Disney's Star Wars Land Adds Line Dancing (To The Annoyance Of Fans)

The new Star Wars-themed Disney World hotel is finally open; a perfect getaway for families or couples looking to conceive the next evil space warlord. Once you’ve convinced your significant other to spend their next vacation in a Lucasfilm-approved windowless grey box, the “Galactic Starcruiser” has everything you’d want in a Star Wars hotel: roaming aliens, lightsaber duels … line dancing classes?

Yup, apparently, a “Ryloth dance lesson” is one of the activities you can partake in. Ryloth, of course, being the home planet of Twi’leks – presumably, this hotel’s bar is also the only place in the world where that factoid might actually work as a pick-up line. Guests will learn how to space line dance to the song “Rockstar Queen” by Gaya, the fictional pop star of the Star Wars universe created purely for this hotel – which is kind of like if Caeser’s Palace grew Celine Dion in a lab. 

Perhaps predictably, a lot of fans weren’t super-thrilled about all this. While Star Wars obsessives are as notoriously fickle as Siskel and Ebert’s thumbs, there is a long history of Star Wars being ruined by the art form of dance. First of all, Disney World itself is partly to blame, after launching the notorious “Hyperspace Hoopla” show in 2008, which, among other Star Wars-y fever dreams, gave us Emperor Palpatine and Darth Maul thrusting in unison to the sounds of the Beastie Boys.

And Princess Leia doing the “Gangnam Style” dance alongside her dead mother …

Then there was the Kinect Star Wars video game which bafflingly included a level in which Han Solo boogies perilously close to Cloud City’s carbon freezing chamber, thanks to beats provided by (*sigh*) DJ Lobot. 

Maybe, in time, fans will come to embrace groups of middle-aged tourists shuffling awkwardly to a fake pop song in a hotel lobby as an inexorable part of the Star Wars canon. 

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Top Image: Disney Parks/YouTube