Trip to Disney Star Wars

I don’t like Star Wars (un-American, I know).  But I love someone who loves Star Wars.  So I found myself on the Disney Star Wars Galactic Space Cruiser.  My presumption was that we’d have an interesting, albeit cheesy experience.

Having taken this ride with Disney, I can say they did something impressive, and I also understand why it’s failing.

From the moment we boarded the “shuttle” to our space cruise, it was fully immersive.  The set was all consuming and the entire crew played along.  Audience member costuming was mixed, but most came in costume and many had elaborate backstories they had prepared—some even with props.

I didn’t fully know what I was getting into until I was there. It’s a new style of tourism, and Disney’s advertising didn’t make it seem appealing. But, what they designed is a ton of fun and clearly took a lot of work.  In addition to games and puzzles on your phone and throughout the elaborate, large spaceship, there is a cast that basically puts on an 8-hour play each day.  They move the story along.  They have lines they need to get through, but when they aren’t reciting lines, they improv with the audience.  Somehow, they don’t break character.

After meeting them once they know your name.  I’m still both creeped out and curious as to how Disney pulled that off.  Do the magic bands tell them my name as I approach?  Is someone watching talking to their earbud: Here comes Maggie.”

The event is fun, but intense.  An introvert will be exhausted by night one.  Extroverts may find themselves tired too.  If you are engaged with the game, you are busy the entire time, except when your head hits the pillow.  But your room is part of the set. A droid even tells you a bedtime story.

The constant intensity is what I think may turn people off.  My vacations are rarely relaxing. I hike mountains and keep a fast pace while traveling, and I felt like I needed days off to recover after mere hours aboard the ship.  I was having fun, but it was draining.

What stands out most is the interaction between the cast, crew, and passengers. That was special.  In theater, there are good audiences and bad audiences (just like good plays and bad).  The audience in this experience matters even more.  They are part of the show and without them, it wouldn’t be the same.

Perhaps an erroneous stereotype, I feel like actors tend to come with some ego and like to be the center of attention. That’s not meant as a criticism.  It’s in part what makes them excel at their job, but the actors aboard our ship were very gracious.  Improv is not easy. They encouraged the audience to get involved. They wanted us to try and engage.  They were rooting for everyone’s success.  Similarly, the audience was encouraging and cheering for each other too.  It created a unique and lovely environment.

The story unfolds as a choose-your-own-adventure.  You can follow the path of the good guys, bad guys, smugglers, Jedi, or a love story.  Some stories overlap.  If you’re a smuggler, you might be working with the good guys, the bad guys, or a little of both.  Ultimately the path you choose determines which stories you will see play out.  You can’t see everything.  Disney surprised me in that if you didn’t build the right trust the with right characters you didn’t access certain scenes.  And they didn’t let you into a scene just to be nice. For example, I didn’t get to meditate with Yoda…bummer.

The journey mimicked life where we have to make choices.  We can’t take every path.  Our decisions impact what we see, who we meet, and how our life unfolds.  That can make life stressful.  Disney didn’t ignore that.  They tried to be reassuring about reality—encouraging you to talk to fellow passengers to see which way they were going.  Or simply to hear about their adventures aboard the space cruiser.

While I’ll admit to having a little FOMO, I appreciated that I couldn’t possibly see everything.  It made my decisions matter.  And when I translate that to life, which can be hard and complicated and we don’t always know if we made the right decision, this realization was comforting.

The choices we make in life matter.  They have meaning.  Whichever road in the yellow wood we select creates a different adventure.  If our choices didn’t matter life might be easier, but it would also be less interesting, less compelling, and less meaningful.

Granted in Disney you can ask your buddies what they saw and hear about the potential adventures you missed had you decided to, for example, become a Jedi. (Did I mention, you’d have gotten to meditate with Yoda?)  Life doesn’t have that option.  No one can relay the adventures I missed by the choices I made.

Still, it’s a good exercise.  Make a choice.  Take a path.  Move forward.  It will be okay.  And no matter what happens, there’s another decision.

It’s not my intent to just pay homage to Disney here.  I have complicated feelings about that company and am not their biggest fan.  Along the way, in my experience on the Star Cruiser, there was room for them to do better, but my overall experience was unique and fun.  And I’m thoroughly impressed with the effort that went into pulling this experience off.  I feel bad for those who worked so hard and have to watch as the ship prepares to go into drydock—the stock line when you ask about it closing while aboard the ship.

This attempt didn’t seem to fully take off, but they tried.  They took a path.  They made a choice to invent something new.  Now there is yet another fork in the woods.  And we’ll all see what the creative teams at Disney do next.