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S01E13: Sterilizing the Starcruiser, Part 1
49 Plays1 year ago
David Chestnut and Ben Dyer join Bob to reminisce about their space cruise aboard the CSL Halcyon, otherwise known as the Star Wars Galactic Starcruiser! Plus a recap of an INSANE episode of The Acolyte on this week's Star Wars Cleaning Crew!
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Transcript
Nostalgia and Star Wars Reflections
00:00:00
Speaker
We're reminiscing about the Star Wars Galactic Star Cruiser, plus a look at a crazy episode of the Acolyte. Grab your joints and brooms, it's time for the Star Wars Cleaning Crew. Welcome back to the Star Wars cleaning crew. You know, we're going to jump in for a few weeks and talk about the Star Wars experience at Disney theme parks. So I've got a lot of thoughts about these. There's so much that I love about Star Wars Galaxy's Edge. There's also so much that I wish had been so much that I felt was promised and got cut for some reason.
Immersive Adventures at Galactic Star Cruiser
00:00:35
Speaker
We're going to talk about all of it over the coming weeks, but
00:00:39
Speaker
We're gonna start off by talking about the Star Wars Galactic Star Cruiser. Now, I'm guessing you know what this is, but just in case you don't, Star Wars Galactic Star Cruiser was the hotel. It was the Star Wars hotel at Walt Disney World. And... In the real world, you had a two-day stay, and on the morning of the second day, you got to go over to Hollywood Studios to Star Wars Land. But in the Star Wars universe, you were boarding the Starship Halcyon for a cruise to the planet Batuu, so you had an entire experience. It was kind of a quasi-larp
00:01:18
Speaker
And LARP stands for Live Action Role-Playing Game, where you really jumped in and got to experience a Star Wars adventure, interact with characters new and familiar. It was really just an amazing experience. So it was just a year ago that I went on my second and now turning out to be Final Cruise because the Star Wars Galactic Star Cruiser famously closed down a little while ago. I had a crew of there were eight of us total. I wanted to bring everybody onto this show, but in, you know, a 10 or 15 minute conversation, there is just not enough room for everybody. So I invited two of my friends here, David Chestnut and Ben Dyer, two guys that I work with who are part of my crew. And we're going to spend a little bit of time reminiscing about our experience. So here is me, David and Ben.
00:02:08
Speaker
All right, fire it up. Let's talk about Star Wars. Let's clean something. We're not only going to talk about Star Wars, we're going to talk about the Star
Personal Experiences and Memories
00:02:15
Speaker
Cruiser. So it was almost exactly a year ago. It was a year ago this week that we pulled together our crew and we boarded the Halcyon for a trip to Batu. I want to start, David, I'll start with you first. How did you like the Star Cruiser experience? You know, what what did you like? What did you not like? But overall, How did you like it? I was just chatting with my wife about it a little bit ago because you know we knew we were doing this today. and I said, man, I would go right now. If somebody called me and said, can you be in Orlando in two hours where the the halcyons leaving? I would be there. I was not expecting to like it as much as I did very plainly. I thought it was going to be a bit hokey. and Then once she got in a room and everybody was kind of in on the joke and everybody was kind of in on the hokey,
00:03:02
Speaker
Man, it was just like, oh, it was permission. And I think, I mean, you know, we all know what we do for a day job. Permission was a big thing. And they gave you permission to believe, which I thought I really liked. The only thing I didn't like were the people that tried to disrupt that. But it wasn't very, it was few and far between. And they policed it pretty well. They kind of just said, hey, go be. Ben, what's your reaction? I saw you nodding while David was talking. No, I think he used exactly the right word. I was going to use a closely related, but different word. I was going to say persistence. And so, you know, if you go and you like to dress up, I love Halloween. I love the idea of dressing up, but I am not a cosplayer. I'm not one of these guys who is ready to fly my nerd flag quite that high. So for me, going someplace where I wasn't going to have a short experience and then have to kind of walk around fantasy land or tomorrow land with
00:03:54
Speaker
a Star Wars costume on, I could go there, have the experience, be dressed up as a character, and then continue to be dressed up as a character, continue to have interactions with the characters, continue to see the story unfold, and continue to play that character as as it did. I think that was what was a lot of fun. It was sort of exploring what happens when it's more than that five-minute character interaction that you might have at a Disney park.
Magical Moments at Galaxy's Edge
00:04:19
Speaker
But David, to your point, I would totally go again. I think it was great. Today, right now. Yeah. Absolutely. I would go again in a heartbeat as well. In fact, I find myself missing it so Last week when you know on my time hop all of the pictures and the videos were coming up of it I was finding myself very sad, you know happy from the happy memories, but also sad that You know, we're not at a state that we can just jump on it right away. So
00:04:48
Speaker
You know, particularly the moment where you are on the elevator just as you're starting your voyage. So in the real world, you're on the elevator, but in the fantasy world, you are on a on a pod that is taking you up to the halcyon. And the music that is playing is the. The music from Rise of Skywalker, and it's very majestic. And then at the very end, as the doors open, you get the little, da da da da like makes me tear up just talking about it, you know? And I just, I love that experience. I love that immersion. And you know, to your point earlier about being able to play
00:05:30
Speaker
I remember the very first night that I went to Galaxy's Edge when Star Wars Galaxy's Edge opened and at the time they were doing it in shifts and my friend Jeff and I were on a shift that was like 8pm till midnight or something that we had access to the the park and it was midnight and we were just standing on the balcony overlooking the Millennium Falcon. There was another guy there in costume who I had met on Facebook and Ray and Chewie walked up and we just had an entire like in character little role play experience that was just magical. And I walked away from that saying, you know, this isn't just a theme park land. This is a playground to play Star Wars. It's like it was when we were little kids in the backyard.
00:06:16
Speaker
where we are using refrigerator boxes to be the Millennium Falcon. It's just that now in this playground, you actually have the real Millennium Falcon. I think that's kind of been lost from the park a little bit, although. Just a couple of weeks ago when I was there, I had an experience very similar to that that was equally magical. So not all hope is gone. But yeah, I mean, that's that's the joy of it is getting the chance to to really play Star
Immersive Play and Potential Future Experiences
00:06:45
Speaker
Wars. Well, Bob, I got a question for you. Yeah. So much of what your experience is at the Star Cruiser or If you're just visiting Black Spire Outpost, it has to do with how much you bring to it and how much you're kind of investing. so When we say, oh man, it'd be great to go play in that, you know do you think there's enough people out there that want to play like that, ah that want that kind of immersion and they are ready to bring that to that experience? There's something that we do to prepare for that, to go into that experience. There's things we bring with us.
00:07:16
Speaker
It was great because I was thinking of a very similar thing. What I liked about it a lot is I'm a very extroverted person, but I spent a lot of time alone when I was there, and I enjoyed that, but they gave me opportunities to play. a you know I could be with a group or I could use the app, talk to the people, I could find little things, and I'll tell you what I did for most of the day at Galaxy's Edge, and I think you guys all saw me at various times. I planted in one spot, and you know what spot it was? Right when people come around the corner, when they see the Millennium Falcon for the first time in true size. And I just watched people's faces for four hours. yeah Little kids, big adults, everyone comes around the corner. They see the Millennium Falcon. There were lines quoted. Their eyes light up. Chewy, where home was was dropped a few times. yeah it was just
00:08:07
Speaker
it was just the It was like pure human joy just coming right off the thing. so Loved that I could do things alone and still feel a part of everything. so Ben, like I think, yeah, because it really is a choose your own adventure in the in the sense that I can go be with a group of 40. I can go be by myself and still feel like I'm playing there. Just the joy of that, right? Yes. Yeah. It's not something you get an opportunity to do too often as an adult. So I think when you do find that kind of stuff, it's really valuable. And I think it's really worth studying. I think a lot of people could get into that. And I think that kind of experience is something that other people should be paying attention to. And I don't know where that could go. But ah David, I remember you and I were talking about I wonder if they could have done this for Star Trek or if they could have done this for
00:08:53
Speaker
Harry Potter, pick three more IPs. Yeah. All right. We're going to hit pause on the star cruiser conversation right now.
The Acolyte Episode Discussion
00:09:00
Speaker
I'll come back next week with the rest of our, our discussion of the star cruiser. But I think everybody who saw the acolyte episode five, which was entitled night. No, it was a pretty action filled, pretty shocking episode of the acolyte. So I wanted to make sure in at least the week of its release that we had a conversation about this episode and shared our thoughts. So I did turn our conversation over to talk about the acolyte. Let's rejoin David and Ben and myself and see what we all thought about this crazy episode. Well, hey, before I let you guys go, we do have to talk about
00:09:41
Speaker
the acolyte, you know, you could argue this last week had the highest body count of any Star Wars event that I've ever seen. Now that's ignoring the fact that like Alderaan gets blown up and millions of people die or the death stars get blown up and hundreds of thousands of people die. However many people were on there, right? But for the number of sheer face heroes who bought it last week, like what was your reaction? Because for me it was a shock. I will just say before we talk about body count, if we have a body count conversation and don't put some respect on Chopper's name, um that little that little war criminal is just the best. but um But yeah, my big thing was like,
00:10:26
Speaker
I went into this episode going, okay, more heroes. We're going to chase a couple more episodes before we have the big reveal. There's going to be a couple more chases to get to the bad guys. They have a convenient number of red shirts. Redshirt Jedi's could offer up, right? Yes. Yellow cloak Jedi's that we could just farm out and it was like, you know, let's chop down a few padawans, but like, wow. And this guy was not, what was so crazy is, again, if you haven't spent a lot of time in the old Republic, as I have, obviously. um But the old republic is these guys were trained guards effectively police. Yeah, some of them were really good. Some of them were fine, but they were taught to fight against people with blasters. Right taught to fight against people with laser swords.
00:11:12
Speaker
Like the they fought against other Jedi's to train, but not a guy that's head butting them with a cortosis helmet or, you know, flinging them and choking them and using actual, it was incredible to watch. Yeah. Yord made that comment, right? That you know he's not playing by the rules. Yeah. There's something really wonderfully Baroque about that, right? Where they they have that sense of rules. They've got this sense of here's what's normal and this isn't it and what's going on. And so I think there's something really neat about that. I really like the idea that there seems like they're shaping this up to be a Sith origin story.
00:11:49
Speaker
I don't know if that's true or if there's gonna be other Sith that kind of predate this. I mean, Star Wars canon is a, let's say kindly, it's a many-splendored thing. So I'm really interested to see the world building that comes out of this. I think though his a for me at least, i'm that's a little bit of a double-edged sword for me though too, because I wanted to see a little bit more on the High Republic before we delved into this story. I wanted to see how was this different than the world of the prequels? And so far as I can tell, it looks very, very similar. um I think if I'm just picking out things I could wish for, I'd have liked to see the Jedi fashions being different. Maybe they weren't wearing robes back then. Maybe they were wearing other stuff. Maybe there were things we wanted to know about how just and how ideal everything was so that when you do find the emergence of the Sith, it feels a little bit more like, oh, no, there's a snake in the garden. This is really bad, you guys. They have no idea what they're in for.
00:12:48
Speaker
So I think there's a lot of opportunity.
Critique of The Acolyte's Pacing
00:12:51
Speaker
Bob, you said something wise on a recent episode here, which was you're kind of waiting until it's all done to see how it turns out. I think that's wise. Nonetheless, I mean, this is stuff that I'm hoping we get more and more of as we go. I'll just add one thing really quickly, which was, I don't know if everybody else, I was like, the action started too fast, not just this week, but in general, I wanted a little bit of episode one. Episode one, the first 30 minutes of episode one is some of my favorite Star Wars because we got I grew up seeing Luke sort of bumbling along trying to figure out how to use this power he discovered. yeah And then you see two Jedi's in full robes at the height of their power in full command of the situation. And you get to have a few minutes to like romance the period.
00:13:39
Speaker
Before the inciting incident happens and we have to run away and I don't feel like we got that here to Ben to Ben's point Which is like the stain I wanted to see the Jedi temple and I wanted to walk past a room of you know 50 kids Learning together and I want to walk past another room of you know Someone teaching them about lore and them all floating balls in the air like I wanted a little more of that Jedi and High Republic world building before we got into, hey, four of these Jedis are jerks, spoilers. But like, and hey, maybe we're the baddies, you know? Well, that definitely seems to be what we're playing with here is, you know, how good are the Jedi? How right are the Jedi? I know some people are are are really upset about that, but also that's kind of the point of the prequels, friends. But anyway.
00:14:26
Speaker
We're going to end it right there. Come back next week and hear more from Ben and David about the Star Cruiser. In the meantime, keep your kitchens clean and may the force be with you. Bye bye.