Okay, here we go kids!
I had resigned myself to the fact that I wasn't going to bother with Star Wars Land until the fall sometime. But then this week the Great Star Wars Flop of 2019 happened and we've been talking for days about how the parks are dead and E Tickets are a walk-on and there's not even crowds in Star Wars Land. So after a very successful nap this afternoon, at 7:00pm I hailed an Uber and went to Disneyland!
This is not good for TDA or major shareholders, but for people who bought a ticket like myself it's great....
Disneyland was DEAD! I got dropped off on Harbor Blvd at 7:25 and waltzed right in with no waits for bag checks or ticket turnstiles. I was standing in the Town Square 5 minutes after my Uber dropped me off. I went straight back to Star Wars Land via Frontierland, as I always thought that center entrance is the one WDI designed to be the main entrance.
Here is my review of Star Wars Land Galaxy's Edge, in my favorite format of
The Good, The Bad, The Ugly and The Funny.
The Good - In the summer twilight the land was drop dead gorgeous upon entry, not because it's pretty (it's actually designed to be ugly) but in that light the rocks and textures and patina just looked fabulous. I bee-lined to
Millennium Falcon: Target Run with a posted wait time of 30 minutes, but the wait was actually half that including the pre-show. The queue and pre-show are Tokyo DisneySea-esque in their scale and size and detail, and that's a good thing. Being a Confirmed Bachelor, I was placed with a perky-perky family of 5 who actually turned out to be fun and were visiting from British Columbia. I was happy to sit in the back while the kids drove and Mom and Dad beamed proudly. I gamely punched buttons that did nothing. The ride was impressive technically, but really it's just a more intimate Star Tours 2.0. I imagine if they had this tech available (and the huge amount of space required to build it in the old Monsanto ride) in the 1980's that this is what Star Tours would have been all along; flying the Millennium Falcon. I ended up doing this ride three times, once more almost immediately and then a third time a few hours later at the end of the night. I give it an A-. But after this evening's three rides, I can pass on this one for quite some time. Done and done, thanks.
Sightlines inside the land are excellent. You really do feel like you are somewhere else, somewhere foreign, not in a theme park.
The uniforms the CM's are wearing are fantastic. They obviously spent a lot of money on this, and the kids staffing this land tonight looked great! Again, the complexity of the uniforms reminded me of Tokyo DisneySea uniforms. Bravo!
The scale reminded me of New Orleans Square, in a good way. The land is obviously designed to hold huge crowds, but they've created all these interesting alleys and nooks and crannies and courtyards. I just happily wandered for half an hour, and enjoyed getting lost in Disneyland for the first time.
After my second Falcon flight I just started wandering through the land. It was getting dark and the lights had turned on and the land was morphing into an equally stunning aesthetic version of itself at night. I ended up in Ronto's Roasters and was just peckish enough to order the Turkey Jerky and a "Sour Sarlacc", which were both surprisingly good. Detailing both inside and outside of all of these shops and restaurants was really well done! Someone did their homework.
The Bad - The Cantina looked like a mess. The land had barely anyone in it almost everywhere, although there was a small crowd outside the Cantina, not unlike what you'd find at any Outback Steakhouse in America. I craned to get a look inside the joint and the hostesses working what appeared to be the hostess stand were just a mess, crabbing at each other and snapping at people coming up to check in for their reservation. Those girls would never cut it at Outback.
Yikes. Why can't Disneyland offer service at their food locations that is above the level of an Arby's on a good day? The shops were almost entirely empty, with no one shopping inside, bored CM's chatting with each other at cashwraps. I checked out Droid Depot, passed on spending 100 bucks on a hunk of Chinese plastic, and marveled at the prices on the kitchen accessories they were selling on a back wall.
They have kitchen accessories?!? One cool thing that caught my eye was an R2D2 steel mixing bowl, but when I picked it up and flipped it over it had a price tag of $75 and was made in Communist China. No thanks, I will survive with my brand new
All-Clad steel mixing bowls that were made in Pittsburgh instead.
The Ugly - The land feels... cold and lifeless. During my first visit from about 7:45 through the fireworks ending at 9:45, the land was lightly populated. I returned to the land just after 11:00pm and the land was EMPTY. I saw two Stormtroopers wandering around bored, and lots of basic CM's staring at nothing or talking to their friends at their empty snack bars or shop entrances, but there was no life to the place. It felt like someone forgot to turn on the music at a party. It probably doesn't help that the land was designed for thousands of people but is currently abandoned, but from 9:45 until 11:00pm I went back into the rest of Disneyland which was equally uncrowded but it still felt lively and upbeat and fun, plus I got on several major E Ticket rides with absolutely no wait and was surrounded by tourists who were having the time of their lives at Disneyland with no lines. But when I went back into Star Wars Land at 11:15pm and it was even less crowded, what little energy it did have had long since drained away. The land looks great at night aesthetically, with obvious attention paid to lighting and art direction, but there's no life to the place. It's cold and dead, especially without crowds of happy tourists and busy CM's.
What's even worse, I never saw Chewbacca.
The Funny - At 9:30 I had been in the land for two hours and was ready to leave when
BOOM! the fireworks started right overhead. This family with Aussie accents were watching near me on this raised patio area and all of a sudden the Mom says
"What the bloody hell, where's the bloody music for these fireworks?!?" I considered trying to explain it to her, but instead I just slunked off down the stairs and watched the silent fireworks from around the corner. After my 90 minute break inside the rest of Disneyland where literally every ride had a 5 minute posted wait and were all walk-ons (I walked out the Critter Country entrance past the forgotten Resistance ride and rode Splash, Pirates, Indy and Matterhorn in just over an hour), I went back to Star Wars Land where the Falcon ride looked abandoned. The two girls at the entrance smiled at me and I asked how long the wait was and the one girl said
"You look like you've got spunk, you'll probably make it to the ship in 5 minutes". Bravo to her for having a personality! And yeah, it was a five minute wait. The App still claimed it was 30 minutes though.
In short, it was a wildly successful four hour trip to Disneyland. Worth every penny as I now don't need to go back to Star Wars Land for quite some time. If you are in SoCal and have the ability to get to Anaheim, this week would be an excellent time to visit Disneyland. The place is a ghost town!!!
On my ride home, my Uber driver told me he has been shocked how slow the business has been in the Resort District. He said there's usually more ride hails than cars available in Anaheim especially this time of year, but right now the business is just gone and he's been focusing on the bar traffic in Newport Beach instead.
Something is definitely going on here, and it's weird. Where is everybody???
P.S. Always tip your Uber driver!
