Is Disney Really Scared of a Four Hour Video Essay About a Defunct Attraction?

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Videos | May 28, 2024 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Videos | May 28, 2024 |

Jenny Nicholson is a YouTuber and video essayist who specializes in deep dives on pop culture topics, with a particular focus on all things Disney. The average Nicholson video is long, exceedingly detailed, and full of the kind of knowledge that only comes from being a hardcore nerd who owns a giant Porg and shelves of Avatar merch. She once did a hundred-minute video about a novel that was essentially published Reylo fic with the names changed. It was great.

Her latest video, her first in a year, is a four-hour achingly precise dissection of Star Wars Galactic Cruiser, an immersive role-playing experience that was nicknamed the Star Wars hotel. Galactic Starcruiser was a two-night event where guests paid a high four figures to board a fake spaceship and live as though they were part of a story set in the Star Wars galaxy. It opened on March 1, 2022, and closed on September 30, 2023, which should give you an indication of how popular it was. Eight months after its closure, Nicholson detailed her experience visiting the resort. She paid over $6,000 for her two-night stay and broke down with laser-like focus why her experience was so underwhelming. It’s a great piece of work and a curiously tragic video, one where an enthusiast who was the target demographic for this ultimately niche attraction found herself left underwhelmed by a poorly executed corporate folly. It’s 100% worth four hours of your time.

The internet agreed, and as of the writing of this piece, Nicholson’s video has earned over 5 million views in one week. It’s gone wildly viral beyond Nicholson’s own niche, where she’s already a big deal. We do love a long-form video essay, as Hbomberguy’s recent plagiarism investigation proved. Many people on Twitter admitted to being enthralled by 240+ minutes of a monologue on a topic they previously had no interest in. Such is the appeal of Nicholson’s warm yet quietly damning style. The unexpected side of this is how it seems to have made a lot of people freak out.

Screen Rant, a content mill I used to write for, published a curiously defensive piece on the attraction, written by a former employee who seemed aggrieved with points that Nicholson never actually made in her video. While it doesn’t name Nicholson or directly reference her video, it’s obvious that the piece is a response to her work. Largely, it’s SEO bait from a site that is ruthlessly efficient at creating it. They saw Nicholson’s video doing well, wanted to cash in on it, but also wanted to stay on the good side of Disney. The defensiveness over an attraction that, may I remind you, has shuttered is curious, to say the least. It’s also evident that neither the writer nor their editors watched Nicholson’s video (or at least the entire thing) because Nicholson rails against the ways that the attraction was dominated by corporate marketing lingo that depersonalized the experience, and the article is full of the exact same rhetoric. It reads like a press release hyping up something that no longer exists, damage control to poorly balance out the sheer number of mainstream media headlines Nicholson got for her video going viral. Nobody bought it.

It wasn’t just them, though. Many Disney fans and content creators seemed truly furious with Nicholson for vlogging about her visit to an attraction she paid real money to attend. They mocked her for taking the attraction too seriously despite the fact that it was sold as an immersive experience where people were encouraged to roleplay. She was accused of somehow being both anti-Disney and a corporate shill. They said she was overtly critical and trying to take down the good people at the House of Mouse.

The main reason Nicholson’s video is so good, aside from her meticulous approach, is that she is an earnest fan of the thing being sold to her and she approached it with good intentions. She’s been dinged a lot lately as an influencer since Disney used a lot of social media figures to promote this attraction, but unlike those people, Nicholson paid full price for the Starcruiser. She made up her own character for the occasion. She is, for all intents and purposes, Disney’s ideal customer: an adult woman with disposable income who reveres the company’s work and is unironically interested in even its weirdest elements. Again, she legitimately loved the Avatar theme park. But she’s no fool. She knows that those fans deserve the experience they paid for and if Disney, supposedly the gold standard in this business, were this sloppy and money-hungry, why would you excuse that?

Moreover, she’s unfailingly kind towards the park’s workers, who she notes were overworked, underpaid, and left in an unwinnable situation. Her issues are with the corporate corner-cutting and cynicism that took a brilliant idea and turned it into the worst possible waste of everyone’s time. The art of Disney she loves so much is not the same thing as the conglomerate that views everything as #content. It’s disheartening but not especially surprising that many Star Wars fans online seem more furious with Nicholson than the company that ripped them off. In that sense, Nicholson ends up going from Disney’s key demo to their worst nightmare: a fan who expects better from a multi-billion dollar brand.

Really, Nicholson’s criticisms of the Galactic Starcruiser are no different from what many Star Wars fans have been saying about Disney’s mismanagement of the franchise for years: it’s poorly planned out, the narrative choices are often nonsensical, they’re more concerned with quantity than quality, and they have no idea what they actually want from this beloved series that redefined the blockbuster form for decades. They promised intense ambition but took the lazy route, whether it was making Rey a Palpatine or encouraging fans to roleplay and then making them feel embarrassed for doing so.

And the responses to her critiques are cut from the same cloth as the inane mindset that insists analysis of a product or story is the same thing as seething hatred for those who enjoyed it. If you enjoyed your visit to the Starcruiser then that’s great, but it seems like you’re projecting some regrets about your experience onto Nicholson if her video bothered you so much.

The Star Wars hotel is closed. That didn’t happen because of a four-hour video featuring a die-hard nerd wearing a Porg outfit, as hilarious as that would have been. Asking for the experience promised to you by a corporate giant that comes with a $6k price tag seems like the bare minimum for fans to ask for.