Original airdate: November 8, 2026
The premise: During a visit to Krustyland, Bart and Lisa go exploring the abandoned Kosmic Kruiser hotel, the elaborately immersive space-themed hotel that quickly went bust, only to find out the attraction isn’t as abandoned as they thought.
The reaction: As someone with a lifelong interest in themed entertainment, I was very intrigued following the rise and fall of Disney’s Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser hotel as the saga unfolded. Marketed as a unique vacation experience transporting you into the world of Star Wars, Disney clearly had high hopes for this brand new Orlando attraction, making guests feel immersed in a fantasy world in an incubated environment for the length of their entire trip, only leaving the hotel for a story-based mission to the Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge section of Disney’s Hollywood Studios theme park. However, an exorbitant price tag for a seemingly mixed bag experience put the future of the hotel into question fairly early in its lifespan, but I don’t think anyone would have predicted that Disney would pull the plug on the hotel so quickly, closing barely a year and a half into its run. Now it sits presumably as storage space, a vacant shadow of an ambitiously half-baked experiment. Many theme park nerds have published their own autopsies as to what went wrong, the most famous being YouTube essayist Jenny Nicholson’s four-hour dissertation breaking down every aspect of the hotel, from its announcement, the marketing, and a full breakdown of her stay and all that entailed, warts and all, giving her thoughts on how Disney managed to bungle things up so badly and what might have saved the experience. Chalking up over seventeen million views, it shouldn’t be surprising some people on the Simpsons staff had seen the video, but a bit more surprising that they decided to make a whole episode lampooning the Starcruiser story, in an effort where I don’t really see the point other than to say they really liked Nicholson’s video. How many normal people know about the Starcruiser? Does this episode make sense if you don’t know about it? Perhaps, but a big issue I have is that the subject matter really doesn’t fit the world here. Krustyland’s Kosmic Kruiser looks like the Star Wars hotel, but is inhabited by actors in Itchy and Scratchy makeup, with a one-off joke explaining that all the lore for the attraction came from an old Itchy & Scratchy space-themed cereal box. I feel like the joke only makes sense if Krusty was trying to follow a Star Wars-themed trend and cynically morphed Itchy & Scratchy into a space-themed setting they don’t belong in to try to wring some bucks out of a passing fad. But it’s all just Star Wars shit, with the blue alien woman singer and repeated jokes about “punching it” to lightspeed, referencing the movies and also a key part of the Starcruiser marketing that Nicholson repeatedly mentions in her video. So much of the commentary referencing the Starcruiser, from its announcement at not-D23, the paid influencers doing pre-launch ads, the awkward roleplay aspect of the experience, all of this is stuff that Nicholson covered in her video and in a more humorous fashion. This is admittedly very specific personal preference, but I find learning about the actual fiasco about the Starcruiser a much more interesting experience than this tepid parody of it. But the real meat of the episode is a Bart and Lisa story: Lisa is touched that Bart wants to have some sibling bonding time like they used to when they were younger, but that positivity is shattered when she finds out that he only broke into the Kruiser to swipe one of the animatronics to sell for big money. They make amends in the end, of course, as they come together to save themselves and the hotel from certain doom by singing their “Super Explorers” song from their youth (“We’re not afraid of scary stuff, scary stuff’s afraid of us! Super Explorers, brave and smart! Super Explorers, Lisa and Bart!”) This is the part where I say how this overly schmaltzy crap doesn’t work on me. There’s obviously a contingent of modern fans that really love this stuff and find it genuinely affecting, and I don’t besmirch them for it. But I just can’t buy into this crap. This show used to be so damn good at making these characters feel genuinely emotional in ways that touched me deeply, but now almost every time they pull this kind of storytelling, it feels so perfunctory to me. The moment they invoke Bart and Lisa’s unified past in the beginning of the episode and them singing the song in the next scene, I just pictured the roadmap of the rest of this storyline and was left waiting for it to unfold in the tired way it inevitably did. Maybe some specificity would have made this more interesting? Bart and Lisa used to be the “Super Explorers,” maybe that could have been literal, like they would spend days out of the house as little kids getting into mischief in abandoned buildings or other weird places, so that the Kosmic Krusier is like a return to form to them, one that Lisa is more hesitant to revisit, but Bart is willing to exploit for his own gains. That’s all I really need from this stuff, just a little more detail to make this feel more like a real story. Instead, it ends up coming off like them wanting to do a Galactic Starcruiser video and stapling a generic Bart-Lisa story onto the script. Seriously, if you haven’t watched Jenny Nicholson’s video and you have even the slightest interest in learning about the Galactic Starcruiser story, I can’t recommend it enough. It may be four hours long, but there’s not a minute wasted in that runtime, believe me.
Three items of note:
– Jenny Nicholson herself guest stars as the Krusier’s onboard robot cat guide KIT-10, with the show openly acknowledging where they were inspired to do this episode from. Regardless of my thoughts on this show, it’s still very cool to see a content creator I enjoy get an opportunity like this, and I assume she had fun pretending to barf up a towel and get thrown off the flying hotel at the end. Good for her.
– There’s not really much explanation given as to why there are still performers on the Kruiser after many months of it being shut down. The likes of Kirk Van Houten and Gil I can buy a bit since they’re sad sack, underemployed losers, but the troupe is led by Sideshow Mel. They don’t even make a joke about him being let go from Krusty’s show or this is his punishment by the boss or anything like that, he’s just inexplicably been waiting in this abandoned hotel for God knows how long for no reason. They also do a joke about theme park employees living there because they’re criminally underpaid. This show has always taken the piss out of their corporate overlords all the way back in the FOX era, but it can’t help but ring a little different for a Disney show to be poking fun at its own shitty labor practices.
– This show’s done a number of theme park parodies over the years, but outside the Kruiser stuff, it seems like they’re running on fumes with the commentary. With the kids away, Homer and Marge spend time at the section of Krustyland where adults can drink, in a sort of hybrid of Trader Sam’s and the Tiki Room. They sit surrounded by broken down robotic birds who sing a song (“We all love to dance and sing, we kick our feet and we flap our wings, we jump and spin with such delight, watch our eyes move left and right.”) What is the joke here? Am I thinking too hard into that there’s anything here beyond the birds are in disrepair and singing about being totally fine and active? The Enchanted Tiki Room is a very old attraction, but the birds still function fine. Is the “eyes move left and right” line a comment on how limited the animatronic are? I dunno, am I off base with this one? Ah, who cares.
