TIL Disney's Star Wars Hotel was a massive waste of time
TIL Disney's Star Wars Hotel was a massive waste of time
I'm only an hour into this person's 4 hour(!) review/criticism of the Star Wars hotel and am baffled at how poorly this was handled.
Just learned about her thanks! She is very passionate, clear and intelligent. Unfortunately this is a lesson most people learn about premium vacations and she made a 4 hour rant video about it. I'm not a star wars fan but I'm likely watching this whole thing.
Love me some Jenny.
Disney was a creative and innovative company up until the 90s maybe... In the last 2 decades almost everything they are known for was either made before or bought and destroyed
Disney built its entire empire on existing/public domain stories. Cinderella, Little Mermaid, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast, Robin Hood. The list goes on. Hell even Aladdin is largely located from Middle Eastern fairy tales.
The fact that they're relying on existing IP now is nothing new. It's who they've always been. It's just that they had to buy it since it wasn't already in the public domain.
Disney built its entire empire on existing/public domain stories. Cinderella, Little Mermaid, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast, Robin Hood. The list goes on. Hell even Aladdin is largely located from Middle Eastern fairy tales.
Absolutely, but at least back then they truly added value by tweaking the stories (those original stories are mostly horror stories to our hears) and providing great animation. Nowadays, they buy great IPs and just ruin them; not only they are not adding any value, they are actively taking value away from them
The 90s? Nah, it died with Walt Disney
Up until they gave Eisner the boot
He was also often very shit, Disney land Paris, for example, that was a huge fiscal drag for decades. A lot of the better stuff he is credited with was due to Wells influence or in spite of him.
Modern disney collapse is due to Chapek, and in particular, why the budget was cut for Star Cruise early in its development. Iger is far from perfect but better than Eisner and Chapek combined.
I'm the type that when I see descriptions like "be the hero of your own Star Wars story" for a tourist destination, I immediately think it's going to be some cheesy oversold experience because you can't really mass produce a main character role.
First of all, just the resources that would be required for the one on one time that would be involved is unrealistic for any scale beyond small groups.
Second, they aren't like DMs that can roll with whatever their characters design; "your own story" needs to be pigeon holed into a limited set of choices they can prepare for, especially if there's supposed to be high production value involved and special effects.
Third, of course any interactive elements are going to be ridiculously easy. They'd rather deal with people disappointed at how easy it is than people (especially kids) frustrated that they can't do something.
So I knew right at the start of this video that it wasn't my kind of thing.
But this thing didn't even live up to the cheesy experience I would have expected. Seems like they bit off way more than they could chew with the initial idea but then we costs ballooned, they could only cut features and offerings while increasing the price, leaving it as an overpriced but underwhelming thing, in the end.
So much corporate shit is like this now. I think it's just another symptom of the problems capitalism brings. Under capitalism, you get a mix of people who want to do a thing and make money from it and people who want to make money and think doing a thing will get them that money. Those that are focused on the thing will generally produce something of much higher quality than those focused on the money they'll make. One asks, "is this good? Could it be better?" while the other asks, "is this good enough? Could it be cheaper?"
She touches on the other aspect in the video a bit, but could have gone a bit further (though I understand why she didn't): the misleading marketing. Social media marketers with conflicted interests between being honest with their audience and keeping the providers of the free shit happy so the free shit keeps flowing. She touches on that aspect.
But I wouldn't be surprised if some of those trolls defending Disney are paid by Disney, maybe directly maybe indirectly. I'm not aware of any regulation against hiring people to pretend to like your product online. I'm not sure that would even technically count as advertisement, if truth in advertisement even matters anymore these days.
Jenny has integrity, at least as far as I can tell. Those "influencers" that don't are scum, whether they are doing it for free shit or getting paid to do it directly.
This was basically not a hotel, but a star wars improv camp where you were all but forced to participate in a bunch of half-assed activities that were supposed to be "immersive" but kinda just fell flat (especially for the price)
I think the interesting thing about this video is that she is the perfect customer for the experience disney tried to set up. She loves themeparks, she loves dressing up as characters, she loves larping, she loves star wars. But no matter how much effort SHE put in to get her enjoyment out of it, it just didn't work.
this video is really the best, most post modern star wars movie of them all. the epic of a ill equipped young true believer with hope beyond all hope taking a stand against a cold empire, causing incalculable damage and living to fight on.
I’ve watched the whole thing. It’s so close to something I’d really like, at least in concept. But the ball is dropped so hard in crucial areas :(
Interestingly there are some videos that show what it’s like when it does work and it’s amazing (though still probably not worth thousands of dollars). That makes it even more frustrating when it doesn’t. It’s been a while since I watched Jenny‘s video but I think she made a point of that near the end.
The hotel was so expensive in both development and upkeep that they had to have a high price and high capacity at the same time to still make a profit. In the end it was basically luck if the actors had time to interact with you and if they didn’t, you had to rely on the rather barebones automated stuff while still paying for the full experience.
That is a damn good point well made
I saw someone below say "it's a review of a hotel". It's so much more than that.
It's a critical indictment of corporate greed, and the fleecing of family entertainment, and nerd culture, told in such minute and well research detail, it's a 4 hour wonder. All of her stuff is like this.
She's a little Forrest gnome with an Einstein brain who graces us with her content. I'm a big big Jenny Nicholson fan.
I didn’t know her at all before watching this, but this tour de force deserved a standing ovation.
I heard about her video on fucking NPR. Seriously.
All Things Considered did a little piece talking about how long form video essays are becoming more popular, but they concluded by saying that she did a bang-up job and had some good insights.
It's not a standing ovation, but having NPR run a story on your video and compliment your coverage is pretty damn skippy.
I watched that video when it came out, it's a delight! I also feel so bad for Jenny about like...everything that happened. So bad! So expensive!
Was there some fallout from this video? Or do you just mean the terrible experience she had at the hotel?
She spent thousands of dollars on a panic attack and disappointment.
Just the entire hotel experience was so bad! I do think some people were complaining about the video, but I mostly didn't see it, only saw people loving the video!
I can't imagine spending that much and having that bad an experience. I think my heart would just explode from stress and sadness.
This concept should’ve been a slam dunk, and they blew it.
It seems like they developed the entire thing in a silo without ever considering how people would actually want to spend their time on holiday. It sounds incredibly appealing on the surface, and aimed directly at my (and my partner's) demographic, but they just screwed the pooch at every corner.
My take was that they were pulled very hard in two directions: the initial idea was to appeal to the hardcore fan who would love nothing more than to drop thousands of dollars to have an immersive Star Wars experience, and it was see-saw'd by the desire to also appeal to the classic Disney market of families with children. Inevitable result: you get something that satisfies neither group.
I'm still watching, but it feels like they didn't bring in people from their parks, hotels, and cruise ships to consult or manage taking the concept from design to execution.
Or some people who have ran LARPs before.
Reminds me of the time my previous employer tried to have a bunch of webdevs build an embedded device
Systematic and systemic failures of Senior and Upper Management, pretty much at every step.
If Jenny ever pursues a career in investigative journalism, she'll eclipse Nader.
Jenny Nicholson has over 53k monthly Patreon subscribers, paying at least $2 a month, some up to $25 (do that math, it's astounding). She's the 7th largest Patreon subscriber base on the platform. She's well exceeded anything Ralph Nader has ever done, professionally.
This may be the dumbest thing I've ever read. While I like her content it's about theme parks and cartoons. Nader helped get us safer cars, safer work places, safer water, FOIA, and 9/11 + 2 major decades long wars. When Jenny's career leads us to trillions of spending attacking countries that weren't actually responsible for attacking us she can say she's on Nader's level.
Her Patreon scroll lasts so long, lol.
I'm sorry, I wasn't clear in my original post, I wasn't speaking of audience or earnings I was speaking of impactfulness and usefulness. But to be clear I find zero fault in her end products and every new video showcases how her topics and methodologies are maturing. She's killing it.
I absolutely believe she is capable of producing products that get the US Congress involved and laws repealed or passed.
In fact my only critique of her is that she is still on Twitter.
Has she gotten laws passed that make cars safer too?
Ralph Nader has literally saved thousands (if not millions) of lives.
Her entire channel is a great watch, only person I've ever used Patreon for
Her Evermore Park video is also a banger
The constant "do stuff!!!"-push combined with the actual insane pricing of the experience, making it so that people feel the need to get all the worth they can from it, gave Jenny an anxiety attack, which she notes that she has never experienced before or since.
That's fucking wild.
The insane pricing creating a miserable push to do all the things is basically the entire Disney experience for families. I used to work in one of the parks, and people were exhausted and burnt out trying to do everything, and my advice to people visiting the parks was always "don't try to do everything, try to pick some of it and enjoy what you do".
I feel like they should have tied this somehow to an existing hotel instead of trying to make a completely new one with such a small number of rooms and high overhead cost.
Jenny is a legend. Her content is awesome.
I'm surprised we haven't seen a post Lucas Star Wars MMO looking to capitalize on the number of people who just want to experience an open ended Star Wars universe to role play in.
Open-ended, "sandbox" style MMOs are a lot trickier to get right than "theme park" style ones like Star Wars: The Old Republic. Games like SW:TOR require a lot of content to be developed, but you can at least be pretty sure that if you develop fun quests then players who like questing will have fun.
For a "sandbox" style MMO, you have to design systems that lead to interesting player interactions... and then hope players actually interact. This is complicated by the market share for sandbox games being smaller overall, meaning you can't guarantee there will actually be a sizable player population. Also sandbox-style players are sharply divided on basically every topic from "how much PvP should there be" to "how much grinding should there be" so you quickly find yourself either targeting increasingly narrow slices of players or trying to appeal to multiple playstyles at once, which is even harder.
I think this is why sandbox games have mostly moved towards smaller worlds and self-hosted servers, like ARK and Rust, where they can thrive with small player counts and individual play groups can tweak the experience to better suit their needs.
They might have had the same idea, but the devs they are letting make Star Wars games are (usually) making turd after turd, so I could see the hesitation
There hasn’t been a great track record with recent Star Wars games though… likely due to shitty execution thinking rabid fans won’t care if the game is good.
I'm sure it's very interesting, but ain't nobody got time for that!
That was my first thought as well. I thought I’d try the first 10 minutes to get a sense of it.
Anyway, four hours later…
You should watch it. Jenny does a great job breaking down what they did right and wrong. And it turns out it was such a monumental project that you need four hours to talk about it fully.
Our attention spans are dropping precipitously, and it worries me.
Did you’se all really need a 4 hour video to tell you Disney and capitalism are bad?
While I don’t care for Disney entertainment much, I have friends that love everything about Disney. They go nearly every weekend and when you ask them about it they smile the entire time as they talk about it for the next hour. Why would I want to take that away from them?