Jenny Nicholson’s 4-hour YouTube video of the Galactic Starcruiser is a must-watch. And here’s the big news to know: we saw the app and it sucked.
Earlier in May, filmmaker and critic Jenny Nicholson released the four-hour YouTube documentary The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel. The video has since commanded nearly 6 million views, and spawned dozens of follow-up thinkpieces, ranging from fervent hand-wringing over the diminished nature of the modern theme park experience, to critics arguing against the continued commercial viability of the Star Wars brand itself, to genuine surprise at consumer appetite for longform video content on YouTube. I personally don’t have a lot to add to the discourse, other than this: Nicholson is right about the app. There was no hope for the hotel with that app.
I was there, Gandalf, during an abbreviated tour of Galactic Starcruiser hosted by Disney Parks in February 2022. As I made clear in my review of the Star Wars hotel, Polygon was invited to the four-hour event on Disney’s dime. In fact, you can see footage from the very same tour that I was on around the video’s two-hour mark.
