Disney 2025: Main Street, Mars.

"For those of us who remember the carefree time it recreates, Main Street will bring back happy memories. For younger visitors, it is an adventure in turning back the calendar to the days of their grandfather's youth."

Walt Disney

Around the rocket in four directions spread the little town, green and motionless in the Martian spring. There were white houses and red brick ones, and tall elm trees blowing in the wind, and tall maples and horse chestnuts. And church steeples with golden bells silent in them.

Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles

Disneyland's Main Street and its idealized Americana always disturbs me a little bit. When Walt Disney was originally designing the park in the early 1950s, he was inspired by his childhood home near Marceline in Missouri, as well as Disney set designer and artist Harper Goff's Colorado hometown of Fort Collins.

However, 70 years after the park's opening in 1955, Main Street's anachronistic turn of the millennium facade doesn't necessarily evoke a carefree time in the same way.  

Part of my disquiet is because it reminds me of April 2000: THE THIRD EXPEDITION*, one of the stories in Ray Bradbury's magnum opus, The Martian Chronicles.  The Third Expedition to Mars successfully lands on the Red Planet, only to discover that the nearby community is a perfect evocation of early 20th Century America, an impossible dream composed of wind-up phonographs, ice-cold lemonade, porch swings, fresh-mown grass and white picket fences, inhabited by the crew's beloved long lost relatives and childhood friends. Astonished and overjoyed, the crew abandons their ship to celebrate with their families and friends. 

Later, lying in bed in the room he shares with his brother in his parent's house, the ship's captain begins to suspect that something is horribly, horribly wrong:

And here we all are tonight, in various houses, in various beds, with no weapons to protect us, and the rocket lies in the moonlight, empty. And wouldn’t it be horrible and terrifying to discover that all of this was part of some great clever plan by the Martians to divide and conquer us, and kill us? Sometime during the night, perhaps, my brother here on this bed will change form, melt, shift, and become another thing, a terrible thing, a Martian. It would be very simple for him just to turn over in bed and put a knife into my heart. And in all those other houses down the street, a dozen other brothers or fathers suddenly melting away and taking knives and doing things to the unsuspecting, sleeping men of Earth ...

His hands were shaking under the covers. His body was cold. Suddenly it was not a theory. Suddenly he was very afraid. 

And when the captain finally tries to act on his suspicions and flee?  He never makes it to the door...

- Sid 

* Titled Mars is Heaven in its original standalone Planet Stories magazine publication in 1948.

Disney 2025: "That's no moon."

As I've discussed previously, Galaxy's Edge is my favourite part of Disneyland, but sadly, I have some mild concerns regarding Black Spire's longevity.  Outside of its immersive environment, Galaxy's Edge has only two ride options:  Smugglers Run and Rise of the Resistance. Rise has certainly remained a popular ride since its Disneyland debut in January of 2020, with wait times frequently reaching 90 to 120 minutes.  However, during our 2025 visit, wait times for Smugglers Run rarely rose above five minutes, and I've heard rumours that the local Disney community in Anaheim is a bit done with the ride.

However, I think that there's an opportunity for Smugglers Run to undergo a revival that would be both economically practical by preserving as much of the current infrastructure as possible, but newly exciting for visitors at the same time.

I realize that Galaxy's Edge is set in a very specific time period between The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker, but what if Disney shifted Smugglers Run back in time to the timeline of A New Hope, when we're first introduced to the Falcon?  Instead of doing a cargo raid for the Resistance, you take flight from Mos Eisley after a confrontation with Jabba the Hutt and Boba Fett. You evade pursuit by an Imperial Star Destroyer, only to discover that the gigantic sphere in front of you is not a moon...

Briefly pulled aboard the Death Star by tractor beams, you manage to successfully break their hold, escape the hangar, and hyperspace to Yavin 4.  Once there, you leave the Falcon, receive a dramatic and emotional briefing from Princess Leia, then board a battered X-wing fighter and head back into space.  

There's an acrobatic dogfight with TIE fighters, you fly your ship into the Death Star's equatorial trench, follow Obi-Wan Kenobi's guidance to launch missiles that destroy the battlestation's reactor, and make a triumphant flight back to the rebel base - the end. 

The good news is that the existing infrastructure from Smugglers Run remains intact: new animatronics of Jabba the Hutt and Boba Fett replace Hondo Ohnaka at the beginning of the ride, and an updated simulation has to be created for the Falcon, but really, that's it for the existing front end.  Then, all you need is a conveniently located exit into the newly constructed Rebel base on Yavin 4, which contains a large hangar full of X-Wings, and a flight simulator motion-platform program, none of which would be a challenge for current state-of-the art - and voilà, Smugglers Run is now The Battle of Yavin 4. They would need to figure out some kind of safe and simple gangway system for quick access and egress for the X-Wings, but that's a minor issue.

After formulating the above plan, it occurs to me that the climactic events of The Force Awakens aren't all that different from A New Hope, and it's a lot closer to the existing Galaxy's Edge timeline - it would be just as easy (or hard) to recreate the destruction of Starkiller Base instead of the battle of Yavin-4.  Well, who cares, say I.  If you ask me, the Death Star battle is iconic, and, no offense to Oscar Isaac, but I'd much rather be Luke Skywalker than Poe Dameron.

- Sid 

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.