After some more waiting in line, our tickets were checked and we were waved inside. The first item of business was a picture taken in front of a Star Wars backdrop. This was an official type museum picture as opposed to a ‘pause with the digital camera’ type picture. George was handed a ticket to identify which picture was ours and we were off.
It was cool.
While the exhibit did bother to try to make things educational, such as comparing the ‘science’ of a landspeeder to the science of a hovercraft, it was too much fun to be bogged down by the educational experience. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that to decry the educational experience in general as the whole concept of this museum is to distract you with the entertainment while you learn something. I’m all for that. There are just certain circumstances where the educational part of the process can feel very deliberately grafted on and this one walked that line on a lot of occasions. It was also the exhibit that I could most easily see the educational part of the process ignored the easiest. ‘Do I look at the costumes or read this panel about ‘real’ spaceships? Hello costumes!’
I spent a lot of time with the spaceship models as I like that sort of thing. I even looked at the educational real spaceships part. They were all theoretical designs for future ships. Oddly enough the ‘reel’ spaceships look more real than these did. Give it time.
Next door to this was the droid theatre. In a small stage was a mock-up of the interior of the Jawa Sandcrawler. Referencing that moment early in the original movie, C3PO laments all the trouble his buddy R2D2 gets him into. The ‘story’ then breaks away to a discussion between the slightly animatronic droid on stage and a video screen just off of it with a real robot designer. They go back and forth, we get introduced to the other real robots on stage (despite the fact that these are probably animatronic versions of the real things as well) and learn how far actual robot designs have gotten. Very interesting. Even if I hadn’t wanted to stay and watch, I had to as Jason wanted to stay and someone needed to stay with him. So I did. We arrived just at the start of the show and stayed the ten minutes or so through the whole thing.
While that happened, the rest of our group pretty much saw the rest of the exhibit! The theatre was the third of four sections of the room. George had taken his pictures and we were about ready to go. I looked at a few costumes, we walked past Vader and exited into the gift shop.
This is also where our pictures had printed out. I thought it odd that they printed all the pictures. Surely a lot of them went to waste as not everyone would want their picture. If memory serves, the package was 3 ‘big’ pictures, 4 wallet sized, a cardboard frame and a key chain for $20. Not a bad deal. It didn’t hurt that the picture turned out looking nice, even with my bald fat self in it. I almost look human! ;)
As it was the second to last day of the exhibit, the merchandise in the gift shop was on sale. George got himself a t-shirt and the children picked out toys. Even after all this, it still wasn’t even 16:00. We had chosen later tickets to the Falcon since we expected to be in there for awhile. Now what would we do?
No comments:
Post a Comment