Donald Hayes
5.9K posts

Donald Hayes
@facingbackwards
Marketing management, photography, pop-culture historian and comic-book nerd.






Disney spent $1 billion in 2019 building a Star Wars theme park where you were not allowed to meet Luke, Leia, Han, or Darth Vader. Galaxy's Edge at Disneyland was set on Batuu, a backwater planet in a narrow window between The Last Jedi and Rise of Skywalker. By that timeline Luke was dead. Han was dead. Vader had died 30 years earlier. Leia was alive but had no canonical reason to show up at an outer rim smuggler outpost. Imagineer Scott Trowbridge spelled out the design rule in 2022. Characters on Batuu would stay locked to their specific era. No visitors from other Star Wars timelines. The immersion was the entire point. In practice guests flew to Anaheim for Star Wars and walked through a $1 billion set to meet Vi Moradi and Dok-Ondar. The locals of Black Spire Outpost. The parallel failure was Galactic Starcruiser. $5,000 for two nights in the same sequel-era window. No Luke, no Vader, no Han, no Leia. Disney wrote down $250 million to close it 18 months after opening. On April 29, Galaxy's Edge at Disneyland abandons the rule. Darth Vader will roam Batuu hunting Luke. Leia and Han will appear at the Millennium Falcon. Kylo Ren is being pulled from the land and relocated to Tomorrowland. The ambient Batuu music gets replaced with the John Williams score. Disney spent seven years defending the design principle. Then Galactic Starcruiser closed with a $250 million write-down. Luke Skywalker showed up for one limited event last year and got swarmed by guests. The rule quietly got dropped. Avengers Campus figured this out on day one. You put Captain America in the Avengers land.










I'm a Texan, and I don't eat any of this junk. I'm also not aware of anyone else who does—the closest I've ever heard of as a signature Texan breakfast is Texas toast, and even then, I don't know anyone who eats it. Texas is a big state, so it's easy to overgeneralize, but this? Tell me steak, BBQ, or Whataburger are Texan, and then I'll believe you.






















