That may be Disney’s quietest achievement. It collapses the distance between parent and child. You want the same things. You believe in the same story. But I was excited to show Adam everything Star Wars. I’d been to Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge in California—it was like being swallowed by an immersive piece of art. I grew up on the Star Wars movies, and my kids are into the mythology. None of the cinematic details are lost on us.
Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance, famously costing somewhere in the range of $400 million to $500 million, is, in my opinion, the greatest ride ever built. We have one at Disneyland: a 20-minute, fully immersive escape story told over four parts—via architecture, performance, moving vehicles, and massive panoramic screens that simulate space. And while I believe Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance is the apex of what a theme park can do, the highlight of the day was Oga’s Cantina. “Epic,” Adam said as we slid into a windowless, chilled, dim bar that seemed to be lifted straight out of 1977.
Oga’s Cantina felt like an outpost in a lawless galaxy where a droid DJ spins upbeat electronic music. Clusters of people holding unnaturally glowing, extremely theatrical drinks were crowded around the bar. Our bartender guided the kids away from the famous “blue milk” and to the Carbon Freeze, a mocktail made with dry ice and tiny green apple popping pearls that smoked and fizzed and spun. The music, the low light, the playful chaos, and the constant motion of bartenders lighting things on fire or pouring out foam creations made us all a little giddy. I did not mind my more restrained Sylop, Oga’s take on a mezcal margarita, either.
But by midafternoon on the third day, I was exhausted. So were the kids, and it took no negotiating to head back to the hotel early (this is one of the less-touted benefits of rope drop—we were done with the rides by 2:00 pm). We were all overwhelmed and overstimulated. There had been copious meltdowns standing in line with Julian and Paloma, who were somewhere between dancing and wrestling with each other, bumping into other people, and occasionally lying on the ground. I thought, a hundred times, this trip was an insane thing to do to myself. There is no way around it—a Disney World vacation is work. The crowds, the heat, the waiting. And like most difficult things, it can be intensely rewarding if you surrender to it.
As we glided back to the hotel on the Skyliner gondolas, the children finally quiet, with the swampland, lagoons, and highways beneath us, I thought about Adam’s pronouncement in Oga’s Cantina. It is epic. Not in the sense of spectacle alone, though there is plenty of that, but in the older sense of mythmaking—of stories built to outlast us, to be retold and passed down. Disney World, for all its excess, is doing something ancient at an enormous scale: giving shape to wonder and inviting us to live inside it.