June is a mistake

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Wednesday, February 7, 2007
Matt Hochberg

Since New Years, we’ve been playing the “what are the 2007 Star Wars Weekend dates?” game with ourselves.  For some reason, Star Wars Weekend is the hardest event to plan.  Probably because all of the other special events at the Studios (Super Soap Weekend, ESPN the Weekend ,et al) are events that are put on by subsidiaries of the Disney Company (ABC and ESPN, respectively).  But Star Wars Weekends, co-produced with George Lucas, is consistently slow to be planned.  For instance, dates for Super Soap Weekend in 2007 already came out weeks before Star Wars Weekend dates just came out and Super Soap Weekend occurred just three months ago.

At any rate, we’ve gotten our 2007 dates this year, the event will occur in the four weekends in June.  And that’s it.  Why the change? This year, George Lucas is holding Celebration IV in Los Angeles, CA from May 24-28.  Speculation is that Lucas did not want to have Celebration overlap with Star Wars Weekends, or that they couldn’t overlap because Disney couldn’t get any celebrities to come to the east coast with Celebration going on.  At any rate, this is the first year there are no dates in May since the event was conceived and first run in 1997 (back then the event occurred in February and March).  And this is bad news for those who want to go down to Star Wars Weekends.

Two points of contention instantly jump out at me when I see an all June event.  The first is crowds.  June is the beginning of Summer at Walt Disney World and summer means huge throngs of crowds.  Many families come down to Walt Disney World in the summer because it allows them to take a week or more off at a time because their kids are done with school so there’s no rush to get back home.  From Memorial Day Weekend through the beginning of August, it’s open season on long lines and busy everything.  According to the Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World’s crowd calendar (If the Guide itself is the Disney Bible, the crowd calendar is like Talmud or Dead Sea Scrolls or something else of important religious importance), crowds in June will uber-busy with most of the month being a 8 or 9 (on a scale of 1-10, with 1 being the least crowded and 10 being the most crowded).  This means if you want to go to Star Wars Weekends, you’re going to have to put up with long lines for nearly everything just to begin with, never mind the throngs of people who will descend into the parks in addition to the mass of people already there. 

The other major issue with having an all June event is the heat.  If you’ve ever been to Star Wars Weekends, you know that even if you go in May it’s hot down there.  Really hot.  I admit I’m a bit of a baby when it comes to heat but there is something to be said about being uncomfortable because you’re sweating buckets and it’s only 10am and trying to enjoy this special event.  As we move the event deep into June, there’s no chance of a cold front coming in and keeping things manageable.  Rather, it’s going to be down right boiling.

I know some people are saying “But Matt, every year there have been dates in June and you didn’t care”.  And that is true, we’ve had dates in June, however, the event’s final weekend would be the second week in June, which is exactly when these huge crowds really got going.  This year, the event will end a week before July 4^th weekend! 

The benefit of straddling the dates between May and June is you have a balance of crowds and times.  The difference between mid-May and mid-June is enormous, more so in crowd sizes than weather but technically, hurricane seasons begins on June 1 so there’s always that possibility of a hurricane although unlikely that early in the year.  Looking in on the event, I have to wonder why May was ruled out.  If it was because of Lucas and he didn’t want something going on at the same time to conflict with his event, fine.  However, if it was a Disney decision because of celebrities, then honestly, I would not have minded if there weren’t any C-list celebrities for the May weekends.  Besides, Disney holds these annual events during times of the year that they need to draw in crowds (Super Soap is in mid-November, ESPN during the first weekend in March and the Osborne Lights occurring from mid-November and running through the first week in January) but filling up hotel rooms in June has never been a problem for Disney, even in 2006 when we were entering another hurricane season after the disaster of a hurricane season of 2005.

Holding Star Wars Weekends in June is going to be a mistake.  It doesn’t mean it will be terrible or boring but what they should have done was hold it from mid-April to mid-May if they didn’t want overlap (crowds die from Easter until Memorial Day Weekend and the weather is much more manageable) or if overlap wasn’t an issue, just hold the dates on the same set of weekends regardless of who could come down.  Although we have the dates for 2007 finally, the real question begins of will 2008 dates return to May & June or are we looking at a final change to an all June event.

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