Yes, this is a 4 hour long review of a hotel that’s already closed.
So worth the time. She had an aweful 2-days 2-nights for thousands of dollars, and did it so you and I didn’t have to lose that money to learn the hard way.
I love that she contextualizes all of this against the backdrop of Disney corporate cowardice and shortsightedness. Also, bless the friggin cast members!
What’s up with this video? I’m not interested in watching it, but YouTube keeps recommending it to me, and every time I see it the views on it keeps exponentially growing.
Jenny Nicholson is a really popular video essayist. She only releases like one of these essay videos a year because she spends so long working on them. (She’s got a patreon where she releases a smaller, lower effort video every month.)
The big videos routinely pull in millions of views, so I’m not surprised the algorithm spams it in people’s feeds. She’s got a lot of followers that watch it right away because they’ve been waiting for a year to see it, so it shoots to the top of the recommendations for other people in that niche. Then there’s a snowball effect where YouTube starts recommending it, more people watch it, so it gets recommended more, etc. You see the same thing on Hbomberguy’s yearly video.
As one of her subscribers, I can tell you that this video has been in the works for years, so we’ve been hearing about it for a long time and were hyped. I just finished it today - broke it up into three different viewings. She breaks all her essays down into chapters so it’s easy to watch just a portion of it at a time.
I had never heard of her. I do not watch influencer videos. I do not like influencer videos and suspect I would not like them personally. The 4 hour long runtime clearly indicated I would not be watching it.
I am now a subscriber and big fan of her work!
The cascade of bad decisions by Disney was so enjoyable to hear about and her experience with ‘Disney magic’ was so very relateble. I too have been placed behind inexplicably large columns, felt the arbitrariness of the ‘experiencing the magic’, and spent far too much money for the privilege of standing in sweaty lines in the Florida heat.
I feel bad for the people involved that really wanted to make something great but were crushed under the weight of corporate ineptitude. I personally knew someone who went, refused to say how much they paid, and refused to talk about their experience. Now I know why. Excellent video. She’s like the NeverKnowsBest of theme parks.
I’m curious and confused on the “influencer” part. My understanding was influencers are just people with “popularity” (manufactured users usually) pushing products in a “native ad” sort of way, never attributed it to general youtubers unless there’s something about the creator I’m unaware of.
I used the term loosely to include the average “YouTuber”, a term I hadn’t thought of. I tend not to watch any of them.
Dismissing youtubers for being youtubers reminds me of people who dismiss all animation because “cartoons are for kids” or whatever. When I think of “influencer” I think of an instagram model who pushes products on their followers. “Youtuber” includes many content creators who devote hours into researching, writing, filming, and editing high quality, entertaining, and educational content.
Jenny is on the low end of the spectrum in terms of basically all of those categories (I love her though), but channels like CaptainD, Contrapoints, Philosophy Tube and Folding Ideas create extremely high quality content that (in my opinion) surpasses educational content coming out of any studio.
tl;dr: Dismissing youtube channels as “influencers” is narrow minded and may prevent you from enjoying content you would otherwise find to be of extremely high quality.
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Jenny is very popular but hasn’t uploaded to Youtube in a year, so this a big comeback.
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Star Wars is a popular franchise but has had mixed success recently, and Disney’s perceived mismanagement of it is a popular topic.
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It’s organized as an Internet-friendly numbered list!
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I, and apparently a lot of other people, could listen to Jenny talk about theme parks all day.
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I watched the first few minutes just to see what it was about, and then 4 hours had passed.
lol I had never even heard of her before yesterday, clicked on that video because I’m a sucker for deep dive video essays that are probably unnecessary about weird topics. I didn’t see it was a 4hr video until I was like 20 min in and now I haven’t stopped watching her stuff. Love finding a new YouTuber to watch endless hours of their back catalogues.
Thank you for posting I am definitely going to spend 4 hours on this. ☺
If this is your cup of tea as well you might enjoy her 4 hour review of a theme park that didn’t make it either.
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Right, it should have been about 3hr45min. She had a few minutes of slip around the 3hr mark, approx. Complained a bit about a couple NBD things.
Some of the content, you could just read if it were released in text format. The videos she took and those she included from others, and the Disney marketing videos, were impactful and enlightening - crucial to fully telling the story and allowing vicarious understanding. Would still need at least 1-2 or 3hr even if she released her commentary in text form.
Absolutely phenomenal and engaging presentation.
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I guess my sensitive side is on today, seeing as I took the comment pretty personally, in fact being shocked reading the rudest personal attack directed at me in a year on this site.
I’m sure you didn’t mean it like that!
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These may well all be irrelevant but I’m curious now beyond this conversation, anything here resonate with you?
- Insecurity/Low Self-Esteem
- Lack of Empathy
- Learned Behavior
- Sadism
- Boredom/Thrill-Seeking
- Resentment/Anger
- Moral Disengagement
There’s absolutely no reason this video should be 4 hours long.
Jenny had 4 hours of stuff she wanted to say and her fans want to listen to it because they find it entertaining. Get a life nerd.
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I’ve watched a 20 hour 2-part video about Skyrim. Your fear of a 4 hour video is pathetic. I am operating on a completely different level than you. You can try, but I doubt your feeble mind would be able to keep up. All this to say, long form content rules.
Your reply is almost good enough for short form copy pasta. 👍
I personally like MauLer’s multiple hour and multiple video breakdowns of why the latest Star Wars movies are bad and how they could have been fixed: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBBJXQJJavX2VueOEqGSaBNsGaHZREWEr
I watched it and enjoyed it all (at 2x speed though), so there absolutely is a reason for it to be 4 hours. I don’t feel like it dragged or was extended for arbitrary reasons. Honestly, it feels like it could be longer reasonably. There’s a lot to cover.
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Oh, that’s great! Some amazing papers can be finished in even shorter times, so nothing should be longer than those either! Wow, that’s so enlightening. I’m glad the only reason something can be lengthy is because it’s a research paper. That’ll save so much time. No more long movies or TV series for me!
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You’re the one who brought up research papers. I just made sarcastic fun about how stupid the comparison is. It’s your own strawman you have issue with.
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Lol. Dude, I just said I enjoyed the video and I’m fine with the length. You came here to say it’s bad and wrong. Go do something else. I’m not mad about anything, but you seem to be for some reason.
Anyway, I’m done here. This isn’t going anywhere and you just keep telling me I’m wrong for enjoying something I enjoyed. Bye.
I’ve read comprehensive scientific papers about years if proving hypothesis that could be finished in an hour
bahahahhaha
HEY EVERYONE, CHECK OUT HOW SMART THIS PERSON IS!!!
Simp
what makes it so much worse is that Disney has the history, Disney has the knowledge, Disney has the engineering, Disney has the know-how and so little of that was on display here – I cannot see any way that Disney fans, Star Wars fans, or theme park fans wouldn’t be absolutely livid after experiencing that …
That’s exactly the conclusion she comes to late in the video: it’s that they cashed in on their deep supply of goodwill with their fans and betrayed them for higher margins. And then wrote the whole thing off by shutting it down suddenly right at the end of the quarter. We are living in a time of animal-backed-into-a-corner, hostile capitalism. The bubble on this system that was literally designed to pop, seems to be popping. So the capitalists are gathering up everything they can, faster and faster. Capitalism as a concept is inherently flawed. You can’t have infinite growth in a finite system. As has been pointed out innumerable times: that’s how cancer works. Not a sound financial system. But here we are, in what is essentially the “going out of business” mad dash by these leeches to grab as much as they can. Our water supply, our natural resources, the climate, the system of capitalism itself are all on the outs. And people feel that. And we’re getting angrier and angrier. This won’t end well, and it seems to be ending faster and faster. They know that. What they plan on doing with all that money after the collapse is unclear. But they’re winning. And that’s all they can conceive of.
Edit: lol I literally forgot as I went on writing that, that I was meant to be talking about Disney. But that’s pretty much what’s happening. They’re in the “squeeze harder” phase, where they’re ostensibly done growing and innovating, now they’re just going to squeeze everything they can out of the people that give them money. It’s about cost cutting, more extreme exploitation of their workers and customers, and essentially going for broke on what’s already there.
Didn’t the CEO during that phase get replaced?
Iger was CEO when the project was announced, left for a while in the middle, missing the opening, and was back again in time to close it down. He stepped down in February 2020 and was reinstated in November 2022.
Can I get the 4 min tl;dr:?
No