We Tried Disney’s New Sensory Deprivation Tauntaun And It’s Gross!

By depriving you of your senses, isolation tanks help eliminate all distractions and allow your mind to wander, which can lead to profound insights. This makes Disney’s decision to create sensory deprivation tanks out of tauntaun corpses at Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge especially baffling.

The giant snow lizards are infamous for smelling bad on the outside, so when you’re forcefully crammed into a freshly-deceased one after it’s been split open from groin to gullet, your senses aren’t exactly deprived. The stench is so overwhelming that you can not only taste it, but somehow even hear it. Yes, you can actually hear the smell. It sounds like a steady, low hum, not unlike when you push the wrong power button on the remote control and it turns off the cable box but not the TV. As you’d imagine, this—coupled with the milky organs slithering along your upper lip—can be quite distracting.

The bad times don’t stop there. This wasn’t even done in a Hoth-like frozen wasteland (which can slow decomposition for an extended period of time). Instead, it’s done in the even worse wasteland of Orlando, Florida, where the humidity brings the temperature to a sweltering 100 plus degrees just in time for lunch—a meal you’ll be skipping indefinitely after this experience.

All that said, the end result was similar to that of a traditional isolation tank, as the over-stimulation of our senses did clear all other thoughts from our heads and made us reevaluate past life decisions. Specifically this one. Reflecting on it, this was a huge mistake. How could we have been so stupid and impulsive? If given the chance to do it over, we would have definitely gotten a Fast Pass.

Image: Pixabay, Lucasfilm