Disney 2025: A Love Letter to Galaxy's Edge.

It's probably not a surprise that my favourite part of Disneyland is Galaxy's Edge - after all, I'm a science fiction fan. But there's more to it than that - every time we visit the park, I fall in love with Black Spire Outpost yet again, thanks to its unmatched ability to take me away to a different time and place.

Fantasyland, Adventureland, Frontierland and Tomorrowland are all conceptual umbrellas for a wide range of source material, which prevents them from being too specific in their overall look. For example, Adventureland hosts attractions based on Indiana Jones and Tarzan, along with the Jungle Cruise, none of which have any connection outside of their shared location, and as such it has to be somewhat generic in its style.

 

 

Galaxy's Edge doesn't have to compromise -  and the result is brilliant.  Radiator Springs runs a close second, but there's nothing that really ties together its storefront elements, whereas Black Spire is a perfectly conceived community from the Star Wars universe, with every part designed and decorated so as to completely evoke the feeling of being in an alien locale in a galaxy far, far away. 

 

 

The outpost's buildings*, archways and storefronts share an aged, distressed aesthetic, marked with the occasional pitted memory of a blaster bolt impact, whereas the port buildings surrounding the central plaza have a more formal, industrial look and feel.  

 

 

 

The attention to detail is impressive and effective. Set decorators for the first Star Wars movie referred to the props used for layering and detailing of the film's sets as greebly dressing, and Black Spire Outpost beautifully maintains and extends that original design philosophy throughout the venue.

 

 

Even the bathrooms have a rough and ready outpost vibe.

To add to the illusion, Smugglers Run and Rise of the Resistance both cleverly extend Black Spire's reality with storylines that logically transport guests away from the outpost's location on Batuu for adventures in space, and then returning them to the surface as part of each ride's continuity.** 

 

I have no idea what lies behind the various facades in Black Spire - logic says that there would be real-world storage spaces, dressing rooms for cast members, coffee rooms and lockers, meeting rooms and so on, but in my hopeful imagination all the backstage spaces maintain the Star Wars look and feel from the exteriors. How great would it be to work in an office space that looked like it belonged to Han Solo?

- Sid

* The building in the above photo is a nod to the colony's Disneyland home - the two circles and the beaklike canopy are an abstracted portrait of Donald Duck.

** The strange thing about Radiator Springs is that you walk through the town to get to Radiator Springs Racers, which then duplicates many of the town's landmarks within the ride itself. 

Disney 2025: "You insult my honour!"

"And believe me, I have very little honour to insult."

Hondo Ohnaka, Smugglers Run

 - Sid 

"With strange aeons even death may die."

A monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind.

 H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

“He was written in the script as a big, whale-like creature. A massive behemoth – it was called The Behemoth. And in designing the movie – we were done shooting, but we obviously never shot the behemoth cause we were gonna do him later – I just basically was like… we were early enough in the design that was able to shift more to a mystical being. So that’s where we started going Lovecraftian. So I was like alright, [we’re] making Cthulhu here.”

Director William Eubank, Underwater

Whenever I travel, I generally load a few movies onto my iPad, just in case the inflight options leave something to be desired.  For this year's trip to Disneyland, one of my entertainment choices was Underwater, the 2020 science fiction horror film starring Kristen Stewart, and I ended up watching it on our flight to Anaheim today.

At the time of its original release, Underwater failed to perform at the box office, with an international gross of $41 million against a budget of about $65 million.  Personally, I rather liked the film, in spite of its poor reception - it might not break any new ground in terms of moviemaking, but I appreciated its abruptly disastrous opening scene, the underwater sequences are well shot and surprisingly claustrophobic, it has good art direction, and its little repertoire cast does strong work with a bare-bones plot. 

Kristen Stewart brings a lot to the table in terms of acting ability in her portrayal of mournfully defiant mechanical engineer Norah Price - at first I felt that she was slumming a little bit in doing a monster/horror genre film like this, but I can't deny that she doesn't hold back in her performance.

But, all other comments aside, I was completely unaware that Underwater was a Cthulhu Mythos film - the gigantic humanoid monster that dominates the climax of the film is never explicitly identified as H. P. Lovecraft's Great Cthulhu, but in context, it's obvious that it's based on the Great Old One who lies dreaming in R'lyeh. (Thereby making the smaller creatures the Deep Ones from the Mythos.)

However, it's really more of a cameo than a starring role. As far as I know, Lovecraft's short fiction is now in the public domain* - let's stop wasting our time doing horror versions of Winnie the Pooh, isn't it time that someone does the definitive Mythos film that we've all been waiting for?

- Sid

* I have the impression that there's some grey area here legally speaking - Lovecraft's work may be public domain, but there have been enough comics, games, and tributes referencing Cthulhu that there may be some challenges regarding explicit use of the name.