I’m only an hour into this person’s 4 hour(!) review/criticism of the Star Wars hotel and am baffled at how poorly this was handled.
I’m surprised we haven’t seen a post Lucas Star Wars MMO looking to capitalize on the number of people who just want to experience an open ended Star Wars universe to role play in.
This concept should’ve been a slam dunk, and they blew it.
Systematic and systemic failures of Senior and Upper Management, pretty much at every step.
If Jenny ever pursues a career in investigative journalism, she’ll eclipse Nader.
Jenny Nicholson has over 53k monthly Patreon subscribers, paying at least $2 a month, some up to $25 (do that math, it’s astounding). She’s the 7th largest Patreon subscriber base on the platform. She’s well exceeded anything Ralph Nader has ever done, professionally.
This may be the dumbest thing I’ve ever read. While I like her content it’s about theme parks and cartoons. Nader helped get us safer cars, safer work places, safer water, FOIA, and 9/11 + 2 major decades long wars. When Jenny’s career leads us to trillions of spending attacking countries that weren’t actually responsible for attacking us she can say she’s on Nader’s level.
I watched that video when it came out, it’s a delight! I also feel so bad for Jenny about like…everything that happened. So bad! So expensive!
I saw someone below say “it’s a review of a hotel”. It’s so much more than that.
It’s a critical indictment of corporate greed, and the fleecing of family entertainment, and nerd culture, told in such minute and well research detail, it’s a 4 hour wonder. All of her stuff is like this.
She’s a little Forrest gnome with an Einstein brain who graces us with her content. I’m a big big Jenny Nicholson fan.
I didn’t know her at all before watching this, but this tour de force deserved a standing ovation.
I heard about her video on fucking NPR. Seriously.
All Things Considered did a little piece talking about how long form video essays are becoming more popular, but they concluded by saying that she did a bang-up job and had some good insights.
It’s not a standing ovation, but having NPR run a story on your video and compliment your coverage is pretty damn skippy.
Right you are! She deserves it.
The constant “do stuff!!!”-push combined with the actual insane pricing of the experience, making it so that people feel the need to get all the worth they can from it, gave Jenny an anxiety attack, which she notes that she has never experienced before or since.
That’s fucking wild.
Love me some Jenny.
I’m the type that when I see descriptions like “be the hero of your own Star Wars story” for a tourist destination, I immediately think it’s going to be some cheesy oversold experience because you can’t really mass produce a main character role.
First of all, just the resources that would be required for the one on one time that would be involved is unrealistic for any scale beyond small groups.
Second, they aren’t like DMs that can roll with whatever their characters design; “your own story” needs to be pigeon holed into a limited set of choices they can prepare for, especially if there’s supposed to be high production value involved and special effects.
Third, of course any interactive elements are going to be ridiculously easy. They’d rather deal with people disappointed at how easy it is than people (especially kids) frustrated that they can’t do something.
So I knew right at the start of this video that it wasn’t my kind of thing.
But this thing didn’t even live up to the cheesy experience I would have expected. Seems like they bit off way more than they could chew with the initial idea but then we costs ballooned, they could only cut features and offerings while increasing the price, leaving it as an overpriced but underwhelming thing, in the end.
So much corporate shit is like this now. I think it’s just another symptom of the problems capitalism brings. Under capitalism, you get a mix of people who want to do a thing and make money from it and people who want to make money and think doing a thing will get them that money. Those that are focused on the thing will generally produce something of much higher quality than those focused on the money they’ll make. One asks, “is this good? Could it be better?” while the other asks, “is this good enough? Could it be cheaper?”
She touches on the other aspect in the video a bit, but could have gone a bit further (though I understand why she didn’t): the misleading marketing. Social media marketers with conflicted interests between being honest with their audience and keeping the providers of the free shit happy so the free shit keeps flowing. She touches on that aspect.
But I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those trolls defending Disney are paid by Disney, maybe directly maybe indirectly. I’m not aware of any regulation against hiring people to pretend to like your product online. I’m not sure that would even technically count as advertisement, if truth in advertisement even matters anymore these days.
Jenny has integrity, at least as far as I can tell. Those “influencers” that don’t are scum, whether they are doing it for free shit or getting paid to do it directly.
Disney was a creative and innovative company up until the 90s maybe… In the last 2 decades almost everything they are known for was either made before or bought and destroyed
Disney built its entire empire on existing/public domain stories. Cinderella, Little Mermaid, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast, Robin Hood. The list goes on. Hell even Aladdin is largely located from Middle Eastern fairy tales.
The fact that they’re relying on existing IP now is nothing new. It’s who they’ve always been. It’s just that they had to buy it since it wasn’t already in the public domain.
Disney built its entire empire on existing/public domain stories. Cinderella, Little Mermaid, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast, Robin Hood. The list goes on. Hell even Aladdin is largely located from Middle Eastern fairy tales.
Absolutely, but at least back then they truly added value by tweaking the stories (those original stories are mostly horror stories to our hears) and providing great animation. Nowadays, they buy great IPs and just ruin them; not only they are not adding any value, they are actively taking value away from them
I think the interesting thing about this video is that she is the perfect customer for the experience disney tried to set up. She loves themeparks, she loves dressing up as characters, she loves larping, she loves star wars. But no matter how much effort SHE put in to get her enjoyment out of it, it just didn’t work.
this video is really the best, most post modern star wars movie of them all. the epic of a ill equipped young true believer with hope beyond all hope taking a stand against a cold empire, causing incalculable damage and living to fight on.
I’ve watched the whole thing. It’s so close to something I’d really like, at least in concept. But the ball is dropped so hard in crucial areas :(
Interestingly there are some videos that show what it’s like when it does work and it’s amazing (though still probably not worth thousands of dollars). That makes it even more frustrating when it doesn’t. It’s been a while since I watched Jenny‘s video but I think she made a point of that near the end.
The hotel was so expensive in both development and upkeep that they had to have a high price and high capacity at the same time to still make a profit. In the end it was basically luck if the actors had time to interact with you and if they didn’t, you had to rely on the rather barebones automated stuff while still paying for the full experience.
