The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel
youtu.be
For two days and two nights, I will step aboard an immersive galactic starcruiser experience and live MY star wars story.References and clip sources: https:/...

Yes, this is a 4 hour long review of a hotel that’s already closed.

  • bazus1@lemmy.worldEnglish
    75·
    6 months ago

    So worth the time. She had an aweful 2-days 2-nights for thousands of dollars, and did it so you and I didn’t have to lose that money to learn the hard way.

    I love that she contextualizes all of this against the backdrop of Disney corporate cowardice and shortsightedness. Also, bless the friggin cast members!

      • cerement@slrpnk.net
        53·
        6 months ago

        this whole thing reads like Disney was planning it as a tax writeoff from the very beginning …

        • Krauerking@lemy.lol
          12·
          6 months ago

          No they fully thought they could get rich nerds to overspend on a cheap hotel because the CEO who was seeing the project was absolutely about maxing profits from the top percentage of park goers.

  • mySFWaccount
    58·
    6 months ago

    I watched the first few minutes just to see what it was about, and then 4 hours had passed.

    • TheFriar@lemm.ee
      7·
      6 months ago

      lol I had never even heard of her before yesterday, clicked on that video because I’m a sucker for deep dive video essays that are probably unnecessary about weird topics. I didn’t see it was a 4hr video until I was like 20 min in and now I haven’t stopped watching her stuff. Love finding a new YouTuber to watch endless hours of their back catalogues.

  • Poppa_Mo@lemmy.world
    46·
    6 months ago

    I’m not a huge Star Wars, Disney, Hotel, Vacation, or fan of this person, and I still watched all 4 hours of this. Really good break down. She’s also very quirky and charismatic.

  • cerement@slrpnk.net
    43·
    6 months ago

    what makes it so much worse is that Disney has the history, Disney has the knowledge, Disney has the engineering, Disney has the know-how and so little of that was on display here – I cannot see any way that Disney fans, Star Wars fans, or theme park fans wouldn’t be absolutely livid after experiencing that …

    • TheFriar@lemm.ee
      51·
      6 months ago

      That’s exactly the conclusion she comes to late in the video: it’s that they cashed in on their deep supply of goodwill with their fans and betrayed them for higher margins. And then wrote the whole thing off by shutting it down suddenly right at the end of the quarter. We are living in a time of animal-backed-into-a-corner, hostile capitalism. The bubble on this system that was literally designed to pop, seems to be popping. So the capitalists are gathering up everything they can, faster and faster. Capitalism as a concept is inherently flawed. You can’t have infinite growth in a finite system. As has been pointed out innumerable times: that’s how cancer works. Not a sound financial system. But here we are, in what is essentially the “going out of business” mad dash by these leeches to grab as much as they can. Our water supply, our natural resources, the climate, the system of capitalism itself are all on the outs. And people feel that. And we’re getting angrier and angrier. This won’t end well, and it seems to be ending faster and faster. They know that. What they plan on doing with all that money after the collapse is unclear. But they’re winning. And that’s all they can conceive of.

      Edit: lol I literally forgot as I went on writing that, that I was meant to be talking about Disney. But that’s pretty much what’s happening. They’re in the “squeeze harder” phase, where they’re ostensibly done growing and innovating, now they’re just going to squeeze everything they can out of the people that give them money. It’s about cost cutting, more extreme exploitation of their workers and customers, and essentially going for broke on what’s already there.

        • ryven@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
          2·
          6 months ago

          Iger was CEO when the project was announced, left for a while in the middle, missing the opening, and was back again in time to close it down. He stepped down in February 2020 and was reinstated in November 2022.

    • mynachmadarch@kbin.social
      9·
      6 months ago

      Evermore makes me so sad. All that potential and a dream that just wasn’t. It’s planned theming was much more my speed too.

  • SomeGuy69@lemmy.world
    261·
    6 months ago

    It’s a crazy experience of her telling this story. I’ve watched 3 of the 4 hours so far and might do the rest today. You can tell the desperation in her voice on day one, when you can see the boring games and faction quests didn’t work, or her role playing was simply ignored, but some things are even worse, like the used emergency measures in place, in case of fire or the really bad app or extra paying for drinks on a $6000 trip. Nightmarish.

  • Audacious@sh.itjust.works
    262·
    6 months ago

    What’s up with this video? I’m not interested in watching it, but YouTube keeps recommending it to me, and every time I see it the views on it keeps exponentially growing.

    • ryven@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
      461·
      6 months ago

      1. Jenny is very popular but hasn’t uploaded to Youtube in a year, so this a big comeback.

      2. Star Wars is a popular franchise but has had mixed success recently, and Disney’s perceived mismanagement of it is a popular topic.

      3. It’s organized as an Internet-friendly numbered list!

      4. I, and apparently a lot of other people, could listen to Jenny talk about theme parks all day.

    • raptorattacks@lemmy.world
      241·
      6 months ago

      Jenny Nicholson is a really popular video essayist. She only releases like one of these essay videos a year because she spends so long working on them. (She’s got a patreon where she releases a smaller, lower effort video every month.)

      The big videos routinely pull in millions of views, so I’m not surprised the algorithm spams it in people’s feeds. She’s got a lot of followers that watch it right away because they’ve been waiting for a year to see it, so it shoots to the top of the recommendations for other people in that niche. Then there’s a snowball effect where YouTube starts recommending it, more people watch it, so it gets recommended more, etc. You see the same thing on Hbomberguy’s yearly video.

      As one of her subscribers, I can tell you that this video has been in the works for years, so we’ve been hearing about it for a long time and were hyped. I just finished it today - broke it up into three different viewings. She breaks all her essays down into chapters so it’s easy to watch just a portion of it at a time.

      • MojoMcJojo@lemmy.world
        131·
        6 months ago

        I had never heard of her. I do not watch influencer videos. I do not like influencer videos and suspect I would not like them personally. The 4 hour long runtime clearly indicated I would not be watching it.

        I am now a subscriber and big fan of her work!

        The cascade of bad decisions by Disney was so enjoyable to hear about and her experience with ‘Disney magic’ was so very relateble. I too have been placed behind inexplicably large columns, felt the arbitrariness of the ‘experiencing the magic’, and spent far too much money for the privilege of standing in sweaty lines in the Florida heat.

        I feel bad for the people involved that really wanted to make something great but were crushed under the weight of corporate ineptitude. I personally knew someone who went, refused to say how much they paid, and refused to talk about their experience. Now I know why. Excellent video. She’s like the NeverKnowsBest of theme parks.

        • Cataphract@lemmy.ml
          6·
          6 months ago

          I’m curious and confused on the “influencer” part. My understanding was influencers are just people with “popularity” (manufactured users usually) pushing products in a “native ad” sort of way, never attributed it to general youtubers unless there’s something about the creator I’m unaware of.

          • MojoMcJojo@lemmy.world
            12·
            6 months ago

            I used the term loosely to include the average “YouTuber”, a term I hadn’t thought of. I tend not to watch any of them.

            • Moneo@lemmy.world
              91·
              6 months ago

              Dismissing youtubers for being youtubers reminds me of people who dismiss all animation because “cartoons are for kids” or whatever. When I think of “influencer” I think of an instagram model who pushes products on their followers. “Youtuber” includes many content creators who devote hours into researching, writing, filming, and editing high quality, entertaining, and educational content.

              Jenny is on the low end of the spectrum in terms of basically all of those categories (I love her though), but channels like CaptainD, Contrapoints, Philosophy Tube and Folding Ideas create extremely high quality content that (in my opinion) surpasses educational content coming out of any studio.

              tl;dr: Dismissing youtube channels as “influencers” is narrow minded and may prevent you from enjoying content you would otherwise find to be of extremely high quality.

            • Cornucopiaofplenty@lemmy.world
              6·
              6 months ago

              To be fair she does actually lightly use the word in this video to describe herself, but only in order to describe how Disney as a company might view her.

        • TheHarpyEagle@lemmy.world
          3·
          6 months ago

          I keep thinking “surely I won’t watch the entirety of this Vampire Diaries video yet again.” 5 hours later…

  • Asherah@lemmy.world
    231·
    6 months ago

    Jenny is one of the best YouTubers around, love everything she makes. Highly recommend, if this is your first time watching her videos, to go back and watch the rest. She makes longform content on a huge variety of stuff and she’s very thorough with her videos.

  • Ballistic_86@lemmy.world
    91·
    6 months ago

    I haven’t taken the time to sit down and watch this video yet, 4 hours! But I love Jenny’s content and am excited to see it.

    Still hoping she will cover the official closing of Evermore

    • raptorattacks@lemmy.world
      10·
      6 months ago

      Disney opened an incredibly expensive Star Wars “hotel experience”, charging $5k plus for two nights. Jenny Nicholson visited (paying full price) and documented the experience, plus background on how and why the hotel was made, some research into what was going on behind-the-scenes, and the spectrum of fan reactions to the experience. The hotel closed down permanently while she was editing the video, and she also goes into why that happened and some larger trends at Disney surrounding the closure.

  • BoxOfFeet@lemmy.world
    61·
    6 months ago

    Jenny’s videos are awesome. This has been in my Watch Later since she released it… I need to get around to watching it.

    • raptorattacks@lemmy.world
      4·
      6 months ago

      Might be easier to start it if you commit to only watching a few chapters at a time. I just finished it after breaking it up into three different viewings and I had a great time.