Springing a Show on You

While no one person can subscribe to every streaming service out there, it seems to me like most of my friends have Amazon Prime, presumably because it kinda-sorta feels "free," included with shipping from the Amazon website. But if it happens that you don't have Amazon Prime, then there is a segment of their streaming content you can access for free: the ad-supported Freevee. This walled garden within a walled garden has its own content, where you must watch the commercials even if you pay for Amazon Prime. Diabolical.

But I have found at least one reason to dip a figurative toe in Freevee: the limited TV series Sprung. Set in 2020, at the onset of Covid-19, Sprung is a sitcom centered on three felons released early from their sentences in an effort to curb prison outbreaks. Rooster invites the Jack and Gloria to come live with him and his mother Barb as they try to get back on their feet. Jack wants to straighten up and reenter society, but the struggle to get by -- especially in the pandemic -- is too real, and the skills he learned in prison too useful. So he resolves only to steal from people who actually deserve it, and his new roommates become his enabling crew.

That may not sound like a comedy to you. But then consider that Sprung is the brainchild of Greg Garcia, the creator of (among other things) My Name Is Earl and Raising Hope. Sprung is a distinctive blend of both, featuring the light moral themes of the former, and key cast members from the latter. Garret Dillahunt and Martha Plimpton anchored Raising Hope, and now they do the same here on Sprung, joined by Shakira Barrera and Phillip Garcia. All four are hilarious, as are the supporting cast members who fill out the wacky world of Sprung.

The show is both fun and funny, and while that would be enough, it also offers up its own form of "prestige television" in a serialized storyline that involves planning one big heist. And over the course of the 9-episode season (sort of 10, with the final episode being double-length), that story is told in its entirety. Sprung seems to be built as this one-off, serving a complete story with resolution for all the major characters. While it's not rare for dramas to be like this, I'm hard-pressed to think of many comedies that have taken this limited approach to television. It's refreshing and rewarding.

If you've liked any of Greg Garcia's previous shows, you will like this -- it's that simple. If you're unfamiliar with him, but you think you'd enjoy Martha Plimpton hamming it up, you should definitely check it out. And yes, if your TV queue is as long as mine, I know you don't need any more recommendations, but this one will slot in at only about 5 hours total (not counting those commercials you can't avoid or skip). Then you'll be done -- and I'd wager, entertained.

I give Sprung a B+. Amid so many serious "must watch" shows right now, I found it pure fun.

Voyager Flashback: Unforgettable

Actress Virginia Madsen isn't someone most people would say is on the Hollywood "A List." Still, she's a star many audience members know, particularly after her role in indie darling Sideways. But she was apparently a "big get" even before that, judging by her "Special appearance by" credit in the fourth season episode of Star Trek: Voyager, "Unforgettable."

When Voyager responds to an alien distress signal, they find a woman who already knows the entire crew. Memories of her species vanish from the minds of other life forms, and that's exactly what happened after the weeks she spent with Voyager already. Now she's seeking asylum from her own people... and hoping to rekindle the romance she claims to have had with Chakotay.

There's a lot of hand waving and heavy lifting to get this story off the ground. I suppose the "why" and "how" of the Ramuran aliens isn't really important: how every other species forgets them, why even technology is affected, what exactly people think they were doing in any missing time when a Ramuran drops out of their memories, and so forth. But it's somewhat harder to overlook the obvious things you might try to overcome such a situation: writing things down physically (which happens at the end of the episode), getting tattooed like Memento (if you really care deeply enough), hiding recordings of your own voice, and so forth.

Assuming you can just let all of that go and "enjoy the ride," this episode still has its hits and misses. The acting is good. Director Andrew Robinson (Garak from Deep Space Nine) is definitely focused on his two leads, Robert Beltran and Virginia Madsen, doing his best to make their relationship compelling and trying to breeze by the sci-fi trappings. Not much time is spent on her character, Kellin, trying to convince people to believe her story; it's accepted in pretty short order. What follows is then a pretty interesting variation on a love story: it's not so much about Chakotay falling in love as it is about Kellin convincing him to fall in love again.

But in a way, that's where the episode ends up a bit flat. The moment we hear about a technology that wipes the memories of Ramuran "runaways," we know where this story is going. Sure enough, the final act sees Chakotay trying to convince Kellin to fall in love a second time, just as she had to convince him. Of course, for the sake of episodic television, that's not going to work. But objectively, this seems to mean that Chakotay just isn't as convincing as Kellin is. He doesn't want the relationship as badly, isn't as resourceful or persuasive, isn't as invested. And if we sense, at some level, that he isn't fully invested, why should we be? (Particularly when, after all is said and done, this is kind of like one of those time travel stories where no one even remembers that any of this happened.)

As I said, though, the performances are committed -- and that extends to little moments for the rest of the regular cast as well. Paris and Kim banter about the latter's crush on Seven of Nine. Tuvok gets in a good Vulcan-style joke about Neelix's food. Seven and Kim have a nice scene awkwardly discussing the customs of courtship. And while it wouldn't be my choice to give Neelix the last (dramatic) word on love, Ethan Phillips does a lovely job with the episode's closing monologue. (I suppose Neelix is the one character on the show who to this point has been in a long-term romance, so maybe it's not that weird.)

Other observations:

• Kellin says that during her first (forgotten) stay on Voyager, she was quite fond of Neelix's cooking. Everyone should immediately doubt her entire story at that point.
  

• This is the first Voyager episode with no B'Elanna at all; Roxann Dawson was out on her maternity leave.

• This episode got me thinking about memory more generally. My memory was that when Seven of Nine was written onto Voyager, the character immediately took over the series. Here, near the end of the fourth season, that hasn't yet proven to be the case. Seven is a background character most of the time, and the fact that other characters feel under-serviced by the writers doesn't really have anything to do with the fact that there are "too many Seven of Nine episodes." (There aren't.) We'll see if that changes in season five.

It's the easy quip, but "Unforgettable" ultimately feels pretty forgettable to me. I give it a C+.

Prodigy: Masquerade

I'm several weeks behind in posting (though not in watching) Star Trek: Prodigy, so let me backtrack to look at the episode "Masquerade."

The Protostar crew is trapped on a planet in the Neutral Zone. As they try to evade Romulan pursuers and face possible destruction by the Dauntless, Dal encounters a strange scientist who answers the question of his origins -- kicking off a crisis of identity.

This episode felt fast-paced, even for Prodigy. In a couple of places, I was a little disappointed in just how quickly it breezed through things -- most keenly in how quickly the character of Okona just takes off again as suddenly as he arrived the week before. I guess he wasn't really meant to be a long-term presence on the show after all.

Another curiously brief appearance came when Admiral Jellico got on the "phone" to snap at Janeway. On the one hand, it is wild to me that they called up Ronny Cox to actually come record a handful of lines, reprising a character he created decades earlier. On the other hand, Ronny Cox has a singular gift for portraying someone you immediately hate the moment he opens his mouth. I do like that the Prodigy writers are keen to touch on all these elements of the Star Trek universe, including them in ways that don't derail their storytelling and don't matter to the segment of the audience who won't catch all the references. "Fan service" is a nasty term -- but appropriate for the way it's so often done. This feels to me like fan service done right.

At last, we get the revelation of who and what Dal is, and it's very surprising, clever, and fitting. He's an experimental blend of multiple species, explaining why we've never seen anyone quite like him before. Moreover, he's an Augment -- a genetically-enhanced human -- explaining why the Starfleet scan of him set off alarm bells a few weeks earlier.

But more important than the facts of it all is Dal's reaction to the truth... and that's also surprising, clever, and fitting. This kids' show really understands it kid characters. Dal didn't just want to know where he comes from in a general sense; he specifically wanted to meet his parents. Learning that he doesn't really have any is a crippling emotional blow. Sure... it leads to a bunch of slapstick, after his procedure to bring out the latent DNA inside him. Nevertheless, the insight into the character is still meaningful. (Plus, the animation combining physical traits of multiple Star Trek aliens is very well done.)

Dal's revelation was not the only one either, as the episode ends with Asencia revealing that she's really a member of the Diviner's species. And she has a Drednok! (Explaining why Jimmi Simpson's name has stayed in the credits all this time.) It's a great tease to lead you into the next episode... which I'll get to soon enough.

I give "Masquerade" a B+. Star Trek: Prodigy remains "good enough." Better even that that, the more you can meet the show on its own terms.

The Best Star Wars Since Star Wars

Amid the taking of vacation and the writing about it, I've fallen behind in my commentary on miscellaneous pop culture. While I have many items to go back and pick up, I think one demands attention first -- Star Wars: Andor.

The newest live-action Star Wars television show finished its 12-episode first season right before Thanksgiving -- and it was outstanding. Much as Rogue One was the best Star Wars film to come along since the classic trilogy, so Andor has become the best Star Wars television series (including all the animated ones). In my mind, it's done more for Star Wars (the franchise) than anything since Star Wars (the film).

Sometimes Star Wars just feels like a toy factory, serving up characters and settings that'll make good action figures and LEGO sets. Sometimes it transcends that and tells an engaging story that makes you actually root for those characters. Andor has transcended that and injected meaningful social commentary at the same time.

The series takes everything that has ever been slightly abstract about Star Wars and made it crystal clear. There have always been "bad guys" in Star Wars, starting of course with the Empire. But not since they blew up an entire planet in the original film has it been so manifest why they are the villains. And Alderaan's destruction wasn't really all that significant; we'd never been there or seen it, Obi-Wan gets briefly wistful, and Leia gets over it immediately. But Andor shows us a fascist state committing atrocity after atrocity, depicting the daily evil that is the Empire as a whole (and not just the cackling figurehead who rules it).

That in turn makes the conflict with the Empire feel more important and real than it ever has in Star Wars. This is not a game; there are stakes here. We see people killed, and their crushed and lifeless bodies collapse to the ground rather than vanish into thin air. We see the horrifying effects of a most cruel torture -- and unlike Leia on the Death Star, the victim doesn't simply bound into action when her prison cell door is opened. And all this arrives at a timely moment when the world seems to need the reminder that fascism is evil.

The characters of Andor are wide-ranging and different. We see people like Cassian Andor who fight in the most literal sense. We see people like Mon Mothma who fight in a very different way. We see people oppose the Empire even though they have everything to lose, and we see people oppose them because they have nothing to lose. (And speaking of the efficacy of characters here: like Rogue One, Andor brought us one of the franchise's best droid characters ever, imbued with true personality. The sequel trilogy's BB-8 was a technical achievement, sure... but he can't hold a candle -- or thumbs-up lighter -- to B2EMO.)

I have heard some people call the first season of Andor absolutely "perfect," and there I will mute my praise ever so slightly. The first two episodes are a bit slow to get the whole thing off and running, with the real meat of the story kicking in around episode three. And I remain uncertain how I feel about the musical score composed by Nicholas Britell. I don't mind the departure from the style of John Williams. (With The Mandalorian, Ludwig Göransson certainly showed us that "this is the way.") But the music of Andor is often purposefully off-key and pitch bent; while clearly meant to unsettle, I find it sometimes distracting in this effort, pulling me out of the moment on occasion.

But aside from those small quibbles, I can only praise the writing, praise the cast, praise the production, praise the ambition... and sit back to impatiently await the second season. I give Star Wars: Andor an A-. Other series coming in 2023 have an incredibly tough act to follow.

Universal Experience

The final two full days of our Orlando trip were spent on back-to-back days at Universal Studios Orlando. But new rides have been built since my last trip, so there were plenty of new things to experience.

(Another thing that has changed is that J.K. Rowling has fully revealed herself to be cruel and transphobic in the time since my last trip, which certainly changed the way the Harry Potter areas at Universal hit. The debate of "art vs artist" is probably worthy of a whole blog post of its own sometime, but suffice it to say that I no longer wanted to buy any souvenirs that might put some additional royalty percentage in her bank account.)

We were parked in the garage at "Spiderman 451," which we jokingly noted was "the temperature at which Spiderman burns." And now I'll probably always remember where we happened to park on this one particular day.

We went directly to the new ride in the Hogsmeade section, Hagrid's Magical Creature Motorbike Adventure, figuring we'd knock off The Big New Thing first on the agenda. The wait was nearly two hours, including a 15 minute pause in line for new cars to be added to the track (where we happened to be stopped right next to a speaker that played the same safety notice -- which we memorized -- on a loop every 15 seconds). But the ride was fantastic. You sit astride a motorbike or in its side car, twisting and turning through different environments to see animatronics of magical creatures. The ride has multiple high-speed launches and a surprise best not spoiled if you're ever going to ride it. We all absolutely loved it.

We also road the newest Velocicoaster in the Jurassic Park area. It's a far more aggressive ride with incredible inversions, steep drops and climbs -- tons of high speed thrills. But the thing is, it's also remarkably smooth for such an intense coaster. (In sharp contrast, when we rode The Hulk later, lurching our brains around inside our heads as it wrenched our shoulders, every single one of us -- even the thrill-seeking kids -- agreed that we'd never want to ride that again.) Make no mistake: riding the Velocicoaster isn't a "sit back and relax" ride by any stretch. But afterward, you feel only the glow of a fun experience.

The rest of the day was spent mostly on rides I've written about before, and so in the interests of compressing the final two days of the trip into a single blog post, I'll just mention that we were around for an evening holiday parade (complete with fake snow that dazzled people in the crowd who apparently don't see the real thing much).

On day two, we tried a couple of new rides in the second Universal park. We went on Fast & Furious - Supercharged, thinking that regardless of the fact that none of us care much about that franchise, it would surely make a good thrill ride. Sadly, they very much found a way to mess it up. It's a low-thrill experience similar to the Skull Island: Reign of Kong ride, but inferior to Kong in every way. You sit for too long in front of woodenly-acted movie clips, the laughably thin plot is just stolen straight from Star Tours over at Disney (a now decades-old ride, mind you), and the actual chase at the culmination of the ride feels more like watching something than experiencing something. This ride sucks, and I like to think it's why hammy ride-attendants in the pre-show area have now added Jungle Cruise-style "I'm miserable too" banter to the experience.

The strangely themed Race Through New York with Jimmy Fallon isn't much of a ride either. It's another 3D movie with motion simulation experience. (But with the giant car built more like the audience stands of the Tonight Show set.) However, you don't expect much from a "Tonight Show ride," I dare say. So when you go on a kind of Mario Kart type of adventure for a few minutes -- you know, the kind of ride you might have expected Fast & Furious to be -- it's fine enough if you don't have to wait more than a few minutes for it.

But we wanted to end the day (and the trip) on rides we knew we'd really enjoy. And so we hopped back over to the other park to wait for Hagrid's Motorbikes again. A full-on ride breakdown for half an hour ballooned our wait to over two hours, but we stuck it out and enjoyed the ride yet again. Then we rode Velicocoaster twice, back-to-back -- a feat only possible for me thanks to the 45-minute line wait for each ride, giving me a buffer between the experiences.

I've talked a lot in these posts about my top 5 rides of the trip. The order shifts a lot, but the top 4 are definitely the Smuggler's Run, Rise of the Resistance, Hagrid's Motorbikes, and the Velocicoaster. Depending on my mood at a moment, that fifth slot might go (surprisingly) to the Ratatouille-themed ride at Epcot, or the new Guardians of the Galaxy coaster (also there).

But any way you slice it, we'd had our fill of fun that last night, as we also got our fill of food at a restaurant in Disney Springs. My feet felt anything but rested when I returned home, but overall I felt recharged and ready for the downhill sprint to the end-of-year holidays.

You Have to Wake Up Early to Save the Galaxy

Our fourth full day in Orlando was our third and final day at Walt Disney World. The plan was to spend the day at Epcot... but the waiting in line started hours before it even opened.

The newest ride at Disney is Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind, a roller coaster that opened at Epcot earlier this year. To manage the demand, they're not doing the conventional "show up and stand in line" thing; instead, you have to join a "virtual queue" using their mobile app. The queue only opens up a couple of times a day, one being at 7:00 am. We were warned ahead of time about the narrow window to sneak through here: by 7:00 and say, 5 seconds, you can reasonably expect that the entire queue until past lunchtime will be completely full.

So we woke early and pooled together no less than six different phones, all of us set to push the "join queue" button literally the instant the clock struck 7:00. We did get in, but even as fast as we were, we were still group 69 (nice) to register for the day -- we would wind up getting on the ride about 3 hours after Epcot opened, around 12:30.

But before that, we went to the also new(ish) Remy's Adventure ride back in the France section of the park. This ride was a wonderful surprise. In a way, it's nothing you haven't seen before if you've ridden a theme park ride built in the last 10 years or so. A small car moves your group from "room" to "room," where different scene snippets are projected on a large screen, with programmed motions meant to make you feel like you're there. But this Ratatouille-themed ride was especially clever in how it pulled from the theme park ride bag of tricks -- when and why it lurched you backward, blasted you with heat, squirted you with water, and so forth. Highly recommended.

We didn't have enough time to wait out the long line for the Frozen themed ride in the Norway section, but for me, Epcot is more about the food, drinks, and shopping anyway. (Which is why kids don't like it as much, I'm sure.) We ambled along, picking up crepes, cider, saki, and souvenirs until our number was called for the Guardians of the Galaxy ride.

It's a good coaster. In many ways, it's the modern version of Space Mountain -- it's mostly a dark coaster, but it does what all modern rides seem to do, using large screens to project a story. The pre-show experience is fun too, lifting a signature element from the now-defunct Star Trek Experience that used to be in Las Vegas and deploying it to great effect. The ride also features most of the Guardians cast members -- including, surprisingly, Glenn Close. (But excluding, also surprisingly, Bradley Cooper and Vin Diesel; Rocket and Groot are voiced by not-quite-sound-alikes.)

It's well worth riding, but the Remy ride might actually have edged it out to get into my "top 5 rides of the trip." The audio mix of Cosmic Rewind seemed off to me. Blaring music is part of the experience (inspired by the "Awesome Mix" tapes of the Guardians movies), and it totally drowns out the dialogue that's trying to tell you the thin story of the ride. Also, that music right now is a Christmas tune medley with Guardians-themed lyrics, rather than the normal random selection of more authentic 80s tunes. But I'd absolutely ride it again, given the chance.

We rode Test Track, which has gotten a major upgrade since I last rode it. They're definitely trying to expand Epcot to be a more plausible destination for thrill ride fans. We had lunch at a buffet in the German pavilion, enjoying too much beer and too much food (see above). We meandered more. There were other little moments too -- looking for Mulan in the China pavilion, watching an ibis unexpectedly lunge for a small lizard hiding in the grass and gobbling it up in one bite, knowing that $100 for an Infinity Gauntlet and stones wasn't for us (but trying it on anyway). Whatever is going on in this picture:

But ultimately -- our feet being tired from 10 miles of walking every day, plus knowing we'd be hitting Universal next -- we decided to call it early for once. (Even though the temptation to park hop to Hollywood Studios for more Star Wars was quietly whispering.)

In all, the Disney section of the trip was a blast, as expected. But there were still two more days of fun ahead.

It's Magic (and... Pandora)

It's hard to imagine many people traveling to Walt Disney World without specifically visiting the Magic Kingdom park -- especially when traveling with kids who have never been there. That's just where we went on the second Disney day of our trip.

Both previous times I visited Orlando, I went to Universal Studios before visiting Walt Disney World. This time, we did the reverse -- and I'm here to say that if you're doing both, that's the order to do it. The rides at Disney (and Magic Kingdom in particular) can seem a little tame if Universal is freshly in your mind. Going to Disney with a "first timer" helps a lot too.

Disney World gets crowded the week of Thanksgiving, I hear... but we were there the following week. We were also there on a day when Magic Kingdom was closing early for an evening Christmas event. Those factors seemed to combine to thin the crowds for us. We got to do basically everything we wanted without ever waiting more than 25 minutes (and typically almost walking right on).

(The one exception was the Jungle Cruise. I would have liked my fill of Dad Jokes on a Boat, but the Christmas themed "Jingle Cruise" version of the ride seems to be extra popular. I didn't need to wait an hour for said Dad Jokes.)

There were a couple of new experiences in the mix. We ate lunch at Be Our Guest, a dining hall set in the castle from Beauty and the Beast. Pricey, but great food. (Yes, there is "grey stuff," and yes, it's "delicious.") I also rode Splash Mountain for the first time, getting that in just weeks before they close the ride to re-theme it for The Princess and the Frog (to finally remove the last vestiges of the racist Song of the South).

We were able to breeze through Magic Kingdom so quickly that we weren't quite ready to call it a day. We'd had Animal Kingdom on the back burner, "if there's time," and our friends' son was especially keen to get there and ride Expedition Everest. So park hop we did, where he loved that ride so much he rode it 3 times consecutively, all in less than half an hour. (Once was good for me.)

Then we decided to brave the wait for the the Avatar Flight of Passage ride -- not for any love of the subject, but because it's one of Disney's newest things and people say it's actually worth the wait. Let me caution you: it can be a rough wait. We only waited about 75 minutes; I've heard it can take 2 to 3 hours. But the queue is oddly retro, with very little going on in it to keep you entertained until almost the very end. You just pass through decorated forest areas and caves for an hour until finally ending up in a lab. A touchstone for Denverites: it reminded me a lot of Casa Bonita.

But... the ride is pretty good. (Not top 5 for the trip for me, though.) A huge 3D IMAX movie is projected in front of you as you straddle a seat that moves like a bird in flight. It's like Soarin: The Next Generation. And the Pandora area of Animal Kingdom in general is pretty impressive.

Night had fallen between the time we got in that line and the time we exited the ride, so it was time to go. A Christmas show was being projected on Animal Kingdom's giant tree as ended our day with the most walking of the entire trip. (Not that there were any "light" days.)

We had one more Disney day to go in the trip....

The Edge of the Galaxy

The first day of my recent Orlando trip revolved around space travel. The second day focused on fake space travel. We went to Disney's Hollywood Studios, home of the Galaxy's Edge Star Wars area that's opened since the last time I visited Walt Disney World.

We were allowed in early enough to beeline straight for the hottest ride, Rise of the Resistance, and face only a 20-or-so minute wait (compared to the 90 to 100 minutes the ride quite regularly balloons to). Rise of the Resistance is a big leap forward in the theme park "technology" of expanding the experience. Yes, it had the now-standard "here's a cleverly realistic movie to watch while you're standing in line." But then it also led to essentially three rides: a mild motion simulator experience, followed by a march through a fully realized set, culminating in a second more intense ride. Once you hit the part that felt like The Ride, the whole experience actually lasted 15 minutes -- epic for the amount of time we waited, but quite novel and enjoyable even if we'd had to wait longer. Rise of the Resistance is, simply, every bit as good a ride as it's said to be.

From there, we headed to an appointment at Savi's Workshop to build our own lightsabers. This is, to be frank, an expensive experience. Even if it were more reasonably priced, it wouldn't be for everyone. You don't end up with a toy you're going to play with; you end up with a highly personalized memento of your vacation that you'll keep on display. That said, that memento is cool as can be. If you've ever swung a plastic lightsaber, this is not that. You choose crystal (blade) color, emitter piece, hilt sections, and end piece -- each from multiple options, resulting in an end product that truly does feel uniquely yours. (Out of more than a dozen people in the room, we were the only one to build a green-bladed lightsaber, so that alone made ours feel more rare.) And this thing is sturdy, hefty. The parts are weighty and metal (or something cleverly crafted to feel sufficiently like metal). In the end, I think the only way you could feel more like "you actually built a lightsaber" is if the end product could actually cut things.

As we continued through Galaxy's Edge, we found the Millennium Falcon: Smuggler's Run ride, which wound up being a personal favorite of mine for the entire trip. You pilot the Millennium Falcon on this ride -- actually steer it in a fantastic motion simulator experience. The ride is built for 6 people, and there happened to be 6 of us together. Two people pilot, two fire the guns, and two repair damage the Falcon takes along the way. All of this is directed by flashing lights directing you to flip switches all over the Falcon cockpit, making this so much more than a passive ride you sit back and experience. We rode it enough times throughout the day for everyone in the group to experience all three roles in the simulator -- and when the line dwindled to a mere 5 minutes at the end of the day, rode it a fourth time for good measure (getting a great group photo of us all for good measure).

The bulk of the day was actually filled with other non-Star Wars rides in the Hollywood Studios park. I'd done the Tower of Terror before, but it was fun to experience it again.

I'd actually never experienced the Aerosmith-themed Rock 'n' Roller Coaster before this trip; that was fine, if well outshined by other coasters in Orlando (even others at Disney). This was notable, though, for the Disney "Magic Bands" we'd secured for the trip. Our travel friend had suggested them as a way to make gathering ride photos much easier (you just wave your band at a button as you get off a ride). But in this case, waiting in line with a band on triggered custom "band tour posters" that displayed on the walls.

We'd encounter that sort of use of Magic Bands again the one time we rode Star Tours this trip. (We got Hoth and Coruscant as the random locations -- nothing added from the sequel trilogy.)

We'd also wait in a too-long line for the Slinky Dog coaster in the Toy Story area, after some friend of friend recommended it. Maybe if you have a kid who's looking to move beyond explicitly "kiddie" roller coasters, sure. It was a big bust with us, given the 60 minute wait to get on.

We closed out the entire day with a stop at Oga's Cantina for a couple of Star Wars drinks that looked quite authentic and tasted amazing. I actually wish more of the Galaxy's Edge area had been built up like this. Seeing the Millennium Falcon just parked there was great, of course. But otherwise, the area looked like a fairly non-descript rock quarry -- not as impressive as the Harry Potter-themed areas over at Universal. Basically, each individual experience within Galaxy's Edge felt wonderful, even if the whole area containing them felt a little underwhelming.

Before this trip, Hollywood Studios was the Disney World park where I'd probably spent the least time. After this, I would say it's the Disney park I'd absolutely want to spent the most time at in any future Orlando trip.

Vacation Blastoff

Hello readers!

I've just returned from Orlando, enjoying an unusual November/December week in the 80 degree sun (even as I watched and cheered on the foot of snow falling on the ski slopes back in Colorado). I've visited Orlando twice before, but there were still plenty of new experiences this time out -- which I'll recount in the days ahead.

Our friends had long been planning to take their kids to Disney -- with the opening of Galaxy's Edge at Disney's Hollywood Studios being the particular push to go. They generously offered up a room in their mother/mother-in-law's condo for my husband and I to join them. Although we'd spend a whole lot of time walking and waiting in lines with them in the next week, our excursion on our first full day was actually just the two of us: we drove out to visit Kennedy Space Center.

I've long been a history buff when it comes to space travel, and was excited to visit this famous site of so many launches. KSC (which does sound like "KFC" when spoken over a loudspeaker, which made us want chicken all day long) is an interesting location: part active rocket launch site, part museum, part theme park. We didn't get to enjoy that first part; apparently, during the week we were in Florida, two different rockets did launch, but we weren't there on those days. (And we were a few weeks late for the much-rescheduled launch of Artemis I a few weeks ago.)

The other two parts, though, we definitely enjoyed. The "museum" aspect of KSC was my favorite, of course. On display at different parts of the center is the actual Space Shuttle Atlantis, a Saturn V rocket remaining from the Apollo program, command capsules from more than one space flight of the 60s and 70s, and all kinds of memorabilia from moon rocks to spacesuits and more. I loved it. Much of it was accompanied by super cheesy short films you were made to watch before being admitted to see the things, which I admit tested my patience. I think the artifacts speak quite well for themselves; but then again, I've been reading about all this stuff since I was a kid.

As for the "theme park" element of KSC, there are a number of motion simulator rides on site -- because this is Florida, and that's the rule. The ones we did were decent enough, though. There was a simulated space shuttle launch -- a sort of "Star Tours" kind of experience, albeit one that actually does tip you mostly on your back for the launch. We also did 2 of 4 different "Soarin" type of rides: your feet dangle from a motion-controlled seat as you're thrust out toward an enveloping circular screen -- in our case, for a tour of the outer solar system and a surface buzz over Mars. We would, of course, experience more entertaining and more intense rides later in the trip, but these were a fun way to "get your feet wet."

If you're not a space nerd like me, KSC might be a bit too far a drive from Orlando amid a Disney/Universal vacation. But I'm glad to have finally done it this time around.