The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel — Jenny Nicholson

Well, we are in no danger of losing money anymore, the thing went bankrupt.

lol I had never even heard of her before yesterday, clicked on that video because I’m a sucker for deep dive video essays that are probably unnecessary about weird topics. I didn’t see it was a 4hr video until I was like 20 min in and now I haven’t stopped watching her stuff. Love finding a new YouTuber to watch endless hours of their back catalogues.

Her doing an entire section with the porg mask and not mentioning it once is top tier content.

That’s exactly the conclusion she comes to late in the video: it’s that they cashed in on their deep supply of goodwill with their fans and betrayed them for higher margins. And then wrote the whole thing off by shutting it down suddenly right at the end of the quarter. We are living in a time of animal-backed-into-a-corner, hostile capitalism. The bubble on this system that was literally designed to pop, seems to be popping. So the capitalists are gathering up everything they can, faster and faster. Capitalism as a concept is inherently flawed. You can’t have infinite growth in a finite system. As has been pointed out innumerable times: that’s how cancer works. Not a sound financial system. But here we are, in what is essentially the “going out of business” mad dash by these leeches to grab as much as they can. Our water supply, our natural resources, the climate, the system of capitalism itself are all on the outs. And people feel that. And we’re getting angrier and angrier. This won’t end well, and it seems to be ending faster and faster. They know that. What they plan on doing with all that money after the collapse is unclear. But they’re winning. And that’s all they can conceive of.

Edit: lol I literally forgot as I went on writing that, that I was meant to be talking about Disney. But that’s pretty much what’s happening. They’re in the “squeeze harder” phase, where they’re ostensibly done growing and innovating, now they’re just going to squeeze everything they can out of the people that give them money. It’s about cost cutting, more extreme exploitation of their workers and customers, and essentially going for broke on what’s already there.

Evermore makes me so sad. All that potential and a dream that just wasn't. It's planned theming was much more my speed too.

She has a great followup to the evermore video on her Pateron that I highly recommend just getting a month for.

(not even complimentary Disney+ on the in-room TV)

She points out that paying for drinks is the norm for all Disney cruises. The food is free and infinite though.

1. Jenny is very popular but hasn't uploaded to Youtube in a year, so this a big comeback.

2. Star Wars is a popular franchise but has had mixed success recently, and Disney's perceived mismanagement of it is a popular topic.

3. It's organized as an Internet-friendly numbered list!

4. I, and apparently a lot of other people, could listen to Jenny talk about theme parks all day.

Jenny Nicholson is a really popular video essayist. She only releases like one of these essay videos a year because she spends so long working on them. (She's got a patreon where she releases a smaller, lower effort video every month.)

The big videos routinely pull in millions of views, so I'm not surprised the algorithm spams it in people's feeds. She's got a lot of followers that watch it right away because they've been waiting for a year to see it, so it shoots to the top of the recommendations for other people in that niche. Then there's a snowball effect where YouTube starts recommending it, more people watch it, so it gets recommended more, etc. You see the same thing on Hbomberguy's yearly video.

As one of her subscribers, I can tell you that this video has been in the works for years, so we've been hearing about it for a long time and were hyped. I just finished it today - broke it up into three different viewings. She breaks all her essays down into chapters so it's easy to watch just a portion of it at a time.

Go watch her breakdown of The Church Play Cinematic Universe and you will understand.

Disney opened an incredibly expensive Star Wars "hotel experience", charging $5k plus for two nights. Jenny Nicholson visited (paying full price) and documented the experience, plus background on how and why the hotel was made, some research into what was going on behind-the-scenes, and the spectrum of fan reactions to the experience. The hotel closed down permanently while she was editing the video, and she also goes into why that happened and some larger trends at Disney surrounding the closure.

No

Might be easier to start it if you commit to only watching a few chapters at a time. I just finished it after breaking it up into three different viewings and I had a great time.

I don't think Jenny is on Nebula. She's got a patreon where she releases smaller videos every month, but to my knowledge she's never "left" YouTube - she just takes a long time to create and edit these videos so she can only release them pretty infrequently. She's got a comment pinned on this video saying about as much.

Are you thinking of Lindsay Ellis? She's still Nebula (and maybe patreon) exclusive.

emily blunt?

I've watched a 20 hour 2-part video about Skyrim. Your fear of a 4 hour video is pathetic. I am operating on a completely different level than you. You can try, but I doubt your feeble mind would be able to keep up. All this to say, long form content rules.

And yet I watched pretty much all off it

It's more like a multipart documentary. Except all the episodes are condensed into a single video. It's really well written and narrated.

I watched it and enjoyed it all (at 2x speed though), so there absolutely is a reason for it to be 4 hours. I don't feel like it dragged or was extended for arbitrary reasons. Honestly, it feels like it could be longer reasonably. There's a lot to cover.

calling everyone who defends a video they enjoyed a simp because said video was written by a woman

Found the sexist

There’s absolutely no reason this video should be 4 hours long.

Jenny had 4 hours of stuff she wanted to say and her fans want to listen to it because they find it entertaining. Get a life nerd.

Right, it should have been about 3hr45min. She had a few minutes of slip around the 3hr mark, approx. Complained a bit about a couple NBD things.

Some of the content, you could just read if it were released in text format. The videos she took and those she included from others, and the Disney marketing videos, were impactful and enlightening - crucial to fully telling the story and allowing vicarious understanding. Would still need at least 1-2 or 3hr even if she released her commentary in text form.

Absolutely phenomenal and engaging presentation.