OPINION
We’ve been following Orlando theme park news long before the Orlando Parks Jotter filed its first story. We take these news stories at face value, or rather, we did. Now that we’ve immersed ourselves in the theme park news cycle, we’ve become aware of how things often work. It usually works surprisingly well. Other times, not so much.
Sometimes we encounter articles highlighting theme park news that seems to be common knowledge, but where we’ve never come across the original source. Trying to find primary sources for these articles is challenging, and sometimes we find nothing at all. Case in point, the semi-autonomous droids of Disney’s Galaxy’s Edge.
Several outlets today broke the news that Disney may finally be rolling out droids as promised… or not. Interesting. We’d heard the long standing rumors but have never seen original reports or official announcements about semi-autonomous roaming droids so we dug deeper. One article cited another news outlet as the source. That outlet cited yet another, and so on, until we found a story speculating about concept art for Galaxy’s edge released at back at the D23 EXPO 2015 and posted to the Disney blog nine months ago. The pictures have long since been taken down. There were also patents that were filed by Disney for technology that could relate to the droids. However, no official releases were made confirming the speculation. And that’s what it was at the time, speculation.
Disney did test a robot named J4-K3 (“Jake”) back in 2017. At the time, a Disney official said it was a test and not an indication droids would be a constant fixture in the land. We also uncovered a story by TechCrunch in February of 2019 that showcases an interview with Disney World Imagineer employees Paul Bailey and Kirsten Makela who talked about the use of droids in creating the land. Only, they used a New Hope-era droid’s “feet” to create tracks on the ground. The article also mentions visitors will be able to interact with droids at the Droid Depot when the land opens. Well, the land has opened and we’ve already seen those droids. They aren’t the army of semi-autonomous droids wandering the lands we’ve all been hearing about.
We’re not saying official releases about the droids haven’t been made. They may be out there somewhere. It’s just that we can’t find them. If they are out there, then we’d love for news outlets to post them in their stories. If there really aren’t any, it would be nice to see news outlets fess up about the purely speculative nature of the articles. To us, it seems a little bit like a game of telephone where stories bounce from source to source until it gets a bit distorted from what it started as. But we’re new at this. Maybe there’s something we’re missing. Let us know at contact@ orlandoparksjotter.com if you’ve got the scoop!