Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge

Several months ago, I wrote about the books and comics set at Disneyland’s Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge. I’m pleased to say that this past week, my wife and I visited the town of Black Spire Outpost on the planet Batuu for ourselves, and it turned out to be just as much fun as I had expected after reading the stories. (In other words, we took a trip to Disneyland.) 

I have to admit, I was so caught up in the wonder of wandering around a Star Wars world, I didn’t take as many photos as I would have expected. And I haven’t even begun to take photos of all the stuff we purchased, so please follow me on Instagram to see photos of all that. What follows is basically the photos we did take, with my thoughts about the park.

tl;dr: I loved it.

As soon as we entered Disneyland a little after 9 a.m., we tried to join a boarding group for the new attraction, Rise of the Resistance. We had heard that the groups filled up within the first few minutes of the park opening. We were assigned to group 182, and were told that we were a backup group and probably wouldn’t get to ride the attraction that day. With that pressure off, we set off to enjoy the day.

As soon as we walked into the Galaxy’s Edge area, we were overcome with emotion. It was just like walking into a Star Wars movie, if a Star Wars movie was filled with a bunch of other tourists. The Disney Imagineers had focused on such detail, we were amazed. You can use the Play Disney Parks app to interact with the environment, which we did, including using the app to reveal this guy lurking in a water tank.

Needless to say, we were wary of drinking the water in the park after seeing this!

We stopped by Ronto Roasters to get a snack. For like $20, we got a sausage and slice of pork and some slaw and sauce in a pita wrap, and a Meiloorun Juice. (We had to get the juice; Meiloorun melons were what Hera sent Ezra to steal in an early episode of Rebels.) It was all tasty, but pricy. And my wife dripped Ronto Wrap sauce all over herself. Fortunately, it cleaned up easily.

We had reservations to make lightsabers at Savi’s Workshop, so we did some simple missions on the app to kill time. We also saw the First Order arrive in their shuttle, and saw Kylo Ren make some threats and walk around. That was kind of cool.

Then came time to make the sabers. The way it works is, you pick one of four styles of saber. We each picked the elemental style; I don’t know why my wife chose it, but I liked the more natural feel. It reminded me of the Force’s connection to nature through creatures like the Convers and the Loth-Wolves. 

Once you’re in the workshop, they do a whole presentation and ceremony where you pick the color of your Kyber Crystal to power your saber. Then you choose the components from the themed set to build the actual saber. There are a number of options to choose from, so even though my wife and I both chose the elemental theme, we ended up with very different sabers.

My lightsaber

Finally, your saber is activated, and they present you with a full lightsaber with a working blade. (Working in that it lights up; it doesn’t actually cut through anything.) They give you a pretty sturdy carrying case to carry it in, too. 

My wife's lightsaber

It’s a pretty pricey experience, but it’s also really neat, The whole ceremony is accompanied by a John Williams soundtrack, and it really feels like you’ve stepped into a scene from a movie. Plus, you get a cool lightsaber that you built yourself.

We also went to the Droid Depot and built a droid. You choose between an R series or BB series droid, and collect the parts you need from a conveyor belt. So you can pick the colors and they style of head and the like.

Then you go to an assembly area where you use a power screwdriver to put it together.

Finally, the droid goes into an activation station to complete the process.

And just like that, we had a new member of our family!

The droid is remote controlled, rolls around, and makes sounds. You can also purchase additional accessories, like blasters and rocket jets. (We got the jets.)

Perhaps even cooler, the droid interacts with elements in the park. So we purchased a backpack to carry it around in. It was like carrying a curious baby that kept looking around and talking about what it saw! Only in the form of electronic sounds, I guess.

Of course, one of the big show pieces in the area was the full-scale Millennium Falcon. Actually standing in front of it was unreal. 

My wife and I got in line for the Millennium Falcon attraction, Smuggler’s Run. We were both assigned to be pilots. I think we did okay; we came back alive and managed to capture two canisters of coaxium on our mission. So that was fun.

Hondo assigns us our mission on Smuggler's Run

The next day, we were able to get into boarding group 30 for Rise of the Resistance! We were so excited! As soon as we finished building our droid, we headed over to the Resistance camp to board the ride. The queue wound through the caves in the Black Spire ruins that I had read about in the Black Spire novel. We were enjoying ourselves, looking at the caches of Resistance supplies as we wound our way through…

…And then we were told that the ride had broken down, and that they didn’t know when it would be working again. We were told that we could wait, but if we left the line, we would forfeit our boarding position for the day. Knowing that there were certainly no longer any available boarding groups to join later, we decided to wait.

The ride broke down a little before noon. After waiting for about 20 minutes, we decided to give it until 1 p.m. before giving up. On the one hand, our big priority for that trip was to see as much of Galaxy’s Edge as we could, On the other, we didn’t pay all that money to spend the day sitting in a cave.

After a while, they stopped making announcements about the ride being down. I dared to let myself hope that this was because they were close to fixing it. Sure enough, at about 12:45, the sound effects came back on and the line started moving. So even before we were on the hottest new attraction in the park, we’d already been on an emotional roller coaster. Little did I know what lay ahead!

I don’t want to say too much about the attraction, because I think a lot of the fun comes from the surprises. I will say that we got to see BB-8 in person, and we got to see Poe Dameron in his X-Wing. (He’s really in there!)

We really saw BB-8!

We really saw Poe and BB-8 in their X-Wing!

Also, since it features heavily in the commercials for the ride, I will say that we did get to see a full-size AT-AT, and that was the first time I really felt tears coming to my eyes in the park. It was awesome, and well worth the frustration of the temporary wait.

A different X-Wing near the Resistance camp

What else did we do? We visited Oga’s Cantina, which felt like the cantina from the first movie. The atmosphere was really cool, but it was really crowded, and the drinks were really expensive and not very alcoholic. I guess I would put that in the same category as the Blue Bayou restaurant at Disneyland: if you haven’t been, you should go to experience it, but after you’ve experienced it, you might not be in a rush to go back. (We had already purchased the “playlist” for the cantina some time ago and had listened to it quite a bit. So it was fun hearing those familiar songs in that setting.)

We drank blue milk, which is something I hadn’t done since I was a kid.

We visited the pet store and adopted a Loth-Cat and a porg. And we loved seeing the sleeping Loth-Cat there.

We visited Dok Ondar’s Den of Antiquities, where I looked for stuff I had seen in the Galaxy’s Edge comic like the baby Sarlaac. And my wife bought a Jedi Holocron and admired the replica Princess Leia dresses they were selling. 

We ate lunch at Docking Bay 7. I had the smoked Kaadu (pork) ribs, which came with a really tasty slaw and a blue muffin (cornbread with blueberries). I liked it a lot. My wife had the Endorian fried Tip-Yip (chicken) with mac & cheese. It was pretty bland and unimpressive. However, we did go back to try the Moof Juice, on the recommendation of a friend. The juice was good, and I ordered the Tip-Yip. My expectations were low, but I love fried chicken and I love Star Wars, so the idea of me not trying Star Wars fried chicken wasn’t in the cards. And we had a Oi-oi puff for dessert, which is a raspberry cream puff in a green tea cake. 

And we bought a lot of stuff. So much that I will have to share pictures later, if I want this blog up anywhere approaching on schedule. We bought so many porgs that when we got back to the room one evening, the housekeepers had set up this tableau.

We saw other critters.

We saw real live landspeeders.

My wife picked up a number of attractive accouterments for herself. (The BB-8 headband lights up and talks when she moves her head.)

Our cats were a bit curious about the Loth-Cat when we got home. Rumplestilskin more so than Gizmo.

I would absolutely say that visiting Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge is a must-do for Star Wars fans. It really is like stepping into that world. If you have the means to do the experiences like building a droid and building a lightsaber, they are well worth it. And Rise of the Resistance is simply amazing.

Oh, and we saw this Disney celebrity on our way, at the “World’s Largest Terrible Herbst” in Jean, Nevada.

That’s about it for this week. See you in two weeks!