Number_6 said:
I went and saw SGE on Friday during the Passholder preview. I had never been to AE, so I didn't have any notions going in of what it used to be. I went in and enjoyed the preshow areas then walked into the main show room. I liked it for the most part, but couldn't help feeling that there is potential room to improve it. There were two things I did have a problem with plotwise, though. The first was 626 calling himself "Stitch" since he wasn't named Stitch until he met Lilo. The second was having him teleport to Florida at the end since his first arrival on Earth was Hawaii in the movie and if he had landed in Florida he would have moved on and followed his programming, destroying any major city he could find, starting with Orlando. Instead of landing him on Earth and having him jumping around on the Astro Orbiter(in bright daytime, when some people will eventually ride this at night) they could have tracked him going to a Transit Center and had him steal a ship that looked just like the Astro Orbiter ships or something along those lines. Just a thought. Overall, it was alot of fun, and with a little work could become a great attraction.
Your point is a valid one. But I disagree. It depends on how you see Stitch. But first thing's first.
About landing in Florida: They had to come up with a story that involves a Florida audience to a degree. Now, they could very well have made all of this take place in Hawaii, but I think they had a larger base of creative material to use in the Florida setting rather than in Hawaii, since I'm sure they wanted to keep the storyline unique while still connecting it with the character of Stitch that most of us have come to love (a few don't.)
The idea is to make the attraction part of the WDW experience, and connecting it with the park itself (stitch's "escape") just makes it a bit more special I think.
Likewise I bet if we'd gotten SGE in DL instead of...sigh...Redd Rockets, that the storyline there would have stitch landing in none other than Disneyland/DCA. It connects it to the park experience and I fully understand their reasoning for doing this.
Second, about Stitch's destructive tendencies:
Stitch was designed to annoy. Jumba brags, but the fact is that Stitch's form of destruction really isn't on the mass chaos scale that some people think. This is even confirmed in many of Jumba's lines in the first movie...none of those things that he said Stitch would do in a big city were anything resembling the "godzilla" type chaos that Stitch inflicted on the model city. My opinion: The city was his own size. Easy for him to playfully destroy. But, I think he was more amused by it than anything. Programming or not, Stitch always had a conscience. This is evident throughout the whole movie. Stitch, being super-computer-smart as Jumba says...probably could have hit and killed at least ONE of those other aliens pursuing him when he stole the "red one."
That little alien guy that Stitch spit on, I seriously doubt got killed. Like most cartoons he probably got out of the way just in time. But we never did see him again, he was no longer necessary to the plot line.
Stitch could have easily taken out that frog, he could have killed those dogs, he could have done much worse. He didn't. If you look at Stitch as more than a collection of drawings, and more as a genuine character with a heart and soul, you see that all along Stitch was good. He problem was that his playful destruction was all that he knew, he didn't know real love, didn't fit in with others, and generally didn't think about it. When he met Lilo, he began to notice that missing part of his life. And then we get to the Lost scene, where we see Stitch's true heart come out, in full force.
you don't know what that does to a person like me who can identify with the idea of Stitch on very many personal levels, and I won't share them here. Let's just say Stitch was a very powerful metaphor that reflected on myself, and the way I see the character is very deep. I saw his heart.
Yeah, it's just a cartoon. But if you think of Stitch in much broader and deeper terms than that, if you see his soul that came out through Chris Sanders, you find Stitch was never a bad guy at all. Never a villain at all. Lilo unlocked his heart. Before that, he still had a concience, but didn't know unconditional love. If you want to go even deeper you could say that some of his destructive tendencies could have been not only programming but also his way of forgetting the missing pieces of his life.
Had Stitch landed in Orlando, I bet we would have seen some chaos and destruction. But nothing deadly. More like, severe annoyance and inconveniences generated by the blue guy. He was, after all, just designed to annoy.
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