Star Wars Celebration, the official fan festival, attracted about 65,000
people this year. Two of the four days for the 2020 event are already sold out.
7,541 pieces, it’s the largest (and, at $800, most expensive) Lego set ever sold. In 2017, Lego unveiled the Ultimate Collector Series Millennium Falcon. Withified the place by combining otherworldly wilderness
with a teched-out overlay of full-scale greeblies (what
VFX folks call the mechanical-looking stuff they attach
to the outside of spaceship models). That’s look and feel.
Galaxy’s Edge also obeys the rules of the galaxy far, far
away: The team sited it on the timeline just after The
Last Jedi, which meant they could have park employees
dressed as Kylo Ren and First Order stormtroopers walk-
ing around (but not Darth Vader and Han Solo—they’re
dead). Lucasfilm offered up a character who could intro-
duce the Millennium Falcon show: Hondo, a stalwart of
the Star Wars cartoons.
Like any good magician, imagineers are so cagey
about the mechanics of all this careful world-building.
Hondo had to be translated from an animated charac-
ter to a 7-foot-tall animatronic robot, his face “aged”
since his cartoon years. An imagineer initially insisted
to me that they’d constructed the Falcon’s interior
according to “original blueprints,” which is nonsense,
of course, since the ride accommodates versions from
all the various movies and multiple cockpits. A spokes-
person finally allowed that a Falcon built from origi-
nal plans wouldn’t have passed muster with Earthly
building codes. The Millennium Falcon flew the Kessel
Run in less than 12 parsecs, but it is not ADA compliant.
And that uncanny hyperspace lever? They spent
months play-testing it with pilots of all ages and sizes.
“But we don’t want you to think about the complex multi-
GPU real-time rendering system and the custom game
engine with stochastic anti-aliasing,” Trowbridge says.
“We just want you to think about, you know, ‘I’m flying
on the fastest ship in the galaxy.’”WHEN DISNEYLAND OPENED in 1955, a low hill surrounded
it, demarcating its borders and cutting it off from the
world outside. The berm was inviolable, except when
visitors walked under the train tracks that circumnav-
igated it and found ... Main Street, an architectural fan-
tasy of small-town America that led to a fairy-tale castle.
As Disneyland’s rides got more complex, the park
needed more room. Imagineers started breaking through
the berm, mounting elaborate facades inside the park
but constructing boxy “ride buildings” or “show build-
ings” beyond the rim. It was an all but undetectable bit
of architectural prestidigitation; no one ever really asked
why the Pirates of the Caribbean boats slid down a cou-
ple of drops or the stretching room in the Haunted Man-
sion carried you down only so the doom buggies—the
vehicles you ride in, “omnimovers,” tilting and pivoting
to direct attention—would carry you back upward again.
It was in service of getting people under the berm and
into the fictional space of the ride building.All those switchbacks, drops, and omni-
moves provided structure for a story. On
so-called dark rides, one tableau here gives
way to another tableau there, a spatial-
ized version of a classical story’s temporal
sequences. As John Hench, the lead imagi-
neer from the 1950s to the ’80s, told the mag-
azine New West in 1978, Disneyland “was
planned like a motion picture, to evolve and
unfold in time so a thread runs through it.”
The whole experience of Galaxy’s Edge,
then, becomes one very long filmic take. You
never (well, let’s say rarely) experience any-
thing you wouldn’t find in Black Spire Out-
post. Except on rides, any music you hear
is on a local “radio station,” or sometimes
playing from an open second-story win-
dow, or courtesy of the droid DJ in the can-
tina. There’s a stand that sells both blue and
green milk. The alcoves of the souk are real
shops. Park workers—the “cast,” officially—
have all been encouraged to come up with
backstories plausible for a Batuuan. Most
of the signage is in the Aurebesh alphabet,
translatable via the Disney app. In the lan-
guage of story-building, that’s called diege-
sis. Everything is diegetic, in-story.
On a walk around the park, Asa Kalama, a
bearded imagineer in tech-regulation kha-
kis, shows me an even deeper diegetic level.
A visitor can use their phone as a “data pad”
to create a character—good guy, bad guy,
neutral—and play games localized to spe-
cific parts of the space. Beating a maze-like
minigame causes lights to flash on control
panels next to doorways, or you can accept
“missions” to find stuff hidden in scattered
cargo boxes, to be scanned with a QR reader.
After Kalama shows me how to “hack” a
comm tower to make it emit a resonant beep,
he points at the unfolding text messages on
my screen. “You can eavesdrop on a conver-
sation,” he says. “These towers are relaying
messages between characters.” I get a little
backstory on a gunfight in the marketplace
that left a wall pockmarked with divots.