With the opening of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, a themed attraction dedicated entirely to this franchise, Disneyland is pivoting away from blurry pasts and instead zeroing in on a hyper-specific place and time. When visiting Galaxy’s Edge, guests are transported to the Black Spire Outpost, a settlement on the never-before-depicted Outer Rim planet of Batuu, at a particular moment in Star Wars history between the events of the recent Last Jedi and the forthcoming Rise of Skywalker. It is a place and time where few recognizable characters appear (Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Leia Organa are nowhere to be found), and even fewer recognizable environments or landmarks. A visit to Tatooine or Endor, this is not.
The unfamiliarity of Galaxy’s Edge is in stark contrast with the rest of Disneyland which, because of the way it remixes both our ideas about history and the actual history of Disney characters from the past century, is unrelentingly familiar to even the most casual Disneyland visitor. It’s hard to argue that the Star Wars saga isn’t a fundamental American myth, at least as influential in culture today as the other mythic pasts—of pirates and cowboys, of princes and princesses—that populate Disneyland. It’s strange, then, that Disney chose not to lean into that shared cultural heritage when crafting their new land. Instead of creating a space that incorporated and remixed stories we already knew, and cherished, it reduced Galaxy’s Edge to merely one component, and an unfamiliar one at that, of the Star Wars mythology. Visitors experience one corner of this universe rather than the whole of it; Black Spire Outpost is just one Star Wars story among many.
What’s more, Disney is aggressively literal about guests to Galaxy’s Edge being “in world.” For instance, Galaxy’s Edge cast members use the word “credits” instead of dollars and “refresher” instead of restroom, and act confused when visitors use terminology that a resident of Batuu wouldn’t know. But instead of feeling immersive, it often feels stilted. By focusing so heavily on the diegetic “reality” of the experience, the emotional experience of being in a Star Wars story is lost.