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.
This concept should’ve been a slam dunk, and they blew it.
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.
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.
Her Evermore Park video is also a banger
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.
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
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?
That’s fucking sad all around.
Why not let people enjoy things if it gives them happiness?
(Not a fan myself, as a disclaimer)
It’s not just harmless little fun, Disney is one of the biggest companies in the world and is responsible for a lot of problems.
There’s more to life than bread and circuses.
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.
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.
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”.
Love me some Jenny.
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.
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.
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’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.
