The Wreck of the Halcyon
This weekend was the final running of the Disney World’s Star Wars Galactic Starcruiser. An attraction that is without question the greatest failure in the entire history of Disney Parks.
River Country was possibly a more expensive failure but that waterpark was closed due to mechanical failures not a lack of interest. The cost-benefit analysis of repairing River Country versus building a new waterpark was math that came down hard against Disney’s first swimming hole.
Superstar Limousine was a much worse concept but it was one that was forced on Disney due to circumstances beyond its control. The ride was originally supposed to be a paparazzi chase but Princess Diana was killed while it was being built and the ride had to be rethemed as cheaply as possible mid-construction.
The ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter was simply too frightening for a Disney ride, other than that it was great and its fans still want it back.
What makes the Halcyon such a spectacular trainwreck was Disney’s deep-seated commitment to pursuing this failure. At no time were any of the Galactic Cruiser’s obvious flaws ever examined during its planning or construction. Because Disney is no longer capable of stopping an impending disaster no matter how obvious the issues are.
The concept of an immersive interactive experience has been proposed on several occasions by Disney’s Imagineering. No idea by Imagineering is ever abandoned, it’s just repurposed. This one started in Michael Eisner’s day when Animal Kingdom was in diapers. I suspect the only version of this concept that might have worked was the Hogwarts iteration back when Rowling was in talks with Disney but even that was iffy.
I am willing to grant that the concept in its final form was perhaps understandable back when the Force Awakens pulled in $2 billion at the box office. Particularly in light of Disney’s institutional revulsion for paying creators what they are owed. Given how much money the first movie made, pursuing a Reyloverse setting was an understandable choice at the time.
It was a very Disney way of doing business.
However, the brakes should have been slammed on when The Last Jedi brought in $700 million less than the previous film. The astonishing level of creative incompetence demonstrated at every level of Disney and LucasFilm hadn’t just sunk Reylo with the fanbase, but the entire Star Wars brand had been endangered.
A trilogy is simply an extension of the three-act story structure, it’s supposed to be one continuous story. While the characters from The Force Awakens were used, an entirely different self-contained narrative was established for the second movie. The foundational plot of the first movie (granted, there wasn’t much to it) was chucked for a brand-new one. You’d think that losing their ultimate weapon would have been a major hurdle for the First Order but it wasn’t even a hiccough. The Republic was conquered off stage and the audience was ordered not to think about it. I’ve heard the arguments that defend the desecration of Luke Skywalker as a storytelling device but frankly, they don’t hold up. The LucasFilm Story Group’s utter contempt for the character shined through in the dialog. The hyper-feminist culture that Kathleen Kennedy established was fundamentally incapable of presenting traditional heroism even as a concept. And finally, the blatant incompetence of killing the main antagonist halfway through the story absolutely should have been vetoed or at least fucking challenged by Disney.
Star Wars fans were outraged by the treatment of Luke Skywalker.
Solo became the first Star Wars movie to bomb and it was the result of a deliberate fan boycott.
In 2017, the damage to Star Wars as a brand was, if not reversible, at least capable of being mitigated. Truth be said even the Last Jedi was potentially salvable with aggressive editing. However, LucasFilm had become as ideologically insular as an Ivy League faculty lounge and Disney corporate culture is incapable of admitting to any kind of mistake. The company’s default was to back LucasFilm’s play.
By 2019 the Star Wars fanbase was becoming extremely frustrated with Disney. They felt there should have been at least a fig leaf of regret expressed by Disney but there was none. Kathleen Kennedy remained firmly in the saddle and the LucasFilm’s contempt for it’s own fans had become impossible to ignore.
The Mandalorian revived flagging interest. It was, in retrospect only just barely good enough but it demonstrated that the Star Wars fandom was still recoverable. However, The Rise of Skywalker was launched a month after we first met Din Djarin.
ROS was yet another example of Disney’s relentless pursuit of failure. The smart thing to do would have been to have canceled the third movie of the Reylo trilogy. Just truncate that whole unfortunate story arc into a duology and abandon it in place. While the conclusion of the Last Jedi was profoundly hated it could at least function as the end of a story. It was such a narrative trainwreck there was clearly nothing that could be saved from that mess. However, the Star Wars fandom could have survived it if The Last Jedi had been treated as an unfortunate but one-time-only aberration. The Rise of Skywalker demonstrated Disney’s commitment to the aberration. It cost about $500 million to make, lurched blindly about on the screen in a desperate search for coherence, and by the end of the movie had ruined the biggest science fiction franchise of all time.
The Star Wars fandom had a final Indian Summer in October of 2020 with the return of Luke Skywalker on the second season finale of The Mandalorian. Season 2 was at best uninspired and was clearly suffering from a deluge of notes from corporate headquarters. Nonetheless, the return of a heroic Luke Skywalker brought the Star Wars faithful back in droves. One final time. Two weeks later Gina Carrano was fired for being a conservative. That is honestly the truth of why Kathleen Kennedy shitcanned her. That event was the black swan.
Star Wars Advocates and Intentionalists were now hopelessly black-pilled. There was no hope for Star Wars so far as its most fervent adherents were concerned, and the Halcyon had not yet begun construction.
The doomed cruise ship experience has all the hallmarks of a major fad in entertainment business, the belief that something popular has been under-monetizatized. All the activities that were behind the paywall inside the Halcyon were originally supposed to be free attractions at Galaxy’s Edge. The fundamental problem is that they were only good as freebies, not a $ 3,000-a-night immersive experience. Perhaps it’s biggest foundational problem was that there was zero replay value. People who could afford it would have no reason to go again.
The Star Wars Galactic Starcruiser should have been put in jeopardy but as near as I can tell cancelation of the project was never discussed. The plan was never reviewed except for those technical aspects of it that were hopelessly behind schedule or over budget. Those were turned into a cheap, low-rent version of things like lightsaber training where you ended up moving a glowing stick to where a beam of light was being revealed by particulate matter, in other words, a dirt-light.
The technical failures shouldn’t have been insurmountable but were, due to another problem the company can’t look at, the Disney Brain Drain. The people that could have done the job got tired of having to keep social justice diaries and attending human resource struggle sessions. The company’s best and brightest Imagineers took flight, leaving the diversity hires to solve the technical issues on their own. They couldn’t.
This Brain Drain made itself felt another way, a complete lack of imagination. Part of what always made Disney rides special was the deep storytelling. You might not have known the extensive backstory of Expedition Everest but the Imagineers did and that let them paint on a deeply layered canvas. The Halcyon’s story was that for six hundred years it had been the most luxurious ship in the galaxy. That was it, there was nothing else to it. Little Boy wants to be a fireman when he grows then grows up and becomes a fireman is first grader storytelling and that is all that the LucasFilm Story Group and Disney Imagineering could manage.
And that was just the backstory.
The food was another problem. None of the high-level talent Disney has (had) both at table side or in the kitchen wanted anything to do with the Halcyon. A top-tier chef wasn’t going to go near this thing because of the inevitable damage to his reputation. Think about it, the goal of making a delicious, original, headliner dish has to be made secondary to presenting something that looks like alien food. Even if the dish is a hit, all the other chefs are going to be making fun of you for serving pretentious, novelty cuisine. You’ll be a joke in the industry. Once again, the B-team had to step in. Consequently, the food wasn’t as good as it needed to be for a white glove experience. The top-tier wait staff wanted nothing to do with it either because they were not going to be making $500 tips, which you would easily get if you worked at Victoria and Albert’s.
The cabins were authentic to what you would have in a non-luxury cruise. Rich people would not be getting their money’s worth from these cramped, dinky rooms and this whole retarded project was supposed to be wallet-hoovering people who have a collection of $20,000 Swiss watches and can’t make up their minds if they should buy a Rolls or a Bugatti. This was Red Robin-level luxury at Michelin three-star prices.
The decor originally looked like it was supposed to have come from a galaxy far, far away. However, the health and safety lawyers went through the plans and deleted all of it. The Halcyon ended up looking like what it was, a concrete bunker.
An overpriced concrete bunker with dinky rooms, weird-looking food, and boring activities that were capped off by a substandard live-action stunt show between characters that were unpopular with most Star Wars fans.
I suppose this raises the question, would the Star Wars Galactic Starcruiser have done better if the fanbase was still healthy?
Try to imagine how you felt about Star Wars back in 2015. Assuming Disney hadn’t destroyed Star Wars and you got to go to have a LARPing session with Luke, Leia, Han, Mara, and Kyle Katarn, then I would say…
No. It still would have failed.
Although it would not have collapsed in the comically short amount short time that it did. This billion-dollar failure was completely avoidable from the start but current year Disney is intrinsically incapable of admitting that Rey is unpopular and will always be a non-starter. There is no mechanism within the Walt Disney Company that allows a way for the admission of glaringly obvious problems. Once a course has been set at Disney, that course will be followed no matter how obvious it is that the ship is going to end up on the rocks. Every aspect of this catastrophe was not only entirely predictable but was repeatedly predicted. By Everyone.
This was a train that left the station knowing well in advance the bridge was out.
This was a failure that was richly deserved.
Star Wars Galactic Starcruiser
2022-2023
