Surprisingly Good
Yesterday we took @little-ricky to Disneyland for the first time since he has really been aware enough to appreciate it. Personally, I am not a big fan because #1, I am apparently rapidly becoming a grumpy old man, #2 because it pisses me off the way these theme parks charge so much and nickel and dime you for everything. I don't feel like getting wound up here, so I will just stick to the positives of the experience for the purposes of this post!
After walking around the park for awhile letting Ricky ride on as many rides as we could, we came across the Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge section of the park. It is dubbed as a 14-acre area that immerses guests in the Star Wars universe. I can't argue with that point, because I immediately commented to @afturner that I was impressed by the level of attention to detail.
As you can see in the above image, the Millennium Falcon was docked outside near a ride, but was unavailable to board itself. Too bad we couldn't go for a ride as it was being refueled. Perhaps we can try again next time!
We ended up spending a good portion of the day just walking around the Star Wars section. Ricky got to meet Chewbacca and really had a blast! He didn't know what to think about stepping into this other worldly environment. All of the little details helped to sell the illusion, such as the old damaged paint on the railings and glitchy sound effects and people walking around dressed as 'locals'.
Even the 'street vendors' were completely in costume. I like it when they actually put the effort in to make the costumes look convincing. Especially at the extortionate prices you pay to get in! But I again digress.
The factory where you can build your own droid was super cool. I didn't read everything about it, but it seems that you go in, pick a droid type that you want to build and then collect all of the parts from the conveyor belt. There is a station where you can take the parts and use what looked like above head pull down screwdrivers driven by compressed air to assemble your parts.
I could see that this would be really fun for the kids. I might let my little one have a go at it when he gets a little bit bigger.
@little-ricky was quite fascinated by this green R2-D2 like droid. He was standing there looking at it when it all of the sudden lit up and started looking around while making noises. He jumped about a foot back and started to laugh.
I felt like you could easily film Star Wars scenes in this location. Everything looks really authentic, at least to my eye. Even where it's not perfect you could simply do shallower depth of field shots to slightly soften the background. But to be honest, in many cases you wouldn't even need to. I would not be surprised if I found out that they did some shots for actual films here.
I always laugh a little bit when I look at the condition some of the ships are in. I try to imagine a universe where people would feel OK exposing themselves to the extremely deadly elements of space in a rickety old junker. I mean, you don't mind as mind driving around in an old piece of crap car because if it breaks down you can at least just step out of it and walk away. In space, a leak or a dead engine would mean certain death, don't you think?
Luckily by the time we got to the end of the day, Ricky was starting to get exhausted. Unfortunately I unintentionally caused a little bit of a scene while leaving the park.
As we were walking through the exit, My 4 year old waist height son got mad at me because he didn't want me to hold his hand. He decided to ball up his fist and turn around with full force and punch me directly in the family jewels. He hit me so hard, and just right that I buckled over and yelled out "AHHHHH!"
I had hold of his metal water bottle suddenly got so angry that I slammed the water bottle to the ground breaking it open and spraying water everywhere. After the pain wore off, I stood up to find 4 security guards standing about 10 feet away looking at me, while @afturner was telling off @little-ricky for hitting me. He kept saying "What's wrong with daddy?"
I stood up, dusted off my shorts and turned around to the security officers and said, "I am so sorry about that. My son just punched me full force in the nuts."
The security guys just started laughing and said that they had seen the whole thing and were just worried I wasn't alright. Apart from that little incident, it turned out to be a pretty great day! I am sure I'll be posting more later, as we still have 2 more days on our 3 day pass. Hopefully Amanda will spread them out a bit!
