They should have said all the people working there were Navi in reverse-avatar bodies, and have them all act like aliens badly trying to impersonate humans.
If I think about it cynically, it's probably because it would be a subliminal message about the Na'vi adopting Earthling culture and using their own as a means of profit. More likely, however, is just that not one Disney Imagineer had this awesome idea. :I
disney should have built beastly kingdom as a tie in to the extremely successful and still relevant film beastly (2011) starring alex pettyfer and vanessa hudges
It's been many years, and I am still so charmed by the employee who says 'have you watched the documentary? This is many years after', as if that's how you talk about documentaries that came out a few years ago. Gonna start saying 'have you watched Walking with Dinosaurs? Well this is many years after that' when I'm next at a zoo
I feel like a more normal phrasing would be "Have you seen Avatar? It's a very outdated documentary, but still worth watching." That functions both as a promo and context I'd think.
"Did you watch that really old documentary, uh... 'Avatar' or something like that? Y'know, the one that showed some of the first interactions between us and Na'vi, that one. Yeah, it's got some interesting info, but it came out pretty soon after that stuff happened, which was, what, like... thirty years ago at least, wasn't it? It's pretty outdated at this point, I think the rusted out military equipment speaks for itself." It's definitely long, but it's casual, and feels more organic. That's how I would've handled it, at least.
The Na'vi now live on reserves, hidden from tourists. But they're perfectly OK with it guys! The -propaganda- pictures and notes on the walls prove it!
I feel like it’s much more sinister than that. Those “air-purifying” pods probably poisoned the air for the Na’vi. That, and human diseases probably killed them all off. The Na’vi in the pictures were probably the last few left as the park was completed (probably with slave labor).
My favorite thing about Avatar is that there are countless horror movies that have essentially the same plot of the movie if it were told from the Naavi perspective. An alien species lands on your native planet and start controlling genetically engineered lookalikes of your species to try and take over. Avatar or Invasion of the Body Snatchers?
What's even scarier is that both Avatar and Invasion of Body Snatchers feature pods as a key plot point, as a convenient invasion technique. Coincidence... I wanna say not, but then Jenny's glowing pod just brainwashed me to plant all those strange seeds being mailed to us, so I'm now forced to deny any of the pod's questionable actions.
Earth man's method of trying to connect with another planet's inhabitants in this film is like White people trying to connect with an African tribe by wearing Blackface. It's demeaning, insulting and creepy.
When I was working at Hollywood Studios, a mother and her adult son came into Tatooine Traders. The mother ended up being a shoplifter and tried stealing a hat and the only reason that security was able to find them so fast was the fact that her adult son was dressed head to toe as a Nav'i. Best moment of my life
They really missed an opportunity here by not creating an authentic Pandora park where the atmosphere is extremely poisonous to humans and if you don't wear a breathing mask at all times you will die.
And if they were going to go that far, they should have just made it a Nausicaa themed park. It's about as culturally relevant anyway...actually, that would be pretty cool...
I hope they say more in the ad that she didn't show, cuz otherwise it doesn't make any sense at all. It's a zoo with a fake, crappy dinosaur thing added to it. So it's... a zoo, with a dinosaur thing added to it. Which still means it's just a fuckin zoo, and they probably couldn't even get things like penguins because of how humid it is in florida. Unless the penguins are in some big building with the polar bears and stuff.
not to mention, she got duplicates, so there probably arent very many total words in the deck. so bladder polyp was a high priority word 1) for the linguists who invented the language na'vi to translate 2) for them to print on those cards ??
My guess is either 1) whoever was in charge of picking out words to use chose "bladder polyp" at random as a way to indicate Na'vi had their own medical terminology, 2) Jenny unfortunately bought a pack that just got a ton of duplicate cards, and/or 3) the Na'vi have terrible urinary tract infection issues due to the pollution and environmental destruction from the humans continually stripmining their resource-rich planet, so much so that they ended up developing this word as a way to indicate this was a nasty symptom of their failing health.
@@thejasminedragonmerchant6843my burdened heart believes our world can handle the latter and in Avatar 3 we explore a volcano where they cured Na'Vi Cancer with just like, ash and spit. It's my right
"Bladder Polyp" is the name of some alien plants that grow on the surface of Pandora, so I assume that that is what it is referring to. However, that does mean that someone decided to name a plant "bladder polyp" and no one decided that there should be a different name.
Could you imagine if, in Disneyland, they had a Peter Pan show that was just a random guy in loose fitting clothing explaining that, while he wont be showing up, Peter taught him how to fly and fight pirates (who also wont be showing up)?
Alpha Industries are still a for-profit company, it will happen again, in the same way the East India Company gained favour in India over their european rivals for being the most culturally sensitive and least violent... until they could make more money by being violent that is
You'd think the translator would be a great product if they just had a ton of Navi writing around the park and you point the thing at it like a QR code, and so people who buy them would just get the novelty of a ton of little easter eggs around the park.
@@feelmypuddle4963 Eh, considering their culture and the environment it seems pretty unlikely. It isn't like the Na'vi need it for anything, since it seems they've still kept themselves to a totally nomadic lifestyle. I am sure their linguist told them as much (it sounded like he was the one pronouncing stuff from the cards by the way, adorable, I love that he's still working on this stuff).
Anteroinen maybe it’s humans writing in Na’vi? I’m learning Lakota (and they don’t have a written languages) so I put little labels on all the things in my house so I can look at them and call them by their Lakota name
Those weird pictures of the Navis working with the humans and all that lore stuff about how great they get along really remind me of those old film reels I've seen oil companies make about my tribe. "Look at the smiling waving Indians, they are so happy that we've built all these oil rigs on their land providing vital jobs-" It would be very ballsy if Disney went ahead and added lore about how 90 percent of the Navi died out from measles, and then the survivors were all diabetic because Disney introduced coca cola to them.
For me, it made me think of this creepy WW2 propaganda film the American government made, filming the Japanese-American citizens they had rounded up to be kept in internment camps. They were filming these scared looking families, with a voice-over saying something along the lines of: "These Japanese-American citizens are so happy to be working hard for our country, and are grateful for the work we're giving them!" I felt so bad.
fun fact - Animal Kingdom doesn't use the "natahzu" tag anymore bc they were recognized officially by the zoological association, and they are actually a zoo now. I learned that when I was working there, and I died.
What a great alagory for Native American U.S history and relationships."Yeah they love us being here Ah they're not here right now but they taught us their music Yeah!"
"Here's some pieces of plastic you can put on a string to replicate their look. Here's their skin as a costume. They're cool with this I promise. No, you can't ask them right now."
@@aurora5481 "Also yeah when we first came we were murderous dicks but the second time around we sent a nicer group and it was aaaaall fiiiiine even if w did basically the same again" It's almost poetic
Not just that. They basically really cheaped out on the entire plan. They told JK that they weren’t going to build hogwarts or the train. They offered to build a magical creatures petting zoo (with an animatronic) and a shooting game ride where you fight dark creatures with your wand. Lots of smaller disagreements too, like wanting Disney merch in the Harry Potter shops, character interactions with Harry and the other main cast, and branded items like Coca Cola
Their pitch was also super basic too- I think Yesterworld covered it with how badly they botched their pitch. They really undervalued how much money they could have made with Harry Potter. And then they put a ton of money into a film people mostly thought had good effects but an uninteresting/problematic story
I can't believe I forgot how much Walt loved trains, god he'd have been ALL over that train concept! plus doesn't HP just have that feel to it that Walt would've been adamant about incorporating into the park? I feel like he would've viewed it the same way he did Mary Poppins and Winnie the Pooh, at least the first 3 books
So many things about this that I’m going to be thinking about for the rest of my life. The pod. The kid who didn’t know there’s a movie. The $80 ugly doll. The ball. The cashier who called it “the documentary”. The translator. This video changed my life
I recently went to the Avatar park and I can’t believe you didn’t mention the giant Na’vi head that’s displayed in the gift shop. It looks like they beheaded the leader and used it as a warning to other Na’vi.
That gets more unsettling when you consider how the Na'vi are Native American coded, and white people displaying/selling the decapitated heads of natives was a pretty common practice during the 17th and 18th century.
My actual favourite thing is how enthusiastic Jenny is in all theme parks and you can never quite tell if it's ironic or genuine because she uses the same deadpan tone of voice for everything, including singing and yelling "whooo!".
Nah she legit enjoys the theme park experience. Even when some of the rides suck and the entire concept of the park is stupid because Avatar is a dead franchise, they can still make a cool bioluminescent jungle with rusting robots.
Genuinely can't imagine anything I'd find harder to deal with psychologically than a performer making consistent eye contact and then handing me a gourd to shake
Where are all the Na'vi? *Buys skin-like Na'vi t-shirt* Huh, I wonder where they all are? *Buys authentic pair of Na'vi ears* Oh well, I guess they went...elsewhere *Buys Na'vi tail*
Okay but the only Navi being in the cave singing alone.. also just adds to the overwhelming sense of dread here. Like, shes the last one--hiding out and singing out her pain of the brothers and sisters shes lost to yet another evil earthling company
And since Alpha Centauri Expeditions has basically destroyed her homeland, the only way she can put food on the table is to perform for these tourists all day. (Do you think she gets paid an actual wage and has to visit the Cantina to buy food, or that she's just paid directly in rations? Does any entity with jurisdiction over Pandora enforce labor laws?)
Also the pods make the air breathable for humans, but wouldn’t that make it toxic for the Navi? So now they’ve introduced a foreign and invasive plant that has taken over the planet to the extent that the atmosphere is completely hostile for the Navi and they’ve been driven underground. 😂 The meta is insane.
I'm wondering how the park is going to deal with the changing canon of the Avatar Universe? The second movie’s depiction of Earth-Pandora relations is quite far from the harmonious co-existence of the park's lore. The cast member's innocuous comment shown in the video “What happened with the RDA will never happen again” really has a darker undertone now.
The third Avatar should be completely about reconciling the difference between the world of the theme park and the story of Avatar 2. You could even go the extra mile and film scenes at the park with employees playing their own characters in a sort of bizarre crossbreed of Escape from Tomorrow and Jimmy Cameron's Avatar. It would be totally insane, and terrible, and I would love it.
Hey! I actually work at Flight of Passage! So the whole point of the park is it Takes place over a generation after the 5th movie. But also James Cameron, planned Pandora after he wrote the main parts of the scripts for the most of the movies. Basically pur story is meant to be completely selective from the main story. ACE came in later to try and fix everythinf
The movie is hamfisted and the villains mustache-twirling caricatures. The park works because it is eerie and unintentional due to dissonance between the reality of the park and the lore and exacerbated by certain budget limitations and constrained creative decisions. The worst part of the movie was when the life tree thing basically declared earth and humans irredeemable non-life and the protagonist's only option to be worthy of the dignity afforded sentient life was to cease being a human and cut himself off from the embodied existence that gave birth to his soul, to his family and to all his ancestors whose evolution was the very font of every good and compassionate impulse he had toward the Na'vi. It broke immersion and told the audience, "You are past redemption." And no one can be spiritually fed by a church of no salvation, which is what the movie's lesson became. But when you go to the park, you are you, and you come with your own existence, and the official lore says, "Actually humans are fine." The impulse to problematize the situation then comes from inside the more thoughtful guest, and they can extend it as far as they want it to go, without having to be speceistically misanthropic. No one's forcing the narrative that your race is entirely evil down your throat, so you can approach the situation from a more nuanced and realistic and less Manichean perspective.
@@Hesperell ...Except for the fact that the main protagonist (Jake Sully) was the only one to permanently transfer into a Na'vi, as I recall. All the other scientists, y'know, the other human protagonists, got to stick around as humans on Pandora at the end of the film. And I'm fairly certain his desire to change permanently had more to do with wanting to stay with the love of his life (and not be confined to a wheelchair, and be able to breath the local atmosphere) than it did some weird species-based self-flagellation. Besides, if the remaining human forces were truly supposed to be "past redemption" in the films view, why are they allowed to leave rather than being executed after the climax of the film? So good job on philosophising, too bad it's all built on a big misunderstanding. But in any case, the fact that you're so deeply insulted by the idea of a sci-fi film saying "Actually humans are a bunch of dicks" (hardly new ground for the genre), even when it DOESN'T say that, speaks volumes about you. It says that you're so rooted in a tribalistic view of the world that even when presented with an entirely fictitious human vs. aliens set-up, you get offended by the humans behaving in a way that humans have done numerous times in our history; i.e. a technologically superior group presuming that it has a right to the resources held by an indigenous population, and waging war to get them simply because it's easier than the alternative. If an entirely theoretical example of that happening is enough to offend you, I hate to think what your reaction to real life atrocities is. But I can take a guess...
Yea it's funny to think about it. It's practically poetic. A movie where space indians have their ecosystem destroyed by colonial marines. And they lay some concrete and chop trees down in a land located in the continent where it all actually happened.
@@Geothesponge111 I love how the villains of the movie were literally gonna massacre an entire race, erase a culture and destroy an ecosystem just for a profit (the mineral they're searching for isn't even essential to survival, it was purely for profit since they mentioned it sold for a shit ton), but they're mad that the god tree thing decided that maybe humans aren't all that great lmao
I learned from a Disney cast member that the shaman of songs animatronic gets taken into an underground area every night and has security cameras that watch it continue to do basic movements all night because the imagineers are so worried that if it ever stops moving they won't be able to get it moving again.
What would be really funny is if they said, "Oh yeah! The avatar technology goes both ways!" and just have some people walking around claiming to be Na'vi in human avatars
That would've been a pretty creative solution, tbh! Imagine the employees getting to pretend to be Na'vi adjusting to "human Avatars" and getting to complain about how different their tastebuds, height differences, lack of tail, etc. are. You could come into work and get to amble around the park, cheerfully explaining Na'avi culture to guests and explaining that you don't look like a normal Na'vi because you're trying out the Avatar technology as part of a xenocultural exchange program with the humans.
And they could do something to make them look taller or just hire like, really tall people! They'd probably also have to have the Na'vi actors wear something Na'vi related that only staff can have to say "This is an "actual" Na'vi, ask them about Na'vi stuff."
@@chocomelo454 bigass lanyard that says "human in training" or something lmao, I'm picturing those "unaccompanied minor" signs that kids used to wear when traveling 🤣
honestly this is a brilliant solution that would solve so many problems with this park at once. It explains, where the hell the Navi went, it shows that they actually 1) ARE getting something out of this park 2) Are in fact cool with it and given control over how the park works and how it represents their culture 3) Greatly reduces the cultural appropriation undertones and just turns it into regular consensual tourism. Honestly the drum performers should have been the "human avatar navi", it would have made the most sense. Plus things like Navi facepaint would not have been so icky as a concept if the Navi themselves were doing it on humans
I really love how Jenny is unashamedly enthusiastic about her interests but also isn’t snobby or gatekeep-ey and doesn’t assume we have prior knowledge about topics.
I went to the Tower of London right before the pandemic hit, and they had actors playing the role of one of the kings getting up in the morning, with his servants and stuff. They asked me where i was from, and when I said America, the king said "that sounds Spanish" and asked me to point to it on their extremely old world map that definitely did not have the USA on it. I just pointed off the end of it and said that it was around there? And i'll never forget the look he shot me--the most perfect "sounds fake but ok" i've ever experienced. Hats off to those actors, they had to basically do what the people at immersive theme parks do, but with the added burden of actually trying to teach history!
I wish they put that sort of effort into the London Dungeons post pandemic (technically within-pandemic, but I'm referring to post-1st-year-of-pandemic) - I went just after New Years 2022, and all of the cast members/staff were wearing plain or boring/standard masks, and I was so disappointed that none of them - ESPECIALLY the ones in the PLAGUE section - were wearing London Dungeon branded Plague Doctor styled masks!!! I was really hoping they had some new merch in the giftshop specifically about the plague bc it was the OBVIOUS choice to me on how to make MAD bank, and yet, NOTHING! The only nod to the current plague situation was the moment where the cast member says* "be careful out there, there's a plague in London!" And everyone went "👀💀 (sigh) we KNOW" Such a wasted opportunity 😭 *this section was a standard part of the show well before C-19, with the only change to the show being the distance between staff + guests + the addition of masks + sanitiser gel stands
That’s actually hilarious. I don’t remember anything specific they said when I visited the Tower of London but I remember the docents were all super in character with the history and had good rapport with everyone! Kinda like a historical ren fairs vibe
@@doctorwholover1012 that would be cool but it’s also kind of unlikely they’d want to make merch about it since people who have survived it or never got it will think it’s fun but people who had family members or friends recently die from it or were hospitalised by it probably wouldn’t like that it’s been used as fuel for fun merch. Yes, we all call it a plague as a joke, but it wasn’t that long ago and it’s actually still going on so there’s not the same amount of distance from pain that there is with the Black Plague, theres still people alive now who are grieving or who are suffering long term side effects (me ☹️) so it’s tricky. Really any company is going to do what is least likely to get them in trouble while still making as much money as they can 🙄 Also the plague doctor mask things sound cool but the staff working there definitely are better off to be wearing masks that keep them safe and probably have to conform to some standards. It’s better it’s a bit immersion breaking if it means the staff are safe. You’ve got some really cool ideas though! I’m British btw 🙈
"Where did they go?" The Na'vi perished shortly after the humans assisted them in relocating to specially reserved enclosures. They seemed to have a toxic reaction to the new blankets they were given. Luckily, we have preserved their DNA in the Avatar program. Whew!
the explanation I would have is that the Pod that "purifies" the air for humans to breed drove out the Na'vi as the earth atmosphere would be as toxic to them as the pandoran atmosphere is to us.
@@CathrineMacNiel yours defs sounds like a more realistic explanation, but i think OP was alluding to how actual native americans were (and to a frightening extent, still are) treated by colonists. i don't think the "preserving their DNA" part has been done yet, though
The weird colonialist undertones feel very fitting. Like Disney would be the sort of corporation to think it is genuinely doing good while actually screwing over the native peoples.
No, they wouldn’ think they’re doing good. I’m sure the guys who run Disney are perfectly aware of how evil the corporation is. They just don’t care as long as it makes money. But yes, the colonialist undertones are very fitting for them 🤣
I think that's a pretty charitable view of them. Like...imagining Disney to basically be the British in the Andaman Islands rather than the British in mainland India is probably the nicest view anyone can have of them while operating in good faith. I look forward to, a few decades from now, seeing which one plays out in their actual colonialist acquisitions.
Don't they have a little resort type deal in Hawai'i? And aren't there also little resort type deals in the Caribbean tied to their cruise lines? Disney's Pandora experience is probably like, the very first time they've done this kind of a "celebrate with the native peoples while on their land with them nowhere in sight" shtick without facing a shit ton of protests from actively fucked over "native peoples."
The fan forums make this extremely charming for me. I wonder how many of those people have visited Pandora since it opened. I know it was the biggest movie of 2009 or something but for fandom purposes it’s tiny and obscure. Imagining a giant property taking your tiny obscure fandom thing and then making it into a million dollar totally immersive disney world park…I hope they like it
One of my friends worked on Flights of Passage and he said the reason they didn't have a walk-around Navi was that they thought that would be too much like exploitation of natives. This is, of course, also something they should have thought of before making a theme park and also doesn't jive with the whole, "create a sacred necklace for just $19.99" aspect, but just thought I'd bring it up.
@@megmoore8681 Yeah, it really feels weirder that there's none at all. Like, where did they go? Did they all leave? Were they forced out? What is the story here?
"We don't want to exploit this fictional race, so we're going to just steal all their traditions and artifacts and sell them for humans to consume without actual representation of said race actually being present." The horrifying thing is this is EXACTLY how cultural appropriation works...
hi I was the girl who gave you the rum blossom! I've been watching your channel for a very long time, and I've never met a TH-camr or anyone I've recognized before so I EXTREMELY shocked in that moment. I was actually shaking. the reason I remade the drink was because I didn't leave enough room for the rum shot heh. Also the glow seed is 3 big ones but because I adore you I plopped one in your drink. I apologise deeply for how cringey and awkward the transaction was. I've been putting off watching this video because of how awkward I acted Yikes. Anyways bye.
Sounds legit to me. I wish there was a way for you to have broken character or hint at you knowing her just a little, but I've worked in an amusement park before. It's hard to keep that focus and talk to people at the same time.
Billy J. Sobolik Hahahaha what??? I wasn't trying to start drama, I just didn't realise the guy before my comment was joking. Honestly, seems like you're the one who's trying to start drama lmao
"No, the Navi aren't here right now but they're totally cool with all this, really. See here's a page from my diary where I talk about how happy they are, what more proof do you need?"
So people turned up, befriended the natives, learned their culture, wiped them out and then sold it off? I thought this was meant to be a fantasy park.
@@BradTheAmerican ok, I was just worried you actually thought this was a completely fictional thing, or thought it was a good thing that that happened to the Native Americans
@@benedictdwyer2608 I'd usually put /s at the end to note sarcasm but this time I thought the absurdity of it would make that more obvious. However, given that there are literally people out there who say things like that with actual sincerity, maybe I should have put it there anyway.
The fact that Pandora, the park that's themed to be about conservation, gives out cheap single use plastic bags that are different from the rest of the Disney theme park bags, instead of slightly sturdier reusable bags, still lives rent free in my head
Like, all they had to do was do a paper bag with a printed design instead, and that would be 1000% better than what they actually chose to do, and that's without putting any additional effort in
When we went (October 2021), the entire place really tried to get us to upgrade to a (surprising large and nice) reusable bag for $1. I bought the pandora-style one that is really nice and the massive one at the beginning of the park. They could easily have charge $20 for that as it is a souvenir bag, but I didn't realize the bags in Pandora were regular plastic.
Also all the merch is seemingly just plastic shit that will end up in a landfill. Like, it doesn't even seem high quality enough to make a nice conversation piece or actual collectible at any point in time.
They need everyone you walk by to know that you've been there, and that they should go there too. For the betterment of the earth! ...Oh wait, I mean Disney CEO Bob's wallet
So I recently went to see Avatar 2 and I realized midway through that everything I know about the franchise is from this one video Jenny made, which I've rewatched at least 5 times. I don't think I ever even saw the original Avatar movie?
Good for you! I saw it, and it left no impact whatsoever. Which arguably makes the 162 minutes I spent watching it an even bigger waste than if I'd spent it watching two shorter, actively bad movies.
I got to open Pandora as a merchandise cast member. We had to train for a month before it was ever open to the public. I sold Sigourney Weaver Na’vi flip flops and 5 Banshees. I made hundreds of people’s personalized Avatars. I rode Na’vi river journey before it was finished and had half the lights on. The animatronic didn’t even have a face yet. I took the language and culture tests. I can verify all this information is 100% true and accurate.
do you mean you sold flip-flops that had Sigourney Weaver's Na'vi character on them to people, or you sold flip-flops that had Na'vi characters on them to Sigourney Weaver
I just can't get over how cringe it is that they made up a vaguely African sounding catchphrase to convey it's "not a zoo," with accents and everything. All for them to walk back on it so hard in recent years, now playing up the conservation aspects of the park. They even have a TV show now about the zoo functions of the park. Because hey it turns out people find animals and zoos really interesting, and conservation is cool now. The whole park and its history feels like Disney misreading trends and misjudging the actual desires of the guests, and the creation of Pandora is definitely a huge continuation of that trend.
I think the next time I'm in Frontierland I'm going to have to keep telling people when my wagon rolled into town until someone catches on and slips into character.
Or you could just be my family and yell a slightly discordant, wordless, a capella rendition of the Bonanza main theme with five-ish parts in semi-harmony. Really gets the blood pumping and adds to the Western ambience.
Watching Jenny pick up a bag of strangely blue popcorn, look at it and go “ooh that’s expired”, jump cut to her eating it, and jump cut to her throwing it up is pure art. Avatar wishes it could master the cinematic tragedy of this,
Revisiting this video 3 years later the day after Jenny uploaded a _four hour_ video about the Evermore theme park and it's adorable how this "excruciatingly deep dive" was (barely) under an hour.
I literally found a comment I made when this video first came out that’s like “idk if my commitment issues can handle an hour long video about a theme park I don’t care about”. Fast forward 3 years when I watched the 4 hour long Evermore video in one sitting, with no hesitation, even though I have even less free time now 💀
I too watched this video for the billionth time. It's just so wild to see a park with some issues but the genius of imagineers behind it in comparison to a park with an imaginative millionaire behind it. I think it's fascinating to compare the two. Where there are both honest critiques but one is...keenly detailed, thought out,and funded to the brim
@@fyrefrost1898 Yeah but only Americans lose their shit when they see people painting their faces to resemble other people. The only reason why Europeans cease to uphold their centuries' old traditions that involve people with their faces painted black is because American media and political personalities practically bully them into it, even though nobody there seems to have a clue what the hell is even supposed to be wrong with it.
@@yarpen26 tl;dr Blackface in Europe has different, less insulting historical connotations than it does in America, but for the most part it's still quite common where traditionally applicable. Also I personally would have liked to see some references to American history regarding the Na'vi's similarity to Native Americans and how ACE is different than RDA (and thematically, America) despite the results of their encroachment on Na'vi land being extremely similar(No Na'vi around except in pictures showing how happy they were to have ACE moving in). I currently live in the Netherlands and I can assure you, Black Pete (blatant blackface, though far less demeaning than American Vaudeville) is very much alive and well. Although I have to say I agree with Jenny on the weird, sinister overtones of normalizing the aftermath of colonialism. I don't think this was done on purpose -- the park's designers were probably just making it based on what they see as the best outcome of a foreign (and definitely capitalist since this is an American park owned by an American company) people settling in an already inhabited land -- but by trying not to have a political message despite the very political themes of the Avatar movie (specifically in regards to nature vs industrialization and natives vs settlers) ends up having a very similar effect to trying to bury a violent past beneath a mask of cooperation. This is just my two cents, but I think if Disney had embraced the thematic similarities between the Na'vi and the Native Americans and mixed in just a few tasteful references to American history, the park could have ended up far more meaningful to people since many -- dare i say most -- Americans have a stronger emotional connection to American history than the Avatar movie. I can see why they didn't do this since it would open them up to criticism from both liberals and conservatives, but I think it would have done added a lot more to American culture than just another place to spend money trying to forget which world you live in.
@@yarpen26 There's a big difference between painting your face black for longstanding cultural reasons and painting your face black specifically to caricature or make fun of people with darker skin.
I'd like a deep dive into Moulin Rouge, but it seems Jenny mostly does children's movies. Sure Satine is puking blood all over then dies and ruins everything, but the Star Wars style rich against poor/ good against evil plot is worth rambling on about.
My brother and I had a hotel guest only early access pass to both harry potter park locations (meaning we got in a few hours before general tickets allowed entrance). It was incredible to see every little detail they put into the world (down to brick detail, it was perfect). There were maybe 50 park goers there. We spent 2 hours looking at everything in awe and went on the busiest ride a few times before the lines hit. The park opened to the general tickets and the streets where flooded. After that, It was still semi-impressive but a lot of details were more hidden and everyone was in a hurry. Would highly recommend going it is a great experience for Harry Potter fans. Also try the Butter beer both hot and cold, they are awesome!
This whole video, I was waiting for the other shoe to drop, where Jenny would reach a hidden cavern with Na'vi prisoners locked in cages, being experimented on, and desperately trying to tell guests that the stories and pictures in the park were all a lie. It seemed heavily hinted at, with no Na'vi visible in the park and all of the employees acting shifty/awkward when asked about the history. But alas, that was too clever or perhaps too uncomfortable for Disney to do.
@@amityislandchum I don't know if it's actually clever, it would be pretty horrifying PR for the kids to have the entire theme park be essentially a perpetual concentration camp enslaving their heroes. There can't be any ways to free them in the lore otherwise the park has to stop existing, so the kids would just cry and no longer be able to enjoy the facade of the park held up by the humans.
@@ThelouwseFD That was even worse. Like they had so many people work so hard on something that they were hired for, only for it to turn out perfect and get discarded
@@ThelouwseFD that video lives in my head rent free. What a stunning example of hubris, such a waste of money and talent. I want to see it adapted as a Greek tragedy
It would be really cool if there were like actors playing homeless Pandora invasion veterans, complete with gruesome arrow wounds and they just sat at the edges begging, holding signs like "arm eaten by alien monster rhino, please help." You could give guests some kind of fake space money and if you give them a pittance they tell you about their horrible mauling.
I remember we stayed at the Animal Kingdom Lodge quite soon after they opened Pandora and there was a channel on the TV in the room that only played Avatar, over and over again.
Literally every time a TH-camr complains about a motorcycle outside or something similar, I’ve never been able to hear it and their complaint about it is just me taking them on faith that it even happened
Same with whenever a TH-camr warns of their audio being bad because they're sick. I've only noticed it once with Quinton Reviews's last Sam & Cat video and he looked like he was dying in that part.
I used to stream, and I quickly learned that things that sound so loud to you almost never gets picked up by the mic, but you can't be sure at the time. And even if you go back and rewatch the footage, knowing that you did hear it then will have you tricking yourself into thinking you hear it again
@@geegeep for months, I've had this video on when I'm trying to fall asleep, on my way to work or school, while I'm studying, and just now when I was doing dishes. Jenny Nicholson for every occasion.
I saw Avatar in theaters the week it came out. I can distinctly remember the really cute jacket a girl in front of me in line was wearing. I cannot remember anything about the plot or characters in the multi-billion dollar hit film, Avatar.
I remember the plot was reeeeaallly similar to some other films/books/movies. It was really bad on DVD though. I think he was supposed to go kill the blue people as a replacement for his brother then he got some blue vagina and betrayed his people. Edit: ah, yes! The movie was dances with wolves and Pocahontas.
I’m not into dark headcanons but this whole park feels like “friendly” corporation killed all the navi (except one and she probably lost her mind at this point) and lie to tourist for money. Also that idea of a empty navi body being forever stuck to that flying lizard thingy (which is presumably sentient enough and not an empty body) is nuts 😂
I was in the gift shop after riding flight of passage and my friend overheard a guest ask a cast member "Do you have any Disney apparel here?" and the cast member responded "Oh, we're not at all affiliated with Disney." My friend recalled that the guest walked away, confused. I think this encounter captures the essence of Pandora.
@@atomic_wait But if there are only two megacorps remaining and this one is a different corporation than the one from the 'documentary' then does that mean Disney invaded Pandora?
Do you ever have a weird moment when you realize that the people who were apart of the conception and maintenance of this park have dedicated so much of their time and mental real estate to this one random movie that everyone thought was "alright". It just amazes me that there are people who've invested so much in details about a movie most people only saw once over 10 years ago. It's just wild to me I don't know why.
The Imagineering Story on Disney+ goes into all this- for this Avatar park and the whole history of Disney. It's wild & inspiring meeting these people who dreamed all this stuff up... carrying forward the legacy of Walt. That anamatronic Navi in the water ride has 42 motors in its face that allows it to express emotion (from S1:E6). Seems they invested too much of their resources into that one feature, because Jenny was displeased by that ride.
I worked there for a semester for an internship and trust me it doesn’t. I just memorized like 7 phrases tops and smiled and played with kid other than that mind empty 🥴😂
That’s the exact same vibe I have. Like it feels like “oh no what a waste of creative energy.” It’s like an unreciprocated crush. Someone pouring out their heart to their crush and the crush is like “who are you? Oh thanks but no.” Like it feels wasted somehow and it makes me sad, but despite that nothing in hell or earth will get me to be invested in this movie franchise.
People thought it was amazing when it first came out. It was the highest grossing movie ever. Unfortunately they didn’t follow up on the sequels and everyone forgot about it. I saw once when I was 7 and like a couple times at 8 and 9 I think
“A theme park project whose motivating drive seems to be spite” Ah yes, I see that the spirit of Michael Eisner has lingered in the Disney theme park subdivision.
I've been watching a lot of theme park/Disney history videos recently and it's actually kind of disturbing how many of my happy childhood memories only exist because of Eisner's spite
Imagine saying goodbye to your family and telling them you won't see them for fifteen years, because you want to go into cryosleep and fly in an interstellar spaceship to visit a theme park on a moon in the Alpha Centauri system.
Got to admire the dedication of performers really. I honestly have no idea how they manage to even perform the exact same 10 minute routine every single hour at the exact same enthusiam levels for months at a time. These people willpower is unbreakable.
Watching this after seeing the real Avatar 2 makes me wonder... How many years after the series does ACE come in to appropriate the Navi culture given the fact it's even more clear how many issues and trauma the presence of humans in Pandora caused.
Okay, but making it immersive is cool, but also makes it really weird. Like, imagine we accepted tourism from an alien race... and they walked around with headbands that had human ears, and had their faces painted to have human skin colors with various "exotic markings" like freckles or acne scars. Imagine that alien then proceeds to buy dolls that are literally labeled "human male" and "human female," and makes a doll of how THEY would look if they were human. Imagine these aliens partaking in rights of passage from multiple cultures that hold no true meaning to them. Hell, imagine an alien having a Bar Mitzvah celebration. They just zap into their avatar, and there they are, in the middle of their D'var Torah with the stares of judgmental distant relatives and bored friends! And one of the souvenirs they could buy was "traditional dented ball" which was just a damn golf ball.
We don't need to imagine it, white colonisers have already done that (and in some cases are still doing that) with virtually every 'exotic' culture they could get their hands on lmao
As someone who was an awkward enough nerd to try learning Navi when this movie came out...I don't think you realize how surreal it is hearing these words again after 12 years.
@@snusemcgoose1001 Not even comparable. Latin language still has extremely strong roots in current day latin-based languages in use. Such as Italian, French, Romanian, and... Spanish. Latin is also widely used in scientific literature to this day, and studied and read all around the world. In Italy, the most prestigious high schools still have weekly mandatory latin classes for all students.
Alpha Centauri Employee : This is way after that documentary. Customer: This? ACE: Yes, this! Customer: What do you mean by “this”? ACE: This time! Customer: “This time”? You mean now? ACE: Yes, now! I could go on, but we all get the point.
Wait. Waitwaitwaotwaitwait. You’re telling me you DON’T need to be reminded of the date our modern era is set, as if you’re acutely aware that the time you live in is not canonically the present?
I cannot wait for Avatar 2's butterfly wings to appear as purchasables in this theme park. Because they exist in the movie solely for that singular purpose - to be merchandise.
Oh, when I saw wide-eyed Kiri sailing through the water with the butterfly wings and the gold glowing fish, my immediate thought was the doll they would make of it.
Ugh, you’re so right about the missed opportunity with Pokémon. I haven’t played or thought much about it in 15 years, but I would absolutely go to a Pokémon theme park. And there’d be none of that super uncomfortable Native American metaphor hanging over everything.
Yeah. It would be replaced with a. Weird sort of legal cock fighting metaphor “but it’s ok because they’re our friends and partners not just animals we make fight”
Except one was based on the lead designer's experiences catching bugs as a child and the other was based on the historical genocide of everyone that lived West of the Canary Islands. It was...The associations are...it's hard to see how one could equivocate them, even as a joke? Like, you and a handful of other people will bring up the whole 'pokemon is fucked up, when you overthink it!' thing, maybe a few people will actually, in good faith, feel uncomfortable and that's totally fine, PETA will protest a few times in between their usual passtime of running domestic animal death camps, and millions will get something they've wanted for decades. Here...not only does no one want this, but it's not like these native similarities are a product of examining something more closely than its creators ever did, the original film is very obviously a deliberate native American metaphor. Even though the culture you're appropriating with that headband and those beads is an imaginary one, the creator of that imaginary one basically just took stereotypical whitewashed mythical versions of 'Native Americans' as a whole and just used those wholecloth without any real effort, so it's still problematic as fuck. What's worse, the nature of the theme park itself really calls your attention to that genocide because they appear to have fucked up in their handling of the incredibly delicate cultural issue they never should have tried to make into part of Disney. So...yeah. Maybe a few hundred or even thousand people in the world would be genuinely upset about a Pokemon Land. That's cool, significantly more people would be offended at my taking offense to ridiculous blue Native American stereotypes becoming part of Disney World if they read it, but let's give it -1 points for that. But there are millions of fans that would be made extremely happy by it, so...let's give it that point back? Avatar Land makes people exactly as happy as a non-offensive original sci-fi setting would, so there's literally no plus side to it. And again, whatever implications you might find in Pokemon, none of them are genocide, which is kind of +100 points. It turns out that metaphors for the worst crimes in history can make excellent films (though didn't in this case) but really become super uncomfortable when they're adapted into the literal embodiment of consumerist excess that is a modern theme park. Generally speaking: if anything you sell in your theme park has a reasonable chance of reminding someone of the way their (great?) grandfather's bones were sold to tourists, you have screwed up to a degree you can never salvage.
Ok so what's funnier The fact that there's a Na'vi word for bladder polyp, or the fact that it's a short, monosyllabic word, which implies it's commonly used?
Either that or Jenny is lying to us which is somehow even funnier when you think about it. Firstly, Jenny lying to us at all. Secondly, the fact that nobody in their right mind would spend the money for the translator and booster packs to confirm the word for bladder polyp and so we are at her mercy for this one singular word.
@@collisionsc-7875 All of those are normal, common things. Cot even has a couple different ways to be used, most of those do. Gotta jet, jet plane, jet black. You’ve got car rims, a drink with salt on the rim, rimshot. Act as in to perform, first act and second act, a heinous act, generous act, Jenny herself even used the word act a ton in this video 😂
Her enthusiasm over the drums definitely made those performers month. "There's someone out here begging for the drum show and is sitting there waiting" "For the drum show....in disneyland?"
I know this vid is pretty old and that I'm a bit late on commenting, but I will always remember the first time I went to Pandora. It had to have been just shortly after it had opened, because they were still limiting the amount of guests going in. But I was in line for the ride, and there was a kid in line ahead of me (about 7 or 8 years old) and he started talking all about how he "knew everything about Avatar." And then he started to explain Avatar... The Last Airbender... to all of his family in line. I just had to hold in a laugh, and was... so embarrassed for the park.
@@julietdeane3128 When I first heard about this Avatar movie, I remember looking it up and thinking "That's not The Last Airbender" with a strong tinge of disappointment. And then there WAS a movie, but it was made by massive fuck-up M. Night.
@@mastermarkus5307 That movie was terrible for many reasons, not just M. Night; he certainly didn't help of course, but it's not his fault a quarter of the movie was cut out at the last minute by the studio.
The main reason I'd want to visit the Avatar theme park is to show up decked out in Avatar the Last Airbender merch before proceeding to ask all the cast members various ATLA questions while remaining utterly and blissfully convinced the theme park is in fact somehow vaguely related to the animated show from 2005.
@@erieri6326 It can be both! Look at the Joker! Not that I think the Joker would do this-he seems like the kind of person who'd get bored and wander off in the middle of "The Storm" and wander off to do some arson, and also is probably too old to have seen ATLA as a kid.
The Hogwarts train thing in Florida's Universal Studios is fucking awesome ngl I'm glad they built it. I've never even seen Harry Potter but it was one of my favorite parts of my trip. They have screens on the windows so you can look out the across the same landscapes as the movies, and the doors also have screens that play the silhouettes of characters walking, talking, and getting into shenanigan's in the hallway. It really makes you feel like you're on a magical train from a movie. So, very, very, VERY rare good decision on J.K Rowling's part. Also Disney REALLY underestimated just how important the train is to Harry Potter fans. Like the idea of riding the Hogwarts train and getting to try butterbeer is more than enough to get them out there and spending money
I love how the Avatar flavored pop corn is colored blue. Like, I'm trying to think of everything blue in Avatar and I'm really drawing a blank, except for the Na'vi. So I guess we know what they did with all the Na'vi. Kept that one in the river ride alive for sport, the cruel bastards.
Escape from Tomorrow 2: Main Street Electrical Boogaloo. Jim stands in line for Flight of Passage, thinking lustfully of about the Shaman of Songs. After a 2-hour wait, shown in real time, he hallucinates that the banshee is a naked woman wearing the novelty ears and tail from the gift shop. Then he breaks into a secret lab that's inside the glowing pod, where the rebuilt robot scientist recaptures him and disintegrates him so that they can use his genetic material to grow 12-inch Avatars dolls, splitting Jim's consciousness into thousands of hideous, overpriced plastic bodies.
So, coming back from Way of Water, I have to wonder how they’re going to explain the whole thing where RDA returns with a vengeance and completely obliterates a huge chunk of the forest to build a city. It certainly makes ACE seem all the more sinister…
The theme park apparently takes place over 100 years after the first movie, so basically any Avatar movie that comes out would be earlier in the timeline than the park.
I liked it when at 17:50, when to in-character cashier asked her about "the documentary" she went along and asked "about Jake and Neytiri?". Its nice that shes meeting her halfway
Still can't shake off how disturbing the metaphor for Native Americans and treating them like a total fucking novelty instead of actual people is here. It's just so strong and something feels wrong about it.
@2D’s blue-ty shorts Well it’s not directly representing a Native American tribe, it’s fiction. Fictional place, fictional beings. A fictional theme park area where parents take their kids is doing no harm. Besides I can assure you that A) no child is going to instantly correlate Native Americans when they see tall blue cat people, and B) there are actual real problems facing Native Americans, and a theme park located and owned by Disney is the very least of their problems or concerns. I mean, do you see any Native activists groups boycotting or writing bad criticisms of the park? No. So I understand what you may think, but if the people that you claim this is hurting don’t seem to give a shit, they why should you?
@@chilly001963 I see your point (especially in your last sentence) and I feel like people can certainly take issues out of context concerning culture. But I feel like this has more to do with the actual themes the source content was taken from. The story of Avatar is basically about a foreign group using militaristic and invasive means to take what belongs to a tribal society for profit. Of course it's only a metaphor for American history but in the vein of 1984, Fahrenheit 451, the Giver, Animal Farm, and Lord of the Flies etc. Fictional stories are powerful ways of conveying political messages. Whether or not it was originally intended to make people feel uncomfortable, (and I doubt it truly was) doesn't detract from the fact that on delivery it appears to be very much a place uninhabited by any it's native population... but completely refitted for tourism and profit. It's not so much as something blatantly offensive as it is a general reminder that this sort of colonial culture is normal. Personally I don't see anything wrong with people trying to enjoy their hard-earned vacations, especially when most people don't even remember the movie. Kids in Navi costumes are just kids who don't deserve to be haggled over something their just parents bought them. I think the actual issue is that one of the largest corporations in the world, who really do seem to prioritize inclusion and culture sensitivity in most cases, somehow had years to develop this project and never seemed to realize how it would look, and what implications it could have. Or, they did realize, but just didn't care.
I find it hilarious that the "alien" hamburger with the meat encased in dough is literally just a regular food that they sell in bakeries in Brazil. They call it: hambúrguer.
Yeah, it's almost a pita bread from Turky too. Well it's not litteraly a hamburger inside so your exemple is better but :p Many cultures have this kind of thing.
@@nn6404 Which is what the Avatar movie did constantly as well. There's a really good Avatar video by Sideways, which mainly focuses on music, but also about how such an ambitious concept with so much lore behind the scenes turned into a pretty dumb and bland movie in the end, I highly recommend it if you're interested.
The panther/predator/black dog creatures in avatar could be implemented in the Na'vi River Journey in such a cool way. At the beginning of the ride you could say, see one hiding in the brush staring at you, then see a pack of them in the distance strategically making their way around the tourists, and then have a jump scare moment with an animatronic, so it's like a hunting scene. All the while you could hear twigs cracking, the creatures communicating in yips like you're about to be pounced by a pack of coyotes
So Disney could have had a Medieval Fantasyland that could take advantage of the dragon/medieval-fantasy current trend, but they traded it for this. My 6-year-old-inner-girl weeps for the unicorn ride.
They probably could have still pulled off something similar if they acquired Harry Potter as well, considering there is an emphasis on the same types of mystical creatures in that universe.
They attempted to acquire the Harry Potter rights years ago, but their ideas didn't sit well with JK Rowling. From my understanding, they only conceptualized a single attraction (similar to what Midway Mania is) as opposed to an entire themed land.
The Lost Continent land that Harry Potter mostly replaced was basically what happened when Imagineers that worked on Beastly Kingdom before it got cancelled ended up jumping ship to the competition. Hence why it also had dragon and unicorn rides and it basically ended up putting DIsney off of the idea.
The thing is, beastly kingdom could tie in with a TON of disney properties. Black Cauldron, Sleeping Beauty, and now that Disney owns Fox, Last Unicorn is on the table.
They kind of tried to bury Black Cauldron though, I think the only attraction it got was in Tokyo Disney and the attraction isn’t even up anymore, so I doubt they’d ever put it in the park but god damn I would love to see beastly kingdom, I didn’t even know it was planned at all and kid me would be so invested in that, plus since it’s a magical world they can compete with universal again since they can sell their own unicorn and dragon merch
@ don't they have a train that you take from the alley to the second section? It's like a big thing and I think the only way to get to that second area
Thus, they properly appeased the Train Gods, and so their theme park did well, unlike SOME theme parks Luckily Star Wars Land learned from previous mistakes
Avatar 2, 3, 4 or 5 will NEVER replace the first one
Yes, that's why they're sequels
Avatar 6 though....
@@SugaryCoyote
... is a mastahpiece! ~here comes the money~
whe... did these movies come out, and I missed them? There's still only one movie still, right? Or what timeline am I in?
TheVeR01 I'm p sure there's I only the first movie. Since the second one doesn't come out till Dec. 2020.
They should have said all the people working there were Navi in reverse-avatar bodies, and have them all act like aliens badly trying to impersonate humans.
David Newgreen it would slightly work too, because Navi can’t breathe the same air as humans
If I think about it cynically, it's probably because it would be a subliminal message about the Na'vi adopting Earthling culture and using their own as a means of profit.
More likely, however, is just that not one Disney Imagineer had this awesome idea. :I
I think people give corporate imagineers too much credit.
Aliens acting like humans acting like aliens acting like humans.
Kyle Frank Yeah, it’d be like a weird reflection of that stereotype of natives building casinos and shit.
ah yes, my favorite avatar character, *Na'vi Female*
I like this character with my HUMAN BRAIN... *INSERT SMILE HERE*
My new waifu
@@evanseifert8858 BE QUIETUAHAHAH
disney should have built beastly kingdom as a tie in to the extremely successful and still relevant film beastly (2011) starring alex pettyfer and vanessa hudges
Beauty and the Beast (2017)... Beastly... Fantastic Beasts... Beastly Kingdom... I only cover topics involving beasts
i giggled at this for too long
@@JennyNicholson What are you suggesting? *eyebrow wiggle*
😂😂
When Jenny said beastly kingdom this is exactly where my mind went
It's been many years, and I am still so charmed by the employee who says 'have you watched the documentary? This is many years after', as if that's how you talk about documentaries that came out a few years ago. Gonna start saying 'have you watched Walking with Dinosaurs? Well this is many years after that' when I'm next at a zoo
im SO glad someone is finally talking about that line bc i think about the wording choice constantly
“Have you seem Hamilton? This takes place many years after that.”
I feel like a more normal phrasing would be "Have you seen Avatar? It's a very outdated documentary, but still worth watching." That functions both as a promo and context I'd think.
"Did you watch that really old documentary, uh... 'Avatar' or something like that? Y'know, the one that showed some of the first interactions between us and Na'vi, that one. Yeah, it's got some interesting info, but it came out pretty soon after that stuff happened, which was, what, like... thirty years ago at least, wasn't it? It's pretty outdated at this point, I think the rusted out military equipment speaks for itself."
It's definitely long, but it's casual, and feels more organic. That's how I would've handled it, at least.
@@theflyingspaget idk "outdated" sounds like the movie is not canon and has the connotation that it's bad
The Na'vi now live on reserves, hidden from tourists. But they're perfectly OK with it guys! The -propaganda- pictures and notes on the walls prove it!
I feel like it’s much more sinister than that. Those “air-purifying” pods probably poisoned the air for the Na’vi. That, and human diseases probably killed them all off. The Na’vi in the pictures were probably the last few left as the park was completed (probably with slave labor).
"Smile for the picture and you get extra gruel rations, filthy blueskin!"
It’d be awesome if there was a deep deep backstory where the Navi execute a WestWorld style takeover of the ACE park
i need an entire lore video
Maybe the sequels will explain this? If anyone watches them?
My favorite thing about Avatar is that there are countless horror movies that have essentially the same plot of the movie if it were told from the Naavi perspective. An alien species lands on your native planet and start controlling genetically engineered lookalikes of your species to try and take over. Avatar or Invasion of the Body Snatchers?
Oh my god you’re right! Why didn’t Disney think of this lmao
What's even scarier is that both Avatar and Invasion of Body Snatchers feature pods as a key plot point, as a convenient invasion technique. Coincidence... I wanna say not, but then Jenny's glowing pod just brainwashed me to plant all those strange seeds being mailed to us, so I'm now forced to deny any of the pod's questionable actions.
Earth man's method of trying to connect with another planet's inhabitants in this film is like White people trying to connect with an African tribe by wearing Blackface. It's demeaning, insulting and creepy.
H.G Wells: Hmm... if only someone could write a novel about this?
Actually Avatar is a [overly long and boring ] remake of "Dances with Wolves" and "Pocahontas"
Plot Twist: they finally open Beastly Kingdom, but it's really just a huge park devoted to the movie Beastly
The comment I needed
🤣🤣🤣😅
This is the best one
Thanks for the gut laugh oml
YESS!
When I was working at Hollywood Studios, a mother and her adult son came into Tatooine Traders. The mother ended up being a shoplifter and tried stealing a hat and the only reason that security was able to find them so fast was the fact that her adult son was dressed head to toe as a Nav'i. Best moment of my life
free her
Note to self: if I go to shoplift from Disney, don't bring my Nav'i son to be an accessory to my crimes
Poor kid.
They really missed an opportunity here by not creating an authentic Pandora park where the atmosphere is extremely poisonous to humans and if you don't wear a breathing mask at all times you will die.
And if they were going to go that far, they should have just made it a Nausicaa themed park. It's about as culturally relevant anyway...actually, that would be pretty cool...
Bimon1234567
Gods that would be SO GOOD
@@dardend4155 I WANT THAT THEME PARK NOW. To keep the immersion they should also revive the God Warriors to exterminate mankind, just for good measure
Yeah im surprised they didn't build it in California too.
Check the end of the vid. Disney asspulled a magic plant that makes the air human-friendly
I’ve watched this video more times than I’ve seen the Avatar movie
Me too, and I’ve only watched this video once.
I actually finished this video.
Yeah, me too, but I’d like to watch Avatar 2
Bro
@@esayers I can't listen to her when I'm trying to fall asleep, because her commentary is interesting. And that kind of wakes me up.
im only a minute in but the disney "it's not a zoo!" ad has me in TEARS. How is that a real ad. it feels like something out of parks and rec
i think you mean NATAZHU + random accent marks
I hope they say more in the ad that she didn't show, cuz otherwise it doesn't make any sense at all. It's a zoo with a fake, crappy dinosaur thing added to it. So it's... a zoo, with a dinosaur thing added to it. Which still means it's just a fuckin zoo, and they probably couldn't even get things like penguins because of how humid it is in florida. Unless the penguins are in some big building with the polar bears and stuff.
Matthew Dekker probably because it’s also not an aquarium and representing Asia and Africa (and not the areas that do have penguins) lol
"Nahtahzhu" or whatever probably translates into "This is a zoo".
roguishpaladin it’s literally a made up word by Disney gdjgddhd
The idea that a single card translates "bladder polyp" is incredibly insane to me.
and the fact that the word is so shortened makes it seem like it’s an extremely common, almost slang word. what’s up bladder polyp
not to mention, she got duplicates, so there probably arent very many total words in the deck. so bladder polyp was a high priority word 1) for the linguists who invented the language na'vi to translate 2) for them to print on those cards ??
My guess is either 1) whoever was in charge of picking out words to use chose "bladder polyp" at random as a way to indicate Na'vi had their own medical terminology, 2) Jenny unfortunately bought a pack that just got a ton of duplicate cards, and/or 3) the Na'vi have terrible urinary tract infection issues due to the pollution and environmental destruction from the humans continually stripmining their resource-rich planet, so much so that they ended up developing this word as a way to indicate this was a nasty symptom of their failing health.
@@thejasminedragonmerchant6843my burdened heart believes our world can handle the latter and in Avatar 3 we explore a volcano where they cured Na'Vi Cancer with just like, ash and spit. It's my right
"Bladder Polyp" is the name of some alien plants that grow on the surface of Pandora, so I assume that that is what it is referring to. However, that does mean that someone decided to name a plant "bladder polyp" and no one decided that there should be a different name.
Could you imagine if, in Disneyland, they had a Peter Pan show that was just a random guy in loose fitting clothing explaining that, while he wont be showing up, Peter taught him how to fly and fight pirates (who also wont be showing up)?
sounds like all the fun!
“I know a place just like that...”-
Stares dreamily of into space
That is the most random comment I have seen
Steven Irizarry
Why doesn’t it surprise me it was pinned by Jenny
This my good sir was a very good comment - thank you
"What happened with RDA will never happen again" had the same energy as "there is no war is Ba Sing Se"
Alpha Industries are still a for-profit company, it will happen again, in the same way the East India Company gained favour in India over their european rivals for being the most culturally sensitive and least violent... until they could make more money by being violent that is
avatar meet avatar
@@spinecho609 you may be overthinking this
@@TheRambunctious ironically, this is a joke comparison, so you instead may be overthinking this
@@roelin360 did I ask?
You'd think the translator would be a great product if they just had a ton of Navi writing around the park and you point the thing at it like a QR code, and so people who buy them would just get the novelty of a ton of little easter eggs around the park.
That... makes too much sense.
The problem with this is that I am pretty sure that the Na'vi officially have not developed writing, so...
@@anteroinen4239 maybe during the time between the war with humans and them selling their land to a tourism company they made a written language
@@feelmypuddle4963 Eh, considering their culture and the environment it seems pretty unlikely. It isn't like the Na'vi need it for anything, since it seems they've still kept themselves to a totally nomadic lifestyle. I am sure their linguist told them as much (it sounded like he was the one pronouncing stuff from the cards by the way, adorable, I love that he's still working on this stuff).
Anteroinen maybe it’s humans writing in Na’vi? I’m learning Lakota (and they don’t have a written languages) so I put little labels on all the things in my house so I can look at them and call them by their Lakota name
Those weird pictures of the Navis working with the humans and all that lore stuff about how great they get along really remind me of those old film reels I've seen oil companies make about my tribe.
"Look at the smiling waving Indians, they are so happy that we've built all these oil rigs on their land providing vital jobs-"
It would be very ballsy if Disney went ahead and added lore about how 90 percent of the Navi died out from measles, and then the survivors were all diabetic because Disney introduced coca cola to them.
godddd that would be so dark
For me, it made me think of this creepy WW2 propaganda film the American government made, filming the Japanese-American citizens they had rounded up to be kept in internment camps. They were filming these scared looking families, with a voice-over saying something along the lines of: "These Japanese-American citizens are so happy to be working hard for our country, and are grateful for the work we're giving them!" I felt so bad.
This comment slaps so hard
@@PissyLissy Jesus
@@PissyLissy That's incredibly unsettling.
fun fact - Animal Kingdom doesn't use the "natahzu" tag anymore bc they were recognized officially by the zoological association, and they are actually a zoo now. I learned that when I was working there, and I died.
"Eetzahzu!!"
I'm assuming they carried you off the premises before pronouncing you dead? Gotta maintain that "no one's ever died here" line.
So now it's *ahzu*
@@lemonferret This whole thread was worth it just for you my friend
A few employees called it “nah-tah-theme-park”, because for tax purposes it was a zoo.
What a great alagory for Native American U.S history and relationships."Yeah they love us being here Ah they're not here right now but they taught us their music Yeah!"
"Here's some pieces of plastic you can put on a string to replicate their look. Here's their skin as a costume. They're cool with this I promise. No, you can't ask them right now."
@@aurora5481 right
@@aurora5481 "Also yeah when we first came we were murderous dicks but the second time around we sent a nicer group and it was aaaaall fiiiiine even if w did basically the same again"
It's almost poetic
Avatar both appropriates Native American culture AND dehumanizes them, it’s an impressive feat of ignorance.
its unintentionally ironic. its laughably sad
Universal Studios got Harry Potter World because Disney didn’t want to build a TRAIN? Walt is probably rolling in his train-loving grave
Not just that. They basically really cheaped out on the entire plan. They told JK that they weren’t going to build hogwarts or the train. They offered to build a magical creatures petting zoo (with an animatronic) and a shooting game ride where you fight dark creatures with your wand. Lots of smaller disagreements too, like wanting Disney merch in the Harry Potter shops, character interactions with Harry and the other main cast, and branded items like Coca Cola
Their pitch was also super basic too- I think Yesterworld covered it with how badly they botched their pitch. They really undervalued how much money they could have made with Harry Potter. And then they put a ton of money into a film people mostly thought had good effects but an uninteresting/problematic story
I can't believe I forgot how much Walt loved trains, god he'd have been ALL over that train concept! plus doesn't HP just have that feel to it that Walt would've been adamant about incorporating into the park? I feel like he would've viewed it the same way he did Mary Poppins and Winnie the Pooh, at least the first 3 books
Oh, watch the galaxy’s edge video, she goes IN on it.
"Walt [Disney] is probably rolling in his...* grave."
Good.
(*edit: train-loving, union-busting, HUAC-informing, etc.)
Bro the "grow your own Avatar" experience is like when you made a Mii based on a photo and it just completely roasted you
oh my god you're so right
So many things about this that I’m going to be thinking about for the rest of my life. The pod. The kid who didn’t know there’s a movie. The $80 ugly doll. The ball. The cashier who called it “the documentary”. The translator. This video changed my life
The man with one ear fully stretched with a collection of earrings.
My question is:
Can you race those pods?
That ear thing was horrible. If he nods his head too fast, he's going to break his earlobe.
Iconic tbh
Abdega Now this is podracing.
I recently went to the Avatar park and I can’t believe you didn’t mention the giant Na’vi head that’s displayed in the gift shop. It looks like they beheaded the leader and used it as a warning to other Na’vi.
The WHAT
Ella Powell Seriously!! It’s a beautiful statue but the implications are fucking terrifying!!
15:44 it’s right there lol
It's also a warning to never mention it's existence.
That gets more unsettling when you consider how the Na'vi are Native American coded, and white people displaying/selling the decapitated heads of natives was a pretty common practice during the 17th and 18th century.
My actual favourite thing is how enthusiastic Jenny is in all theme parks and you can never quite tell if it's ironic or genuine because she uses the same deadpan tone of voice for everything, including singing and yelling "whooo!".
Legit I believe that she’s playing into the attraction, so legit enjoyment.
Nah she legit enjoys the theme park experience. Even when some of the rides suck and the entire concept of the park is stupid because Avatar is a dead franchise, they can still make a cool bioluminescent jungle with rusting robots.
I think she genuinely just likes being at theme parks.
To be fair, when you go to a theme park. It's hard not to have at least a little fun
Anyone who is really into something and isn't a weird fanboy is comfortable making fun of parts of it while still enjoying it.
Genuinely can't imagine anything I'd find harder to deal with psychologically than a performer making consistent eye contact and then handing me a gourd to shake
Lmao. The only way it could be worse was if they pulled you up to be with them in front of the crowd and got you to dance around shaking the gourd.
Where are all the Na'vi?
*Buys skin-like Na'vi t-shirt*
Huh, I wonder where they all are?
*Buys authentic pair of Na'vi ears*
Oh well, I guess they went...elsewhere
*Buys Na'vi tail*
_They've been there the whole time just offscreen!_
😂😂😂
*TO SERVE MAN!!! IT'S A COOK BOOK!!!*
OH NO
NO WAIT. *WE'RE THE NA'VI NOW*
*WE'RE TURNING INTO FURRIES*
the imperialism implications of the idea of "get your face painted like this native species that has now disappeared" are dizzying
It's (albeit made-up culture) cultural appropriation!
@@eteline_music i mean in context isn't it like... analogous to blackface?
@@thomasstone3480 Yeah, it is. Or, more accurately, those racist Native American Halloween costumes
Okay but the only Navi being in the cave singing alone.. also just adds to the overwhelming sense of dread here. Like, shes the last one--hiding out and singing out her pain of the brothers and sisters shes lost to yet another evil earthling company
And since Alpha Centauri Expeditions has basically destroyed her homeland, the only way she can put food on the table is to perform for these tourists all day. (Do you think she gets paid an actual wage and has to visit the Cantina to buy food, or that she's just paid directly in rations? Does any entity with jurisdiction over Pandora enforce labor laws?)
There's more than just her in the forest of the ride and the echoing voices in the river ride is supposed to echo the others in her tribe.
Also the pods make the air breathable for humans, but wouldn’t that make it toxic for the Navi? So now they’ve introduced a foreign and invasive plant that has taken over the planet to the extent that the atmosphere is completely hostile for the Navi and they’ve been driven underground. 😂 The meta is insane.
@@wolffisu Or the severed spirits of her massacred people, wailing in agony for all time.
That cave Na'vi is a vibe and a half
I'm wondering how the park is going to deal with the changing canon of the Avatar Universe? The second movie’s depiction of Earth-Pandora relations is quite far from the harmonious co-existence of the park's lore. The cast member's innocuous comment shown in the video “What happened with the RDA will never happen again” really has a darker undertone now.
i can only assume that the story of the park now takes place in a different canon or something
The third Avatar should be completely about reconciling the difference between the world of the theme park and the story of Avatar 2. You could even go the extra mile and film scenes at the park with employees playing their own characters in a sort of bizarre crossbreed of Escape from Tomorrow and Jimmy Cameron's Avatar. It would be totally insane, and terrible, and I would love it.
Hey! I actually work at Flight of Passage! So the whole point of the park is it Takes place over a generation after the 5th movie. But also James Cameron, planned Pandora after he wrote the main parts of the scripts for the most of the movies.
Basically pur story is meant to be completely selective from the main story. ACE came in later to try and fix everythinf
@@jasonfenton8250 Escape from Tomorrow was so bad though
Avatar 2: "It happened again."
Ironically the Avatar theme park seems to do a better job of illustrating the evils of colonialism than the actual movie.
The movie is hamfisted and the villains mustache-twirling caricatures. The park works because it is eerie and unintentional due to dissonance between the reality of the park and the lore and exacerbated by certain budget limitations and constrained creative decisions.
The worst part of the movie was when the life tree thing basically declared earth and humans irredeemable non-life and the protagonist's only option to be worthy of the dignity afforded sentient life was to cease being a human and cut himself off from the embodied existence that gave birth to his soul, to his family and to all his ancestors whose evolution was the very font of every good and compassionate impulse he had toward the Na'vi. It broke immersion and told the audience, "You are past redemption." And no one can be spiritually fed by a church of no salvation, which is what the movie's lesson became.
But when you go to the park, you are you, and you come with your own existence, and the official lore says, "Actually humans are fine." The impulse to problematize the situation then comes from inside the more thoughtful guest, and they can extend it as far as they want it to go, without having to be speceistically misanthropic. No one's forcing the narrative that your race is entirely evil down your throat, so you can approach the situation from a more nuanced and realistic and less Manichean perspective.
@@Hesperell ...Except for the fact that the main protagonist (Jake Sully) was the only one to permanently transfer into a Na'vi, as I recall. All the other scientists, y'know, the other human protagonists, got to stick around as humans on Pandora at the end of the film. And I'm fairly certain his desire to change permanently had more to do with wanting to stay with the love of his life (and not be confined to a wheelchair, and be able to breath the local atmosphere) than it did some weird species-based self-flagellation. Besides, if the remaining human forces were truly supposed to be "past redemption" in the films view, why are they allowed to leave rather than being executed after the climax of the film?
So good job on philosophising, too bad it's all built on a big misunderstanding.
But in any case, the fact that you're so deeply insulted by the idea of a sci-fi film saying "Actually humans are a bunch of dicks" (hardly new ground for the genre), even when it DOESN'T say that, speaks volumes about you. It says that you're so rooted in a tribalistic view of the world that even when presented with an entirely fictitious human vs. aliens set-up, you get offended by the humans behaving in a way that humans have done numerous times in our history; i.e. a technologically superior group presuming that it has a right to the resources held by an indigenous population, and waging war to get them simply because it's easier than the alternative.
If an entirely theoretical example of that happening is enough to offend you, I hate to think what your reaction to real life atrocities is. But I can take a guess...
saunz departier It doesn’t work though because I don’t care if that’s the moral. Humans ain’t shit.
Yea it's funny to think about it. It's practically poetic. A movie where space indians have their ecosystem destroyed by colonial marines. And they lay some concrete and chop trees down in a land located in the continent where it all actually happened.
@@Geothesponge111 I love how the villains of the movie were literally gonna massacre an entire race, erase a culture and destroy an ecosystem just for a profit (the mineral they're searching for isn't even essential to survival, it was purely for profit since they mentioned it sold for a shit ton), but they're mad that the god tree thing decided that maybe humans aren't all that great lmao
I learned from a Disney cast member that the shaman of songs animatronic gets taken into an underground area every night and has security cameras that watch it continue to do basic movements all night because the imagineers are so worried that if it ever stops moving they won't be able to get it moving again.
this sounds like a fnaf x disney fangame waiting to happen
thank you so much for this knowledge. this is genuinely the most hilarious insane thing i’ve ever heard of happening at disneyworld
Thats some Adeptus Mechanicus shit right there
Lol tha k you for telling us this. That is wild
This is the most relatable thing as someone who did robotics for a bit. It is not if it will break but when it will break.
What would be really funny is if they said, "Oh yeah! The avatar technology goes both ways!" and just have some people walking around claiming to be Na'vi in human avatars
Would have solved the lack of Na’vi problem and would have made it seem like the Na’vi are getting something out of the arrangement too.
That would've been a pretty creative solution, tbh! Imagine the employees getting to pretend to be Na'vi adjusting to "human Avatars" and getting to complain about how different their tastebuds, height differences, lack of tail, etc. are. You could come into work and get to amble around the park, cheerfully explaining Na'avi culture to guests and explaining that you don't look like a normal Na'vi because you're trying out the Avatar technology as part of a xenocultural exchange program with the humans.
And they could do something to make them look taller or just hire like, really tall people! They'd probably also have to have the Na'vi actors wear something Na'vi related that only staff can have to say "This is an "actual" Na'vi, ask them about Na'vi stuff."
@@chocomelo454 bigass lanyard that says "human in training" or something lmao, I'm picturing those "unaccompanied minor" signs that kids used to wear when traveling 🤣
honestly this is a brilliant solution that would solve so many problems with this park at once. It explains, where the hell the Navi went, it shows that they actually 1) ARE getting something out of this park 2) Are in fact cool with it and given control over how the park works and how it represents their culture 3) Greatly reduces the cultural appropriation undertones and just turns it into regular consensual tourism.
Honestly the drum performers should have been the "human avatar navi", it would have made the most sense. Plus things like Navi facepaint would not have been so icky as a concept if the Navi themselves were doing it on humans
I really love how Jenny is unashamedly enthusiastic about her interests but also isn’t snobby or gatekeep-ey and doesn’t assume we have prior knowledge about topics.
She loves an excuse to over share on her fixations.
I went to the Tower of London right before the pandemic hit, and they had actors playing the role of one of the kings getting up in the morning, with his servants and stuff. They asked me where i was from, and when I said America, the king said "that sounds Spanish" and asked me to point to it on their extremely old world map that definitely did not have the USA on it. I just pointed off the end of it and said that it was around there? And i'll never forget the look he shot me--the most perfect "sounds fake but ok" i've ever experienced.
Hats off to those actors, they had to basically do what the people at immersive theme parks do, but with the added burden of actually trying to teach history!
I was told once that if you go to Plimoth Plantation in Massachusetts that if you mention Philadephia, they think you're talking about a bible verse.
I wish they put that sort of effort into the London Dungeons post pandemic (technically within-pandemic, but I'm referring to post-1st-year-of-pandemic) - I went just after New Years 2022, and all of the cast members/staff were wearing plain or boring/standard masks, and I was so disappointed that none of them - ESPECIALLY the ones in the PLAGUE section - were wearing London Dungeon branded Plague Doctor styled masks!!! I was really hoping they had some new merch in the giftshop specifically about the plague bc it was the OBVIOUS choice to me on how to make MAD bank, and yet, NOTHING!
The only nod to the current plague situation was the moment where the cast member says* "be careful out there, there's a plague in London!" And everyone went "👀💀 (sigh) we KNOW"
Such a wasted opportunity 😭
*this section was a standard part of the show well before C-19, with the only change to the show being the distance between staff + guests + the addition of masks + sanitiser gel stands
Same thing happened when I visited Dover Castle and the actor looked at the blue Powerade I had brought with me and suspected it was going to kill me.
That’s actually hilarious. I don’t remember anything specific they said when I visited the Tower of London but I remember the docents were all super in character with the history and had good rapport with everyone! Kinda like a historical ren fairs vibe
@@doctorwholover1012 that would be cool but it’s also kind of unlikely they’d want to make merch about it since people who have survived it or never got it will think it’s fun but people who had family members or friends recently die from it or were hospitalised by it probably wouldn’t like that it’s been used as fuel for fun merch. Yes, we all call it a plague as a joke, but it wasn’t that long ago and it’s actually still going on so there’s not the same amount of distance from pain that there is with the Black Plague, theres still people alive now who are grieving or who are suffering long term side effects (me ☹️) so it’s tricky. Really any company is going to do what is least likely to get them in trouble while still making as much money as they can 🙄 Also the plague doctor mask things sound cool but the staff working there definitely are better off to be wearing masks that keep them safe and probably have to conform to some standards. It’s better it’s a bit immersion breaking if it means the staff are safe. You’ve got some really cool ideas though! I’m British btw 🙈
"Where did they go?"
The Na'vi perished shortly after the humans assisted them in relocating to specially reserved enclosures. They seemed to have a toxic reaction to the new blankets they were given.
Luckily, we have preserved their DNA in the Avatar program.
Whew!
the explanation I would have is that the Pod that "purifies" the air for humans to breed drove out the Na'vi as the earth atmosphere would be as toxic to them as the pandoran atmosphere is to us.
@@CathrineMacNiel yours defs sounds like a more realistic explanation, but i think OP was alluding to how actual native americans were (and to a frightening extent, still are) treated by colonists.
i don't think the "preserving their DNA" part has been done yet, though
Headcanon. The Na'vi were recycled into the avatars for tourists.
The weird colonialist undertones feel very fitting. Like Disney would be the sort of corporation to think it is genuinely doing good while actually screwing over the native peoples.
No, they wouldn’ think they’re doing good. I’m sure the guys who run Disney are perfectly aware of how evil the corporation is.
They just don’t care as long as it makes money.
But yes, the colonialist undertones are very fitting for them 🤣
I think that's a pretty charitable view of them. Like...imagining Disney to basically be the British in the Andaman Islands rather than the British in mainland India is probably the nicest view anyone can have of them while operating in good faith. I look forward to, a few decades from now, seeing which one plays out in their actual colonialist acquisitions.
Don't they have a little resort type deal in Hawai'i? And aren't there also little resort type deals in the Caribbean tied to their cruise lines? Disney's Pandora experience is probably like, the very first time they've done this kind of a "celebrate with the native peoples while on their land with them nowhere in sight" shtick without facing a shit ton of protests from actively fucked over "native peoples."
elfarlaur Exactly. Listening to her describe it makes me feel a little nauseous
I wish thy would've done the narrative that you're part of the research team :(
The fan forums make this extremely charming for me. I wonder how many of those people have visited Pandora since it opened. I know it was the biggest movie of 2009 or something but for fandom purposes it’s tiny and obscure. Imagining a giant property taking your tiny obscure fandom thing and then making it into a million dollar totally immersive disney world park…I hope they like it
God that is the dream right? I hadn't thought of it that way.
avatar is atually the #1 grossing movie of all time
@@banchii1576
And that’s pretty much the only reason anybody remembers it even exists
@@SharkyMcSnarkfaceMust've worked twice then seeing as the second film is the 3rd highest grossing
@@banchii1576 and yet how many people could actually sit down and tell you the whole plot of either of the avatar movies though? 🤭
One of my friends worked on Flights of Passage and he said the reason they didn't have a walk-around Navi was that they thought that would be too much like exploitation of natives. This is, of course, also something they should have thought of before making a theme park and also doesn't jive with the whole, "create a sacred necklace for just $19.99" aspect, but just thought I'd bring it up.
I'm sure a walk around na'vi would be less sinister than having none at all??? The whole theme park seems a little thoughtless honestly.
@@megmoore8681 Yeah, it really feels weirder that there's none at all. Like, where did they go? Did they all leave? Were they forced out? What is the story here?
"We don't want to exploit this fictional race, so we're going to just steal all their traditions and artifacts and sell them for humans to consume without actual representation of said race actually being present."
The horrifying thing is this is EXACTLY how cultural appropriation works...
And also allow random pleb natives to experience their sacred rites of passage to adulthood. That's not exploiting their culture at all.
why not just have some navi go across the path and into the forest every now and then
smh
hi I was the girl who gave you the rum blossom! I've been watching your channel for a very long time, and I've never met a TH-camr or anyone I've recognized before so I EXTREMELY shocked in that moment. I was actually shaking. the reason I remade the drink was because I didn't leave enough room for the rum shot heh. Also the glow seed is 3 big ones but because I adore you I plopped one in your drink. I apologise deeply for how cringey and awkward the transaction was. I've been putting off watching this video because of how awkward I acted Yikes. Anyways bye.
seriously???
Sounds legit to me. I wish there was a way for you to have broken character or hint at you knowing her just a little, but I've worked in an amusement park before. It's hard to keep that focus and talk to people at the same time.
Mad Science Does Jenny seem like that kind of person?
Billy J. Sobolik Hahahaha what??? I wasn't trying to start drama, I just didn't realise the guy before my comment was joking. Honestly, seems like you're the one who's trying to start drama lmao
Don’t worry I would have been nervous too! And it’s so easy to make mistakes when you are anxious. You sound like a lovely person ^^
why does the nahtazu ad sound more like an snl skit than a legitimate disney ad campaign
THIS IS SO ACCURATE
I loved this. Jenny has a special way of delivering her material - it’s this blend of earnestness and sarcasm. You never quite know which one it is.
Agreed. The best I can put it into words is that she uses this ethereal, innocent tone while saying things that just drip with irony. It's awesome.
@@lethargogpeterson4083 She reminds me a lot of April from Parks and Rec (in terms of mannerism and humor)
It tickles my brain.
"No, the Navi aren't here right now but they're totally cool with all this, really. See here's a page from my diary where I talk about how happy they are, what more proof do you need?"
So people turned up, befriended the natives, learned their culture, wiped them out and then sold it off?
I thought this was meant to be a fantasy park.
That is the ultimate fantasy
@@BradTheAmerican are you joking?
@@benedictdwyer2608 Yes
@@BradTheAmerican ok, I was just worried you actually thought this was a completely fictional thing, or thought it was a good thing that that happened to the Native Americans
@@benedictdwyer2608 I'd usually put /s at the end to note sarcasm but this time I thought the absurdity of it would make that more obvious. However, given that there are literally people out there who say things like that with actual sincerity, maybe I should have put it there anyway.
The fact that Pandora, the park that's themed to be about conservation, gives out cheap single use plastic bags that are different from the rest of the Disney theme park bags, instead of slightly sturdier reusable bags, still lives rent free in my head
Like, all they had to do was do a paper bag with a printed design instead, and that would be 1000% better than what they actually chose to do, and that's without putting any additional effort in
When we went (October 2021), the entire place really tried to get us to upgrade to a (surprising large and nice) reusable bag for $1. I bought the pandora-style one that is really nice and the massive one at the beginning of the park. They could easily have charge $20 for that as it is a souvenir bag, but I didn't realize the bags in Pandora were regular plastic.
uh, why would you charge an idea rent anywhere
Also all the merch is seemingly just plastic shit that will end up in a landfill. Like, it doesn't even seem high quality enough to make a nice conversation piece or actual collectible at any point in time.
They need everyone you walk by to know that you've been there, and that they should go there too.
For the betterment of the earth!
...Oh wait, I mean Disney CEO Bob's wallet
So I recently went to see Avatar 2 and I realized midway through that everything I know about the franchise is from this one video Jenny made, which I've rewatched at least 5 times. I don't think I ever even saw the original Avatar movie?
what a realisation
Good for you! I saw it, and it left no impact whatsoever. Which arguably makes the 162 minutes I spent watching it an even bigger waste than if I'd spent it watching two shorter, actively bad movies.
Avatar's pretty good, I recommend watching it at least once
Please, don't use a question mark if you aren't literally asking a question. Now you're asking the people on the Intenet if you think that way or not.
@@seriouscat2231 serious cat should be more chill cat
I got to open Pandora as a merchandise cast member. We had to train for a month before it was ever open to the public. I sold Sigourney Weaver Na’vi flip flops and 5 Banshees. I made hundreds of people’s personalized Avatars. I rode Na’vi river journey before it was finished and had half the lights on. The animatronic didn’t even have a face yet. I took the language and culture tests. I can verify all this information is 100% true and accurate.
Bayley True wow!
I need to hear more about these tests.
do you mean you sold flip-flops that had Sigourney Weaver's Na'vi character on them to people, or you sold flip-flops that had Na'vi characters on them to Sigourney Weaver
"All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... time to die."
True like your last name
I just can't get over how cringe it is that they made up a vaguely African sounding catchphrase to convey it's "not a zoo," with accents and everything. All for them to walk back on it so hard in recent years, now playing up the conservation aspects of the park. They even have a TV show now about the zoo functions of the park. Because hey it turns out people find animals and zoos really interesting, and conservation is cool now. The whole park and its history feels like Disney misreading trends and misjudging the actual desires of the guests, and the creation of Pandora is definitely a huge continuation of that trend.
Yeah lots of large companies are really good at misreading trends; I suspect it’s related to complex management
I never knew it existed before right now, and I'll probably never visit Disneyworld, but I'm still a little torn up over the loss of Beastly Kingdom
@@AudreysKitchen Ah, the things we lost... that we didn't know existed...
@@AudreysKitchen yeah, WTF, ceo? Why choose a concrete jungle over a literal fucking castle roller coaster and sea monster
@@AudreysKitchen well, not beastly kingdom but in disney paris theres a dragon under the castle, its not much but its something i guess
I think the next time I'm in Frontierland I'm going to have to keep telling people when my wagon rolled into town until someone catches on and slips into character.
Isn't that what Westworld was?
omgsicle would this be pronounced Fro (like afro) Land or Fro (like fruh) Land?
@@Snake-bq3kf FroLand or no land, my man
Or you could just be my family and yell a slightly discordant, wordless, a capella rendition of the Bonanza main theme with five-ish parts in semi-harmony. Really gets the blood pumping and adds to the Western ambience.
running to the bathroom every time i go to a different area of disneyworld so that i can change into my theme-appropriate outfit I have in my backpack
Watching Jenny pick up a bag of strangely blue popcorn, look at it and go “ooh that’s expired”, jump cut to her eating it, and jump cut to her throwing it up is pure art. Avatar wishes it could master the cinematic tragedy of this,
Revisiting this video 3 years later the day after Jenny uploaded a _four hour_ video about the Evermore theme park and it's adorable how this "excruciatingly deep dive" was (barely) under an hour.
came here for the exact same reason lol
I literally found a comment I made when this video first came out that’s like “idk if my commitment issues can handle an hour long video about a theme park I don’t care about”.
Fast forward 3 years when I watched the 4 hour long Evermore video in one sitting, with no hesitation, even though I have even less free time now 💀
@@artemiswolf4508 ME MAN ME TOO
* me too man me too
I too watched this video for the billionth time. It's just so wild to see a park with some issues but the genius of imagineers behind it in comparison to a park with an imaginative millionaire behind it. I think it's fascinating to compare the two. Where there are both honest critiques but one is...keenly detailed, thought out,and funded to the brim
Jenny: Where are all the Na'avi?
Also Jenny: So guys, I brought home this "Avatar Flavoured" popcorn...
🤔🤔🤔
@Aspiring Marauder no i'm shaking and cryimg this can't be true APLHA CENTAURI WOULD NEVER DO THIS
@Aspiring Marauder I've never hated a TH-cam comment as much as this one
I've never loved a youtube comment as much as this one.
at first I thought this was just a funny little quip about Jenny, but then realized what you meant and now I'm truly horrified
Soylent Blue is NA'VI!
My favorite favorite favorite kind of Jenny vid. Roasting something for almost an hour that I don’t really know anything about.
You get nearly 100% of the fun of going and mocking it yourself, with 0% of the expense and hassle.
Michael Stern The experience of watching a Jenny video is actually more fun than going to the actual theme park because of her commentary
YESS!
A whole hour went by? AY, CARAMBA!
I would never visit a themepark in bad weather.
Some day I will make an earth themed theme park, with human flesh colored candy popcorn.
It can be peach, toffee and chocolate
This is like bad appropriation of a culture that doesn't exist.
The _best_ kind of appropriation.
Courtney Johnson isn’t the Na’vi face paint essentially like alien blackface
@@fyrefrost1898 Yeah but only Americans lose their shit when they see people painting their faces to resemble other people. The only reason why Europeans cease to uphold their centuries' old traditions that involve people with their faces painted black is because American media and political personalities practically bully them into it, even though nobody there seems to have a clue what the hell is even supposed to be wrong with it.
@@yarpen26
tl;dr Blackface in Europe has different, less insulting historical connotations than it does in America, but for the most part it's still quite common where traditionally applicable. Also I personally would have liked to see some references to American history regarding the Na'vi's similarity to Native Americans and how ACE is different than RDA (and thematically, America) despite the results of their encroachment on Na'vi land being extremely similar(No Na'vi around except in pictures showing how happy they were to have ACE moving in).
I currently live in the Netherlands and I can assure you, Black Pete (blatant blackface, though far less demeaning than American Vaudeville) is very much alive and well. Although I have to say I agree with Jenny on the weird, sinister overtones of normalizing the aftermath of colonialism. I don't think this was done on purpose -- the park's designers were probably just making it based on what they see as the best outcome of a foreign (and definitely capitalist since this is an American park owned by an American company) people settling in an already inhabited land -- but by trying not to have a political message despite the very political themes of the Avatar movie (specifically in regards to nature vs industrialization and natives vs settlers) ends up having a very similar effect to trying to bury a violent past beneath a mask of cooperation.
This is just my two cents, but I think if Disney had embraced the thematic similarities between the Na'vi and the Native Americans and mixed in just a few tasteful references to American history, the park could have ended up far more meaningful to people since many -- dare i say most -- Americans have a stronger emotional connection to American history than the Avatar movie. I can see why they didn't do this since it would open them up to criticism from both liberals and conservatives, but I think it would have done added a lot more to American culture than just another place to spend money trying to forget which world you live in.
@@yarpen26 There's a big difference between painting your face black for longstanding cultural reasons and painting your face black specifically to caricature or make fun of people with darker skin.
In all honesty, I'd love an "An Excruciatingly Deep Dive into The Wizarding World of Harry Potter" too.
I actually found this video because I was looking to see if Jenny had that video.
Yes!!!
I'd like a deep dive into Moulin Rouge, but it seems Jenny mostly does children's movies. Sure Satine is puking blood all over then dies and ruins everything, but the Star Wars style rich against poor/ good against evil plot is worth rambling on about.
My brother and I had a hotel guest only early access pass to both harry potter park locations (meaning we got in a few hours before general tickets allowed entrance). It was incredible to see every little detail they put into the world (down to brick detail, it was perfect). There were maybe 50 park goers there. We spent 2 hours looking at everything in awe and went on the busiest ride a few times before the lines hit. The park opened to the general tickets and the streets where flooded. After that, It was still semi-impressive but a lot of details were more hidden and everyone was in a hurry. Would highly recommend going it is a great experience for Harry Potter fans. Also try the Butter beer both hot and cold, they are awesome!
i need this is my life immediately
#GetJennyNicholsonAPressPassForStarWarsLand
+
@MrNiesGuy it's too long.
She works there or used to at least. Maybe not in that specific area but the park.
I approve of this message.
really catchy and easy to read it'll catch on very well let's go
I love that the "colonialism is bad actually" movie now has a theme park based entirely on colonialism
Classic Disney!
This whole video, I was waiting for the other shoe to drop, where Jenny would reach a hidden cavern with Na'vi prisoners locked in cages, being experimented on, and desperately trying to tell guests that the stories and pictures in the park were all a lie. It seemed heavily hinted at, with no Na'vi visible in the park and all of the employees acting shifty/awkward when asked about the history.
But alas, that was too clever or perhaps too uncomfortable for Disney to do.
Avatar Land feels like something the nebulous evil company from those movies would make to exploit the Na'vi and their traditions.
@@amityislandchum I don't know if it's actually clever, it would be pretty horrifying PR for the kids to have the entire theme park be essentially a perpetual concentration camp enslaving their heroes. There can't be any ways to free them in the lore otherwise the park has to stop existing, so the kids would just cry and no longer be able to enjoy the facade of the park held up by the humans.
For real, it's yet another reason for why the choice of Avatar is so baffling
Love how Disney managed to culturally appropriate something they invented
@@ThelouwseFD That was even worse. Like they had so many people work so hard on something that they were hired for, only for it to turn out perfect and get discarded
This shouldn't even be technically possible. No, it isn't.
@@ThelouwseFD thanks for the recommendation, that was depressing :I
It's almost impressive in its oddity
@@ThelouwseFD that video lives in my head rent free. What a stunning example of hubris, such a waste of money and talent. I want to see it adapted as a Greek tragedy
Love the irony of dumping out billions of plastic bags as part of an experience dedicated to a quasi-ecological fairytale.
Yeah, I was expecting her to pull out a fancy Avatar-themed paper bag and instead got Pandora plastic. As you said: love the irony. ^^
Don't worry, all the bags say "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" on the top, so it's okay.
@@KaworuNagisa I was expecting like an unbranded woven mesh made to look like plant fibers or something, but I guess plastic was cheaper so
My grandfather died trying to liberate Pandora and now my family can go there and just pretend that everything back on Earth is okay? Thanks ACE.
It would be really cool if there were like actors playing homeless Pandora invasion veterans, complete with gruesome arrow wounds and they just sat at the edges begging, holding signs like "arm eaten by alien monster rhino, please help." You could give guests some kind of fake space money and if you give them a pittance they tell you about their horrible mauling.
Rayce Archer very Disney
My grandfather was ambushed on a medical mission and has not been the same since.
Liberate? LIBERATE?! It was a war of imperialist aggression! Bush did it for the Unobtanium!
I know what you mean man...my grandfather was also a part of the mission and lost a lot of friends to those blue bastards
I do need to know how well theme park canon squares with The Way of Water canon, like, right away
If this is foreshadowing the tourist destination thing being the villain of Avatar 2, this might be the best viral marketing stunt ever
holy shit that'd be cool actually
Do you really think that Disney would cast itself as the villain of its own movie?
Only once it is already far too late to stop them! MUAHAHAhAHA!!
Which was like five years ago so yeah, as long as it makes them money.
@@nn6404 I mean, they kinda did in Dumbo.
Oh worm?
I remember we stayed at the Animal Kingdom Lodge quite soon after they opened Pandora and there was a channel on the TV in the room that only played Avatar, over and over again.
Did they keep the swearing and sex in?
There's a Black Mirror episode in there somewhere.
homeiswonderland the swearing and sex in Avatar???
That sounds like madness itself.
Frog Whisperer Yeah they have sex in Avatar. There’s also swearing.
Wait...Na'avi headbands with ears, Na'avi skin shirts, Na'avi tails; THAT's where the Na'avi have gone!
OH MY GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD!
Avatar flavoured popcorn.
The answers were right in front of us the whole time.
Soylent Green is Na'avi!!
im going to get myself a Na'vi hand ashtray!!!
holy shit you're right
Literally every time a TH-camr complains about a motorcycle outside or something similar, I’ve never been able to hear it and their complaint about it is just me taking them on faith that it even happened
Same with whenever a TH-camr warns of their audio being bad because they're sick. I've only noticed it once with Quinton Reviews's last Sam & Cat video and he looked like he was dying in that part.
I like to think it's all the same guy, in a one-person crusade to mildly inconvenience TH-camrs across the globe
@@acecat2798 Jerma's vroomer has been set free
I used to stream, and I quickly learned that things that sound so loud to you almost never gets picked up by the mic, but you can't be sure at the time. And even if you go back and rewatch the footage, knowing that you did hear it then will have you tricking yourself into thinking you hear it again
Me whenever I have an hour to kill: Jeez, time to watch An Excruciatingly Deep Dive Into the Avatar Theme Park again'
It's starting to become a way of life really
Glad to know I'm not the only one that rewatched this video several times just because
@@geegeep for months, I've had this video on when I'm trying to fall asleep, on my way to work or school, while I'm studying, and just now when I was doing dishes. Jenny Nicholson for every occasion.
This one is remarkably rewatchable!
Honestly though. I do the same thing with her Star Wars Land, Forces of Destiny and Trigger Warning videos.
I saw Avatar in theaters the week it came out. I can distinctly remember the really cute jacket a girl in front of me in line was wearing. I cannot remember anything about the plot or characters in the multi-billion dollar hit film, Avatar.
I remember the plot was reeeeaallly similar to some other films/books/movies. It was really bad on DVD though. I think he was supposed to go kill the blue people as a replacement for his brother then he got some blue vagina and betrayed his people.
Edit: ah, yes! The movie was dances with wolves and Pocahontas.
Avatar is the precursor to the MCU, apparently.
I learnt more about the movie avatar from this one hour video than i did by spending like three hours on a theater watching avatar
We need to help the underdog and get along even if we’re goofy looking.
I remember a legless man and a tree... i think...
I’m sitting here crying laughing at the idea that there is a single na’vi word for bladder polyp.
And its one of the first words you need to learn for some reason...
I’m not into dark headcanons but this whole park feels like “friendly” corporation killed all the navi (except one and she probably lost her mind at this point) and lie to tourist for money.
Also that idea of a empty navi body being forever stuck to that flying lizard thingy (which is presumably sentient enough and not an empty body) is nuts 😂
I was in the gift shop after riding flight of passage and my friend overheard a guest ask a cast member "Do you have any Disney apparel here?" and the cast member responded "Oh, we're not at all affiliated with Disney." My friend recalled that the guest walked away, confused. I think this encounter captures the essence of Pandora.
They maybe should have pointed back to the rest of the park and said "Oh sorry, Disney is back on Earth."
'Disney is the other one of the two remaining megacorps'
@@atomic_wait But if there are only two megacorps remaining and this one is a different corporation than the one from the 'documentary' then does that mean Disney invaded Pandora?
I'm cackling thank you for sharing this
Do you ever have a weird moment when you realize that the people who were apart of the conception and maintenance of this park have dedicated so much of their time and mental real estate to this one random movie that everyone thought was "alright". It just amazes me that there are people who've invested so much in details about a movie most people only saw once over 10 years ago. It's just wild to me I don't know why.
The Imagineering Story on Disney+ goes into all this- for this Avatar park and the whole history of Disney. It's wild & inspiring meeting these people who dreamed all this stuff up... carrying forward the legacy of Walt.
That anamatronic Navi in the water ride has 42 motors in its face that allows it to express emotion (from S1:E6). Seems they invested too much of their resources into that one feature, because Jenny was displeased by that ride.
@@regiirecords8829 Invested too much in that, not enough in anything else.
I worked there for a semester for an internship and trust me it doesn’t. I just memorized like 7 phrases tops and smiled and played with kid other than that mind empty 🥴😂
That’s the exact same vibe I have. Like it feels like “oh no what a waste of creative energy.” It’s like an unreciprocated crush. Someone pouring out their heart to their crush and the crush is like “who are you? Oh thanks but no.” Like it feels wasted somehow and it makes me sad, but despite that nothing in hell or earth will get me to be invested in this movie franchise.
People thought it was amazing when it first came out. It was the highest grossing movie ever. Unfortunately they didn’t follow up on the sequels and everyone forgot about it. I saw once when I was 7 and like a couple times at 8 and 9 I think
“A theme park project whose motivating drive seems to be spite”
Ah yes, I see that the spirit of Michael Eisner has lingered in the Disney theme park subdivision.
I died. Best comment.
I've been watching a lot of theme park/Disney history videos recently and it's actually kind of disturbing how many of my happy childhood memories only exist because of Eisner's spite
And then there's Shrek, which exists because of Katzenberg's spite against Eisner's spite
23:24 I was not prepared for the cameo of Hat Dan - The Dan With A Hat
ive seen this video like 4 or 5 times and just realized thats folding ideas. wild cameo i wasnt expecting
Yeah I did a *hard* double-take on that one.
I wonder if Folding Ideas was just randomly there and actually randomly appears in a Jenny Nicholson video…
Imagine saying goodbye to your family and telling them you won't see them for fifteen years, because you want to go into cryosleep and fly in an interstellar spaceship to visit a theme park on a moon in the Alpha Centauri system.
It’s very f*cked up when you put it this way.
Then again, that’s something rich assholes in the future would probably do.
You are the Einstein of Disney theme parks; they should hire you as a consultant
Thats so nice to see you here :D
I admit, the theme park and leftist philosopher/critic youtubers coming together is always the best thing about this hell site.
Nationalize theme parks!
Einstein? srsly? Does she have a weird left ear thingy? No.
But that would get in the way of my dream job for Jenny- pointing at scripts and telling the studio no
I am very attracted to the commitment of the guy running the Na'vi Drum Show. Very good energy for someone running a doomed attraction. Anyone else?
No, he's pretty cute. I hope he gets a better show in like Disney Springs or something.
I agree lol. I saw him the other day (I'm a passholder living in Florida) and he really tries his hardest 😂 poor guy, hope he's getting paid well.
Can't stop the ship from sinking so the band may as well keep playing
@@meddle98 Maybe this is Disney hinting at James Cameron Titanic World?
Got to admire the dedication of performers really. I honestly have no idea how they manage to even perform the exact same 10 minute routine every single hour at the exact same enthusiam levels for months at a time. These people willpower is unbreakable.
Watching this after seeing the real Avatar 2 makes me wonder... How many years after the series does ACE come in to appropriate the Navi culture given the fact it's even more clear how many issues and trauma the presence of humans in Pandora caused.
they need to embrace that ACE is post-colonization and genocide of the na'vi
I don't see why they felt the need to add lore to the theme park because every in lore explanation is real weird
Supposedly it takes place after avatar 5
God I hope Avatar 5 doesn't end with this
Okay, but making it immersive is cool, but also makes it really weird.
Like, imagine we accepted tourism from an alien race... and they walked around with headbands that had human ears, and had their faces painted to have human skin colors with various "exotic markings" like freckles or acne scars.
Imagine that alien then proceeds to buy dolls that are literally labeled "human male" and "human female," and makes a doll of how THEY would look if they were human.
Imagine these aliens partaking in rights of passage from multiple cultures that hold no true meaning to them. Hell, imagine an alien having a Bar Mitzvah celebration. They just zap into their avatar, and there they are, in the middle of their D'var Torah with the stares of judgmental distant relatives and bored friends!
And one of the souvenirs they could buy was "traditional dented ball" which was just a damn golf ball.
That sounds hilarious and I wholeheartedly support it. Plus, for eighty bucks a pop, I'll make them as many human-sonas as they want.
We don't need to imagine it, white colonisers have already done that (and in some cases are still doing that) with virtually every 'exotic' culture they could get their hands on lmao
@@retroyoongi Disney's "Maui costume" that was just tattooed mesh skin.
I'm down to sell golf balls to aliens for $90
Golf balls are dimpled, not dented.
As someone who was an awkward enough nerd to try learning Navi when this movie came out...I don't think you realize how surreal it is hearing these words again after 12 years.
this is the coolest comment. I am trying to imagine now.
It’s probably the closest feeling to finding and hearing a dead language like Latin
@@snusemcgoose1001 Not even comparable. Latin language still has extremely strong roots in current day latin-based languages in use. Such as Italian, French, Romanian, and... Spanish. Latin is also widely used in scientific literature to this day, and studied and read all around the world. In Italy, the most prestigious high schools still have weekly mandatory latin classes for all students.
@@Narcan885 Alright ease off professor, Latin was just an example, pick another one if your gonna go ape shit over just the word Latin
@@Narcan885 pls shut up, im sorry but this is so stupid
"This is way after that documentary" is the best line ever. Very natural, i feel immersed :)
Alpha Centauri Employee : This is way after that documentary.
Customer: This?
ACE: Yes, this!
Customer: What do you mean by “this”?
ACE: This time!
Customer: “This time”? You mean now?
ACE: Yes, now!
I could go on, but we all get the point.
@@UnrealisticGuy "That documentary was a long time ago" sounds more realistic
Wait. Waitwaitwaotwaitwait. You’re telling me you DON’T need to be reminded of the date our modern era is set, as if you’re acutely aware that the time you live in is not canonically the present?
I cannot wait for Avatar 2's butterfly wings to appear as purchasables in this theme park.
Because they exist in the movie solely for that singular purpose - to be merchandise.
The butterfly wings exist for Cameron's Jesus allegory to have visually obvious angel wings.
Oh, when I saw wide-eyed Kiri sailing through the water with the butterfly wings and the gold glowing fish, my immediate thought was the doll they would make of it.
that did not occur to me at all while watching, i was kind of just baffled by their inclusion in terms of plot
Ugh, you’re so right about the missed opportunity with Pokémon. I haven’t played or thought much about it in 15 years, but I would absolutely go to a Pokémon theme park. And there’d be none of that super uncomfortable Native American metaphor hanging over everything.
Yeah. It would be replaced with a. Weird sort of legal cock fighting metaphor “but it’s ok because they’re our friends and partners not just animals we make fight”
I'm super glad Disney is not in charge of Pokémon.
@@liamross340 ...and lock in small cages between fights.
Except one was based on the lead designer's experiences catching bugs as a child and the other was based on the historical genocide of everyone that lived West of the Canary Islands. It was...The associations are...it's hard to see how one could equivocate them, even as a joke? Like, you and a handful of other people will bring up the whole 'pokemon is fucked up, when you overthink it!' thing, maybe a few people will actually, in good faith, feel uncomfortable and that's totally fine, PETA will protest a few times in between their usual passtime of running domestic animal death camps, and millions will get something they've wanted for decades. Here...not only does no one want this, but it's not like these native similarities are a product of examining something more closely than its creators ever did, the original film is very obviously a deliberate native American metaphor. Even though the culture you're appropriating with that headband and those beads is an imaginary one, the creator of that imaginary one basically just took stereotypical whitewashed mythical versions of 'Native Americans' as a whole and just used those wholecloth without any real effort, so it's still problematic as fuck. What's worse, the nature of the theme park itself really calls your attention to that genocide because they appear to have fucked up in their handling of the incredibly delicate cultural issue they never should have tried to make into part of Disney.
So...yeah. Maybe a few hundred or even thousand people in the world would be genuinely upset about a Pokemon Land. That's cool, significantly more people would be offended at my taking offense to ridiculous blue Native American stereotypes becoming part of Disney World if they read it, but let's give it -1 points for that. But there are millions of fans that would be made extremely happy by it, so...let's give it that point back? Avatar Land makes people exactly as happy as a non-offensive original sci-fi setting would, so there's literally no plus side to it. And again, whatever implications you might find in Pokemon, none of them are genocide, which is kind of +100 points. It turns out that metaphors for the worst crimes in history can make excellent films (though didn't in this case) but really become super uncomfortable when they're adapted into the literal embodiment of consumerist excess that is a modern theme park. Generally speaking: if anything you sell in your theme park has a reasonable chance of reminding someone of the way their (great?) grandfather's bones were sold to tourists, you have screwed up to a degree you can never salvage.
@@iusethisnameformygoogleacc1013 I totally agree.
Ok so what's funnier
The fact that there's a Na'vi word for bladder polyp, or the fact that it's a short, monosyllabic word, which implies it's commonly used?
this is the funniest thing in the video to me and i'm so glad someone else noticed
It implies that Na'vi routinely experience bladder polyps.
Either that or Jenny is lying to us which is somehow even funnier when you think about it.
Firstly, Jenny lying to us at all. Secondly, the fact that nobody in their right mind would spend the money for the translator and booster packs to confirm the word for bladder polyp and so we are at her mercy for this one singular word.
Monosyllabic doesn't imply commonly used though. Cot, act, jet, vat, dye, rim are all monosyllabic short words but they aren't really commonly used.
@@collisionsc-7875 All of those are normal, common things. Cot even has a couple different ways to be used, most of those do. Gotta jet, jet plane, jet black. You’ve got car rims, a drink with salt on the rim, rimshot. Act as in to perform, first act and second act, a heinous act, generous act, Jenny herself even used the word act a ton in this video 😂
"I do respect the illusion that, in the future, nobody takes lunch breaks."
*Jeff Bezos has entered the chat.
robots don't need lunch breaks, so if you want a job you need to be able to compete with robots
@@thomasc8482 Yeah, full-automation isn't compatible with the profit motive.
Thomas C sounds like we might need a worker’s revolution to ensure we can fucking live.
@@acmom9471 probably, I'm up for it any time!
@@acmom9471 lol, why fight progress? Instead, if you're worried about becoming obsolete, fight for UBI.
Her enthusiasm over the drums definitely made those performers month. "There's someone out here begging for the drum show and is sitting there waiting" "For the drum show....in disneyland?"
I know this vid is pretty old and that I'm a bit late on commenting, but I will always remember the first time I went to Pandora. It had to have been just shortly after it had opened, because they were still limiting the amount of guests going in. But I was in line for the ride, and there was a kid in line ahead of me (about 7 or 8 years old) and he started talking all about how he "knew everything about Avatar." And then he started to explain Avatar... The Last Airbender... to all of his family in line. I just had to hold in a laugh, and was... so embarrassed for the park.
Aw man...I hope that kid still had a good time
oh no that POOR kid
as an avatar the last airbender superfan, that would have gutted me.
@@julietdeane3128 When I first heard about this Avatar movie, I remember looking it up and thinking "That's not The Last Airbender" with a strong tinge of disappointment. And then there WAS a movie, but it was made by massive fuck-up M. Night.
@@mastermarkus5307 That movie was terrible for many reasons, not just M. Night; he certainly didn't help of course, but it's not his fault a quarter of the movie was cut out at the last minute by the studio.
Aw, you didn't even mention that you could "adopt" a Navi baby plush and rip it away from its family
eXCUSE ME WHAT
RyGuy3323
That’s horrifying.....and hilarious.
Wtf?! How did that get approved?
I don't remember seeing that in the shop. Unless you mean the $80 face print figure?
*flashbacks to the Native American indoctrination boarding schools*
The main reason I'd want to visit the Avatar theme park is to show up decked out in Avatar the Last Airbender merch before proceeding to ask all the cast members various ATLA questions while remaining utterly and blissfully convinced the theme park is in fact somehow vaguely related to the animated show from 2005.
I don't even know if that's funny or evil
@@erieri6326 the ATLA fan in me in screaming in delight, and the customer service worker in me is screaming in horror
ngl when i clicked on the video that's what I thought she was talking about until she started describing the movie
Although now you put this awesome idea for an Avatar theme park in my head and not just the ride I vaguely remember from Kings Island as a kid LOL
@@erieri6326 It can be both! Look at the Joker!
Not that I think the Joker would do this-he seems like the kind of person who'd get bored and wander off in the middle of "The Storm" and wander off to do some arson, and also is probably too old to have seen ATLA as a kid.
The Hogwarts train thing in Florida's Universal Studios is fucking awesome ngl I'm glad they built it. I've never even seen Harry Potter but it was one of my favorite parts of my trip. They have screens on the windows so you can look out the across the same landscapes as the movies, and the doors also have screens that play the silhouettes of characters walking, talking, and getting into shenanigan's in the hallway. It really makes you feel like you're on a magical train from a movie. So, very, very, VERY rare good decision on J.K Rowling's part.
Also Disney REALLY underestimated just how important the train is to Harry Potter fans. Like the idea of riding the Hogwarts train and getting to try butterbeer is more than enough to get them out there and spending money
The issue didn't sound like it was with the train, but with Rowling wanting the train to reverse along the track rather than looping
I love how the Avatar flavored pop corn is colored blue. Like, I'm trying to think of everything blue in Avatar and I'm really drawing a blank, except for the Na'vi.
So I guess we know what they did with all the Na'vi. Kept that one in the river ride alive for sport, the cruel bastards.
Lots of the fake animals in Avatar were blue tho afaik
Yeah and human popcorn in skin coloured…
@@gabsolute I mean people disappear all the time.
Although that's fun and whimsical we have caramel corn and that's similar enough to where I'm not immediately like THE POPCORN IS NAVEEZ
Now with 30% more pureed Na'vi
"Lady, we will build you whatever trains you want," is one of my favorite Jenny lines ever.
Same! I had to pause cuz I was laughing so hard
$30 plastic wands! What a nice reference to everyone’s favorite movie, Escape From Tomorrow!
Oh great! Now Randy Moore is going to make another black and white movie to relieve the predator part of his being!
Disney? More like RELIGION-ney!
*_HISSING_*
Escape from Tomorrow 2: Main Street Electrical Boogaloo. Jim stands in line for Flight of Passage, thinking lustfully of about the Shaman of Songs. After a 2-hour wait, shown in real time, he hallucinates that the banshee is a naked woman wearing the novelty ears and tail from the gift shop. Then he breaks into a secret lab that's inside the glowing pod, where the rebuilt robot scientist recaptures him and disintegrates him so that they can use his genetic material to grow 12-inch Avatars dolls, splitting Jim's consciousness into thousands of hideous, overpriced plastic bodies.
Kellen Maura AHAHAHA OH MY GOD THIS COMMENT MADE ME CACKLE
So, coming back from Way of Water, I have to wonder how they’re going to explain the whole thing where RDA returns with a vengeance and completely obliterates a huge chunk of the forest to build a city. It certainly makes ACE seem all the more sinister…
The theme park apparently takes place over 100 years after the first movie, so basically any Avatar movie that comes out would be earlier in the timeline than the park.
@@Rivecha Imagine that for any other franchise
Kid: "Mommy, where's Elsa?"
Staff: "She's dead, sweetie. She's been dead for centuries."
56:26 love the way Jenny says "the documentary" rather than "the film" as if she was actually an employee.
She’s *REALLY* trying to get that Star Wars Press Pass in the future
@Marylandbrony
Dr Augustine just used to have a job in pest control a long time ago, that’s all. She didn’t like it but a girl’s gotta eat
But... but... if all of it is supposed to be real, then isn't Navi facepaint offensive? I mean, isn't it pretty much an equivalent of blackface?!&
I liked it when at 17:50, when to in-character cashier asked her about "the documentary" she went along and asked "about Jake and Neytiri?". Its nice that shes meeting her halfway
she has shown successful brainwash near the end of the video
Still can't shake off how disturbing the metaphor for Native Americans and treating them like a total fucking novelty instead of actual people is here. It's just so strong and something feels wrong about it.
@2D’s blue-ty shorts Well it’s not directly representing a Native American tribe, it’s fiction. Fictional place, fictional beings. A fictional theme park area where parents take their kids is doing no harm. Besides I can assure you that A) no child is going to instantly correlate Native Americans when they see tall blue cat people, and B) there are actual real problems facing Native Americans, and a theme park located and owned by Disney is the very least of their problems or concerns. I mean, do you see any Native activists groups boycotting or writing bad criticisms of the park? No. So I understand what you may think, but if the people that you claim this is hurting don’t seem to give a shit, they why should you?
@@chilly001963 just beacuse its fictional doesnt mean it isnt written in such a way that it feels weird
@@chilly001963 I see your point (especially in your last sentence) and I feel like people can certainly take issues out of context concerning culture. But I feel like this has more to do with the actual themes the source content was taken from. The story of Avatar is basically about a foreign group using militaristic and invasive means to take what belongs to a tribal society for profit. Of course it's only a metaphor for American history but in the vein of 1984, Fahrenheit 451, the Giver, Animal Farm, and Lord of the Flies etc. Fictional stories are powerful ways of conveying political messages. Whether or not it was originally intended to make people feel uncomfortable, (and I doubt it truly was) doesn't detract from the fact that on delivery it appears to be very much a place uninhabited by any it's native population... but completely refitted for tourism and profit. It's not so much as something blatantly offensive as it is a general reminder that this sort of colonial culture is normal.
Personally I don't see anything wrong with people trying to enjoy their hard-earned vacations, especially when most people don't even remember the movie. Kids in Navi costumes are just kids who don't deserve to be haggled over something their just parents bought them. I think the actual issue is that one of the largest corporations in the world, who really do seem to prioritize inclusion and culture sensitivity in most cases, somehow had years to develop this project and never seemed to realize how it would look, and what implications it could have. Or, they did realize, but just didn't care.
I find it hilarious that the "alien" hamburger with the meat encased in dough is literally just a regular food that they sell in bakeries in Brazil. They call it: hambúrguer.
Wow, so exotic.
It just looks like Baozi lmao
It's literally just a bao bun. They do that American thing where anything vaguely "foreign" is used to convey aliens.
Yeah, it's almost a pita bread from Turky too. Well it's not litteraly a hamburger inside so your exemple is better but :p
Many cultures have this kind of thing.
@@nn6404 Which is what the Avatar movie did constantly as well. There's a really good Avatar video by Sideways, which mainly focuses on music, but also about how such an ambitious concept with so much lore behind the scenes turned into a pretty dumb and bland movie in the end, I highly recommend it if you're interested.
The panther/predator/black dog creatures in avatar could be implemented in the Na'vi River Journey in such a cool way. At the beginning of the ride you could say, see one hiding in the brush staring at you, then see a pack of them in the distance strategically making their way around the tourists, and then have a jump scare moment with an animatronic, so it's like a hunting scene. All the while you could hear twigs cracking, the creatures communicating in yips like you're about to be pounced by a pack of coyotes
So Disney could have had a Medieval Fantasyland that could take advantage of the dragon/medieval-fantasy current trend, but they traded it for this. My 6-year-old-inner-girl weeps for the unicorn ride.
They probably could have still pulled off something similar if they acquired Harry Potter as well, considering there is an emphasis on the same types of mystical creatures in that universe.
They attempted to acquire the Harry Potter rights years ago, but their ideas didn't sit well with JK Rowling. From my understanding, they only conceptualized a single attraction (similar to what Midway Mania is) as opposed to an entire themed land.
@@TheWaverunners Missed opportunity now with the new Fantastic Beasts movies
@@TheSongwritingCat Fantastic Beasts is crashing down hard, though.
The Lost Continent land that Harry Potter mostly replaced was basically what happened when Imagineers that worked on Beastly Kingdom before it got cancelled ended up jumping ship to the competition. Hence why it also had dragon and unicorn rides and it basically ended up putting DIsney off of the idea.
The thing is, beastly kingdom could tie in with a TON of disney properties. Black Cauldron, Sleeping Beauty, and now that Disney owns Fox, Last Unicorn is on the table.
They kind of tried to bury Black Cauldron though, I think the only attraction it got was in Tokyo Disney and the attraction isn’t even up anymore, so I doubt they’d ever put it in the park but god damn I would love to see beastly kingdom, I didn’t even know it was planned at all and kid me would be so invested in that, plus since it’s a magical world they can compete with universal again since they can sell their own unicorn and dragon merch
Oh my God a Sleeping Beauty Maleficent dragon roller coaster would’ve been so GOOD
And along with the mythology/fantasy beasts thing, Hercules
omg a last unicorn land would be sooo coooool
Bring back Mystery Tour from the Tokyo park!! That ride was kinda terrifying but also completely amazing
“Lady we will give you whatever trains you want”
@ don't they have a train that you take from the alley to the second section? It's like a big thing and I think the only way to get to that second area
Thus, they properly appeased the Train Gods, and so their theme park did well, unlike SOME theme parks
Luckily Star Wars Land learned from previous mistakes
they definitely didn't say "lady we'll give you whatever trans you want"
I was dying at this
@@d36williams Unless whatever trans she wanted was none.