An Excruciatingly Deep Dive into the Avatar Theme Park

so I want to tell you the story not of avatar but of the avatar theme park an entire theme park land Walt Disney World most people's first question is how and why is there an avatar theme park so I thought today as a huge theme park buff I could go over its whole sordid history with you and talk a little bit about what it's like because I have been there there is a motorcycle that's been going for that whole take so should I just use it anyway would it be funny I had the full Navi experience and I want to share my findings I was going to divide this video into some kind of numbered list but then I thought instead of numbers I would use avatar sequels because someday there are going to be more avatar sequels than numbers in the English language so part 1 Avatar 2 The Chronicles of animal kingdom for those not in the know Disney World is actually separated into four different parks in layman's terms the one with the castle the one with the Star Wars stuff and the one with the drinking around the world the fourth park is animal kingdom and that one is the zoo when it opened they had a whole ad campaign about how it's not just a zoo it's more than a zoo [Music] business animal kingdom it's many many things but remember it but it's basically just a zoo it's a zoo with highly themed really cool areas but it's a zoo animal kingdom is weird because it's like 90% live animals in representations of Asia and Africa and 10% Dino land USA Dino land USA is a dinosaur roadside carnival themed land it's not a very thematic Allah cohesive Park but the reason animal kingdom feels kind of unbalanced is this was not the original vision of the park Disneyland says right on its plaque that it's meant to represent worlds of yesterday tomorrow and fantasy and animal kingdom was going to be kind of similar they were going to represent yesterday today and fantasy for animals of yesterday you would have Dino land showing extinct species for animals of today you would have the massive zoo portion of the park showing real living animals and for animals of fantasy you would have beastly Kingdom a mythology themed land with a rollercoaster through a dragon and infested castle a walk through unicorn labyrinth and a restaurant next to a lagoon with a big animatronic sea serpent in it and then they ran out of money they couldn't afford to build everything for opening day they could either build Dino land USA or beastly Kingdom they could build either the concrete lot with the chintzy roadside carnival or the epic world of medieval fantasy beasts now I love Dino land USA but in my opinion the choice between the two seems somewhat clear but the CEO was like hey we're about to release that movie dinosaur you guys remember dinosaur the smash box office success that's definitely a property that merits its own theme park tie-in so we got Dino land instead of beastly Kingdom no big deal they'll just build beastly Kingdom later and then they ran out of money again so beastly Kingdom was permanently cancelled and the only hint that it ever would have existed is like you could see the image of a dragon on some benches around the park and the land that was earmarked for it was just sitting there a vacant lot moving on avatar 3 why avatar I hope that's the real title of avatar 3 so animal kingdom opened in 1998 as a park that was essentially only 60% finished and this did not escape people's notice and the public gave this theme park a cruel name a name that means half-formed Quasimodo no they called it a half-day Park this basically means that compared to the other parks there wasn't that much to do and you didn't have to a lot that much time of your vacation to experiencing it as a company you don't want a half-day park a half-day park means nobody staying for dinner it means worse evening crowds in the other parks and it means people are booking shorter trips and there's no such thing as a cheap theme park to build or to operate so if it's open you want to be maximizing your profits and then in 2010 another terrible thing happens coming this spring Universal Studios right across town opens the Wizarding World of Harry Potter Disney and made an aggressive play for the theme park rights to Harry Potter but ultimately JK Rowling went with Universal Studios because they were more willing to give her creative control legend has it that the point of contention with Disney was that JK Rowling said that she needed to have a full-size locomotive take guests into the park and then reverse down a hundred-yard stretch of track to go pick up more guests and Disney was like that sounds asinine and pretty bad for crowd control and Universal Studios was like lady we will build you whatever trains you want so in 2010 Wizarding World opens and it's beautiful it's really really good they completely knocked it out of the park it's the first time Universal has put anything in any of their theme parks that's even remotely comparable to Disney and not only is it comparable it's kind of better than anything Disney has recently and beyond that the biggest success of Wizarding World is the merchandise people are paying premium prices for wizard robes and $30 plastic wands and butter beer and by people I mean myself and Universal is just like making more money than they ever have before they're making 4 billion dollars a day or the first time they're giving Disney a run for their money and also for the first time Universal Studios is a competitive location to Disney World Universal Studios Florida used to be that thing where like you're already in town for Disney World and you think oh maybe I'll go there for a day - now Universal was a destination like people were going to Florida just to go there and they weren't even going to Disney World while they were in town so this brings us to 2011 Disney is like we need to get these crowds back in our parks and maybe they're a little bit like we should just built that darn train but no Disney needs something new and Disney's like what's the property with a huge cultural impact comparable to Harry Potter set in an immersive alternate universe what's the property loved not just by children but by adults and millenials where they want to live in its world and they'll buy expensive costumes and proper application themed beverages and then somebody was like I know avatar yeah Disney wouldn't fight Star Wars until a year later so their new land was avatar as soon as they announced it the general public response was what and why and no avatar is a very weird franchise I want to compare it to something but I can't think of anything similar it was mainly groundbreaking for its special effects and the characters and story were generally pretty unmemorable most people liked it okay and a few people liked it a lot but after it hit home video people just kind of stopped talking about it presumably because on a small screen and 2d it just wasn't as much fun to rewatch progress on the sequels stagnated and people forgot about them or assumed they'd been cancelled fan forms dwindled to a dozen or so active members and those members are still active today they're the ride-or-die avatar fans you had this weird phenomenon where the movie that had been the biggest movie in the world two years prior now held less cultural relevance than like Sonic the Hedgehog without any sequels confirmed the avatar theme park could only get less relevant in the six years it would take to open people were confused they were angry they wanted something else they want a Disney to prioritize repairs on existing attractions they wanted their own original idea to be built they wanted beastly Kingdom back on the table Disney acquired Star Wars long before they had even broken ground on the Avatar Land project and fans waited for years expecting the project to just be quietly cancelled but it seemed like it was almost a point of pride in management like you thought we weren't gonna do it there had been so many naysayers for the Avatar project since the beginning and backing down now would only prove them right it's bizarre to see a theme park project who's motivating drive seems to be spite but that's really what the vibe was at the time but anyway they pushed onward and Pandora the world of Avatar opened in 2017 avatar for the valley of muara so here is the in Canon story of avatar land the land is officially called Pandora the world of Avatar but within its own lore the location is called the valley of muara in case you've somehow forgotten the plot of the Avatar movie is that an evil company called RDA has moved into Pandora to mine the natural resources and displace the local peaceful aliens called the Navi the humans who in this dystopian future have already over developed and ruined the earth are now unfairly encroaching on the navi's beautiful paradise so the theme park is set in the future after the events of the movie RDA is long gone they've already been defeated and now a new company Alpha Centauri expeditions has moved in to foster a peaceful relationship with the Navi a sea he has developed human settlements and is now bringing out tourists to share in Pandoran culture this is actually a really cool idea because if you look around the land you can see that various props and buildings are repurposed military materials like signs that have been painted over to have something friendlier on them or reclaimed industrial looking materials that have been fashioned into more native looking signposts or lean twos and all of the more industrial looking buildings or materials are now being reclaimed by Nature so you might see an old metal door from the military base but it's being swallowed up by vines and moss it's never fully explained how the Navi came to reverse their decision on that whole welcoming humans to their planet thing especially after that debacle where we hauled in a bunch of space tractors and demolished the tree which is their God I realized that in this part of the timeline were meant to understand that the humans are super nice to the Navi and interested in learning about their culture and I guess it's mutually beneficial like I don't know I feel like usually the benefit of tourists coming to where you live is like an influx of cash but the Navi live in like big tribes where they share everything and their magical forest home provides all that they need even if a seee is giving them a cut of those sweet earth tourism dollars what are they spending it on did we bring the Navi around to our culture are they buying iPhones and beats by dre the theme park kind of glosses over how this cultural exchange could work both ways but that's not important what's important is the Navi are totally cool with this trust us [Music] in the Pandaren restaurant they even have photos all over the wall commemorating the opening of the canteen and there are like diary entries about how well AC e and the Navi are getting along and photos of them constructing the building together and like high-fiving each other and my personal favorite a photograph of a human guy and a bunch of Navi holding big oversized shovels at the groundbreaking ceremony you know groundbreakings a thing the Navi would love I don't know this story just has some pretty grim implications like I thought in the movie the Navi were a fairly clear proxy for Native Americans I mean it was basically just Dances with Wolves like everybody compared it to Dances with Wolves and the only ones who didn't compared it to Pocahontas presumably because they were too young to have seen Dances with Wolves but either way Native Americans so who had that in mind it feels a little uncomfortable that you're buying like clip in beaded hair extensions and light up medicine man staffs and bongo drums and t-shirts of their buff naked bodies build your own knobby bracelet or necklace this feels wrong what are you even ignoring that I got a sense of kind of a ghoulish wrongness in Pandora and it took me a minute to put my finger on it there aren't any Navi anywhere you see them in photos with humans in the canteen a couple of them appear on screens and the rides there's just one animatronic but they're not walking around there's no evidence that they're coexisting with the humans in this society obviously that makes sense because they're so dead set on being faithful to the source material that they don't want a Navi that's not ten feet tall so they can't just put somebody in a suit and do a meet-and-greet like they do with the princesses and I don't know couldn't they have considered that before committing to the theme-park concept because meaning characters is a thing at all of the Disney parks in Cars Land you even meet the cars and they drive around and stuff can't they just have somebody on stilts so they're like 7 feet tall I mean it's not 10 but it'll trick your eye especially if you're a child or they could do like an indoor meet-and-greet where there is a stationary puppet or animatronic Navi maybe like the legs are a statue and it just moves from the waist up and since it's so high up it doesn't have to look that good it just has to look good in photos so the primary message of the land in keeping with the themes of Animal Kingdom is conservation and in this case humans coexisting with the creatures and the Navi the dominance of landscape over architecture and the dominance of natural forces over the built human world intrinsic value of nature transformation to adventure personal call to action these are the values of Animal Kingdom if you say them again those are the themes of the film avatar so avatar and animal kingdom will nest into each other I think very very neatly but the more you keep repeating that the more you're really feeling the navi's absence there used to be Navi here you can see them in photos you can see a giant Navi sized drum set that they used to use in their drum circle so they used to be here where did they go it's like the humans have colonized and taken over suddenly Alpha Centauri expedition starts to feel a little sinister man they must be making a lot of money selling these premium vacation packages to Pandora boy they sure do like to frame the evidence of their good relationship with the Navi and hang it right on the restaurant wall for the patrons to see you're also smiling and welcoming I'm sure it's fine tomorrow I'm going back packing to the home tree it's good it's fine avatar five immersion avatar was pitched as a fully immersive experience that really puts you on Pandora and let me be clear pandora is a really really cool theme park land even though the hype around this lands opening was so lukewarm the development team really threw themselves into it like they went all out there are beautiful floating mountains with amazing force perspective and they they don't look like they should be possible there are real and fake waterfalls everywhere there are weird fake alien plants seamlessly incorporated in with real plants at night half the stuff is bioluminescent and even the ground has like these blotches that light up when you walk across it it's such a sensory overload of beautiful alien things that you really feel like you're on another planet and this was all intentional I think they were trying to take a page out of their nemesis Harry Potter lands book by trying to make everything as convincing and in universe as possible this also means that everybody working in the land had to do an extra training day where they would learn the history of Avatar and Pandoran culture and even some of the language do you speak any Navi Celt a he Obama yes see you soon why you it's thank you all the lands that Disney are supposed to look and feel immersive but the people working in them aren't in character like if you go up to a cashier in Frontierland to buy a t-shirt they're not going to ask you how many days ago you rode in on the wagon train I mean unfortunately but in Avatar Land the employees are expected to be in character like while they're ringing you up they are tersely asking you how you're enjoying the Navi homeland like they're afraid you're an undercover boss about to terminate them if they slip up and my personal favorite if you make any reference to the film avatar they correct you and refer to it as the documentary about Jake and Neytiri which i think is delightful it's kind of a shame because the designers did go so deep into the lore but most of the general public won't remember avatar enough to understand or appreciate most of it and unless you happen to ask the right cast member who really remembers their Pandora training day you're not likely to pick up on a lot of it by word of mouth unless you watch all the making of promo videos and imaginary interviews you can find on YouTube before your visit like I did some things around Pandora have signs which i think is a very positive idea like if you wander in the right direction you can find this pond with these big ocean Nautilus looking creatures bobbing at the surface and there's a warning sign next to it say not to get too close to the water because if you do they will shoot out powerful Jets of venom which they use to knock their prey out of the air Oh and if you look around the edges of the pond and even under the water lying on the bottom of the pond you can see these big two-foot long plastic insects that have been killed by these Nautilus things when it knocked them out of the air I just thought that was a really cute detail and good storytelling I live for that kind of thing in theme parks and I think having the warning sign was such a well integrated way of explaining to people what the heck was going on by contrast there are some things that do not have signs that definitely should have signs in commitment to the theming of the land it was decided that the rides should not have big fancy signs out front and instead they put up these big woven symbols that are meant to symbolically convey what the ride is and they intentionally built Pandora to be kind of circuitous and have a bunch of little paths that go off in different directions with no clear signs of what is where and that was supposed to give you the feeling of authentically exploring an alien planet which is really cool but it does make it really easy to get turned around it also means that when it's really late at night and it's dark out and it's been raining this everything is all slick and wet and you're wearing a poncho that's obscuring your vision and you've just run all the way across animal kingdom because you saw in the app that knobby railroad journey the one ride you haven't done yet is down to a five minute wait but the park closes in ten minutes so you have to get there before they cut the line off and you can't remember which corner of Avatar Land the ride is on for me it's river journey straight or is it the one that's to the right yeah okay thank you it's just not exactly ideal that they don't have a clearly labeled sign it's like that big right the big woven thing I like him no that's fine it's even more ridiculous because although the riots don't have signs saying what their names are they still have the Disney park standard signs there are little LED indicators of the wait time which of course they have that it would be chaos if people had to ask every time they wanted to know how long the wait is but if they're going to have that and break the theme with the big metal pole and the LED sign with a number on it why can't they just have some kind of discreet sign that's easy to read that says what ride you're looking at finally my favorite part of Pandora's commitment to immersion when you buy anything at a Disney park you get a plastic Disney parks shopping bag they change the design every few years but it's uniform across all parks but pandora wants to be immersive so if you buy anything in pandora you get this plastic bag it says pandora just like in Avatar avatar 6ik me Maya let's get into the ride slight if passage is the big ride in this land the e-ticket as they're called this ride can get up to like a five-hour weight on any given day and if you go in the morning and it's like a short line it's still like an hour line fortunately on this trip we had fast passes because know the story of this ride is that you are going to take part in the ikan Amaya the Navi coming-of-age ceremony in which you ride on the back of an e Kron or Banshee or dragon it's just a dragon in the story of this ride you are not a Navi you are a human tourist visiting with Alpha Centauri expeditions and they are going to match your brain to an existing avatar that they have in the lab and then you are going to straddle a link bike and they are going to connect your brain to this avatar body and the avatar is already on the e cron and once you get there a Navi guide is going to guide you around Pandora so that you can prove your mettle as a Navi warrior you might have noticed that this idea is a little high concept especially to little kids visiting a theme park who maybe were born after 2009 and have never seen avatar or for adults who saw avatar only once in 2009 and only kind of remember it they seem to realize this because when you're going on to the ride you have not one but two pre-show rooms and in the first one you watch a video where a man greets you and explains the story of the rise you're gonna have a chance to undertake an amazing Navi rite of passage so what you're gonna do this is by being managed to something called an avatar you guys ready to get your avatar first we have to scan you for Pandora by comparison this enormous company called the RDA created a lot of damage to the area through their bad mining practices thanks to a special link chair your lie will be able to control that Avenue and we're here in the valley of war on studying mansion they're created by blending human DNA and Navi DNA the Navi have been riding on the backs of banshees since their earliest history need to find the compatible match of your genetic material with the genetic material of one of the avatar bodies that we already have we need to find each of you in Avatar 2 these things called avatars then you go into the second pre-show room and you watch a movie where a woman explains the story of the ride to you she just tells you all of it a second time before we send you to a link chamber let's watch this piece by dr. Ogden who runs the program the way you'll be able to fly is by linking to an avatar you establish a link using powerful Scion again the human driver is connected to an adapter once the link takes place will be affected to your avatar this ride is a motion simulator ride which I generally hate and find boring but I actually really like this ride and I think it's because the ride system is so cleverly executed I don't want to go too deep into it in case you want to write it and believe that magic is real but if you've ever been on a ride in Epcot called Sauron around the world you can see pretty clearly in that ride what the ride system is it's not really disguised so this is basically the same ride system it's just dressed up a lot better which makes the execution a lot better yeah I went into this ride prepared to be a bitter hater because I hate motion simulators but I actually really liked it I even waited 90 minutes to rewrite this thing and I like don't do liens and granted if it had been a five hour line I would not have done it I would have preferred to just lie face down on the pavement and let my dreams carry me to Pandora but a 90 minute line is a pretty big concession from me and I did it happily I like the smells that they picked to represent Pandora I like that you can feel the Banshee breathe I like the quiet moment where you stop in the crystal caverns and it like that they spray mist basically directly into your eyeballs for the entire experience I like the part where your Navi guide shouts save aku which they've explained to you in the pre-show means rise to the challenge however I do have to say when you think about it this story is pretty funny I mean think about it we know from the movie that avatar bodies are just empty shells when a human brain isn't actively linked to them but this one is already riding a banshee when you link in linking to an avatar that's already on the back of any cross so like I guess the people that work for this company went out and like bungee corded a bunch of floppy avatar bodies onto these Banshee like you think you're having this transcendent spiritual experience with this band sheet and then you find out it's just doing a memorized route day in and day out like a pony in a summer camp then your session ends and the avatar body on its back goes all limp and floppy again and then it takes its 15 minute snack break while it waits for the next tourist to plug in also remember that thing I was saying about the implications of this land on a meta-level with like the craft commercialization of the sacred Navi ways I like that the anemia is explained to be this sacred rite of passage within Navi culture like young Navi warriors probably trained their entire lives to be able to take part in this dangerous and spiritually significant ritual and now you're just some guy from Florida that paid to come out and do this in an afternoon for fun like it's a ziplining excursion on a cruise to the Bahamas whoo fun theme park fact this Sigourney Weaver like has such a soothing voice because she actually provided the voice for one of the computer system voices that you hear when you're waiting in line first Star Tours and her character name dr. Jackie Ogden is in honor of a real person dr. Jacqueline Ogden who was a vice president of Animal Kingdom for a time she's a psychologist and her focus was on developing education and conservation programs for the park and I just think it's really cool that they did a tribute to her and that's it it's just a fun fact you know just some deep theme park trivia that probably barely any of you will care about Avatar 7 navi river journey bad ok sorry no let me explain light of passage is the big ride in Pandora and Navi river journey is the less good ride it's the humbler ride it's not trying to be as good it's smaller less exciting less ambitious but it is still new and it's kind of the consolation prize for people that don't want to wait five hours for flight of passage so it can still get like a 40 to 90 minute wait we wrote it as I mentioned right before closing time so we did not have to wait we basically walked right on which is really really good news because I would rather swim down the tumble wil infested waters of the Cass Pavan River myself than wait 90 minutes for this experience right it smells kind of bromine smell like Irish Caribbean but it smells like tired to the Caribbean and natural gas yeah like someone left the stove on and it's gonna just blow up despite the pretty negative feedback when this opened I was actually the most excited for this ride it's a dark ride which basically means an indoor ride with show scenes conveying some kind of story traditionally with blacklight I love me some dark rides they are my favorite kind of ride Oh I'm going to be so cool and I heard this one was slow and lame and boring and underwhelming and bad but I didn't believe it I assumed all the naysayers were just Jeavons who were mad it wasn't a roller coaster or something like oh my get it it's a boat ride and you don't go over a splash I'm so sorry can't anybody just appreciate quiet Beauty anymore and it turns out it's just not a very good ride it's very boring and very short and I don't mind boring I write the Carousel of Progress every time I'm in Florida sometimes twice in one day the story of navi river journey is you sit in a woven boat and you slowly drift down a river occasionally you see a screen against a back wall with navi running past or animals running past it kind of loops a little too quick for it to seem convincing you hear distant singing and then you reach the navi shaman of SOGs who is singing then you round a corner and you realize you're back at the loading station and the ride is over oh sure what I'm trying to say is this right has no story which that's weird for a dark ride but it's not necessarily a bad thing like you can have some rides that are more about conveying ambiance than a linear narrative the thing is this ride is just a lot of jungle scenery with nothing in it you boat past lush plant life some of which is glowing occasionally you'll see one of those whirly top things from the movie turning around or one of those flying jellyfish things represented by taking a rubber jellyfish and putting it on the wire and jiggling it occasionally there are no animatronics except for the shaman of songs at the end and she is possibly the best animatronic they have ever made she's huge and she moves so much and she looks like she's alive her her movement is so fluid but she's also the only one supposedly this ride was originally supposed to be more like Pirates of the Caribbean with like little scenes and tens of Navi animatronics and maybe animatronic creatures too but thanks to time constraints and course budget cuts they scaled that back to a whopping one animatronic if you've ever ridden Pirates of the Caribbean you might remember that when the ride begins you're going through these drippy empty pirate caves and occasionally you'll see a tableau of some skeletons on a beach or something then you round a corner and you're in this amazing huge ship battle and then you go into the city and there are so many pirates and they're moving around not the river journey is like if you rode Pirates of the Caribbean but it moved half the speed and there were no drops and it was only cave scenes and there were half as many skeletons and the crab on the beach that waves its claws is just a rubber crab that's tied to a string and it jiggles sometimes and then you get to the end and there is one incredibly impressive pirate animatronic and he's not from any of the movies and he's speaking a made-up language so you have no idea what he's saying and then the right ends I really want to like Navi River journey the bioluminescence are beautiful but they're not really more beautiful than the ones that are outside that you don't have to wait in a line to see and the jungle just straight up doesn't have that convincing forced perspective that the Disney rides have to suggest depth it only ever feels like you're in a narrow boat going down a narrow hallway with like maybe three feet of plants on either side of you the projections and screens look nice like it's good sharp image quality and they do that thing where it's like layered screens to suggest depth but there's just no technology yet that's adequate enough to trick the human eye into thinking that a thing on a screen is a tangible thing in front of them oh yeah maybe someday but not yet right now it just feels like a sad shortcut there are some cool effects like they have this canopy of leaves on the ceiling and at one part the leaves are screens so they show the underside of a frog jumping around on top of the leaf and when the projection of the frog silhouette moves the leaf twitches up and down like it really has the frog on top of it I mean that's really cool but it's a lot less cool when I tell you that at that moment that's like the only thing happening on the ride I'm also really confused with why if it's a budget issue they didn't use the jungle setting to their advantage like they can use the fact that their leaves everywhere and just build like part of an animal that kind of moves and put it half hidden behind some leaves that would add a lot of mystique and an interest where did where am I Panther cat thing go where did it go they could construct like just the furry head of this vana tour and have it prowling behind the leaves and maybe it's so simple that the head just kind of moves side to side to show that it's watching you like maybe the ears twitch or something the only thing I really appreciate about this ride is the very repetitive very catchy song [Music] I assume it's called ma a WA because that's most of the lyrics [Music] the lyrics are all in Navi but fortunately somebody on those aforementioned still-active fan forums has translated it for us bound together oh great mother wood sprite we live well Oh a wha respect Navi look at wood sprite anyway I guess the silver lining is that they built this ride so like it's a good groundwork and maybe someday when they have the money they will go in and add a bunch more figures and it will become an amazing ride maybe they will someday but like that's also what we said about beastly Kingdom South Pole Oh big jollies [Music] big jellies boom Avatar 8 miscellaneous atmospheric elements I didn't have a category for this but I had to talk about the Navi drum ceremony this is an atmospheric show which takes place every hour in one of Pandora's outdoor courtyards they have an interactive drum circle with a seating area around it as a permanent fixture of this area so at all times of day toddlers can run up and bang on these synth drums at show time every hour this trio of happy smiling miked people come out cheering and chanting and start banging on these drums they're humans but they're dressed like it's Burning Man to convey that this is some kind of tribal experience they chant so which means welcome then they drum a bunch they talked about how important drumming is to the Navi and then they drum some more [Music] like the midpoint of the show they tell us that the purpose of our drumming and cheering is to make enough noise to get the Banshees attention the floating mountains over our head have a speaker installed in them so you hear Banshee screeches coming from up there and then the hosts are like we did it and then the show ends the original version of the navi drum ceremony show was about 15 minutes long very poorly received and criticized for being boring and confusing it almost immediately was pulled for a hiatus and when it came back it was about five minutes shorter and reportedly dumbed down i watched the original show on youtube and i was mainly long stretches of drumming punctuated by speaking in na'vi and occasionally asking the audience if they feel the connection so the new version of the show is both objectively an improvement and practically the same the performers are great they're giving it their all but I honestly don't know what Disney was thinking having this show happen every hour it's not very engaging and I would designate it as being in real danger of being cut entirely in the next couple of years and then it'll just have these drums that kids can bang on and people will kind of wonder why they're there and that's why I was so determined to see at this trip and I was very afraid because the day I was supposed to watch it it started raining heavily and this show cannot happen in the rain so I was in the position of literally just sitting on a cold wet bench huddled in my poncho waiting for the rain to stop and hoping for any sign that they were going to resume their drums ceremony scheduling is gonna ask the man if the drums show is happening oh no he looks it looks like he's delivering God yes not here at enthusiastically sir yeah of course we're doing the drum show yeah definitely what's happening he said since it was wet and miserable out when the performers initially came out there wasn't like a crowd gathered and they could see me like sitting there in the front row clearly waiting for this show and like recording it and and intently watching so the performers kept kind of like making eye contact with me but that was a great enhancement to the experience I almost felt like it was just for me and when it got to the interactive portion they brought me a gourd to shake another miscellaneous offering is Navi face paint which I thought was funny and prior to my trip I thought I was totally gonna do it alright time for the big reveal ready yes like when you're there in the Florida heat and humidity it starts to sound like torture and you're also hyper aware that it's going to very quickly melt off your face in hindsight that probably would have made it a lot funnier and I should have just gone for it in the time I was there I didn't see a single person with Navi face paint finally there are several Pandora exclusive refreshment options and they are uniformly bizarre firstly we have Pangu Pangu the drinks counter which is repurposed from a defunct decommissioned RDA robot attack suit von goo is the na'vi word for party and to my delight I found out that when Pandora debuted they had a cast Pangu that's real Hong goop on booze menu consists mostly of slushies and run the slushies I ordered the rum slushy and the girl behind the counter made it and then gave it to me and then was like wait you wanted the rum slushy I have to make you a new one and then she we made the exact same drink and then just dumped a shot of rum on top it wasn't incorporated it was just floating on top of the slush so now I just had two drinks and they come with glowing pods I don't know if they were delicious or if it was just really hot out but I give it a four star rating or as the Navi would say for snot on hits yep then we headed over to satu Lee canteen which means heritage canteen and their signature dish is thus a tule bowl which means Heritage Bowl pick a protein you pick a base and you pick a dressing and then they put boba on top to make it look like alien I got the tofu which was basically like if you could make tater tots out of tofu and I loved it five out of five snot ten hits yep same for the dessert which basically was a cheesecake but looks like some kind of mysterious blue alien dome I wish all my desserts looked like that as the it's a cheeseburger pod it's made of some kind of alien cheeseburger oh all right but one of those halves in your mouth it's all of the tell me how to eat the whole thing yeah eat the whole thing at once or it's not authentic it's okay yeah are you are you glad you got it no it actually tastes like a cheeseburger and I'd like the bow itself tastes like just like Rumble friend we go it was just kind of bread it's just bread and cheeseburger well so it's a cheeseburger you just speak at ease whoa the final offering is the gift shop food I was surprised how much stuff was on offer and I also imagined that they don't sell a lot of it expedition trail mix rock candy and Doron tree spores coconut brownie bites rice krispies veined pod my friend Kirsten got these vile gummies that looks like grubs customary Navi gift of a imma text your birthday for them I mean they tasted okay but I was just kind of put off by the experience of eating grubs I don't like the texture of it feeling like a slug and lookin like a slug oh and finally I brought this bad boy back with me it's avatar flavored popcorn and I haven't tried it yet I hope it's okay to eat this it has been like a month since my trip I don't see an expiration date on it oh oh this is expired hmm do it for the views Jenny it's it's mainly because it was expired that was gross but it also didn't taste good I thought one of the almonds it's okay to eat if I can get to one uh-huh I like how they even died the almond blue let's try this yeah almonds are good I mean the party like about the almond is the almond taste and then it just has this like gross candy coating on it so I guess they just like almonds and this is a failed product alright let's move on avatar 9 the merch as I said this land was unsubtle II made in response to Wizarding World so they went ham on the merch and it's really weird all my favourite characters from Avatar [Music] Thanet or EXA peed Lyon up Trix nice put this even evoke Pandora to you it just looks like an ugly phrase ok this it's just a lava lamp I noticed that there were a lot of people looking at things in the gift shop but there was never a line at the registers there's basically a predictable disconnect between the public and Avatar where people remember it and have vague positive feelings toward it but they're really at the theme park land because it's a cool theme park land and also it's new and exciting not because they love avatar enough to want high-end collectibles from it in fact I would venture to guess that the souvenir sales in pandora are just going to drop more and more the longer it's open right now I would imagine that the highest value of pandora merch is that the avatar theme park is still really new and people have heard of it but a lot of people haven't had a chance to go yet so if you're wearing merch from it it's a good conversation piece and it's also a good way to flex on people when avatar land isn't new anymore people are less likely to go oh you've been to that avatar theme park what was that like and at that point I would expect the value of the merch to drop off sharply contrast that against franchises like Harry Potter or Star Wars where people just genuinely loved the intellectual property and want memorabilia of it removed from the context of the theme park but anyway I picked up some Pandora merch while I was there including the sick wearables I've got on right now I need to get some can't do our diet I have in the tradition of Disney parks headwear which usually takes the form of Mickey Mouse ear hats or headbands Pandora offers the Navi headband with ears and tribal looking headdress and you can round out the look with your novelty Navi tail I thought these were so funny and I immediately had to buy and wear them and and then as I was walking around the park it slowly dawned on me that there was not a single other soul wearing them like this was a really outlandish thing I was wearing it's Disney World people actively wearing Mickey Mouse ears were casting quizzical looks at my Navi ears that's how not in the cultural consciousness avatar is like I was walking around in animal kingdom and people were looking at my head and thinking why is she wearing ears I got this Navi woven ball I just thought it was the funniest thing in the gift shop it's just this rubber ball with like fake weaving around it I put this in my carry-on bag to fly home naive to the fact that on an x-ray scanner at an airport a dense rubber ball like this is going to show up on the screen looking exactly like a large cartoon bomb so I got to enjoy the TSA guy going through my entire bag laughing at me when he found this and then when he tried to ask what it was I simply did not have an explanation for him I also got this Navi woven pen which was funny to me for the same reason the ball was also my favorite souvenir and I speculate that I was maybe the first person ever to buy this souvenir this is a Navi translator they really got a lot of mileage out of this on the trip not because I was actually able to utilize it to translate anything in a useful context but because I liked to irritate my friends by learning the vocab words and attempting to pepper them into my conversations this is a naughty word for sangria on the down-low uh no no okay okay starter pack when you get the translator comes with 12 language cards but you can buy booster packs where you can get eight new words at a time for seven dollars when I say that price out loud I'm kind of mortified in hindsight by how many of these cards I have later see ow Jenny this is Jenny and her like plethora of hobby car huh did you get any duplicates not really I got like five okay say something else for posterity okay now that I know not be I bet you guys are really good to say it then at just a little under $1 per word becoming fluent in Navi is a very expensive investment but who can argue with the utility of learning to say words like that means bladder polyp finally I of course have to mention the to premium merchandise experiences at Pandora the first is this very expensive plastic banshee puppet you can buy which comes with a whole adoption ceremony [Music] Oh No wild beasts what is the pricing on the Banshees and the 65-foot tax okay and then the purchase is separate right it okay he doesn't bite Oh No despite the nine th dollar price tag this is probably the most popular thing you can buy in Pandora I think they're just two plasticky for my taste next up is the $80 create an avatar experience where you can get an avatar toy that looks like you this is in my opinion even less worth the price but I thought it was funny and basically good content so I did it when I first went up to create an avatar the guy at the kiosk basically had to tell me that the person who does it was on a lunch break and to come back in an hour but because of Pandora's commitment to immersive storytelling he couldn't just tell me that the guy was on lunch she couldn't do it right now it's the thought that counts but I do appreciate the implication that in the future nobody takes lunch breaks that would have just shattered the illusion so when I returned the technician was done calibrating the growing chambers and I was good to go now first I want to say what this experience is not it's not a thing where they scan your face and make a 3d model of it and then 3d print it on to a toy it's also not a thing where they take a picture of your face and then flat print it onto the blank head of a toy it's funny because in 2018 they could do either of those things and those kind of things usually do cost about $80 you are paying mainly for the experience and the performance of the cast member which lasts about five minutes you sit down in an important looking chair he hits a bunch of buttons on a tablet then he pretends to talk to somebody in his headset and then he pulls down this glowing scanner apparatus and starts waving it all around your face he explains that this apparatus is not only making a 3d scan of your face but is also vacuuming genetic material off of your face to grow your avatar with the first red flag in this process is I said as he was scanning my face oh I should remove my hat and then he said no you don't have to so the screens in front of you display first a picture that the scanning apparatus took of your face at some point then it displays a 3d model of a human head that objectively looks nothing like your head finally it displays your avatar face which looks nothing like either of the previous two images my avatar face was objectively hideous which great getting roasted even the technicians didn't have a poker face about it like you could tell they agreed that it was ugly and then they hand you an iPad so you can choose your eyes hair and the pattern of stripes you want on your na vi's face then they send you away for 45 minutes and basically in that time somebody in a back room is pulling out pieces of Navi and snapping them together at the end they like it so this that's right just like snapped on the hip you wanted then they put it in a futuristic vending machine to make it look like it's being created by science Oh I would also like to point out that at two points in the day during the toy making experience and during the flight of passage pre-show there were narrative beats where there was supposed to be an avatar that somebody was matching to me and in both instances there was some kind of ominous systems error where it appeared that something had gone very wrong stand by we are looking into delays with the genetic matching system Billy Oh No okay I'm sorry there's my avatar my avatar be wrong it melted melted my avatar anyway now I've got this - I don't know - love so that was my trip to Pandora the world of Avatar my hottest take on all this is that if Disney wanted an intellectual property that they could acquire to make a theme park out of that vaguely fit their animal theme and was popular with both kids and Millennials as a franchise and that would sell a lot of merch Pokemon they should have done Pokemon and I know Universal has the theme park rights for Nintendo but they didn't back then even though I maintain that avatar is a very weird concept for a theme park I do think they executed it as well as they possibly could have except for Navi River journey I don't just like Pandora I love Pandora it turned Animal Kingdom from a half-day park - for me at least like a two-day park it has such cool atmosphere I kept wanting to be there like not even for the rides but just to exist in the environment I love the food I love the comically specific merchandise I love the simulator ride I love how earnest the entire experience is one of my favorite moments of the entire trip is I was in sat - Lea canteen and I was walking back to my table with my satu Lea Bowles I walked past a kid who was staring up open mouthed at one of the pictures of the Navi at the groundbreaking ceremony with the humans he looked completely in awe of what he was seen and then he turned to his dad and said dad there's a movie and that kind of illustrates the weird duality of the Pandora experience oh I almost forgot to talk about my favorite thing at Pandora on the way into avatar land you see this gigantic Aryan pod if you know the deep pandora lore like I do you know that this pod is what enables humans to breathe in the valley of Melara in the documentary they established that the atmosphere on pandora is toxic to humans but this large alien pod intermittently spits out steam which is purifying the air and making it safe for humans to breathe the pod is the first thing you see and it is such an odd fixture it's big noisy ominous looking and objectively very ugly throughout avatar land you see the recurring motif of this pod there are what appear to be smaller seedlings of it growing in the planters in the gift shop you can buy your own rice krispies pot we may order a rum slushy at pong coupon boo they drop a glowing pod into your drink I love the pod while I was visiting I got to rub the side of the pod it grumbled its approval and pulsed with light he's gonna rub the pod [Music] rub harder it's working some water dripped directly into my ear it compelled me to gather my own small pod specimen and take it back with me to my homeland I am to care for it until it is strong and then planted in the earth [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] I was very torn on making this video because theme parks are like my favorite thing to talk about but what I want more than anything is to get a press pass for the media day that they will inevitably have for Star Wars land because I don't want to go on opening day and be literally trampled by crowds and I feel like this video is like exactly how you ensure that that doesn't happen by being critical and making jokes and stuff and getting hypnotized by an alien pod

Channel: Jenny Nicholson

Views: 1,683,931

Rating: 4.9532619 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: xrIxGWterYA

Length: 59min 0sec (3540 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 10 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/artuno]

Anyone else know her from the Friendship is Witchcraft series? That's where I first learned about her and have been following her stuff on tumblr and YouTube ever since. Genuinely love the topics she discusses.

[u/bonstrosity]

+1 for Jenny Nicholson. One of my favorite youtubers!!

[u/dcmldcml]

Jenny Nicholson is the best. Her videos are perfect for this sub- long-winded enough to be watched over a good period of time, detailed enough to get you invested in something you might not otherwise even think about. Plus, I love her sense of humor.

Also, this park sounds like a shitshow and I'm fascinated by its existence.

[u/LinkUnseen]

Please, share your findings of the Avatar theme park for a whole hour!

ducks out the window

[u/RadicalDog]

That porg is fucking enormous.

This is a good video. It also took me a while to spot that her shirt has muscle shading on it, which is just weird.

[u/LeBigManInCharge]

Where the fuck does she get the money to fly to Florida like every other week and buy all that merch?

[u/notdanielpants]

IMO everytime I see one of her videos pop up in my recommended feed, it’s always about her complaining about a highly anticipated movie and it always makes me feel like she just watches movies to rip them apart. I never finish a video because I just find it annoying, and I’m starting to see that in other people and Yt channels too. It makes me feel like people get too focused on negative parts of a movie and never the positive. The anticipation for movies is getting too big. Maybe I’ll consider giving this one a chance because it’s not about a movie, so I’ll probably make it to the end.

[u/RockKillsKid]

Dan Olson making a cameo in the "Flight of Passage" pre-ride at 23:25? I swear I see him cameo in nearly as many vids of other youtubers as videos of his own that he puts out on Folding Ideas. Though given he's been credited with production help in a few (including this one), I guess that makes sense.