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

at Walt Disney World. Most people's first question is how and why there is an Avatar theme park, so today I thought as a big theme park fan. I could go over their whole sordid history with you and talk a little about what it's like because I've been there. There's a motorcycle that's been running during that entire shot, so should I use it anyway? Would that be funny? I had the complete Navi. experience and I want to share my findings.

I was going to break this video up into some sort of numbered list, but then I thought instead of numbers I'd use

avatar

sequels because one day there will be more

avatar

sequels than there are numbers in the English language, so part 1 Avatar 2 The Animal Kingdom Chronicles For those who don't know, Disney World is actually separated into four different parks in layman's terms, the one with the castle, the one with Star Wars stuff, and the one with drinks around the world, the fourth. The park is the animal kingdom and that's the zoo when it opened, they had a whole advertising campaign about how it's not just a zoo, it's more than a zoo.

The animal kingdom is many, many things, but remember, but basically it's just a zoo, it's a zoo. with really cool very themed areas, but it's a zoo animal kingdom, it's weird because it's like 90% live animals in representations of Asia and Africa and 10% Dino Land USA. Dino Land USA is a roadside dinosaur carnival themed land, it's not a very cohesive Allah Park theme, but the reason the animal kingdom feels a little unbalanced is that this wasn't the original vision of the park. . Disneyland says right on its plaque that it is meant to represent worlds of yesterday and tomorrow and that fantasy and the animal kingdom were going to be somewhat similar. to represent yesterday today and fantasy for yesterday's animals you would have Dino land showing extinct species, for today's animals you would have the huge zoo portion of the park showing real live animals and for fantasy animals you would have the Beastly kingdom, a mythology-themed land. with a roller coaster through a dragon and an infested castle, a ride through a unicorn maze and a restaurant next to a lagoon with a large animatronic sea serpent inside and then they ran out of money, they couldn't afford to build all for opening day, they couldn't build Dino land USA or Beastly Kingdom either, they could build the concrete lot with the 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 a bit clear, but the CEO said: Hello, we are about to release that movie Dinosaur, you guys remember Dinosaur, the big box office hit that is definitely a property that deserves its own theme park tie-in, so we have Dino Land instead of Bestial Kingdom, no big deal, they'll just build Bestial. Kingdom later and then they ran out of money again so the beastly Kingdom was permanently canceled and the only hint that it would have ever existed is like a picture of a dragon can be seen on some benches around the park and land that was intended for it. was sitting there a moving wasteland in avatar 3 why avatar i hope that's the actual title of avatar 3 so Animal Kingdom opened in 1998 as a park that was essentially only 60% finished and this It did not go unnoticed by people 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 much to do and there wasn't much to do. time of your vacation to experience it as a company, you don't want a half-day park a half-day park means no one stays for dinner means worse crowds at night at the other parks and means people book shorter trips and there are no kind of like a cheap theme park to build or operate, so if it's open you'll want to maximize your profits and then in 2010 another terrible thing will happen this spring.

Universal Studios, just across town, opens the Wizarding World of Harry Potter Disney made an aggressive play for the rights to the Harry Potter theme park, but ultimately JK Rowling opted for 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 she needed to have a full theme park. A medium sized locomotive takes guests into the park and then backs up a hundred yard stretch of track to pick up more guests and Disney said that sounds stupid and pretty bad for crowd control and Universal Studios said ma'am, I'll tell you.

We will build whatever trains there are. If you want, in 2010 Wizarding World opens and it's beautiful, it's really good, they completely knocked it out of the park. It's the first time Universal has put something in any of their theme parks that's even remotely comparable to Disney, and it's not just comparable. something better than anything Disney has done recently, and beyond that, Wizarding World's biggest success is the merchandise that people are paying premium prices for $30 wizard robes and plastic wands and butterbeer and for merciless people. I mean me and Universal is like making more money than they ever have before making 4 billion dollars a day or the first time they are giving Disney a run for their money and also for the first time Universal Studios is a competitive place for Disney World.

Universal Studios Florida used to be that thing. where you're already in town to go to Disney World and you think, oh, maybe I'll go there for a day; now Universal was a destination like people went to Florida just to go there and they didn't even go to Disney World. while they were in town, this brings us to 2011. Disney is like we need these crowds back in our parks and maybe they are a little like we should just build that damn train, but no Disney needs something new and Disney is like what is it. the property with a huge cultural impact comparable to Harry Potter set in an immersive alternate universe.

What is the property loved not only by children but also by adults and millennials? Where do they want to live in your world and will they buy expensive costumes and themed drinks with the right app? and then someone said: 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 response from the general public was what and why, and no avatar is a very strange franchise that 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 overall story were pretty unforgettable.

Most people liked it and some people really liked it, but after it hit home video. people just stopped talking about it, presumably because on a small, 2D screen it wasn't as fun to rewatch the progress of the sequels, they stagnated and people either forgot about them or assumed they'd been cancelled. The fan forms were reduced to a dozen or so active members and those members are still active today, they are fans of the Ride-or-die avatars. You had this strange phenomenon where the movie that had been the biggest movie in the world two years earlier now had less cultural relevance than Sonic the.

Hedgehog without sequels confirmed that the avatar theme park could only become less relevant in the six years it would take to open people were confused, they were angry, they wanted something more, they wanted Disney to prioritize repairs to existing attractions, they wanted their own original idea To build, they wanted the beast kingdom back on the table. Disney acquired Star Wars long before they had even started the Avatar Land project and fans waited for years hoping the project would just be quietly canceled, but it seemed like it was almost a point of pride. In the administration, as if they thought we weren't going to do it, there were so many detractors of the Avatar project from the beginning and backing down now would only prove them right.

It's strange to see a theme park project whose motivating impulse seems to be spite, but that was really the vibe at the time, but they went ahead anyway and Pandora, the world of Avatar, opened in 2017 for Avatar for the Muara Valley, so that here is the canon story of the land of avatar, the land is officially called pandora, the world of avatar, but within its own lore, the location is called the muara valley in case you have somehow forgotten that The plot of the movie Avatar is that an evil company called RDA has moved into Pandora to extract the natural resources and displace the local peaceful aliens called Navi.

The humans who in this dystopian future have already overdeveloped and ruined the earth are now unfairly invading the beautiful navi paradise, so the theme park is set in the future after the events of the GDR movie have long passed. , have already been defeated and now a new company Alpha Centauri Expeditions has moved in to foster a peaceful relationship with the Navi, a sea in which has developed human settlements and is now bringing tourists to share the culture of Pandora, this is truly a great idea because if you look around the earth. You can see that several fixtures and buildings are repurposed military materials, such as signs that have been painted to have something friendlier or reclaimed industrial looking materials that have been transformed into more native looking signs or simple two and all looking buildings. more industrial. or the materials are now being reclaimed by nature, so you might see an old metal door from the military base, but it's being swallowed by vines and moss.

It's never fully explained how the Navi came to reverse their decision about welcoming humans to their planet. Especially after that debacle where we dragged a bunch of space tractors and demolished the tree that is their God, I realized that in this part of the timeline we needed to understand that humans are super nice to the Navi and are interested ​​in learning about their culture. and I guess it's mutually beneficial, I don't know, I feel like normally the benefit of tourists coming to where you live is like an influx of cash, but the Navi live like big tribes where they share everything and their magical home in the forest gives them provides everything.

What do they need even if a seee is giving them a portion of those sweet land tourism dollars what are they spending it on do we incorporate Navi into our culture? Are they buying iPhones and Beats by Dre? The theme park glosses over how this cultural exchange could work both ways, but that's not important. The important thing is that the Navi are totally fine with this, trust us at the Pandaren restaurant, they even have photos all over the wall commemorating the opening of the cantina and there are like diary entries about how well the air conditioning works .

E and the Navi get along well and photos of them building the building together and high-fiving each other and my personal favorite, a photo of a human man and a group of Navi holding large oversized shovels at the opening ceremony, already You know, the beginning of construction is one thing. The Navi would love it. I don't know, this story just has some pretty grim implications, like I thought in the movie. The Navi were a fairly clear representative of the Native Americans. I mean, it was basically just Dances with Wolves, like everyone compared it to Dances with Wolves. and the only ones who didn't compare him to Pocahontas, presumably because they were too young to have seen Dances with Wolves, but anyway, Native Americans, who had that in mind?

It feels a little uncomfortable to buy a beaded hair clip. extensions and lighting up healer's staffs and bongo drums and t-shirts of their naked, muscular bodies build your own bracelet or knotty necklace this feels wrong what are you even ignoring? I had a feeling of something macabre on Pandora and it took a minute to point it out. There is no Navis anywhere. You see them in photos with humans in the cantina. A couple of them appear on the screens and in the attractions there is only one animatronic, but they don't walk. There is no evidence. that are coexisting with humans in this society, obviously that makes sense because they are so determined to be faithful to the source material that they don't want a Navi that isn't ten feet tall, so they can't just put someone 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 the meaning of the characters is a thing in all the Disney parks? in Cars Land you even meet the cars and they drive and stuff, can't they just have someone on stilts so they're like 7 feet tall?

I mean, it's not 10, but it will fool your eyes, especiallyif you are a child. or they could do an indoor encounter where there's a stationary puppet or animatronic Navi, maybe like the legs are a statue and it just moves from the waist up and because it's so high up it doesn't have to look like that. Well, it just has to look good in photos, so the main message of the land according to Animal Kingdom's themes is conservation and in this case, humans coexist with creatures and the Navi, the dominion of the landscape on architecture and the mastery of natural forces. about the human world built intrinsic value of nature transformation to adventure call to personal action these are the values ​​of Animal Kingdom if you repeat them those are the themes of the movie avatar then avatar and the animal kingdom will fit into each other, I think That very, very clearly, but the more you repeat that, the more you really feel the absence of Navi.

There used to be Navi. Here you can see them in the photos. You can see a giant Navi-sized drum kit that they used to use in their drum circle. Used to be here Where did they go? It's as if humans have colonized and taken control. Suddenly, the Alpha Centauri expedition starts to feel a little ominous. They must be making a lot of money selling these premium vacation packages. Pandora Boy, they sure like to frame evidence of their good relationship with Navi and hang it on the restaurant wall so customers can see that you're smiling and welcoming too.

I'm sure tomorrow will be fine. I'll come back packing my bags. to the starting tree, it's good, okay, avatar five immersion, avatar was presented as a fully immersive experience that really puts you in Pandora and let me be clear, Pandora is a really cool theme park, even though the hype in around the opening of this land was very lukewarm. The development team really jumped into it like they had done it all. There are beautiful floating mountains with an incredible perspective of strength and it doesn't seem like they should be possible. There are real and fake waterfalls everywhere.

There are strange fake alien plants perfectly incorporated. with real plants at night, half the things are bioluminescent and even the ground has these spots that light up when you walk on it. It's such a sensory overload of beautiful alien things that you really feel like you're on another planet and this was it. Intentionally, I think they were trying to take a page out of their Harry Potter lands book, his nemesis, by trying to make everything as compelling and in-universe as possible. This also meant that everyone who worked on the land had to do an extra day of training where they would learn. the history of Avatar and Pandora culture and even some of the language.

Do you speak any Navi Celt? He Obama, yes, see you soon. Because? Thanks to all the lands Disney is supposed to look and feel immersive in, but the people who work in them aren't. It's not something like if you go to an ATM in Frontierland to buy a t-shirt, they're not going to ask you how many days ago you arrived in the caravan, I mean, unfortunately, but in Avatar Land you wait for the employees. be a character while they call you, they briefly ask you how you are enjoying Navi's homeland, as if they are afraid that you are some undercover boss about to fire them if they make a mistake and my personal favorite if you make any reference to the avatar of the movie, they correct you and refer to it as the documentary about Jake and Neytiri, which I think is delightful, it's a shame because the designers went so

deep

into the story, but most of the general public won't.

Remember the avatar enough to understand or appreciate most of it, and unless you ask the right cast member who actually remembers their training day on Pandora, you're not likely to pick up much word of mouth unless you see the whole thing. the process. from promotional videos and imaginary interviews that you can find on YouTube before your visit, like I did some things in Pandora that have signs, which I think is a very positive idea, like if you walk in the right direction you can find this pond with these big Oceanic nautilus staring. creatures floating on the surface and there is a warning sign next to it that says not to get too close to the water because if you do they will shoot powerful jets of poison that they will 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 at the bottom of the pond you can see these big two foot long plastic bugs that have been killed by these Nautilus things when they were knocked out of the air. I just thought it was a really nice touch and good storytelling. I live for that kind of thing in theme parks and I think having the warning sign was a very well integrated way of explaining to people what the heck was going on, on the other hand there are some things that don't have signs that should definitely have signs In commitment to the theme of the terrain, it was decided that the attractions should not have big fancy signs on the front and instead they placed these large woven symbols that are meant to symbolically convey what the attraction is and intentionally built Pandora to be a little twisty. and have a bunch of little paths going in different directions with no clear signs of where it is and that was supposed to give you the feeling of authentically exploring an alien planet, which is really cool, but it does. making it really easy to turn around, it also means that when it's really late at night and it's dark and it's been raining, everything is slippery and wet and you're wearing a poncho that obscures your vision and you just run all the way across the kingdom animal because you saw that gnarly train ride on the app, the only ride you haven't taken yet is reduced 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 in for me is it a straight ride down the river or is it the one on the right yeah that's fine thanks it's just not exactly ideal that they don't have a sign clearly labeling is that big right, the big woven thing I like no, it's okay, it's even more ridiculous because even though the riots don't have signs saying what they are called, they still have the standard Disney park signs, there are little LED indicators of the waiting time.

Which of course they have it would be chaos if people had to ask every time they wanted to know how long the wait was but if they are going to have that and break the theme with the big metal pole and the LED sign with a number on it, would they? why can't they just have some kind of discreet sign that's easy to read that says what attraction you're seeing? Finally, my favorite part of Pandora's commitment to immersion, when you buy something at a Disney park, you get a plastic Disney. Park shopping bag, they change the design every few years, but it's uniform across all the parks, but Pandora wants to be immersive, so if you buy something at Pandora, you get this plastic bag that says Pandora, like in Avatar Avatar 6ik me Maya, let's get into the journey. slight, if the ticket is the big trip on this earth, the e-ticket, as this trip is called, can reach a weight of five hours on a given day and if you go in the morning and there is a short line, it is still like an hour long line, luckily on this trip we had fast passes because the story of this trip is that you will participate in ikan Amaya's coming of age ceremony, the Navi, in which you will ride in the back of an e Kron. o Banshee or dragon, it's just a dragon in the story of this journey, you are not a Navi, you are a human tourist visiting Alpha Centauri expeditions and they are going to match your brain with an existing avatar they have in the laboratory and then you you will ride a link bike and they will connect your brain to the body of this avatar and the avatar is already in the electronic cron and once you get there a Navi guide will guide you around Pandora so you can prove yourself.

As a Navi warrior, you may have noticed that this idea is a bit high concept, especially for young children visiting a theme park who may have been born after 2009 and have never seen Avatar or for adults who saw Avatar only once in 2009. and they just remember. They seem to realize this because when you go to the attraction you have not one but two pre-show rooms and in the first one you see a video where a man greets you and explains the history of the climb you are doing. You will have the opportunity to undertake an incredible Navi rite of passage, so what you are going to do is be managed by something called an avatar.

You guys be ready to get your avatar. First we have to scan them for Pandora compared to this huge company called. the RDA created a lot of damage in the area through their bad mining practices thanks to a special link chair, your lie will be able to control that avenue and we are here in the valley of war studying the mansion, they were created by mixing human DNA and Navi DNA The Navi have been riding on the backs of banshees since their earliest history. We need to find a compatible match of their genetic material with the genetic material of one of the avatar bodies we already have.

We need to find each of you in Avatar 2, these things are called avatars, then you go into the second pre-show room and watch a movie where a woman explains the story of the trip to you and tells you everything a second time before we send you to a link chamber. Let's see this article by Dr. Ogden who runs the program, the way you will be able to fly is by linking to an avatar, you establish a link using the mighty Scion again, the human driver is connected to an adapter, once the link is made your avatar will be affected , this ride is a motion simulator ride that I usually hate and find boring, but I actually really like this ride and I think it's because the ride system is very cleverly executed.

I don't want to go too

deep

into it in case you want to write it down and believe. That magic is real, but if you've ever been to a ride at Epcot called Sauron Around the World, you can see pretty clearly on that ride what the ride system is, it's not really disguised so it's basically the same attraction system, only it is disguised. much better, which makes the execution much better, yes, I went into this ride prepared to hate bitterly because I hate motion simulators, but I actually really liked it. I even waited 90 minutes to rewrite this and I like not making encumbrances.

And of course, if it had been a five-hour line, I wouldn't have done it. I would have preferred to just lie face down on the pavement and let my dreams take me to Pandora, but a 90-minute line is a pretty big concession on my part and I happily did so. I like the smells they chose to represent Pandora. I like that you can feel Banshee breathing. I like the quiet moment where you stop in the crystal caverns and they spray mist basically directly into your eyeballs throughout the entire experience. I like the part where your Navi guide shouts save aku, which they explained to you in the pre-show means rising to the challenge, however, I have to say, when you think about it, this story is pretty funny.

I mean, think about it. I 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 to an avatar that's already on the back of any cross, so I guess. the people who work for this company went out and bungee-tied a bunch of flexible avatar bodies to these Banshee like you think you're having this transcendent spiritual experience with this band and then you find out they're just doing a memorized route from the day in and You spend the day as a pony at summer camp, then your session ends and the avatar's body on your back becomes limp and limp again and then you take a 15-minute snack while waiting for the next tourist to come online.

Also remember that thing. I was talking about the implications of this land on a meta level with the artisanal commercialization of the sacred forms of Navi. I like that it is explained that anemia is this sacred rite of passage within the Navi culture, as the young Navi warriors probably trained their entire lives. to be able to participate in this dangerous and spiritually significant ritual and now you're just some guy from Florida who paid to come and do this for an afternoon for fun, like it was a zip line excursion on a cruise to the Bahamas, what a fun topic!

In fact, this Sigourney Weaver has such a relaxing voice because she actually provided the voice for one of the computer system voices you hear when you're waiting in line first at Star Tours and her character's name, Dr. Jackie Ogden is in honor of a real person, dr. Jacqueline Ogden, who was vice president of Animal Kingdom for a time, is a psychologist and her focus was developing educational and conservation programs for the park and I think it's really cool that they gave hermade a tribute and that's it, it's just fun. In fact, they only know some deep trivia about theme parks that none of you probably care about.

Avatar 7 Navi River Journey Bad, okay, sorry, no, let me explain, Light of Passing is the great journey in Pandora and Navi River Journey is the least good, it's the most humble journey, it doesn't try to be as good, it's more small, less exciting, less ambitious, but it's still new and it's kind of a consolation prize for people who don't want to wait five hours for a passenger flight, so it can still be like a 40-hour wait. 90 minutes, we wrote it as I mentioned just before closing time so we didn't have to wait, we basically walked which is actually good news because I'd rather swim through the infested waters of the Cass Pavan River myself than wait 90 minutes for this experience, true, it smells like bromine like the Irish Caribbean, but it smells like Caribbean fatigue and natural gas, yeah, like someone left the stove on and it will just explode despite the pretty negative comments when it was opened.

In fact, what I'm most excited about about this attraction is a dark attraction, which basically means an attraction covered in scenes from shows that convey some type of traditionally black-lit story. I love some dark rides, they are my favorite type of ride. Oh, I'm going to be so cool. and I heard this one was slow, dumb, boring, disappointing and bad, but I didn't believe it. I assumed all the naysayers were just Jeavons who were mad because it wasn't a roller coaster or something like, oh, get it, it's a boat. ride and don't get splashed. I'm so sorry, no one can appreciate the quiet beauty anymore and it turns out it's not a very good trip, it's very boring and very short and I don't mind being bored.

I write. the Carousel of Progress every time I'm in Florida, sometimes twice in one day, the story of the Navi River trip is that you sit in a woven boat and slowly sail down the river, every now and then you see a screen against a back wall with Navi running or the animals running past circle too fast to look convincing, you hear distant singing and then you reach the SOG navi shaman who is singing, you turn a corner and realize you're back in the charging station and the ride is over, oh right, what I'm trying to say is that this right has no story. which is strange for a dark ride, but it's not necessarily a bad thing, since you can have some rides that have more to do with conveying atmosphere than a linear narrative.

The thing is, this ride is just a bunch of jungle landscapes with nothing in it, you boat through the lush stuff. plant life, some of which occasionally glow, you'll see one of those spinning things from the movie spinning around or one of those flying jellyfish depicted taking a rubber jellyfish and putting it on the wire and moving it around occasionally, there are no animatronics. except for the song shaman at the end and she is possibly the best animatronic they have ever made, she is huge and moves a lot and looks like she is alive, her movements are very fluid, but she is also the only one who was supposedly originally this ride .

It's supposed to be more like Pirates of the Caribbean with small cutscenes and dozens of Navi animatronics and maybe animatronic creatures too, but thanks to time constraints and course budget cuts, they cut it down to one huge animatronic if you've ever mounted on Pirates of the Caribbean. Caribbean, you might remember that when the journey starts you're going through these empty, dripping pirate caves and occasionally you'll see a painting of some skeletons on a beach or something, then you turn a corner and you're in this amazing huge ship battle. and then you enter the city and there are so many pirates and they move, no the river ride is like you were riding in Pirates of the Caribbean, but it moved at half speed and there were no falls and it was just cave scenes and there was the half skeletons and the crab on the beach waving its claws is just a rubber crab that's tied to a rope and sometimes it moves and then you get to the end and there's this incredibly awesome pirate animatronic and it's not from any of the movies and He speaks a made up language so you have no idea what he's saying and then he finishes right.

I really want to like the trip down the Navi River, the bioluminescence is beautiful, but they're really no more beautiful than the ones outside. that you don't have to wait in line to see and the jungle just straight up doesn't have that compelling forced perspective that Disney attractions have to suggest depth, you just feel like you're on a narrow boat going down a narrow hallway with maybe three feet of plants on each side, the projections and screens look good, like they have good sharp image quality and do that layered screen thing to suggest depth, but there is still no technology that is adequate enough to deceive. they make the human eye think that something on a screen is something tangible in front of them oh yeah, maybe one day, but not yet, right now it feels like a sad shortcut, there are some interesting effects, like this canopy of leaves in the ceiling. and in one part the leaves are screens, so they show the bottom of a frog jumping on top of the leaf and when the projection of the frog's silhouette moves, the leaf moves up and down as if it really had the frog on top, I mean.

That's really cool, but it's a lot less cool when I tell you that at that moment that's the only thing happening on the trip. I'm also really confused as to why, if it's a budget issue, they didn't use the jungle setting to their advantage. like they could use the fact that their leaves are everywhere and just build themselves as part of a moving animal and put it half hidden behind some leaves, which would add a lot of mystique and an interest: where am I? Where I am? The panther cat went where. It was like this? They could just build it like the furry head of this Vana tour and have it lurking behind the leaves and maybe it's so simple that the head just moves from side to side to show that it's looking at you, like maybe the ears move or something like that.

The only thing I really appreciate about this ride is the very repetitive and catchy song. I'm assuming WA is called ma because that's most of the lyrics, all the lyrics are in Navi, but luckily someone on the aforementioned still-active fan forums has translated it. We united, oh great mother wood elf, we live well. Oh, what respect, Navi, look at the wood elf anyway. I guess the bright side is that they built this trip so it seems like it's a good foundation and maybe one day when they have the money they'll go in. and add a bunch more figures and it'll become one hell of a ride maybe they'll make it one day but that's also what we said about the Beastly Kingdom South Pole Oh big joys big jellies boom Avatar 8 various 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 that takes place every hour in one of Pandora's outdoor patios. They have an interactive drum circle with a seating area around it as a permanent feature of this area, at all times of the day. little kids can run around and play these synthesized drums at show time every hour, this trio of happy smiling people with microphones come out cheering and singing and start playing these drums, they are human but they are dressed like it's Burning Man to broadcast that this is some kind of tribal experience that they sing, which means welcome, then they play a bunch of drums, they talked about how important drumming is to the Navi and then they play some more like at the midpoint of the show, we They say the purpose of our drums and cheers. is to make enough noise to get the attention of the Banshees, the floating mountains above our head have a speaker installed so you can hear the screeching of the Banshees coming from up there and then the presenters are like we did and then the show ends.

The original version of the Navi Drum Ceremony Show lasted about 15 minutes, was very poorly received and criticized for being boring and confusing. It was almost immediately suspended for a break and when it came back it was about five minutes shorter and reportedly dumb. I watched the original show on YouTube and mainly played long stretches of drums punctuated by speaking in Na'vi and occasionally asking the audience if they feel the connection, so the new version of the show is objectively an improvement and pretty much the same, the artists They are great, they are giving their grain of sand. everything, but I honestly don't know what Disney was thinking having this show every hour, it's not very engaging and I would designate it as in real danger of being phased out entirely in the next two years and then you'll just have these drums that kids can play and people will wonder why they are there and that is why I was so determined to see them on this trip and I was very afraid because the day I was supposed to see it it started raining heavily and this show can't happen in the rain so I was in the position of literally sitting on a cold, wet bench, curled up in my poncho, waiting for the rain to stop and waiting for some sign that they were going to resume the drum ceremony schedule, I'll ask the man. if the drum show is happening oh no, it seems like you are delivering to God, yes, no, here with enthusiasm, sir, yes of course, we are going to do the drum show, yes, definitely, what is happening, he said, as it was damp and miserable when the artists initially arrived.

There wasn't a crowd gathered out there and you could see me sitting in the front row clearly waiting for this show and recording it and watching it intently, so the performers were keeping eye contact with me, but that was a huge improvement to the experience. I almost felt like it was just for me and when it got to the interactive part they brought me a pumpkin to shake. Another varied offering is Navi face paint, which I thought was fun and before my trip I thought it was. I'm totally going to get it right, it's time for the big reveal, done, yeah, like when you're there in the heat and humidity of Florida, it starts to sound like torture and you're also very aware that very quickly your face will melt into retrospective.

It probably would have made it a lot more fun and I should have tried it during my time there. I didn't see a single person wearing Navi face paint. Finally, there are several Pandora-exclusive soda options, and first of all, they're uniformly strange. Pangu Pangu, the drinks counter repurposed from a decommissioned RDA robot attack suit von goo is the Na'vi word for party, and to my delight, I discovered that when Pandora debuted they had a Pangu cast that it is real. Hong Goop's alcohol menu consists mainly of slushies and run slushies. I ordered the rum slushie and the girl behind the counter made it and then she gave it to me and then she said 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 I just poured 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 shots and they come with shiny pods. I don't know if they were delicious or if it was too hot, but I give it a four star rating or as Navi would say, for the snot on the bumps, yes, so we headed to the Satu Lee canteen, which means traditional canteen and of course Therefore, its signature dish is a tule bowl, which means inheritance.

In the bowl, you pick a protein, you pick a base and you pick a topping and then they put boba on top to make it look alien. I got the tofu, which was basically like you can make tater tots with tofu and I loved five of them. five snot, ten hits, yeah, same for dessert, which was basically a cheesecake, but it looks like some kind of mysterious blue alien dome. I wish all my desserts looked like this, since it's a cheeseburger pod, it's made from some kind of alien cheeseburger, oh okay, but one of those halves in your mouth is the whole thing tell me how to eat it whole yeah , eat it all at once or it's not authentic okay yes, are you glad you ate it? no it actually tastes like a cheeseburger and I wish the bun itself tasted like Rumble dude come on it was just some kind of bun it's just bread and a cheeseburger so it's a cheeseburger you just talk with peace of mind.

The final offering is food from the gift shop. I was surprised by the amount of things. it was on sale and i also figured they don't sell much expedition trail mix rock candy and doron tree spores coconut brownie bites rice krispies marbled pod my friend Kirsten got these disgusting gummies that look like larvae usual Navi gift from an imma Text them your birthday, I mean, they tasted good, but the experience of eating larvae put me off a little. I don't like the texture, it feels like a slug and looks like a slug. Oh, and I finally brought this bad boy.

Back to me, it's avatar flavored popcorn and I haven't tried it yet.I hope it's okay to eat them. It's been about a month since my trip. I don't see an expiration date. Uh oh, this is overdue. Hmm, do it for. Jenny's view is mainly because she was expired, that was disgusting but she didn't taste good either. I thought one of the almonds was okay to eat if I can get to one. I like how even the blue almonds died. try this, yes almonds are good, I mean the party about almond is the almond flavor and then it just has this gross caramel layer on it, so I guess they just like almonds and this is a failed product, okay, let's continue with avatar 9. merchandising, like I said, this land was not subtle.

I made it in response to Wizarding World so they went crazy with the merch and it's really weird, all my favorite Avatar Thanet or EXA characters peed on Lyon and Trix. Well, put this, it even reminds you of Pandora, it just looks like it. like an ugly line ok this is just a lava lamp I noticed there were a lot of people looking at things in the gift shop but there was never a line at the cash registers basically there is a predictable disconnect between the public and Avatar where people remember it and have vague positive feelings towards it, but they're actually at the theme park because it's a cool theme park and it's also new and exciting, not because they love Avatar enough to want high-end collectibles, in fact, I'd go so far as to .

I'm guessing souvenir sales at Pandora are going to drop more and more the longer it's open. I imagine the biggest value of Pandora Merch is that the Avatar theme park is still really new and people have heard about it, but a lot. of people haven't had a chance to go yet, so if you're using products from it, it's a good conversation starter and it's also a good way to convince people when the land of avatars is no longer new, it's people less likely to go, oh. You've been to that avatar theme park, what was that like?

And at that point, you would expect the value of the product to drop sharply, in contrast to franchises like Harry Potter or Star Wars, where people really loved the intellectual property and wanted memorabilia. It was removed from the context of the theme park, but I still bought some Pandora products while I was there, including the sick wearables I have now. I need to get some that I can't do with our diet. I have in the tradition of Disney Parks Hats, which generally take the form of caps or headbands with Mickey Mouse ears. Pandora offers the Navi headband with ears and a tribal-looking headdress and you can complete the look with your new Navi tail.

I thought they were really fun and immediately had to buy them. and wear them and then as I walked through the park I slowly realized that there wasn't a single soul wearing them like that, it was really extravagant. What I was wearing is Disney World, the people who were actively wearing Mickey Mouse ears were throwing out mocking questions. look at my ears Navi this is how not in the avatar cultural consciousness it's like I was walking in the animal kingdom and people were looking at my head and thinking why does it have ears. I bought this woven ball from Navi.

I just thought it was the funniest thing. in the gift shop it's just a rubber ball with fake fabric around it. I put it in my carry-on bag to fly home naïve to the fact that in an x-ray scan at an airport, a dense rubber ball like this will appear on the screen looking exactly like a big cartoon bomb, so I kind of enjoyed it. TSA checking my entire bag, laughing at me when he found this and then when he tried it. to ask what it was just didn't have an explanation for him. I also bought this Navi woven pen which was fun for me for the same reason that the ball was also my favorite souvenir and I speculate that I may have been the first person to buy it. this memory this is a Navi translator I really got a lot of use out of this on the trip not because I could really use it to translate anything in a useful context but because I liked to irritate my friends by learning the vocabulary words and trying to include them in my conversations this it's a naughty word for indentation in the background uh no it's not okay, it's okay, the starter pack when you receive it, the translator comes with 12 language cards, but you can buy booster packs where you can get eight new words in one time for seven dollars when I say that price out loud, in hindsight I feel a little mortified at how many of these cards I've seen later, oh Jenny, this is Jenny and she like a lot of hobby cars, huh, you got any duplicate?

I have about five, well, I said something else for posterity, well, now that I know, no. I bet you guys are pretty good at saying it. So at just under $1 per word, mastering Navi is a very expensive investment, but who can argue? the usefulness of learning to say words like that does it mean bladder polyp Finally, of course, I have to mention the premium product experiences on Pandora. The first is this very expensive plastic puppet that you can buy that comes with a full adoption ceremony. Oh no, wild beasts, what? Is the price ok for the Banshees and the 65ft tax and then the purchase is done separately?

It's okay, it doesn't bite. Oh no, despite the ninth dollar price, I think this is probably the most popular thing you can buy on Pandora. They are just two sticky ones for my taste. The next price is $80 to create an avatar experience where you can get an avatar toy that looks like you. It's even less worth the price in my opinion, but I thought it was fun 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 making it was on lunch break and would return in an hour, but due to Pandora's commitment to immersive storytelling, he couldn't.

Don't just tell me the guy was having lunch and she couldn't do it now; It's the thought that counts, but I appreciate the implication that in the future no one takes lunch breaks that would have shattered the illusion, so when I returned the technician finished calibrating the growing chambers and I was ready to go. First I want to say what this experience is not. It's not something where they scan your face and make a 3D model and then 3D print it on a toy. It's also not something where they take a photo of your face and then print it on a blank toy head.

It's funny because in 2018 they could do any of those things and those types of things usually cost around $80 and you pay mostly. For the cast member experience and performance, which lasts about five minutes, you sit in an important-looking chair, press a bunch of buttons on a tablet, then pretend to talk to someone through their headphones, and then put down this scanner bright. device and start waving it around your face. He explains that this device not only does a 3D scan of your face, but also vacuums up genetic material from your face to grow your avatar. The first red flag in this process is what I said. he was scanning my face, oh I should take off my hat and then he said no you don't need to so the screens in front of you first show an image that the scanning device took of your face at some point and then show a 3D model. from a human head that objectively looks nothing like yours, finally shows your avatar face, which looks nothing like either of the previous two images.

You could tell they agreed it was ugly and then they handed you an iPad so you can choose the hair in your eyes and the stripe pattern you want on your na vi's face, then they laid you off for 45 minutes and basically in that time someone in a back room takes pieces of Navi and puts them together at the end. They like it so it fits just the hip fit you wanted and 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 times during the day during the toy making experience and during the pre-show walkthrough there were narrative beats where there was supposed to be an avatar that someone was matching to me and in both instances there was some sort of error sinister in the systems where it seemed like something had gone very wrong wait, we are investigating delays with the genetic matching system Billy Oh No, okay, sorry, there's my avatar, my avatar is wrong, it melted, my avatar melted .

Anyway, now I have this, I don't know, love, so that was my trip to Pandora, the world of Avatar, my best vision of all this is that if Disney wanted an intellectual property that they could acquire to make a theme park. That loosely fit with its animal theme and was popular with both kids and Millennials as a franchise and would sell a lot of Pokémon merchandise. They should have made Pokémon and I know Universal has the rights to the Nintendo theme park, but they didn't back then. Although I maintain that Avatar is a very strange concept for a theme park, I think they executed it as well as they could, except for the Navi River ride.

I don't just like Pandora, I love Pandora, it turned Animal Kingdom into a half. -day park: for me, at least as a two-day park, it has a great atmosphere. I kept wanting to be there not even for the attractions, but simply to exist in the environment. I love food. I love comically specific merchandise. I love it. the simulator ride I love how serious the whole experience is, it's one of my favorite moments of the entire trip. I was in the sat-Lea canteen and was walking back to my table with my satu Lea Bowles. I passed a boy who was looking up.

Open-mouthed at one of the photographs of Navi at the opening ceremony with the humans, he seemed completely amazed by what he had seen and then turned to his father and said, "Dad, there's a movie and it illustrates the strange duality of the Pandora Experience, oh I almost forgot to talk about my favorite thing in Pandora on the way to the land of avatars You see this gigantic Aryan capsule, if you know the deep lore of Pandora like I do, you know what this capsule is. allowing humans to breathe in the Melara Valley. In the documentary they established that the atmosphere in Pandora is toxic to humans, but this large alien capsule intermittently spits out steam that purifies the air and makes it safe for humans to breathe. capsule is the first thing you see and it is such a strange accessory, it is large, loud, sinister looking and objectively very ugly throughout the land of avatar You see the recurring motif of this pod There are what appear to be smaller seedlings growing. in the flower pots at the gift shop.

You can buy your own rice krispies pot. you can order a rum slushie at pong boo coupon, they drop a shiny pod in your drink. I love the pod while I was visiting. I rubbed the side of the pod, he grunted approval at it and pulsed brightly. He goes to rub the sheath, rub harder. Working some water that dripped directly into my ear, he forced me to collect my own small pod specimen and take it back to my homeland. I must take care of it until it is strong and then plant it in the ground. I was very torn doing this. video because theme parks are my favorite topic to talk about, but what I want more than anything is to get a press pass for the press day they inevitably have for Star Wars Land because I don't want to go to opening day and be literally trampled by crowds and I feel like this video is exactly how you make sure that doesn't happen by being judgmental and making jokes and stuff and getting hypnotized by an alien capsule.