon Mothma's here? Like, isn't she old as did? I don't think it was my Mothma. I think it was someone from that big party that was there while we were there. Yeah, we ended up, like, hanging out with her at breakfast the final morning.

Oh, did we? Oh, that's who it was. Yes, that's who it was. It was. It was. And I think they took a stab, because we don't know how, like, Shandrillan names work. So, like, you just riff on Mon. And I think it was, like, like, Bon, Moth, or something like that.

It was, like, a similar sounding thing. But I think Croy might have just said Mon Mothma. Croy just said Mon Mothma at the end. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Croy is the first officer, lieutenant, who comes aboard the ship. Right.

I think for me, I've softened on the experience since it ended. Soften as in your less harsh critic. Yes. And I think that is because, and got me a lot of discussion of this on remap, because some shit went down while I was at Disney World as a just enjoying, enjoying myself. But one of the things that I sort of experienced while I was at Disney World, and this was really like, I'm glad I had this expanded context. M.K. and I went full bore.

Like, we're going to have a great magical fucking Disney World time. And we're going to, you know, effectively, like, it wasn't fully like spare no expense, but we were going to resource and going to restaurants that are like... It's like honeymoon shit. Yeah, but also it was like we're not going to come away from this. maybe we'll never be back. We're not going to come away and have the experience of like,

well, maybe it would have been better if we'd gone to the really good places that we did. So we tried. We went for a full like, all right, what's the best Disney World can do? And the answer is not very good. And so,

like, this is a, like, as a resort experience, Disney whiffs horribly at the high end, just consistently across the board. This is not unique to the Halcyon. And in fact,

having that experience across the rest of Disney really brought our experiences with the Halcyon into sharp focus because so many of the things that you're like this is not worth it this kind of sucks is a reaction you will have daily across Disney

as you are doing some of their like signature nicest experiences and you're like how are you this short of the mark and so much of it is because and I suspect this is probably a big part of, look, someone behind the scenes email us with the dirt on like why Halcyon is the way it is. But one of the things you consistently encounter at Disney is that

restaurants and hotels are only so individuated. They have to share like supply of cooking ingredients, dishes, but they have like different names to match the theme of the resort, but they pop up again and again and again. That's funny. The Halcyon actually was one of the best places I at Disney and had some of the most unique menu offerings compared to anywhere else I went. That second day meal was actually really good. That was like a highlight. Especially because I thought the first day I was like, ah, it's been fine. And the buffets had been okay. Some fun gimmick foods and stuff. But that second meal was like, oh, this short rib is actually very good or the potatoes in that one was really one of the best meals I had at Disney. And I like ate at multiple like

signature restaurants. And this was one of the better ones. And so like, So many of those things that I think I dwelled a lot on it on those diary recordings is that it was like for what's supposed to be a premium like luxury experience in some ways, it's really whiffing. And that's just like that's just kind of the Disney of it all. And I suspect like anyone who probably worked to make the healthy on what it is probably ran up against some of the like dictates and constraints that are put on all Disney resorts that really prevent you from having that like, both achieving that high end, but also having site-specific and theme-specific stuff that, like, really elevates something to that next level. And so, like, coming back from, you know, extended trip at Disney, suddenly I had, it's not necessarily, it made me like Halcyon more, but it made me way more understanding and respectful of what they've achieved.

Inside of the limitations of being at Disney World Resort. Right. Yeah. I mean, that's, That's the, you know, I mentioned things like LARPS and mega games and immersive theater. It's not to say they should have done this. It's to say that like, I mean, I wish they had done that. So it is kind of to say that. But you can feel that they wanted to do those things. And then we're constrained by Dan is here with Little Jacob or whatever. And like we have to appeal to families.

We can't count on everyone being game. Can I hijack this? because it's actually, this is why I wanted to throw to y'all. How much do you feel, like, how much do you think Halcyon is defined and maybe constrained by its initial assumption that it would be families and kids doing this? Hugely, but hugely. I mean, that's, I think the whole, I think that's the big shackle on it. Do you think that's the original sin that maybe is why this thing is it going to be staying open?

I mean, maybe, maybe that's the original sin. is that or that it's set between Last Jedi and The most swagless era in Star Wars Which like that's a much bigger conversation that we have to have after this But it's tough because like the accommodations are designed for families and kids But the thing that stands out to me in terms of like Who I saw there and like the way that you engage with that story

Is that like you know, if you're bringing two six-year-olds to be in those bunk beds, are they, you assume they each have their own individual phones or are paying attention to text messages from a, like a bounty hunter? Like, that's not how they're going to engage with this.

I didn't think about that. Having observed the six-year-olds a lot, they were at, they had a phone, like they had a, first of all, six-year-olds these days are on the, phone. They are on the phone. They are watching TikTok. They are on the phone. They know how to

notifications work. They're like, they are with it. They yeah, I saw like any kid I saw had their own phone and were walking around doing their like dragging kind of their parents behind them doing their own missions and parents like kind of pushing their kids to the front of like whatever event was going around going on. There it is worth saying there were very few children. on our star cruiser, which I would mainly attribute to the fact that we flew the week after Labor Day. So school was very much back in session. But I have to imagine, I mean, this thing runs every two days all year long. School is in session. Most of the, you have like three months and like some you know holiday breaks and stuff the majority of people who have the income

the disposable income and time to do this are going to be like adults like single adults or couples or groups of friends um and it is it is it had i this debuted in 2021 so it's been two and a half years the idea that it doesn't seem like it's changed at all basically since launch. Like some of the merch offerings may seem a little bit different, like some of them have changed. But virtually the programming seems exactly the same. And the fact that it hasn't adapted to accommodate for more adults than kids being the dominant, you know, audience is, bizarre to me especially if you are like on the like on a particular cruise uh session with multiple like many more adults than children like the spaces just don't accommodate for it because like then you have yeah then you

have like adults trying to take turns in the in the tiny bar to like get a you know there's just not enough spread of places to be and exist and spend time. There should have been a second bar. The thing that I actually keep thinking is like it's actually not that it's children focused because like there aren't that many children focused events. There's like the droid building society thing or whatever with the kids. There's droid racing. There's like a loth cat that like that's the same thing. That's the same. The droid racing and the loth cat thing, that's the same thing. And I looked. That's the same. It's like, Literally the same event.

No, no, no, but it's part of the same track of events. That's the same track. Yeah, there's like a bunch of events on that second day. There's like four events. Kids are, kids get up and they're coming back earlier. Yes, from, from Batu. Because they have the earlier dinner session. But it's not like there is a lot of, you know, the, like, frankly, the, like, the, the bridge buttons are really high up, right?

Like, imagine a little kid doing the shield defense thing. Well, I was too short for the fucking Jedi training shit. This is what I'm saying, right? Yeah, it is strange. Natalie's been working on her excuses. Well, okay, so this is the thing, is that the thing I want to get to you is like, it's not that it is, it's not that it's tilted towards kids. It's that it's a mess and doesn't, and it has to try to appeal to both. And I don't think that they could have committed further either way.

But they'd committed further to it being a kid adventure, and we looked at the videos, and it was all like kids, summer camp, we wouldn't have gone. Right? And if it's, and if it's, if it's, if it's very clearly an adult resort, you know, and like, oh, it's for adult larpers, the kids aren't, the families aren't going to go and they want that family money. And so it's like they wanted to have it both ways, right? They wanted their penny and their bun and they're not going to give the opportunity, you know, like, I think that that cuts it across. It is the most double income no kids ass thing, though, I can imagine. Like, this is the funny thing about it. The biggest family we saw was Neil Patrick Harris's family. And that dude lives in a brownstone that was

featured in an architectural digest. Right. This is the, like, to make the family experience really work. Yeah. You're talking about like more families in that kind of bracket closer to that. But the other thing is, I am not sure. Immersive Theater is a concept that a lot of kids are fully going to get. And so just the structure of the thing kind of invites more. adult participation, but then everything around it is like, but it has to be kid friendly in some way, or at least it can't, it has to, it has to, like, presume the presence of children, even though you look around, it's like there's a lot of, a lot of adults here, which is, you know, just such a weird part of the, of the Halcyon experience.

I would say that kids are more inclined to participate in, like, like, the kids were the first ones to like engage with you know a for like you know try and talk to the first yeah well to kneel before Kylo Redd that keeps happening when I went back to Galaxy's Edge I saw it happen three more times kids go up and they bow to Kylo Ren it's weird I think he's don't sometimes he's like don't do that sometimes he's like no he's literally like he's like you are not selected or whatever um But no, I do think kids are often finding themselves in like kind of immersive theater type experiences when they do like play groups and they're like, you know, challenge to like, hey, you know, participate in this activity as if you're fulfilling a role. Like I think they are more primed than an adult.

Like adults are awkward. We're self-conscious. We're like, I mean, I definitely struggled with initiating a lot of the, you know, interactions. with different cast members and stuff. So I, but it's hard when you're trying to role play, you know, a character, and then there's the kid next to you that's like, the wookie's right there! Yeah, but the thing there is the kid is just being the kid in the world.

Exactly. You're not, you were not being Natalie Watson video game producer and who has been whisked away to Star Wars World, who is from the planet Los Angeles. If you had, maybe it would have been easier, actually. Yeah, yeah. To be like, I just want to talk to these sodden about my day job. I'm just trying to talk about the stress I have

and working in this fucked up industry. You know, like, maybe that would have actually been easier to slip into. Talk about these layoffs. But, like, the kids are doing Dora the Explorer. Do you know what I mean? They're doing, like, you know, bad guy, you know? Yeah, yeah.

The kids can do, like, let's pretend, but what they can't do is, like, the context of, like, role playing, I guess, in the way that ideally the thing would invite, but then the thing is pitched down to kids, especially the First Order stuff. So they kind of, they kind of hedge around it. But Natalie,

I did want to revisit one thing, because I, like, I am curious, like, people have to let us know. One of the things the last night, I was talking to one of our fellow passengers, Hatch. And this was after everything was over.

I was, I was running and getting water because I was all fucked up on crate reactors. But one of the things that he told me is that he had heard, at least. that when the ship launched, like the attraction has changed,

it's been scaled back to accommodate smaller crowds and maybe like claw back some of the profit given that the thing was only booking half because he said, he heard from people on the early cruises. There were more characters

and there was more character interaction and there would be stuff happening after those like evening finale where you have everyone go in the muster stations and all that. that like that you could come out pretty late at night and you would see characters who were part of the story hanging out of board ship still and boy was that not our experience because like those folks clocked in and they clocked out this is the 30% go ahead Natalie I was just going to say

that's like it's so it's hard to imagine that because that is like I wonder what the like what the actor, work contract, like, how is this, like, structured, like, what, what are your off hours? Because the actors are there pretty much, it feels like 20, I mean, as soon as you wake up, you're bound to run into one and by the time you go to bed. It feels like there's tears, though, right? Because, like, Gaya shows up for her performances. She, she maybe does a signing, you know, and then she's not there. But, like, Raith is there almost all day.

Sammy kind of pops in and out. The captain and the cruise director aren't there all the time, but we'll show up from time. Sandro is always there. Like, there's really, like, there's really, Sandro, I could find Sandro 24-7. Like, that's not true. Because, like Rob says, after the final event, they disappear. And maybe they didn't used to disappear. Maybe Sandra used to hang out for drinks or Wraith used to hang out for drinks longer or something.

But again, hanging out for drinks is not, it sucks that that's the way that you have to engage with this. And you can get non-alcoholic drinks and hang out in the bar or whatever. But like, the bar cannot hold 100 people. It's a small bar. And this is where the 30% thing happens, or I kind of go both ways on it. On one hand, I think that there would be some of the story beats would feel real weird if there are only 30% of the people there. Like what? Any of the time that you're supposed to be in the big atrium and it's supposed to be like, oh my God.

I mean, the idea that we're on a cruise ship with 30% of the people, the idea that you'd sit down for dinner and half that room is empty and everyone's cheering for. for Gaia, but more than half the room is empty, is that is ye. That doesn't feel good, right? And then, and then also, frankly, going to Batu would feel weird because it would, one of the nice things about being Batu with us was like, oh, that's another person from our ship. Oh, that's not the person from our ship. It really feels like the cruise ship landed here and a bunch of people got out, right? Yeah. Also, frankly, you'd see less people in cool costumes. You'd see less people who are like, like, that's the, I mean, I guess theoretically, I don't know that because the percentage of people who made costumes and be higher. I feel like the costume. I feel like the

Costume people might have been frequent flyers. But swoop wasn't. Do you know what I mean? No, swoop was like us. Swoop was like I got to get it before it's gone. There's a lot of people who are like, we got to get it before it's gone. And they showed up in costume or at least the kind of closet cosplay, hey, let's throw something together. Let's try to be in character. I'm going to buy a stupid crystal and put it through my arm sleep, my arm thing. You know what I mean?

Like, were there ways to get to Star Wars and be, you know, taking it sort of seriously that a lot of people did there? The things that would go better with the 30% is, I bet it's easier to stay up and keep role-playing with people when there's only one-third of what was there. Because I don't know how Wraith would have done another two or three hours of hanging out with people surrounded by 30 people the whole time. You know? Yeah. Even the main events were bad with Rath sometimes where it was like, Natalie and Natalie, I think

there were both times when you were with me when I was trying to, like, do a Rath event where Rath's whole thing, Rath is the manager of Gaia and the head of the smuggling path We all did different story paths. I did the smuggler one. And that path was really cool. Like I got the, I think I probably got the best path all said. It ended in Gaia explaining colonial, colonialism,

and shit talking to the new republic and basically saying, same as the old boss. Like, as long as there are people on Ryloth that aren't from Ryloth, as long as their boots are oppressing, as I don't care what color of the boots are. Like, yeah, okay, y'all got me. Y'all got me the one true actual thing. Also, because the main story,

ends with this real wishy-washy, we're all-in-one galaxy message that sucks. It sucks so bad. Whereas the guy stuff fucking ruled. The guy stuff literally being this our core premise of the way we've always talked about places like Ryloth and Rodea on this show is extremely funny to me. Anyway, Raythe is the main smuggler guy. He's his guy's manager and he has all these little things. He's done a heist.

He's negotiating for stolen coaxium. And that's happening, right? like he has a chief negotiator and then Sammy had a chief negotiator and they those two people had to like try to negotiate out a deal to change this coaxium. It's not really happening because they're going to say yes no matter what eventually right because the story has to move forward but that's a cool scene except 20 people or 30 people are around it in the atrium and it's like dude there's nothing surreptitious happening here. It's very clear that we are we are doing something in this in this moment. So I think that is an example.

is something where the 100% just doesn't work. And I don't know how you would have hung out until 2 a.m. doing scenes with people when you're surrounded by people who are like, can I do a scene with you? Me. I would be that person being like, Wraith, can I do the next scene? Can I do the, I'm in line to talk to Wraith about my character and my character's parents who have been kidnapped by the black son. It's not, it's not the vibe. 30% might have been the vibe. But 30% probably wouldn't be the vibe when we were doing the thing where we were trying to sneak Chewbacca out and like everyone has to like raise their hands and pretend to be doing a Saja breathing exercise to hide. Yeah. Yeah. No way because you see Chewbacca. You need it to be cramped

to hide Chewbacca. But you do you do something different. Like you pull the stormtroopers that you know, it's the script. You know, it's the script. Because like the experience that I had with Chobaka of suddenly seeing 40 people walk past the dining room into this way smaller room. and having this one character actor in front next to a guy in a Chewbacca outfit. Oh, no, that was, yes. And me just like cramped in this little room and it's all like, thanks for helping out Chewbacca. Yeah, that doesn't work.

That's not the part I'm talking about. Yeah, but like. I don't know the later part. But those two things can't work with the same amount of people. You need more for one and less for the other. And that's why it's broken. I'm saying that like the capacity that we had ruined that smaller moment in a way that like, in the experience that you're talking about, the improv could have filled

in those gaps, right? It wouldn't have, because it wasn't improvved. Wraith had that planned with the Saja. That's a scripted moment. Us doing the big breathe-out thing was not an improvved solution to that problem. That was Rath being like, okay, no, I've talked to the Saja.

We're all going to raise our hands to do a fake Saja breathing exercise, and Chubak is going to be behind us as we do it. Yeah, but the problem with that is, like, I being on the Saja track had no idea that like... I'm not defending this. saying that the, yeah, you had no idea that that side of the thing happened.

I get what you're saying is that like, physically. Physically, we couldn't hide Chubaka with six people. We needed 30 people to hide Chubaca. Yeah, I get what you're saying. It wouldn't have worked with 10 people. And so even inside of the, the single plot arc, which is Chubaca gets arrested, Chubaca shows up way too many people in the brig to get arrested so many times. Yeah, Chbacca arrest.

Okay, first of all, Chubbacca. we told you to chill and stay downstairs and hide. Every time you hide Chewbacca, we would leave the room and then immediately find him somewhere else. He would be like chilling upstairs. He'd be like in the bar. I just saw him standing in the bar right after he was like, okay, stay in the cargo hold. Nope. He's in the bar like chatting up some girlies.

I don't know what's going on. We don't really know what goes on in Chui's private life, do we? We do not. We do not. So we did respect, we did have an all-time moment for me of Chewy pointing at Rob's beard and pointing at his beard and being like, you and me, you and me, you know, we're kin. Yeah, yeah. Also, Rob was wearing the sick long jacket, the robe coat thing.

Yeah. Perfect. Ideal. It was swaggy. It was swag, recognized swag. But my point really is there isn't a coherent amount. I don't know, I don't think that there is a right amount of people. Or if it is, it's not 30% or 100%.

It's 70% or 60% or something. And maybe they bet on that. Maybe they're like, well, we're not going to get 100%. We'll start at 100% and it'll drop down to 70%. And we'll plateau there. But plateauing at 30% would really make certain events way better and other ones, I think, way worse. It's hard because it's easy to be a part of a lot of things. Like, you, you aren't really that, like, fragmented across the four factions as you would expect to be.

Like, I was invited to every smuggler resistance thing that was going on, basically, until the final, like, decision, decision, like, you've chosen, chosen, chosen, chosen your path. And this is, like, the final thing. Because they're all at the same time. And you basically have to pick one to go to. And I only found that out because I was like, why? Like, the captain's telling me, she's invited me to this thing, and it's not showing up on my events page. And I found out it was because I had committed to the Saja thing. And if I wanted to do the Saja path, then I had to stay with the Saja.

I thought of one more quick example of not having enough people, which was the bridge crew training, where the four of us got put on a team by ourselves, and we couldn't compete with the scores. And we did, you know what, by the last event. We held our own. Oh, we totally had fun. We totally had fun. But the point being that, like, that was not enough. people to do the bridge cruise shit, you know, which is wild. Although we were all gamers, we were almost as good.

We were almost as good. We were, we were gaming. We were gaming. We were. I think that, I mean, that's a consequence of, there were a lot of large parties. And I think that because they tried to make it so that each party is in the same dining experience and the same Jedi training, same bridge. Like they try to make it so that you're all kind of being shepherded through the experience together. So I imagine that that was just a consequence of, I'm sure there was another group that was like overbooked or something.

But yeah, it's difficult because I think that predominantly it was too many people. I get for like the one sort of experience of like hiding Chewbacca that you need a certain amount of people. to just physically be able to do that. But for the majority of my time, I was on the outside of a large group of people trying to hear a whispered conversation between two character actors, or like kind of wandering around,

like seeing if I was going to, like, get called into something. For the majority of my time, I felt like I was on the outside, like looking into an experience that other people were having. Fair to say, Natalie, that for you, you feel the same today as you did? Pretty much. I think, you know, I am really grateful that we got to do it. I'm grateful to have had the experience. I do feel similarly to Allie that I wish I had at least been like, if you're going to do this path, here's a couple things you should know.

Like here's like a person that you should talk to or here's like make sure that you engage at this point in time by this point or something. Like I wish I had had some guidelines for how to get the most out of my experience because that is like a huge part of why I think I felt so bummed by the end of like end of night too is I just felt like I didn't get the most out of this experience that I was paying an exorbitant amount of money for. And that really, like, it bummed me the fuck out. I was, and I was like, I'm never going to do this again. So I'm, you know, sitting here. And some of it is on my own volition. Like, I struggle with, like, you know, putting myself out there with a character actor to have, like, a one. Like, Austin had to, like, nearly, like, be, like, physically push me into a character.

Like, to go do a thing, to go do a scene. That ended up being, like, so awkward and weird, which I was. by that on one of the diaries. Yeah, we did. Yeah. I don't have to talk about that. We don't need to revisit it. But it was, I, I, I came, I just, I remember I was, like, sitting in the atrium, like,

right before, like, the final muster, just feeling, like, out of the loop, I had, didn't really understand what was going on. I didn't understand how my path ended up. I didn't understand how the Saja path ended up at the place it was at by the end of the night. Like, there was, like, a. I had a bunch of gaps in my understanding of the plot, despite being one of the people that showed up to get the most out of it. And being, like, in my eyes, the person, like, a type of person that, you know, would engage with everyone

and tried to, like, do the most, but consistently felt like if I wasn't being singled out by a character actor, like if Raith didn't look at me and say like we had that one experience with with Raith Austin where we were like standing around and he was like are you guys doing anything we're like no we're just chilling and then he like grabbed us and then pulled us to the side and that was great

but it's like outside of an experience like that if I'm not just like gluing myself to the hip of a character actor which I'm not inclined to do because I'm a person that hates to impose and hates to feel like I'm in the way of something or hates to like and you don't know who's in character and who isn't

And you don't know, and there's no mechanisms for bringing you on board again. This is a thing that LARP design has encountered for years, right? It's like, how do we get people to feel comfortable to enter their role and how do we get them safely out of that role when it's time to de-roll? This is not new, this is not fresh territory. There are decades of design thought on this, and none of that scaffolding was here to help bring someone like you into a place where you felt like you could just go do a scene with someone or go role play.

So there's a couple things going off of someone Natalie's saying we've been talking about here, One is that I just think it's an unreasonable expectation Like You know I had the experience I was also having a conversation with MK Where I was like you know I didn't get as much out of it But I think it was on a bad path And I could have engaged with it better

And like Austin had much better better you know time with it And you know MK was like But Austin does RPG stuff for a living Like if it works for someone who can See the systems and like the way you're meant to interact with them But then they're not handholding anyone who doesn't do this for a living that's a major problem. And also, like, I was sort of thinking about this a little bit

with regard to, like, the proper size and scope of this thing. The reason I sometimes wonder if they had more characters in play, if they'd flooded the zone a little bit with character moments and opportunities to interact, do you accomplish two things? Because I do know that you're up against the fact that players consume content, like crazy. Whenever there's content, they will consume it. But if you flood the zone a bit,

and you create more things happening so that people do not feel like they have to glom on to the every time they see a group of like 60 people doing something if there's a little more confidence that like if you go somewhere else something interesting will also be happening do you have the crowd distribute and you have more interesting like not private but like semi-private small group experiences rather than this experience of like I'm either doing nothing or I'm standing with a crowd of like 50, people. But I think the other big X factor in this is was the guy, was the main character, Rath, doing the smuggling path. Is the smuggling path just better and more developed? Or was that guy just so much better at doing the job of being a performer on the Star Cruiser that every other track looked like shit by comparison because they didn't have someone who could read and lead

like groups the way Rath could. It feels like A and B. It doesn't feel like it's one or the other because for instance First of all I did just look at the full list of characters

no one was removed from this. There were not more characters before. They might have been more available in the past but there was never oh and also there was another officer on the ship that you could role play with or something like that. It's just the set that there were

including the Saja who never had a named character just really they have you know Saja Bill or whatever or Sajer Jen but not, there was never the Saja important character. But the thing that I want, a really good example for this for me is I think Lanka, Lanka mocked the cruise director, just as good as Rath in a scene. Mm-hmm.

In a scene. But is not around in the way that Rath is. And that's design. That's not her. Someone, her job is not to be around the way his is. Right. And to me, that's not about talent. That's about how the game and how the show is designed.

where she's meant to be. Exactly. I will say that Allie and I had a really, like, great experience with her that was, like, semi-not-in-character, semi-in-character, where we were just talking about, like, the crew uniforms. Like, Allie and I were sitting waiting for, like, the fashion show event where everyone gets to show off their outfits. And she just kind of came over and she was just chatting, like, kind of just shooting the shit with us, which was like nice because I felt it didn't have to do with the story and didn't matter at all.

But it just felt like I was like having like a character moment with this actor and also kind of like a person moment with this person. Sorry, Allie, you're about to say something. Yeah, I, I, she was one of my favorite actors on the ship. But I think in terms of her character and the way that she interacted with people, she was the sort of head of the resistance track which was the track that I was on and like the way that those interactions were like structured were not one on one like she never asked me my name the way that like wraith knew that you were like by the end of the weekend and I don't know if that was just like the the smuggler track in itself requires sort of more intimacy between the the characters in that way you know Austin, you spoke of, like, an event that you had where you had to, like, have a, like, a handkerchief or something. So people knew that you were in it.

A cocktail napkin under my wristband, basically. Whereas with the resistance track, it is the focus of the plot line. It is probably assumed the most popular one because it's the one that you kind of get funneled into the easiest, just going through the motions of the thing. and also like, you know, does not provide the opportunity where, you know, somebody's OC is going to be the focus of that story because it's going to be Ray. It's got to be right. Like, and I think that's that's sort of the, also the problem that you ran into with the Jedi thing, which is that like not only where there are no Jedi, but the only Jedi interaction,

90% of the people there were going to get whether or not. that was full or not was going to be right at the end of the day anyway right yeah and it wasn't like it it was really it's funny because the Jedi had the most the Jedi track had technically the most actors assigned to it that were around like the poor Saja how was that possibly true how could you have had that experience I was just thinking this as as you as y'all were talking about like Raith carrying the smuggler track so well and like doing so much to kind of like single out specific people we had four Saja on the on the on the on the ship at any given time and I would barely talk to them and I like barely saw them and then thinking about the resistance

track having the the captain and then also I I guess, technique, like, guy, well, guy is kind of the, or the captain and Sammy. Yeah. Like,

and then the first order track, having the lieutenant and two stormtroopers, like, you can't have any meaningful conversation with the stormtroopers because they have, like, auto response, like,

you can kind of fill in the blanks with your imagination, but ultimately, like, my most meaningful interaction with them was, like, them giving me, like, sneaking me some rice, crispy treats or whatever.

That's fun. It was very cute, But it was just like, but you're not really getting like a lot of characters. You're not asking what planet they are born on. Exactly. Yeah. I missed this Rice Crispy interaction. Oh my God.

It was, it was, I thought they were going to. I don't think you talked about it on the other. Did I not? I thought I talked about it on. How did you get Rice Krisp? Because I know there's a little snack sitting snack area in the atrium. But like, how did the Stormtrooper end up smuggling new treats? There were just two Stormtroopers standing next to the snack.

bar and I like walked over to like look at the snacks and then I was like I'm fine and then I like kind of got nervous because I had my my uh lightsaber hilt on my bag and the stormtroopers were standing right there and I was like oh am I going to get like stopped by and he like pointed to me and was like wait and then I was like oh shit and then he grabbed two of the rice crispy treats and then put them in my hand and said like move along and I was like that's cute as hell. That's very cute. And then he ended up, he actually ended up asking me, what do you think, are you concerned? Or he was like, what do you think of like the Saja and their, you know, studies of the Jedi, like philosophies or something like that in so many words? And then I was like,

I would say it's more of like an interpretation than, you know, a serious study. And then he was like, that's concerning, and then, like, walked away. And that was actually, like, actually, in retrospect, that was one of my favorite moments. Yeah. Because it just felt like, I don't know, like, we were playing off each other. And he, like, you know, obviously saw that I had, like, the lightsaber hilt and probably noted, you know, noted that I was hopefully following the Saja track and engaged with that in a small but, like, meaningful way.

But outside of that, like, yeah, the Saja, like, I just, it continues to not make any sense to me how the Saja, like, had a presence on this ship and were, like, there was one point where I had a conversation with the Saja member, and he was telling me, like, oh, yeah, we brought the Stormtroopers, we into the lightsaber training, and we taught them, you know, like, we should. showed them what we do and I was like why the why would you do I literally asked this man like why would you do that and he was like yeah it was strange because you know usually it's blaster fire on the other side and or I don't even know it was just like it was so befuddling we really got we really got frat boy yeah we got like the the wot saja like worst of all time saja it just well and this is This is the thing is that when I say like it takes both, there are four Saja who could have just freely role played with it with people whenever they wanted to on one side. There's Linka Mock who's great at roleplay, but he's not in open air roleplay situations that often, if at all. And then the thing with Rath, I like, I realize now this might not be clear because

you didn't go down this path. But like the first time I introduced myself to Rath, it's because the Datapad told me to go find Rath and introduce myself to him and tell him my name, right? And it was like, oh, Rath is a real thing. over here needs help with getting Guy's bags on board. This is why I'm saying, like, it's not just the play, the role player, the character actor, rates actor was really good. The game structured situations where he would get to know me. Go help him unload Guy's luggage. And then there's a mini game for that, which I don't know that I mentioned, but like the luggage was

color-coded and had tags on it. And you had to line it up in the right way. And then you to decode the Arabish message that was on the luggage, which said that they're, okay, you know, I think it was like two numbers, and that meant that those pieces of luggage were really important because they had smuggled goods on them, and then you take those numbers out, and you're like, okay, you know, you go take these one and this one, you take this one this way, and that's a way for rate the actor to start to see faces. That doesn't exist with Lankhamok, that didn't exist with the Saja. There weren't those structured places where the actor could come to get to know everybody. So by the time that-

It wasn't even that, like, involved of a thing to do. No, you weren't doing mini games all day. I wasn't doing anything. And so, like, the way, when Wraith came over and grabbed you and me, Natalie, I'd already done three things for Wraith in person, not just on the data pat. So he knew me already. And it was like, oh, okay, maybe, okay, let's go, me go engage with him. I already met him that one time.

Da-da-da-da-da-da. And so that's what feels like it was lacking from at least the Jedi and First Order mission tracks. Resistance, it seems like it also didn't have those, that sprinkle of on the ground things. So I guess like the Chubbacca one is sort of that, but like not really. Yeah. And like I, it's funny because the, the first engagement that you had with the luggage thing was something that I was kind of pulled into by Sandra. Right. Who, Sandro intentionally, the more that I think about it is a character who is designed and played to seem like somebody who is paying to be on the ship.

Yes. Like he's in your muster. Again, the first scene I had with him was during the muster. He was one step to my right. I thought he was another passenger in sick costuming because day one, everyone's going wild. And then to his right was Neil Patrick Harris. And the three of us did a little scene in the middle of that muster about Sammy, who's the new engineer looking nervous and running around. I was like, oh, my God, he looks like something. He looks

bad. He looks nervous. And Sandra was like, no, I think he's just new, maybe. I don't know. And I'm like, okay, we're like doing a little C-well. This is other passenger. And next thing you know, it's like, oh, no, he's- Right. Yeah, exactly. That's how I got graded to think, because also thinking that he was just like another guy. He was like, there to be in character. I, like, complimented him on his outfit. And he was like, come over here. We're, we're helping Wraith with this thing. And then by the time we were over there, it was 40 people swarmed around 10 boxes. And, like, it just. wasn't, it was cool, but it was not a thing I can engage with. And like, I feel like if we,

if we had not, you know, if I had just gone by myself or we weren't doing it for this and I'd really like, at the end of the day, been like, who did I engage with the most? Which it tracked interests me the most. It would have been like, oh, well, Sandra was cool. And then the Wraith character really interacted with me, so I should be a smuggler. And, you know, I don't think that that's a good design either because then that one track would get bloated. with so many other people who think that, that, like, it would just fall apart. And then this thing that we're talking about of, like, is it better with 90% of people? Is it better with 30% of people?

It doesn't matter. It's going to fall apart other way if 70% of them are smugglers. Well, it's funny because you have, I was kind of talking around this earlier, but you have the ability to follow these tracks for quite a while until you're, like, kind of separated off. So I was invited to, like, a lot of the smuggler things and a lot of the resistance things. And I, and so I don't know if maybe there was like- But not my characters, by your phone app, right? By my phone app, yeah, by, like, because I answered something on one of the questions in a... But I specifically was trying to only answer in a way, like, sometimes I didn't even have a Jedi option to, like, answer a certain, like, and how would you respond to this?

There are these, like, personality quizzes that are disguised as, like, you know, uh, uh, random. Interactions. Like, Lieutenant Croy messaged to you and says, like, you know, I expect to bring, yeah, I'm going to bring order to the ship. How do you feel about that? And you're like, I would never follow you. And your answer to something like, the force already brings order to everything or something.

Yeah. And then he keeps, he keeps, he keeps, like, hitting me up. After I'm like, yo, I fuck with the force. I'm with the force is in me, beside me, around me, whatever. Like, and he's still like, are you sure? Are you sure? And like, I get it. You want to give people the opportunity to, like, change tracks if they so desire.

But it was, it, it, it was shocking to me how little I, like, by the time I ended up in the final, Jedi, which was basically the only Jedi event that I had been invited to other than like doing some assignments on Batu. I say this in the diary, but I missed like one of the major Jedi events because I just wasn't invited to it for

some reason. There's like, as far as I know, two major like Jedi scenes, Jedi track scenes and I just didn't get the notification for one of them. That was one where you're trying to just like be there for. That's the one we were trying to just like sit in the simulator

at the right time for and I guess we were like an hour early we had like the wrong time um so by the time I ended up in the Jedi the final Jedi scene they were like so as you know like like Ray is here and I was like what's like when did Ray get here and I had no like I didn't even know that we were ending we were going to end up in a Ray Kylo like I knew like Chubaka is kind of like, I feel like a figure that can be there without it being like a I don't know, he shut up and get at the end

and I was like, are you for fucking real? Chewy. We did the Saja hand breathing thing to get you out of here. You're back? Which is always coming back. But he was, and he was like, and as you know, we have this like

special piece of cargo that, and then it's a holocron from fucking Yoda. and I'm like, where, where are we? Where are we? What is going on? Who are the Jedi?

Who are the, who are the Sasha? What are you doing? What is the, why are we like, and the Holocron is like, Yoda being like, if this holocron enter Kylo Ren hand, it, uh, terrible. Yes. Yes, he says Kylo Ren. He's like, cannot enter possession of Kylo Ren, cannot, or whatever. And I'm not as good as Yoda.

No, you never say that. Never say that again. You're better than Yoda. So, Ray is there and this. This is in the lightsaber room. Ray is in the room. And Ray's like, thank you for getting me on the ship safely. I was like, when the fuck were we getting you on the ship?

That may, Natalie, I think I know when that would have. It might have been. It might have been the event that you miss. Don't tell her. Don't tell her. We don't need to talk about this. It has to be the Sammy event, right? Which Sammy event?

That you missed. The one that you were holding on the table. It has to have been that. There's a situation where we, this is another design problem. Allie and I had a resistance slash smuggler event where we were down in the engineering room. I guess it was a combo. It went long. It tells us how long it's supposed to go.

It was supposed to be over at 650. That shit went to. 7.05. And Natalie stayed in the bar with the drinks to watch the table. Because I had 45 minutes between our bridge training and this double event that we said. And I said, I have exactly enough time for one drink. And that's it. That's literally it. Or I go to my room and sit down for 20 minutes. But I don't want to just be alone for 20 minutes. So I ordered a drink. But the drinks were late. The drinks took too long. This was one of the problems. The drinks took too long. So y'all left before you got the drink yeah can we and then I guarded the drinks you did until y'all

came back but I missed yeah I missed the Sammy bridge moment can we watch this Yoda message together sure I would love to see this I'm gonna cut ahead a little bit in this video I'm gonna share my screen it's I just want to say before we watch this together actually how shocking it is how we cannot get away from Yoda during this whole visit. What's the first Yoda experience? Because it's not this. The one in the, the lightsaber training. Right. You, oh, ah, we're doing the lightsaber training. We already just said this on the other diary. I don't care. We're going to say it again. We're doing the lightsaber training. And almost towards the end, the Sajja's like, all right, all right, students, I can tell you're really taking this seriously. We've really

trained a bunch of great lightsaber wheel. And then Yoda breaks in his life. like, hmm. And then massage is like, good, but not ready they are or whatever.

You have to use the force, right? Yoda shows up to be like, you're doing it wrong. You got to use the force. And then Yoda takes away your

stopped. Okay. The lightsaber training is an aerobics class. You're holding a lightsaber, a toy lightsaber. And a beam appears

above left, above right, below, left, below right. and you have to block the beam with your lightsaber or lightsaber shield which they sell by the way if you go buy the lightsaber from

and it's the worst piece of shit it's so bad the worst toy imagine you imagine bringing this thing back to a child from Disney World it's so Star Wars no it isn't they should have made the Gungan shields or something you know what I mean it should have been

it's the lowest prop quality it's like just saw it's like like just saw it's like just saw it apart flexi with a shitty little backing and it's it's extremely what do we have around you know what I mean oh we got some extra plexie yeah bring it in um the they had to give something for the other 30 people to do when the four people in the front are doing are doing the laser training there's so much of this entire thing is rotation so many of it's like all right now rotate now rotate now change positions um the the the At the end of it, then, Yoda shows up to be, like, use the force instead of using the lights, the training bolts.

And so you have to look at the back wall and see the lights, like, almost like starlight breaking through on the walls. Yeah, and they're really hard to see. They're extremely visible. But you have to, you have to have some connection to the forest. So, Yoda showed up then. Then when we made our lightsabers on Batu, Yoda shows up again. Yep. That motherfucker is franchising.

You know? He won't leave. Him and, you know, him and your... He's chilling in the force. Obi-Wan are celebrating in the ghost zone because of like, yeah, we got Jedi now. We just make... We fucking churning out these lightsabers.

I put out eight every 30 minutes. We got, we got, boom, we're back up. We're back on these streets. We're back on our corners. You let them know. And then finally, here. I'm going to come in. Master Yoda hologram appears from a Jedi Holochron

at the Star Wars Galactic Star Cruiser from Attractions Magazine on YouTube. I'm coming in at two, let's come back a little bit here. I want Ray to give the lead in here. Let's do 2.30. We're going to come in on it. This is a little long, like five minutes long. All right.

Ready? Mm-hmm. Go. This is your readiness now. Only when the pond is still, can you see clarity? This is a sager we didn't have. He seems cool. That's ray.

That was the ray we had. Close your eyes. Does that lady have a Yoda hat on in the back? Yes. Yes, Yoda ears. It closed through you. This connection has always been inside of you. Now we must.

A little arm touching happening. That did not happen in mine. Good. Open your eyes. Focus only on a hologram. Now send the energy of the force from you to the holocaum. And you can buy these at Savvy's workshop. Oh, can you?

You can't buy this one. Yes. Yes, we did. Yes, we have. Asaging, you can see this. Ski, record this. Oh, Eski is recording the hologram. Mm-hmm.

Or the holocron. Great on. Oh. Oh, my legs. No! He's so little. Chinese little Yoda. Yeah, dude, we know.

We know. For many years in isolation, but never alone. Always with me before she is. Always revealing itself if open one is. Discoveries of new abilities. What? What? What legend?

I thought, but now, I know a real... What legend did you think you knew? And certain times, these are... Captain... ...you saw he went when he found out, maybe a forced ghost to leave your holy order to die. We just got a stake. Keep these safe, you must.

We just got a rash on Yoda. Mm. Mm. Mm. With the terrible costume, yes, tyranny. In this horror one,

there's a lineage I place Of the force, to you who fall in the path and the light, hope to the galaxy will you bring. Mm. Mm. Your name, I know not. Yeah. Your spirit.

Mm-hmm. Yes. That I feel. Strong is your connection. Through time? No. You. It feels like, you is about to start a multi.

not to start a multi-level marketing campaign. Yeah. Should never we need. May the force you have always. You are... You can see the thing going back down to the Holocron. No.

Master Yoda. Master Yoda. What supplies a powerful time. You're trained Luke. Oh, this holocawn have belonged to Master Skywalker. Right. If the knowledge that this hologron possess falls into the wrong hands, all hope will be lost.

Oh, that's right. Right. The darkness is rising. But we will rise to meet it. We will follow the path of the light. The first order is threatening as yet. Bone noise. I mean, at least known to like a Bart Simpson shirt in the background, you know what I mean?

Yeah, true. These people came through. Well... If he gets this and the knowledge it holds, first order, this is... Nothing would matter, none of us would be safe. I understand. Right?

This guy... We have to visit this message. I wish I had this guy. We would advise. He's doing it. This recording isn't what Carlo will be. Isn't what Kylo will be after? He's after the knowledge the

holocron contains. But S.K., I do believe this recording will help us. Kyla doesn't care about the holocaum. No, at all. And dangerous. It would only attract Kylo and more.

We can use his obsession with power. We have to keep this to ourselves. I think we're done here. I think we're done. There's nothing. Except for a Saja you didn't get, which is funny, but... Yeah. Wait, so Kylo didn't want the holo crown around?

No. What do you mean Kylo didn't want... Did you have a scene with Kylo? Sort of. It's like... So when you do the first order bridge training, the bridge event... Yeah. Like, Lieutenant Kroy calls in...

Ah. Like, lets people know... Like, basically Lieutenant Kroy has... a trigger happy superior who's like hell with it we're just going to blast the halcyon the pieces and kroy is like well there's a bunch of people aboard the ship i'm aboard this ship uh like this is like this is completely out of pocket and he mentions that he's gotten evidence that ray is aboard the ship and the imperial officer doesn't care but then kilo throws him aside and is like tell me about ray and

And so the thing that brings him to the ship is Ray. He doesn't know or care of there's a Holocron aboard as far as we can tell. It's that it's playing into the fact that like he's obsessed with Ray. But that's just the one thing. And we don't even know what the like secret power, the holic, like Yoda just is like this holocron has crazy shit on it. Don't let Carlo get it. Do you?

That's a, honestly, Star Wars frequently. struggles to describe exactly what's so important about a given holocron. That's true. Like Luke in those terrible novels is like, I have a holocron. And it doesn't appear to do shit and then Exarchan comes out of it. And like, we'll get there in the comics. Well, we won't get there in the comics, I guess. We'll learn about XRCon.

We'll learn about XRCon. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We sure will. But like the thing there is like, do you think this is someone being like, all right, we need Yoda to know about how Ray and Kylo could talk to each other across time and space. And so maybe it's in this holocaque. You know what I mean?

Like, we need Yoda to be, to know about all of the force powers that show up in the sequel trilogy, that we're not in the prequel or original trilogy. And so those are all in this holocron. Don't worry about it. Yoda knew their canon. Because he's talking about like,

oh, there's extra force abilities listed in this hologron. And it would be scary if, do you think battle meditation is in there? Double jump. Double jump. Double jump is definitely in there. Dude, it definitely is. I don't know, but it was, and then they played that, that Yoda bit during the final scene.

So it's not even that special. Because we saw Yoda do that shit just on a screen instead of a fake hologram. Yeah, yeah. So, like, I'll just, that's it. That's your big final scene. That's it. That was it. Yeah.

That was it. Yeah. And then it was like, go to the atrium to confront the dark, the first order. Oh, my God. And it's not like the Like it's not like the Jedi We're like okay everyone use the force now And destroy something

It was just Yeah you all should have brought down the The chandelier That would have been sick That would have been cool There's a point where the chandelier Of the halcyon like breaks Because Kylo is throwing a tantrum

And As is his want As is his want like so I talk more about the first order experience on the other recording and so you'll eventually hear that thing I'll just sketch out here in brief is that and this goes to the point of like characters steering people toward content that does require content existing to steer people towards and it just didn't seem like the first order had any equivalent to the smuggler stuff that goes on that that stuff is is not really happening for the first order and so the first order and so

the first order like basically is a like your only interaction unless you end up like talking to the croy actor is basically through messages through your data pad and then you go do escape room stuff with him you know on the final night and then it's over then he shouts out his favorite first order helpers right uh i was not listed even though i did all his little quests yeah um But the other, the other part of it is just like there's just no, there's no points of interaction that are meaningful with the, with the character. But I think it also speaks to, and you get a little taste of in that clip we just played, so this attraction has a politics. And its politics are one, they stem from, I think, a lot of the Abrams quality of the new trilogy, which is that we don't actually want to have a politics, but we want something that's nice and Anodyne and Universal.

So we will say that the first order represents like a darkness, a gathering darkness. And the highest order, the highest good in the Star Wars universe in the Abrams era is hope. Is like, you know, what's, who can be against hope? So everything the rebels do, and this pops up in solo, a Star Wars story, like all this stuff is like, you know what? It's good we did all that because it created hope. hope. Ignite the spark, you know? Light the spark.

Light the spark. And this is what Ray represent. She's going to light the spark. And what that means is, uh, aboard the Halcyon now, something that like is almost like closely related to that is the idea that conviction itself is like inherently admirable. You know, we all, the important thing is we all believe in something that we have values and we act on them. Uh-huh.

And I think that's beautiful. And we get a taste of how that applies to the first order. Insofar as, well, one, anyone who played the first order track at the end of the event gets a message from the captain that's like, hey, you know, obviously some of you were working with the first order, but you were just doing what you thought was right. So that's cool too. Like we'd like it when people do what they think is right. But then also the final event, you get a bit of dinner theater moment where the first order guy and the captain talk and be. basically, you know, he's like, you know, honestly, you and I. We're not so different. And like, honestly, I can appreciate you. Like, you're a great,

you're a great captain. You're a great officer. Like, we need people like you in the first order. And she's like, but you're a fascist ethno. Like racial hierarchy. And he's like, that's like, that's true. But not all of us believe that. He explicitly makes a slight at her being Pandoran. He's like, even for a Pandoran. Well, that's the weird thing. It's also a gear shift. Because first he's like, well, no, I wouldn't believe that. But then at the end, he's like, but then of course you are

a filthy Pandoran. And everyone's like booed Tana Croyd. Which is weird, by the way, again, like the fact that we're booing someone in the room, the slippage between interactive experience

and stage show never felt good to me. No. Like, am I supposed to boo or am I supposed to be in character? Because in character, I'll be keeping my fucking head down. That dude has all the guns on port. Mm-hmm. But instead, he's just like there is a, he's a clown, right?

Right. He's not even Javert. He's just, he's just an absolute hapless buffoon. He's like, damn it, I can't get these resistance people. Every time you have to distract him, it's like the one, like, main distraction scene with him is like us putting him in a car. Konga line. Literally it is. There were so many fucking conga lines.

Mr. McGoo-ass. Like, he just can't. Colonel clink-ass motherfucker. He has no. And, like, that's the, and like, it's fun that he has no swag. And if you take it at a real, if you come in to be like, I'm doing a Star Wars themed comedy show. Like, if you think about this the way you can think about, like, Star Tours. specifically versus rise of the resistance, which takes itself seriously, more seriously,

let's say, then like, okay, I'm in that space. If you think about this in relation to Star Wars robot chicken or detours or, you know what I, or the Star Wars Christmas show, a holiday special, it's in that space. But then you can't turn around and be like, it's so important, we light the spark. Yeah. Well, and I think that this speaks to maybe one of our biggest topics or our biggest feelings that shared, I think, which is like, wow, it's sucks that this end Batu are locked in the sequel trilogy timeline because it's not it doesn't it's not good it doesn't it doesn't even make like when Ray comes into that that Saja sequence that I was in that we played the Yoda Holocron Ray is like um you know I haven't really

interact he she was like I I this is my first time interacting with the Saja and the Saja have like a motto that's like all together as one. Someone says all together and then you reply as one. And she was like, and I really like this sentiment all together. Like that is the nature of the force. And it's like if you don't even have a relationship with Asaja and this is somehow the Jedi track, like what are, why should I care about being a Saja, which is just like a

a proxy for being a Jedi it just it was bad it was so confusing to me why the Saja were selected as the the Jedi track like proxy when

we're like we're trapped in between Last Jedi and Rise of the Resistance or Rise of Skywalker and there's just we know the end of that move like we know what happens next like seeing ray and kilo fight each other i'm like y'all are gonna be making out in like a movie like you'll be together it's it's fine it's gonna be

i don't know maybe that's for me it's like not even that part because like i can suspend my disbelief or you know whatever for i can play along right and be like i don't know where this is going um but what I think is much simply worse is that, like, the, think about Return of the Jedi, right? Think about the original trilogy in general. Those are movies that have a politics. They're material politics reflected in the way that the fighting happens. You know, we've talked already, and Lucas has talked already about how it maps to the Vietnam War, how it maps to questions of imperialism, like, all that stuff is there.

But there's no rousing speech about something as, you know, as fundamentally flexible as hope, a thing that literally everyone engages with in the world, regardless of what your political belief system is. The stuff that is like that is like sort of wishy-washy is actually tied to personal relationships and personal feelings of forgiveness and redemption. And that's things like Luke saying he has good in him, right? And that's not a recurring theme. People throughout the original trilogy don't say things like he still has good in him.

The things that are recurringly returned to are never tell me the odds, or I have a bad feeling about this, those lines happen. But like, Mon Mothma doesn't give a big speech at the end. I mean, she does give a big speech. But that speech is like a bunch of Bothans died to bring us this information. The Death Star is almost going to be, you know, up and operational again. May the force be with you, right? Like, it's not the ignite the spark of hope, this sort of vague 2000s, you know, 2010s era, you know, it's a mush.

It's a gruel of a position. And I think that, like, that's the part that the entire park and this thing feels stuck in. Because riding rise of the resistance and even walking around that space and all the first order stuff feels locked in this very high. baked echo of the original trilogy, which is how I feel about that sequel trilogy entirely, which is like, we want to have stormtroopers, but they're like a little different. They're like a little different. Their masks are a little different. And Kylo is like Darth Vader, but like a little different.

And like, I really feel like that park would just be better if Darth Vader was walking around. Yeah. Right? I think it would be cooler if regular-ass tie fighters were parked. I mean, the coolest stuff about that park is seeing an A-wing. I was like, yeah, damn dog, the A-wing fucking rips. You know? The Millennium Falcon thing is fun, right? But it's like, it's the Millennium Falcon. That is an established, well-loved piece of design and narrative, you know, like, it's a column. It's a pillar that holds up Star Wars is getting to see the Millennium Falcon. And so, like, that stuff all works. But the stuff that doesn't is the era that you're in feels so undercooked. The first order has always felt, you know how fascists have to be both the strongest and the weakest at all times?

They have to be like put upon and degraded and against a secret massive worldwide conspiracy against their true beliefs. And they have to be the underdogs, but also they have to be like the strongest person ever to have lived. That's how the first order is actually positioned in those movies where like they're an upstart strange outside group. But also they could blow up seven planets at once. And also now they run the world. But also they are run by the biggest goofball. imaginable. Including Snoke, from Snoke down, from Palpatine down, it's all goofballs. It's all, like, and there's no structure. There's no, like, the thing that you get from the original, from the original trilogy is you get the empire feeling like, okay, there are, there's a grand moth, there's governors, there's these competing admiralcy, you know, admirals and the admiralcy, there's Darvader off to the side, and that's kind of a weird thing. And above it all, is this mysterious emperor. And they've divided the galaxy up into sectors. Here's the Alderon sector. There's senators who just lost power. And then in the prequel trilogy, you have a really clear idea about what the structure of the galaxy is, because that's what those movies are just about, is about the Senate falling, you know.

And none of that exists in the sequel trilogy in any sort of clear way. And I think it, I think that there's like a knock on effect that makes the entire world feel mushy and doesn't feel like I have a clear idea of, you know, we're in August Cantina. I don't know anything about what about the, what was such a feel in Batu other than it's not quite tattooing. other than the canteen doesn't have any cool aliens in it it only has a robot DJ and it has like I guess it has one alien in a jar somewhere or something

Hey can I confess something? Yeah, what's up? What? I don't know who Oga is. Oga runs the bars and... Oga runs the bar and is in one of the tanks. With a gun to my head. Yeah.

I couldn't tell you anything about like this is not Rick's cafe where it's like everyone comes to Rick and that's a thing burned in your memory. that movie once, and you remember the cat think. Oh, Oga's not from the movies. Well, Oga is invented for Batu. Yeah. That's entirely it. Because Batu is a new planet. Yeah, Batu wasn't in those movies. Oh my God. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is what I mean. They could have done anything, Rob. It's like, it's weird because it's a planet invented to take place in an incredibly specific

moment in time with very little, like you said, there's very little meat outside of the direct conflict between Ray and Kylo and extending parties. Like there's not, even if you look at what was happening in the original trilogy, prequel trilogy, like there are so many other stories being told during these moments of time outside of just the clone wars are happening

or Luke is fighting, you know, is fighting Darth Vader. There's like other things going on that you can, there's more like meat to draw from whereas being, and it's strange because it's simultaneously caught between being such a specific moment in time but also having to be a place where you can access,

and this is more a critique of Galaxy's Edge, I guess, but a place where you can access the newest Disney, or the newest Star Wars properties. So like the Mandalorian is walking around. And now that Asoka's out, like characters from the Asoka show are walking around. And it's, it's like odd to, for there to be such a void of the sequel and prequel trilogy, like, uh, uh, like people, like, uh, characters, um, but also for it to feel so, like, but Yoda, we're calling back to Yoda in the lightsaber.

Because that's where the juice is. There's no juice in the new shit. Yeah. You know, I, I, we got, uh, None of you were in this, but Hondo calls in in the big smuggler finale thing. The whole thing in the smuggler finale is... Oh, I saw this. Or were you in there? Yeah, you were there for that, right? I didn't see. I didn't know.

Wait, were you, Al. Well, it was part of our bridge thing. Yeah, our second bridge thing. Yeah, you were there for that, right? Yeah, we're like, we're defending Hondo's ship to drop off the coaxium. And Hondo calls in. And that had more juice than any of the prequel or any of the sequel, or any of the sequel trilogy stuff. Even in

the, even in like Riot of the Resistance, a ride that I thought was pretty cool, like I like Finn. And Finn shows up and I'm like oh, Finn's here, but like, okay. I, you know, it's not, you know. Obsetting animatronic Finn. No, wasn't it? Oh, wasn't it? There is an animatronic Finn in the ride. Oh, I forgot about that. You might have

missed it. He's like in the fucking corner. Oh, yeah, he's like hiding with a gun. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I did that. He's like, he's like, he's enforcers. Yeah, it really is. Yeah. But even all that stuff is like, I just don't care in the same way. We talked about this when we were going into rebels and talking about how like I am in that cohort of people who like those original sounds and designs and visuals of Star Wars still hit.

And the stuff in the sequel trilogy, and I think the prequel stuff would be, would too. If they did, if they did Rise of the Resistance set during, you know, or not Rise of Resistance, or they did like a Clone Wars era, prequel trilogy era place, I bet that would look sick. The Naboo Starfighter is a sick looking thing. I would love to see a big one of those. But where Star Wars is in the sequel trilogy, and really even in the Mandalorian, less so, but increasingly so, as we got into the Mandalorian season three and all the Mandalorian stuff really starts to feel like ignite the spark of hope too.

You know what I mean? And it's an empty message. Like, and well, light the spark of the forge. Exactly. And it's the same good. We've all been spending all our time wondering, when are the Mandalore going to reclaim their planet and re-fire their holy forges? Uh-huh. We can't wait for this.

I think that's part of it. I think you really hit where I struggle, where it has been so hard to connect with this experience is because I never really, like, I like, we all know I like Kylo Red. I like to like the evil boy But not in a way that's like any It's not meaningful It's like the way that I like Anakin Actually there's like a lot of depth Like there's depth to Anakin's character

There's we've seen him go through like trials and tribulations The amount of time we spend with Kylo is so short And it's so It's so bad It's like this the script is terrible The there is no we haven't gotten there as a group yet in discussing the sequel trilogy and I look forward to it when we do because it's so it's just it's such a it's so lackluster that it's it's fascinating that they decided

to make a park like to build so much off of it but of but where else what else are you going to build off of like you it is the Disney thing to do it is what they're doing across the parks entirely they're they're shutting down old rides uh IP list rides to replace them with Disney IP like they're doing this across Disney parks in general of just capitalizing on the newest IP and making that at the forefront of their experiences it it's only natural that they're doing the same with their Star Wars franchise uh but it's just it's it's weak it's like weak foundation to build off of it's it's a there's one less thing i did want to bring up here which is that i think some of my favorite moments came when interacting with waitstaff in various

huge a hundred percent and this actually was across like the rest of my Disney vacation as well there's a lot of moments where like the whole thing is like a house of cards it's wobbling and you're like this is not really working for me i'm starting to think about i'm thinking way too much about what the bill is for all this. And so frequently those moments are rescued by, you know, they call them cast members at Disney. They're rescued by waitstaff. They're rescued by people working the parks or,

but often like working the restaurants, working the bars, working the hotels. But this was true at Halcyon as well where like some of my favorite interactions were with like bar staff. We had a great, you know, waitress, you know, for the, for the banquets. Shout out to Emma. Shouts to Emma, shouts to, we have a few great.

Aldra, shoutouts to, uh, fuck. There's at least one other one that we had who was great. I forget, I forget her name, feel bad. But yeah, it was, it was pretty terrific across the board and also in a weird way. All right, here's my list of people. Swoop, Hatch, Kell, J and Luna, Emma, Kiori, and Audra. I have totally was the

was the six time swoop Oh right Right she was Rob missed this Hiori was our was our Sublight Lounge Waitress a couple times And when Swoop told her

That he'd won the The Galactic Pod Racing Championship Five times she was like Oh that's pretty good That's pretty good I did it six times And it really got on to his skin Well what What speed race pod racer did you

did you drive and she was like you wouldn't know it like just didn't even give it it it was great I love it Zed down here in quotes I don't know what that means who could say sure but but yeah the like those were moments where it's like

they often did a better job of regrounding the experience and like oh the Halcyana's a real place in the Star Wars universe and like I'm a guest aboard this thing and also because their weight staff they're giving you the actual sense of like personal attention and indeed the sense that you exist aboard the halcyon that is often sorely lacking from the rest of the experience. And so like, you know, in a weird way, like, I came away from

this. You took all the immersive theater shit out of it. And it was just like, go hang out with your buddies and pretend you're on a Star Wars ship. I've had a better time. I think the answer might be yes. No, I mean, I think I think that's really interesting right now is seeing people who are big fans of the Star Cruiser, try to fill that gap, right? If you go to the Star Cruiser like Reddit, subreddit, it is filled with people asking questions like, and like some of it's really sweet, right? Like there's a picture on one of these posts of a kid left, a kid with a saja, posing with a saja and smiling. And I will read some of the post because, you know, it's not, it's basically them saying like, hey, we were fortunate enough to go on this cruise. My

11-year-old son, who's artistic and creative and dramatic, found his love, he was put on this planet to LARP on the Halcyon, now that's gone, can people suggest an alternative. We already do crop building, we do costuming, we're looking for suggestions that have that same magic. And the thing that's interesting is, I think that there are way better alternatives for LARPing out there or for other similar things. I think we could all go to a Star Wars LARP and have a way better time. What we wouldn't get is production value, right?

And I didn't think the production value is like hit and miss on some of this stuff, but it's high. We did see an A-wing. We did see an X-wing. You know, you can talk to a droid that has voice recognition in your via video call and say some wild things that it like picks up and like can run with. You know, you are in a custom bedroom thing with a fake outside, looking outside the screen, you know, the star screen stuff. Like, and I came to like the being in the Star Cruze. I mean, I think, I do think, I didn't answer this from the beginning, but like, I am also softer on it now than I was at the time.

I still objectively think it's a bad, bad use of money. I think it's too cramped both physically and, uh, and time-wise. I think a third day would help a ton if there were also more things to do or if you could go to about two multiple times, maybe. I would like there to be a little less, um, a little more room for role, a little more room to hang out, a little more room to vibe. I wouldn't mind spending an hour playing Cotor in my bedroom one of those days. Do you know what I mean?

And just be like, oh, we're on vacation is what we're doing. And partly this is also like Star Tours isn't in the Galaxy's Edge. There aren't enough things to do in Galaxy's Edge. I'd love one more ride in Galaxy's Edge or something or a reason to do to rerun the Millennium Falcon One once or something like that. Yeah. It's funny because Star Tours is caught between being a vet like. a ride that has been around since the original trilogy and has changed with each

successive, yeah, trilogy. I've done the original trilogy one, and now that I think about it, I actually did do the prequel one, but the version in, because it's also in Disneyland, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so I did that one.

It's in Tomorrowland. Yeah, I realize now that I've done Disneyland once years after doing Disney World. And so I did do both versions of Star Tours. I've not done the current Star Tours. But my point being, there's not enough to do in Batu. There's not enough to do on the ship to support a third day. But I really feel like three days would feel better.

But despite all that objective stuff, I'm finding myself on the galaxies or the Galactic StarCruiser subreddit. I'm finding myself thinking about moving around those spaces and talking to those characters. And it is the classic sentimental thing of like, I had a good time with my friends. I met some new people who were cool. again, shout us to the people that we hung out with throughout those days that were like nice

And that stuff Is successful But also if the thing It had been a little bit longer I think some would have been filled out with I had a great time talking with Hatch And Jay Yes, instead of cramping all of that

Into the last two hours of the last night It was like I just met those people Like soon turned out to be Fucking awesome Yes And actually really good inhabiting his character Because I saw him at checkout Yeah

and he was no longer swoop. Yep. And I did the double take of like seeing an actor out of performance. But he wasn't in makeup. He just truly had embodied this character for the, and this is not a guy who's done it before. No. And it's like, damn, like that rules.

Give me an extra day to hang with those folks. Yes. And give me, and again, structure me some activities. Give me some reasons to hang with those folks. That's what this stuff is. I mean, I joked that it wasn't summer camp before, but make it a little more summer camp. If you're not going to make it more larp, let me do some crochet. You know what I mean?

Like, give me some. give me something to do to just meet new people. Give me some like not literal speed dating style, but like pair me up with some people to go do an activity in a way that's like, oh, wow, and then we can hang out. And then here's a drink voucher, here's a snack voucher. Here's, you know, whatever. Like, go get yourself a treat at the end and talk about the experience. Like, none of that stuff happens. And so the personal interactivity doesn't have the room to breathe, except for with the group you came with, you know? Or if you come back a second time, imagine doing it again and being like, well, we don't have to care about the main plot shit.

Like, I'm going to go do a handful of things I care about, but, like, I'm just going to vibe in costume and chat with people and be like a, and have a little time. Not worth the money. Extremely not worth the money. Objectively not worth the money. But I'm finding myself thinking like, damn, I'm glad we did that. I really enjoyed our time there. I really liked some of the physical spaces.

And again, I think we mentioned this in the first episode, but like, the coolest spaces on that ship, it turns out to be are like the dark, weird, liminal ones, like the hallway were all the rooms are. And the, you know, stuff like that, the brig is cool. You know what I mean? It's not cool. But it's the engineering room feels a little more Star Warsy than some of the pictures that they show of like the main atrium do. And also, Robert and you said on the first day was, hey, I'm not looking at my phone very often. I mean, you are. You constantly are because that's where the data pad is. But like, you do walk off. But not to check on email and shit. Right. Exactly. And that's just vacate. It's not just vacation for me. Because I just had a better

vacation a week before this, which I think also speaks to my disappointment to some degree, right, especially with the park. I went out to Joshua Tree and then to some places in the high desert in Arizona. I went to this place called Arcosanti, which is this like architect's dream archology in progress. Hey, how do we build a better city that's start it by building a weird commune in the desert? And that was more Star Wars than anything on Batu. And like the world is already filled with big, beautiful, wild places. And so to go from that, and then a week or two weeks later, to be in

Galaxy's Edge and seeing, like, the fake facade, cliff walls, it's just like, it's not going to compete. But the stuff that did compete is people in costumes, is people, like, swoop and people, the, um, the woman who did the, like, Amadala style makeup. And then

also did, like, the dark side Amadala style makeup and hair stuff, wild. Cool. And that, and that I have a lot of fond and sentimentality for still. In a way, I didn't expect I would when I left. Because I was so down on it when I left. Yeah.

I guess I just, I, the thing that, I guess the thing that sours it for me is just wishing that I had had a more personal experience with it. Like if we had done, if we could do it again, I would absolutely do a different, I would do the smuggler track and I would just like go all in on that. And I think I would have had a better of time not worrying that I was missing out on something. Like so much of my, like, I can forgive, like, I can forgive a lot and, like, and suspend a lot of disbelief. But, like, the idea that the thing that will take me out of it the most is feeling like I have this temporary experience that I only have so much time with. And I'm not getting the most out of it.

and I'm never going to get to do it again. And so now I'm, like, watching YouTube videos of, like, the stuff that y'all did in, like, the experiences that I missed. And it's, like, well, at least I was there, but it, um, yeah, I'm, yeah, it's, like, a bittersweet thing. I, I'm, like, super happy we did it and had some really good experiences and, uh, good memories and I'm like happy that we did it together like as a as a crew that was like a really fun thing for us to also just like be in person together and go hang out and like be we don't

get to do that very often at all so a lot of stuff to be grateful for but I just wish that there was a little bit more like outreach within the Star Cruiser to make things happen I'm curious because Natalie, I think you're in you're in a different position from the rest of us in one other key respect. You were a point person on arranging a lot of this and you handle the money.

Yeah. It's solid. You felt it. Yeah. I mean, you know what this cost. I don't. I actually am sitting here and I can't tell you like what the all in all in from AMCA was on this. But yeah. Do you know that number? Do you know? I mean, not right now.

I can give you a guest of it. Don't give us a guest, but I'm not, because it makes it. I don't want to say it. The only way I could do this was that this money never hit my bank account. But this is the thing, right? If this money hit my bank account and then like you said go, okay, now pay $4,000 for this trip or $6,000, whatever. I know, uh-uh, no, but sorry. Here's another weird thing I was thinking about, though, is like going to Ogas was kind of clarifying for me.

Because it also made me realize why maybe something like Star Cruiser is never going to work. They can't make money fast enough at a place like Star Cruiser, even charging what they charge. Yeah. To compare with what a pretty mid-Disney attraction. Ogus was like drinks we didn't like for a set 40-minute time period, expensive snacks. Mediocre cheese plate. And like, what's the snack stuff with the little bits of nuts? No, not nuts because that would be allergenic.

It's like different forms of cracker and shit. Crack. together, snack mix. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Chips, some dip of some sort of hummus. We were there for 40 minutes, one round of drinks, two shitty snacks, and the tab came out to be like $200. You're ridiculous.

And that's an attraction that you have to book. You have to book a time for that. Like, we could go to the bar. We go into a really good dive and, like, truly had a better time. It's like that bit in public enemies when Dillinger sees, like, the central, like, bookkeeping bookmaking operation, the Capone is running in Chicago. And the guy tells him like, who cares about robbing banks? This is a

river of money we are tapped into. And that's kind of what Halcyon is. It's the hardest way to make money that probably exists at the resorts. And they charge a fortune for it. And so I think it hits us like a punch in the gut given, given

what it all costs. But then you turn around and it's like, do they clear the kind of margin on a Halcyon? guest that they clear in an hour of operating ogas. I'm not sure they do. Right. Does ogas bring in more per per square inch?

It's also one of the newest things at the park. It's, yeah, you can only get in with a reservation. It's hard to do walk-ups. At Disneyland, it's like one of the only places you can drink in the park. I think they just actually added three more restaurants that offer alcohol at Disneyland. But for, like, years, it was the only place you could get an alcoholic beverage in Disneyland. So it's, like, super high demand. Yeah.

Everyone wants to go. It's booked out every single day at the park. They're making a shit ton of money doing that. Yeah. Because there's just such a high churn. Yeah. Well, and then... But calcium is only two days.

So in the same way, it's like, but you're making 5K off a person. plus alcohol in two days I mean But to support that person being there You have the cast members I just wonder

Like is it just one of those things Where it's like For the square footage And the money The margins We just turn it into more park space And and it was running At 30% capacity rumor is

Right So they were not getting What their return was They assumed it was running At 70% or 80% capacity That's twice as much money That they thought they'd be bringing in And so, like, you know, Raith was supposed to talk to, you know, one cast member is supposed to provide entertainment for X number of people.

If that X number is X, is half X, it suddenly doesn't look like it's worth it, you know? The thing that's really sad is per some conversation, again, on the Galactic Star Cruze or Reddit, someone's basically like, well, what's going to happen to all this stuff? And one of the people who responded was basically saying, like, okay, my understanding is that this is a, tax right. They're going to write this off as a failure as like a tax write-off style. We are pulling out of this business, this business unit. We're done with it. It failed. We're writing it off. And as part of that, you have to agree to never use anything from that business operation again, right? You can't like, you know, if we decided that AMCA LLC was done, we couldn't

then be like, but we're going to, and we wanted to write it off in this way where we wouldn't have to pay taxes on X, Y, Z things, we couldn't then take the episodes and re-host them on remap or something like that, because then we would be still using the stuff to do, not that three of us here own remap, but you know what I'm saying, right? Rob, you couldn't go do that without it being, you wouldn't get to write it off in that way. Right. And so to make sure that they never do that at Disney, again, I'm going to say that this is a third hand thing, but this feels in line with other stuff I've heard and read in the past. They tend to just destroy the stuff that they write off in this way.

Instead of housing it in a warehouse somewhere, which is expensive, or, you know, trying to, you know, eat the cost and reintegrate it elsewhere. They just destroy it. And so it's wild to think about, like, all right, they're just going to burn this fucking place to the ground. We should have been ripping things off the... A hundred percent. That was the wild thing because everything is, like, do not take.

This is, like, the only thing you can take home. And then as soon as we, like, left the ship. some of us like started looking up what's on eBay and like the menus are going for like hundreds of dollars on eBay and and we got an email after the the Star Cruiser was done that was like hey if you want to buy anything from the Star Cruiser like you still have a chance so I thought oh maybe they're selling the sort of like the stuff that was in the inside gift shop or stuff on that there's another gift shop on the way out that's like branded Star Cruiser

so it's like out of universe stuff it's just the same costume shit and like three other shirts from the outside so they're not even going to offer it to people any and there is like high end jewelry like 400 plus dollars jewelry pieces

like tons of you know clothing and props and ornaments and all these kind of little souvenirs. All of that is just going... I mean, some of it may... From what I've seen in Disney's past, like some of it ends up in auction sometimes. Usually it's just like abandoned or destroyed somewhere.

Right, right. It's... Yeah, it sucks. I mean, this is what a lot of companies do. Like, look at like fast fashion companies or even designer house. like instead of discounting merchandise because it will undervalue the company

they will just destroy like take you know scissors and like cut up you know designer handbags or like things like like this is a practice that a lot of companies do so that they're not devaluing the company itself and they get to write this off it's it's so fucks it's so it's so it's so

it's so fucked up I don't know how to else describe. I mean, not that, like, let us buy our pins and let me buy my shirt or whatever, but, you know, somebody out there wants it, you know? Yeah. It's an incredible amount of waste. It's huge amount of waste. This thing. Yeah.

And I think it's already very wasteful and, like, that I already feel some sort of way about being that. You know what I mean? And it's like, oh, yeah, good. And then also all of it just fucking gone. Cool. Trash it. The last thing I would say, too, so I went back to Galaxy's Edge a couple of things. You got to go at night, which I'm really jealous about

because I really want to see that place in there. And this was the weird thing. Being there not in character. Yeah. We did all the same stuff. But it was not like, probably the big difference, honestly, is we paste ourselves better.

And listen, we missed a trick. Docking Bay, whatever, is it 47? 7. Docking Bay 7. Docking Bay 7. Actually, a pretty nice, cool place. to hang out and cool in both senses of the word. It's indoors.

It's chilled. That was me. No, I was like, DocuBay 7 sucks. I needed to have Ronto Raps. Y'all had talked about those Ronto raps so much. That sucked. They used to be so good in time they replaced it with a fucking zucchini. I don't know what else to say.

Meanwhile, in DocuBay 7, I was chowing down on ribs. Y'all got ribs? Rips. Ice cold beer. I got beer Yeah I was just I was living the life And you know You go inside on this place?

What are we doing? I ran over to the milk stand And brought green and blue milk back Through the back door for MK Look at this So that like we just hang out in a quiet corner And just just hang But the point is we had we had a long day there

We did the rides We went absolutely Buck Wild The lights did the droid building, which was less... Yeah, we skipped that. It's not much. Like, both that and Savi's workshop is like a lot of money for an experience that's over in 30 seconds. And it's like two pieces of click together.

It's like done. Yeah. Like, even for a kid, I think probably a little unsatisfying. But the main thing is we just hung out a lot in the space. Then we did take detours out in other parts of the park and, you know, saw more of, Hollywood Studios, but then we had a chance to come back when the heat died down, the crowd died down. This is the weird thing.

It is such an extraordinary experience at night. And first of all, it has an entire soundscape that you just can't hear during the day. There are sound effects playing. There's an entire sense of a village and an environment like breathing around you that exists at night because you hear the soundscape and you can't hear any of it during the the day. The night lighting is gorgeous, but there's so much sun down there, you barely see the park lit up this way.

But like, suddenly, Austin, those sets look way better. I bet. Because you can light them to conceal the sins. Yep. And so just this weird thing of like, oddly enough, going there out of characters, you don't have the dissonance of like trying to have your bullshit Star Wars, Galactic StarCruz experience while being in Galaxy's eyes. It's just not being there as just a person and sort of going at your own pace without the pressure of like,

I'll be back to work my starship for more dinner theater. It was actually way, way more enjoyable. And I think you pointed out, Austin, that if they had given us access as members of like the Star Cruiser, just like a special, they do this, you know, you have the after-hours park passes associated with all the resorts. It's like if we could have just gotten like something to do for an hour in the galaxy's edge space, you know, that was like private to the Halcyon or something, I think you'd come away feeling way more like we had a fucking Star Wars experience. I'm honestly surprised they didn't do that because they do after hours park stuff all the time. Hollywood Studios closes at 9 for everyone And often at least at Disneyland Oftentimes they'll close the park

Like a couple hours early for like special events I'm really surprised that they didn't just give us access to Batu For like an hour after the park closed for like one of like Maybe even the first night that would even rotate This whole thing for me is like I The idea that You get this one six hour chunk on Battoe feels like such a weight.

I mean, I know it's not next to Batu, you have to take a bus there that they've hidden as a shuttle. It's basically next to me. But that bus rules.

The bus rules. The bus rules. By the way, I love the bus. If anyone associated with this has access to, so there is an album on title,

Spotify, whatever, the Galactic Star Cruiser music. It's mostly Guyas shit, some soundtrack stuff, but actually there's more music they pipe in throughout the Star Cruise. It was generally pretty good.

Yeah. And I'd be curious what the, what the big playlist is there. The bus ruled. The bus was great. But my point being, I, first of all, I think I say this on a diary thing that, like, I kind of wish we'd started at Batu and then left it for the, and I think it used to go either

way. But my instinct on this is really what I'm talking about is, for me, going to Galaxy's Edge really took me out of a Star Cruiser. Because, like, it's Blue Lives Matter shirt time. It's Pepsi shirts. It's the world, you know, it's like the Washington football team shirt. And you're like, oh, wow, now I'm thinking about a completely different world. I'm now thinking about politics, like, in the world, which is fine.

But, like, that's, I'm out, I'm checking my, the second day I started checking my emails. Do you know what I mean? Because we were in the park and I was bored and I was like, let me check my emails real quick. Let me send some slack messages, which is like, and that didn't happen to me at all day one because I was so consumed by this space that felt separate. And I felt sort of like, I wish we'd done the Galaxy's Ed stuff on day one and then gotten to load into the housey down on day two and stayed there and then come back out for a night thing on day two or you know what I mean to get it three days gives you a little bit more breathing room but I get why it's

not that alley you were to say by the way oh no I didn't gone yeah someone said by that was Rob it was no I'm just saying like you want to see proof that like cops are wildly unpaid uh I saw more cops at Disneyland like obviously cops like always let you know they're cops uh you know if the steroids don't kind of indicate what's what's up but Like, it was a highly represented profession at Disney World. And it's like, a lot of cops here. A lot of cops whose kids love stormtroopers. Yep.

Which is like, I come. I love BobaFat. I had a Darth Vader mask. You know, yeah, Mommy Handcuffs did happen. That did happen. I didn't say this to anybody yet. In the first, we were in the first order. We were in the first order gift shop, which exists.

And this little kid Looked back and was like mommy Look they have handcuffs And mommy was like They sure do They're like yes They sure do Weird

He's weird And then immediately after I think is when we saw The child Neil before Kylo Ren Yeah Neil in front of Kylo Ren to Yeah Well like you know Compared to Kroy You know

Kylo Ren seems like he has it going on Yeah Yeah. The kids loved Kroy. And Kroi like the kids. Like they were symbiotic. It was like, he was good at interacting with children. He had good like theater for kids energy.

Well, and this is the thing that's the wildest is like, someone who's listening is like, no, he didn't. Because they had a completely different Kroy who had completely different energy. Right. Yeah. Which is one of the wildest parts about this that I haven't quite worked through yet is that like, I want the whole cat. I want to see everyone who's going to be. ever played every one of these roles you know what i mean yeah because i've seen other wraiths who are like young guys and that's not the vibe i want inside the actor's studio with the

same same same big i mean this is the this is the everything in addition to destroying all the props and shit disney is such an nDA happy company from what i gather we are never going to get the behind the scene story of like so what was from concept through execution what was the Star Cruiser I'm praying that defunct land I feel like defunct land is one of the only like

historians out there that would be able to accomplish a deep dive on the Star Cruiser after shut down I'm so curious how long it'll take before a cat because there's also so many people who work it but yeah it'll take years

yeah those I'm If I had a theory If I were just to theorize It feels like something that had an internal champion at one point That it no longer does Well I think it's a yeah Yeah I think it's a mixture of that I think it's a mixture of like poor marketing

Which uh Disney parks is like Known for is like notorious for Especially with like special events or limited Uh You know attractions or things like that, it's hard to, it's hard to find out about them. It's hard to sign up for them if you're not like. Oh, that Disney app is one of the worst things I've ever used in my life.

Like the degree to which it obfuscates. Like, I heard a thing is happening. Can I buy tickets? Yeah. And that fucking app is like, maybe. Probably not. If you know where to go. Maybe you want to use our concierge service?

Maybe you want to pay a little extra money or a little bit of a, you want a genie? Want a Jeannie Plus? Yeah. That's what the new... That's the new fast-pass system. Fast-pass, right. Yeah, it works with Lightning Lane. I mean, that was the other thing, and I may have said this.

Did I say this bit in the diary that, like, I had to admit to myself, I just don't like theme parks because, like, if this one didn't do it for me. Yeah. All that stuff just kills me. And then we did Epcot the last day, which was not on the diary, which was very funny. Like, Epcot is a wild place, you know? I went back. That was the only park I went back to.

Rob and I walked past seven frat. dudes in the conical, like, Asian-style hat, quote-unquote, you know what I mean, posing and making, you know, no racist faces, but you know, you know what they're doing, I've taken the photo, and it's like multiculturalism, F-Cott is here, baby, F-Cott to bring in the world to your doorstep. Like Canada. Like Canada. $12 Molson on sale here.

They got coffee crisp. I should have gotten a coffee crisp. We got an expensive ice coffee instead. We rode, we wrote, not listen to the land, it's not called that anymore. It's called Living Off the Land, Living with the Land. Oh, sure, sure. Which is wild. Love to have, have the Disney narrator voice explain that we used to make mistakes in agriculture

because we were just trying to be so efficient with our food production. But these days, we're being better with the environment. It's such a funny place. It's a very funny place that's like, it's the, it's the most. intact of like the original vision sort of what that well not not really original because originally it was supposed to be like a utopia that Disney was designing and then it became like this like you can see the whole world in one place yeah but it was like based on the idea of like progress and a lot of the

sort of older rides if you ride them they're they still have that theme through them, which is lost at a lot of the other parks. And the new IP is like very loosely tied. I don't know. I find it fascinating. It's definitely, it's a place. It's a place where I saw a guy wearing a shirt that said, I'm an Epcot dad. It's like a regular dad but drunk or something like that.

And I was like. Hey, listen, Epcot, lots of good places to snack. Lots of good places to drink. The food is better at Epacott also. Though I did get worse there than anywhere else. Really? How so? I booked a signature dining experience.

Supposedly one of the best at Disney. And it did not go well. Where? Monsieur Paul. Well. Yeah. I think in general the snack carts are almost always better. than whatever, like, fine dining thing

Disney has to offer. Yeah, well, yeah, but either way, it is, it is funny, like, the degree to which, like, Epcot is sort of alone in terms of, like, it is a park. Actually, that's not true. Animal Kingdom still has that sense of, like, there's an original concept here that is still in play.

Like, they have the new Avestar stuff, but ultimately Animal Kingdom is an awesome zoo. Yeah, but they're shutting down, whole dinosaur they're replacing dino land with uh like like i think it's going to be indiana jones themed yeah they're doing south america technically to fit in with the like asia and india theming of the other parts of the park but they're they're just putting in indiana jones and in condo stuff there this is the wildest part of this all to be is being like we're at living on the land living with the land and then like the finding nemo aquarium is

next door the way in which like they want to do it all but also you got to hit the brand part of it you got to put a character you got to do that stuff because otherwise it won't sell like people won't go do it is epcot is like the most obviously the most version of that because it is stuff that literally used to be edutainment yeah and it still has most of those older rides that a lot of the other parks have just replaced with new IP I mean this is like One of the biggest complaints, I think, of, like, modern Disney fans is, like, how IP directed every new attraction at Disney is, and how much of a loss there is. I mean, this is what, like, defunct lands, this is a YouTube channel that does a lot of videos on, like, defunct rides, defunct Disney experiences, and also outside of. of Disney, just amusement parts in general.

I highly recommend it. But, yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, like, I think some of the criticism, too, is, like, a lot of the IP focuses, you're focusing on, like, IPs that are not as compelling, they're as enduring, right? The same things we're saying about, like, Star Wars is now kind of trapped in amber at this one, like, really underwhelming moment in Star Wars history. And that's just, that's Galaxy's Edge.

And, like, going to Magic Kingdom, yes, it is, like, the opening experience, there is Walt Disney's nostalgia for his past, right, of like America at the turn of the century from the 1800s and the 1900s. But it still, they would never build that again, right? They would not, they would not build a park to look like that, but still kind of enduring and has a vibe because, like, it's so strongly conceived. And it has been there for ages that this is a core Disney parks experience. And man, the other spaces don't really hold account. And, man, the other spaces don't really hold a candle to that in a lot of ways because, like, they're built on such ephemera that is, like, corporate dictate guided that, you know, in a weird way, I will take Epcot's

corny perennial 1960s World's Fair, pseudo World's Fair vibe. I would take that all the time over, you know, a lot of the other spaces that Disney is creating now in their parks. Right. Right. Yeah. But we're getting fun. Farrefield now into a broader Disney conversation. I guess anything wanted to hit to close it out. I feel like, once again, I feel like, how did we feel like just, I guess, broadly negative? I guess, like, glad we did it. Wouldn't pay to do it again if they invited us out to do it again.

They would do it again. They reopened. They re-it-it-you-up. Yeah. We did see that. Didn't you say there was a Reddit post, Austin, about like there being rumors around them testing like a show? I think that Reddit is trying to summon a reality. Yeah. So what happened was there was a shorter two or three hour session that like you could go and you got the whole basic story. You got the dinner with Gaia and you got like the show, you got the whole thing in one night. The counter argument in that subreddit post was someone being like, yeah, that was for like cast and crew family so that people could show up, watch the event that their parents or their partners had been working on for years and get a taste of it before it's done. That was not testing a dinner performance version of this, which would be so expensive to keep the lights on in this place.

You know what I mean? I guess like they'd be less expensive than it is now. But like I don't think it would be necessarily good. I wouldn't want to get, like, okay, everybody, get on the bus. I wouldn't want to do that whole thing in one, in three hours or whatever. Yeah, I don't know. That doesn't sound great to me.

Yeah, I have no idea how you use that space for anything else. Oh, yeah. And they're not redesigning all of those hotel rooms and trying to do the same thing over again. Like, that's not happening. But, like, in a world where they do, in a world where they somehow redo it in a year or two, hit us up. I'll, you know, I'm not going to spend this money again. I'm not. If we're going to spend

money on something like this again, it would truly be better for us to go do some sort of LARP somewhere, a Star Wars LARP or Mega game. I would really love to do. That would be sick. And like to see, to contrast that, which is also like, if you're listening to this and did Star Cruiser and are like, I really want to do something else, I know that there's some Star Cruiser fans who are trying to get a cruise ship together to go do that. If the part of this you love is being in costume and like role playing, please look into LARPS and and tabletop role-playing games and other stuff. And, you know, before you feel like you only have to recreate the expensive cruise part of it. I especially wouldn't do this on a Disney cruise.

I feel like I'm not going to reward them for failing to knock this one out the park by then giving a different reporting unit money for it, you know. And on a boat in the middle of the fucking ocean? No, but I would go on a cruise with y'all. We were joking about this feat. a couple months ago. We'd get a boat house. And like, Star Cruiser indicated, like,

a cool themed cruise. Totally. With y'all, that's a great time. Yeah. I just wouldn't want to be in the middle of the ocean. I would, like, if the cruise just went down the coast. Oh, they don't go in the middle of the ocean. They just, like, putter around between, like, tourist locations.

I mean, they don't go, they don't go deep into the ocean generally. I'm scared. Cruise route. No, the only, like, only canard line still does, like, transatlantic type cross crossings. And that only has. happens a couple times a quarter it's mostly it's mostly like oh we're going between these these destinations in the Bahamas or whatever right looking around your boat and just seeing nothing but sea wait hang on Natalie did we just is this new do I know about

this phobia I'm I'm not not ocean I'm not an ocean friend okay we're kind of all in the ocean I almost drowned once so I feel like that's kind of where it came from well Yeah, we do it. I'm also just, like, scared of the depths, like, of the unknown. I don't, same reason I don't like space. Maybe Jedi wasn't the right path. There's a lot of the amount of evidence for that. I don't like space.

Like, the idea of going to space really scares me. Yeah. Okay, so oceans basically space on Earth. Earth is basically space on Earth. It's all bad out there, Natalie. We're all dying. So true. Well.

Always a good time. Next week, I think Patreon backers will get to hear our drunken thoughts and immediate reactions. Someone's repeated, but genuinely, I think we had a different conversation today than we did a week ago. We had a conversation. So I haven't got my fucking swag yet, by the way. I didn't get my lightsaber yet. Has it shown up. Oh, that's not a good sign, dude.

Yeah, I can check. Mine arrive the day that I did. Yeah, my, by the way, the Droid Workshop shipping is so cheap. It's so cheap. You got, so here's why you do, buy something from the Droid Workshop. Yeah, you don't have to ship all your shit. Rob, you don't have to buy anything.

They'll just ship stuff from other places. Yeah. No, no, no, no, no, no. The way to explain thus was you were lied to. Because you bought something at the Droid Workshop, you're eligible. They lied to you. Okay, well, this shipping was cheap as hell. It's so cheap.

Yeah. I've been like, no money for this. This is why I've been like, I guess it'll get here when it gets here. Yeah, I got it, like, all my shit, like, showed up. And I shipped like three days after you did. Yeah, okay, I'll check with that truck. tracking number and shit. Yeah.

I'll see what's that what's going on. But I want my lightsaber. I got a cool lightsaber. Okay, here's a moment that's not on the pot. Maybe it is. Did I talk about changing my lightsaber decision? We all went to get the lightsabers and I went in feeling a sort of way, which was like, you had looked at them before.

Yeah, I knew what lightsabers were. You know what I mean? And like, I knew who I was as like a fan of lightsabers and like when I play Coteur, what type of lightsabers do I make? And when I played like old Republic MMO or whoever, my OCs and stuff, and I'm like, okay, I'm going to go with the, there's four types of lightsaber hilt, and then you get sub-options inside of those, that kind of category, but you pick a category. And it's, it's, uh, justice and defense, no, justice and peace and justice, which is like the Luke Skywalker, Obi-Wan

Knobe, OG style saber. There's power and discipline or something, which is like the, the, Darth Vader, first order, Kylo Ren. Centrism and equivalence. Centrist, well, no, the third one is, the third one is, Nature and nature, nature and, what I have, but they also changed them. They did change them. So you can't make mine anymore. Yeah, that's true. That's good, though.

Yours is like now bespoke. Right. And then what was the, what's the final one? It was like. It was like high Republic vibes. Yeah, or even old Republic vibes in some way. It was elegance and defense or something. It might be the one I got.

Is it protection and defense? I'm looking right now. All you and I both get from that side. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hilt materials bear mysterious motifs and inscriptions that reconnect users with the ancient wellspring of the force. Like ancient Jedi stuff. And I went in thinking I'd get protection and defense and I'd get a golden blade. I'd get the like yellow X-Arcon blade, which is now, of course, the ray blade because that's how that fucking movie ends.

Anyway, I got up there and I had gone to make the selection. And I looked at them all and I was like, you know what? no, I need peace and justice. And then I got to the crystals and the crystals were all laid out in front of me and I saw them glowing. And I went for the, yeah, and I went, no, it's green. It's always been green. It's always been returned to the Jedi Luke. Like, that's the shit. Rob got his lightsaber out. Rob was bringing his lightsaber. Rob got two lightsabers, didn't you? Rob got three lightsabers. Rob was not on the call yet because he stood up to get these. He got three. Rob got three light sabers? You got three lightsabers? You might have. No, I got two. Power and control. Elemental

nature is the third one. That's, that's, that's. So wait, would you go back and get? That's, that's, that's power and control, Rob. No. Oh, that's the Dukus saver. No, that's the Duku. That's the Duku. That's the Duku. All right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah. And also, this thing weighs a ton. It like, this is the highest quality lightsaber. Well, it's Dukus. Of course it is. But check it out. You got blue saber ducu. You got OG ducu. And I asked about it.

I was like, wait, isn't his lightsaber red? And they were like, no, but remember, he was a Jedi. He was a Jedi. And when he was a Jedi, his blade was blue. Respect, respect to the, uh, to the Savvy's workshop, uh, cast member who knew that. Yeah. I've, I, when I saw. the, like,

premium dark saber. I was tempted. Wait, there's a premium. Then I was like, I know the ending of the dark saver and it's fucking whack.

Wait, the, you don't know the ending of the dark saber. We still, oh, yes, we used to we do. Yes, we do

because that's Mandorian. Yeah. We don't know the middle of the, there's more middle. There's more middle. Oh, that's so whack. I bet the dark saber comes back.

They're going to bring the dark saber back. They're going to. I got it right here. It's right here. You have the Dark Sabre, right? Yeah. So I had not get three lightsabbers. I got my Savvy's workshop thing

was just part of like the full Star Cruze Experience and then I saw this thing in the, this wasn't at Savvys. This was at the... Star Tartouin Traders next to Star Tours? Actually, I ended up so it was M.K saw Calcastas's

lightsaber at Tatooing Traders and lost her life. I would know it to look at it. Mm-hmm. Well, you would know it because it was one of the most beautiful lightsabers at Star Tours. It was like, this thing looks extraordinary. And really that's craftsmanship. So we ended up grabbing that.

And then when we read a- This is cool. This is cool looking. The Jedi, like, curiosity shop. Yeah, what's that one called? Onderon. It's Oda. No.

Yeah. No, no, no, that's it. That's Oda's or something like that. But they have a lightsaber. They have all these collectible lightsabers, like the legacy series. And the Duku one called to me. Yeah. Because.

Yeah. Doc on dars. Doc on dars. Doc on dars oddities. Right. Sure. We all know this. Yeah, they have like Asoka's lightsaber.

They have Ventriss's lightsaber there. they have everyone everyone is there crucially a lot of them feel somewhat cheap a lot of like plastic or

metal like plastic to look like metal the Duku thing is steel this is a steel case slide saviour it is ridiculous so is the cow one a bit

The cow one is sick has this like leather wrap and stuff every Every color. You can hold down the button because you can change the color. It will. Wow. Yeah, this is pretty cool.

The thing is, I didn't want Calcestis's lightsaber. I wanted Austin Walker's lightsaber. That's a thing. That's a thing. I was wondering if there was like some way to customize the Calcestis one because you can customize it in the game. In the game, right. It doesn't appear to be.

It is really cool. It is the blend of the stuff that I like for these various things. It weighs a bunch. It feels like quality for sure. And now we're all lightsaber wielding. Well, that's really like

a lightsaber display. Austin did the lightsaber building. That was not like my character from house yeah, which is part of the thing that's weird about that switch, that pivot. Also, it was like it was too hot

to go in costume to Galaxy's Edge, which also broke that for me. Like 95 degrees in humid. It was so gnarly. Yeah. But I'm glad I had I had some

tropic weight Star Wars stuff but nothing matched that coat I found that was that coat was so good green top coat

is probably the prize possession coming out of this thing and Halloween this year solved can serve can serve candy to neighbor children

swinging by as your Star War character I'm a Jedi guy man just whatever yeah have some have some candy

but anyway so our plans from here so next week right we think the Q&A thing will drop Yeah, it sounds right.

That'll be our bonus for this month. And then two weeks. So I don't know when this goes up, because we just had an episode. Did we? Yes. Today. Yesterday? Wednesday.

It's Sunday, Wednesday. Yeah. I don't know the days. So, but what we should do is we should drop, I think you're right. I think what we should do is drop, maybe we drop this, this week, because it's, you know what I mean? And we drop the Q and A. We drop the Q and A. Well, the bonus.

recordings for the 27th. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, in lieu of the Q&A. Yeah, exactly. And then resume our Cotor voyage. Right, on the 4th or the 11th. Yes. And we'll see what our schedule allows for. TBD, but we wanted to get this out to y'all, ASAP, this month.

We just did it. You know what I mean? And before it ends. So maybe actually it won't be tomorrow, won't be the last voyage. Next week will be the last voyage by the time you hear this. Also, we need to make sure Cato can actually edit it. So this could all be for not us saying all this could be. Today, you're hearing this.

It's either the, we released it, it's either 20th or the 27th. Thanks for listening. Thanks for listening, whichever day it was. Maybe you're listening to it in May, because you're catching up to the podcast. And you're like, oh, wow. Maybe it's 2025. And you're at the Halcyon 2.0. And you're like, they said they couldn't do it.

I want to know what it was like back then. I want to know what it was like back now. I want to know what they changed. Yeah. I hope it's better. Me too. Don't do the Jedi route. Maybe they'll fix that too.

Maybe the Jedi Rout will be lit. I don't know. Yeah. And do go listen to these diaries because things like Natalie's ridiculous Saja, one-on-one experience. We talk more about our characters. We talk more about our characters. Yeah, if you want to know who all of our OCs are, if you want to know my character's last name and background, all of our characters.

We do a lot more stuff. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, until next time. Thanks for supporting us. Please rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice. And may the stars light your way.

Ignite the spark. Tabooite, neighbor. Tabooite. Actually, you know what? Tabuite. Tabuite. To booty. I'm going to be able to be.

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