The <em>Star Wars </em>Park Doesn’t Feel Far, Far Away
Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge hadn’t even opened yet, and the trash cans were already disgusting. Brown-green streaks ran down the sides of the bins in Disneyland’s newest, most hyped zone, but standard messes like kid spit-up and splattered Mickey bars weren’t to blame. These stains had the look of overflowing effluent, rotted in the sun and impervious to power washing. Galaxy’s Edge is the five-years-in-the-making supposed future of theme parks, and its first impression is not entirely a pristine one.
Gunk and junk are, in fact, the best part of this new Star Wars spectacle. Just as Walt Disney’s artisans selected sherbet pink to coat Sleeping Beauty’s Castle when the Anaheim, California, resort opened in 1955, some Imagineer must have agonized over the shade and shape of the scum for the Galaxy’s Edge trash cans. The 14-acre park expansion is stunning not because of its sci-fi gimmicks, but because of its shabby-chic detail. The Millennium Falcon’s interior resembles an aborted condo rehab, all drywall patches and exposed wiring. You could spend a morning counting the blaster craters on the spaceport’s stucco-like walls. In the corner of the central bazaar stands the corpse of an R2-D2 cousin, un-domed and ash-scorched, looking less like space-age tech than like a charcoal grill at a poorly maintained public beach.
The manifold crud is a it for $4.05 billion in 2012, understands the gut appeal of the Star Wars universe. The discourse around the original movies got clogged up with arguing that Luke Skywalker’s journey scratched a primal itch for “chosen one” tales, and while that read isn’t wrong, the plot was not the most relevant factor in ’s influence. Star Wars’ , really, came in look and sound. Lucas’s team brined sleekness in the future-thinking-but-ubiquitous textures of the 1970s: concrete brutalism, post-Vietnam military surplus, sticky linoleum, S&M rubber. Though imbued with the mystical Force and populated by muppets traveling at hyper-speed, the galaxy far, far away came off like one that Earth’s people could—and maybe already do—live in. Four decades later, Star Wars like the ruins of the now.
