In the video below, Dictor van Doomcock rants about Disney’s “Star Wars: Galaxys Edge” at Disneyland. What brings this on is a report that attendance at the attraction, and the park as a whole, is lower than projected by Disney, which apparently assumed massed hordes. I’ve got to take issue with DVD here, though. He (and a few other YouTubers I’ve seen) portray this as the attraction being deserted, but it could just be that the park is swarmed with visitors, rather than ultra-swarmed.
I will not be darkening “Galaxys Edge” doorstep. But then, it was never going to be otherwise. For one, I haven’t visited a theme park in something like 35 years, and have little enough interest in doing so again. Vast sums of money to spend hours standing in the sun waiting in a line with thousands of sweaty, smelly, unhappy tourists? Bleah. But the fact that “Galaxys Edge” isn’t *actually* “Star Wars?” No thanks.
I have no idea if GE fell below expectations due to fan backlash. I have no idea if this shortfall is the permanent state of things, or just a short-term blip. It could very well be that people who would happily attend are staying away simply because they all want to avoid the hordes of other fans they expect are attending. But from what I’ve seen, it just doesn’t seem all that interesting. The setting is a planet invented just for this. It’s a place with no actual Star Wars history. Its set in the lame Mary Sue Rey era and has no references to the characters that made Star Wars interesting… no Han, Luke, Leia, Vader. Apparently it is mostly a place to spend EVEN MORE money by buying trinkets and doodads. There’s a life-size Millenium Falcon, which is cool and all; there’s also apparently some sort of Falcon flight simulator, which has the potential of being really cool. But … get a load of this description of what the visitors get to do in the cockpit:
The left pilot controls the horizontal steering, and the right pilot controls the vertical steering (remember: up is down and down is up!) and the hyperdrive (the most fun part arguably!). The left gunner controls the upper turret (denoted by blue-colored lasers) and the right gunner, the lower quad gun. The engineers, like the gunners, have their own screens on the side, and similar to the gunners (who are always on “auto”) simply press a button repeatedly at the correct times, whether they’re shooting down enemy TIE Fighters or repairing ship damage. Occasionally, at key times, a secondary button may pop up (e.g. to fire a missile or grappling hook).
WAT.
That sounds like a barren source of amusement, especially if you are paired up not with your best buddy, but the random next person in line. Feh.
Never mind the politics involved, the fan backlash over how dreadful “Last Jedi” was, or how wokeness is trashing the franchise, or how the SJW morons running Star Wars these days hate the actual fans. The attraction just doesn’t seem like much fun, never mind *thousands* of dollars worth of fun. I truly doubt that the attraction is “deserted,” but it would surprise me not at all if the overall response, rather than an unceasing invasion of mountains of fans waving wads of cash, is a collective “meh.”