Chalk and Cheese Chronicles

Star Tours: Waiting You are

June 3rd, 2011 was a big day in Star Wars history. Any self-respecting Star Wars fan knows that this was the official grand reopening of Disneyland's Star Tours, the Adventures Continue.

(Personally, I think the grand opening ought to have been May the 4th, but I'm only the mother of Star Wars fans, what do I know?)

In the predawn hours of June the 3rd, the most dedicated and crazed among Star Wars fans crawled out of bed and waited at the Disneyland main gates for the park to open. Check-in for the ride was said to be at 4:30am, with the most eager of fans arriving around 2:30am!

At 10:30am, some eight hours after the first fans had arrived on the scene, Star Tours still had not opened to the public. That's a whole lot of waiting around. That's practically the flight time between the Bay Area to Paris!

So who are these fans at the very front of the Star Tours line? Let's take a peek. Remember, while you were sleeping, they were making their move to the front of the line. Now that's dedication!

 

Behind the gang of early risers, stood thousands of would-be riders. The queue snaked past the Plaza Inn and then doubled back toward Sleeping Beauty's Castle and then criss-crossed into a mess of a line through the roundabout at which point I stopped a cast member and asked about the wait. "Four hours, " he said. Holy cow.

I looked at the line to size up the people but there were few padawans and mostly 30- and 40-somethings whom I took to be lifelong Star Wars fans. I did see a couple of grandmotherly types, but I bet they didn't realize they were standing in a four hour long line!

Which is worse/better, waiting eight hours to be at the front of the line or waiting four hours (in the sun) at the back of the line?

Here's the line at about the four hour mark. These dauntless folks were a model of stamina. I don't know how they did it.

 

In the days following the grand opening, the wait time for Star Tours has gone down considerably, with my Mouse Wait app putting today's wait time at 135 minutes. That's quite an improvement, but will probably hold steady for the duration of the summer.

Did you stand in line for Star Tours? Was it worth it?

 

Original post to Chalk and Cheese Chronicles.  

Shhh, I rode Star Tours three times during a preview event and my wait time was four... minutes. More on Star Tours coming later this week.

 

 

 

The Kid in the Star Wars Shirt

Quick, spot the kid in the Star Wars shirt! At any given date and time, at any given location, there will always be at least one kid in a Star Wars shirt. A boy, usually. If there are two boys wearing Star Wars shirts, they will stop and stare at each other's shirts. Sometimes, one boy will unzip his sweatshirt and stretch out the bottom of his shirt so that the entire Star Wars graphic can be seen. Then one of the boys might mention Anakin. It will go something like this, "Anakin Skywalker turned to the dark side of the force." Then each boy will assume the light saber position and start making light saber sounds.

Wearing a Star Wars shirt is like belonging to an exclusive club. It's an invitation to a conversation or better, a light saber duel. You like Star Wars, I like Star Wars. Let's be friends. It's the badge of the 3 to 10-year-old Star Wars groupie. Is that a Star Wars mini fig shirt you've got on there? Well, I've got a Y-Wing at home!

My boys might love Star Wars, but I'm not a big fan of those shirts. I'd rather see my boys dressed in colorful, cheerful clothes, Mini Boden style. But it's a losing battle. Given the choice, my boys would wear a Star Wars shirt every day. I hate the black shirts with the busy Star Wars graphics. It looks like graffiti to me. The Target and Old Navy version are barely tolerable. The Lego Star Wars shirts are better because at least they tie into the act of building Legos. If I had to choose, I'd say the Star Wars shirts I picked up at H&M are my favorite.

Sorry, Virginia, There is No Lightsaber

It would have been better if I'd told him there was no Santa Claus.

He teared up, sunk into a brief melancholy, his face full of disbelief. As I watched my son, I had a flashback to that devastating day when I'd found out there was no Santa Claus. I knew how he felt.

How does one explain to a child that the DK Star Wars Visual Dictionary references a work of fiction, that the lightsabers referenced within are the result of special effects? Sure, some of the ideas in Star Wars are based on hard science, but most of it stretches the truth as to what science can actually do. It's science fiction, after all.

Recently, we were in the audience at Foothill college's annual Physics Show. We had to flee midway through the show because my two little scientists were not getting along, so when we got home, I gave them a guilt trip made up a story about how, by leaving, we'd missed out on a demo of lightsaber physics. There really was no such demo, but I wanted my Star Wars obsessed boys to think they'd missed something great.

My boys think that somewhere out there, lightsabers are real. They do realize that to enter the world of Star Wars is to enter the world of make believe, but when kids yearn for something so much, they push aside all logic and believe what they want to believe. Lightsabers are real. Santa Claus is real. Elf on the Shelf is real, sort of. Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker? Not real, but lightsabers are something that could be built. It certainly is a world of mixed up realities over at our house.

To my kids, lightsabers are the coolest thing ever. We started out with pool noodles and small inflatable party favor lightsabers. Then this past autumn, we finally acquiesced and bought our now 5-year-old boys, a bunch of heavy duty toy lightsabers. But I think, at the back of their minds, these toy lightsabers were just a way to a means, that somehow the future would bring the coveted real lightsaber, like the ones wielded in the Star Wars movies.

Jedi Training Academy: Trading Mouse Ears for Lightsabers

Mickey Mouse has delighted millions of children for generations. He and his endearing ears are iconic to Disneyland.

He is cute.

Yet for all the things Mickey Mouse represents, to my boys this beloved character is more defined by what he is not.

He is NOT Luke.

He is NOT Anakin.

He is NOT Darth.

He is NOT a guy with a lightsaber.

When we visited Disneyland last month, my boys blew past the Mickey this and the Mickey that. They poo poo'd anything with a princess on it. They pronounced the Winnie the Pooh ride as "for babies." The only other character at Disneyland to give them pause was good old Buzz Lightyear and his futuristic zapper. They love Buzz, but they love and fear Darth.

This year, in 2009, it's all about Star Wars.

My boys are obsessed. It began small, in preschool, then quickly blossomed into a full-blown obsession.

I don't fuel the obsession by showing them Star Wars or Clone Wars movies. But I do indulge them with the occasional Star Wars Lego set or Star Wars action figure...oh, and I might have shown them a You Tube video (or ten!) of children at the Disneyland Jedi Training Academy.

Star Wars, 24/7

Tears, again. A boy down, howling in pain.

He hit me in the eye!

By accident, Mom!

And so it goes, this ritual of of confiscating pool noodles come lightsabers because it always ends in a bash-your-brother brawl.

We have rules, of course. No hitting in the face. Stop when your brother says stop. The promises flow. Sure, we'll be careful. Sure, we'll not hurt each other. But they can't help themselves, these 4-year-old Jedi warriors of mine. Whack! It always ends in tears.

I made a mistake. I gave into the Star Wars thing, allowing my thrilled husband to introduce our boys to their first Star Wars film. Star Wars is all the rage among the preschool boys at our school. Kohls, the moms explained, has Star Wars tshirts on sale for seven dollars! I bought two. At Christmas, my boys unwrapped two menacing looking lightsabers which soon after mysteriously disappeared and have never been seen again. Even the grandparents the Easter Bunny caught wind of the Star Wars craze and left a couple of Yodas and R2D2s in my children's Easter basket.

A movie, a tshirt, a yoda and whoosh, my boys left behind all their former interests. Cheese Boy's extensive dinosaur collection sits untouched. Chalk Boy's Legos lay in an abandoned pile. It's as if someone tapped them with a lightsaber and transported them into another dimension, their favorite toys left behind. All my boys want to do is play Star Wars, 24/7.

The standard greeting between my boys and their peers goes something like this: PEW PEW PEW and then they make guns with their fingers and pretend to engage in imaginary battle. My boys even do this when out in public with me. PEW PEW PEW (at Target), PEW PEW PEW (at Starbucks). Stop it, not here, I say sternly. One of my boys announced that his gun finger is sore from overuse. Oh, honey, give it a rest and soon your gun finger will be back in action, don't worry.

My boys are intoxicted by the Star Wars thing. I feel like I don't know which way to go with this; on one hand, a little imaginary play is age appropriate and good; on the other hand, it tends to escalate into a inappropriate levels of brother on brother violence. And they've learned all sorts of terms for killing and maiming each other which I find more than a little unsettling. They also fight over who has to be the bad guy. Bad guy = guy who gets clobbered. Can't you just both be Yoda?

We decided to put the brakes on showing them any more Star Wars films, figuring the first film provided enough material to draw on for a very long time. This is so different from how I've approached their interests in the past. When my son loved whales, we read books on whales, visited aquariums, collected whale toys, and watched whale videos. It was Whale Immersion 101. But Star Wars? I think it's enough for now. I won't be buying them any more Star Wars themed anything. I'm already dreading Halloween. Sorry, guys, they only had the Yoda costumes in stock!