Totem Lake Reindeer

Ern watched a Christmas classic today... one of the Home Alones?

I'm at the twilight of any scrap of remaining Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser content and getting pretty desperate.

LEGO STAR WARS: Summer Vacation isn't usually the sort of thing I would watch but it had some scenes aboard the Starcruiser so I had to check it out. The atrium area looked fairly faithful to the real one.

Sadly there were no droid bartenders in the Sublight Lounge when I was there.

Somewhere along the line I developed the habit where when I’m about to read Ernie a book I read the title then instead of the actual author I will say “by Ernie J Wernie”. Today he said “Wernie” at the same time as I did. It was fun.

Tolls are pretty serious in this fancy pants metro area.

Totem Lake had some Christmas events. Today it was a reindeer viewing.

 

Chandrila to Kirkland

I got my hands on one of the tie-in books that relate to the Star Wars Galactic Starcruiser experience we did at Disney World.

They did a really good job of capturing some of the magic of the real hotel. The elevator/shuttle ride from the ground to the ship was very well done in the real life version.

This I thought was cool because they tied in several adventures that Star Wars characters had on the ship. This in particular was especially cool. There's a lightsaber battle and they scratch the wall while they're fighting. At the real hotel, then, there was a big scratch on the wall from the fight. Disney did a really good job placing the location within the Star Wars universe and gave some extra depth and lore to hardcore people in the know.

I may have already mentioned but I was similarly excited by the book The Princess and the Scoundrel because there they mention Han scratching his and Leia's initials on a pipe in the engineering room and you could see that on the real ship as well. There were fun easter eggs waiting for the nerds which I appreciated.

Ernin Around

I borrowed this Galactic Starcruiser related graphic novel form the library. Sadly there wasn't a ton of related material made before the place shut down so I'm already scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Our Galactic Starcruise Concludes

Our third day of Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser was just like releasing an animal from some cushy wildlife refuge back into the jungle. I didn't want to leave but I had to, so making the process as orderly and painless as possible was the goal.

D3-O9 gave us a nice send off to wrap up the story of our time together.

They did such a good job with this. It remembered some of the stuff I told her and some of my actions. It did say I "helped the resistance on Batuu" which isn't true, so sadly she seems to not be integrated with anything other than my interactions with her directly. Still I was impressed and entertained.

After that nice conversation she made it very clear that we would never speak again. That's a cold robot.

We had one last meal in the Crown of Corellia Dining Room.

I had requested to book the Captain's Table but it already reserved for out cruise. It looked cool though, I think you maybe got to talk to the characters while you ate and maybe an extra course as well. Everything was over now, though, so we sat at the fancy table for funsies.

Even the hardcore guests were wearing their Earth clothes now. It was all coming to an end.

The Atrium still showed some of the damage that had occurred from last night's showdown.

The sabacc was unavailable up until the last minutes of the journey. I never ended up playing it.

It really is a beautiful place and it is very sad that Disney couldn't figure out how to make it all work out.

We took the transport back to Chandrila. People were balling their eyes out at various points in the trip. Especially I think after the grand finale last night but during this part as well. Some people at breakfast were wearing "forever" tshirts they had made where the "o" was the symbol of the ship. I think people's emotional reaction to it closing is a big testament to how cool and special this place was. It felt special to take Ernie to such a cool thing too, even though he won't remember it. Who knows if something like this will ever exist again. 

I read a lot about Starcruiser and the effects of its failure on the industry. I think Universal was considering doing a similar experience with Game of Thrones but Disney's failure cascaded and caused Universal to shelve their plans. It's weird, even though this experience was expensive and run by a giant corporation the fact that it's dying kind of underscores how delicate art is and that it needs to be supported if it's going to survive.

There was one last little gift shop by the valet area. This was pretty smart because we were standing around waiting so why not peruse? Also now that we had left the "universe" a lot of this merchandise had a different tone. I bought a t-shirt that says "Galactic Starcruiser" on it for example while everything inside was "in universe".

It was interesting to see the scaffolding holding up the scenery of Galaxy's Edge and it underscored that we were back to reality.

I hurriedly took some screenshots of some of the communications with the characters on our apps. I didn't know how long we had before they would cut us off once and for all.

Hank hung around with us a bit while we killed time before our flight. We headed back to Disney Springs and hit the PhotoPass Portrait Studio. We had already paid for the photo package so I thought we should wring the most possible fun out of it.

Plus you can never have too many pictures of Ernie. He was back to being my son now, and not an Ewok or an astromech droid. He's still pretty cool though.

Datapad was officially reset.

They had a fun Haunted Mansion set featuring the Hitchhiking Ghosts.

There was a $79,000 Epcot Spaceship Earth. I'll think about it.

I spotted a nerd on the plane transporting his lightsaber.

Instead of going straight from Orlando back to Seattle we made a stop in Nashville so normal human Ernie could hang out with his Tennessee fam.

Ernie showed everybody that he's been practicing his rolling skills.

Ernie's antics were a good distraction for me to read more about Starcruiser. When I really like a game or movie or something that I've just finished it's common for me to do some research on it to learn more.

I even dug up some of the promotional material from before Starcruiser was launched. Here some Disney Imagineers are chatting about what they have wrought.

Some of the conceptual images were fun to look at to see how well they matched with the final product.