Star Tours

Star Tours
Entrance to Star Tours
Disneyland
Land Tomorrowland
Designer Walt Disney Imagineering
Industrial Light & Magic
Attraction type Flight simulator with Audio-Animatronics all synced to film
Soft opening date December 1986
Opening date January 9, 1987
Closing date July 27, 2010
Vehicle names Starspeeder 3000
Vehicle capacity 40
Ride duration 4:30 minutes
Height requirements 40" (102 cm)
Replaced Adventure Thru Inner Space
Replaced by Star Tours: The Adventures Continue
Sponsored by M&M's (1987–1995)
Energizer (1995–2006)
Star Tours
Tokyo Disneyland
Land Tomorrowland
Designer Walt Disney Imagineering
Industrial Light & Magic
Attraction type Flight simulator with Audio-Animatronics all synced to film
Opening date July 12, 1989
Closing date April 2, 2012
Vehicle names Starspeeder 3000
Vehicle capacity 40
Ride duration 4:30 minutes
Height requirements 40" (102 cm)
Replacement Star Tours: The Adventures Continue
Sponsored by Panasonic (1989–2009)
Star Tours
Disney's Hollywood Studios
Land Echo Lake
Designer Walt Disney Imagineering
Industrial Light & Magic
Attraction type Flight simulator with Audio-Animatronics all synced to film
Opening date December 15, 1989
Closing date September 7, 2010
Vehicle names Starspeeder 3000
Vehicle capacity 40
Ride duration 4:30 minutes
Height requirements 40" (102 cm)
Replaced by Star Tours: The Adventures Continue
Sponsored by M&M's (1989–1995)
Energizer (1995–2006)
Fastpass available
Star Tours
Disneyland Park (Paris)
Land Discoveryland
Designer Walt Disney Imagineering
Industrial Light & Magic
Attraction type Flight simulator with Audio-Animatronics all synced to film
Opening date April 12, 1992
Vehicle names Starspeeder 3000
Vehicle capacity 40
Ride duration 4:30 minutes
Height requirements 40" (102 cm)
Sponsored by IBM (1992–2002)
Fastpass available

Star Tours is a motion simulator attraction currently operating at Tokyo Disneyland and Disneyland Park at Disneyland Paris. The ride is based on the successful Star Wars film series created by George Lucas, making it the first Disney attraction based on a non-Disney produced film.

The first incarnation of the ride appeared in Tomorrowland at Disneyland in 1987, replacing the previous attraction, Adventure Thru Inner Space. Star Tours at Disneyland closed on July 27, 2010 to allow for the conversion to Star Tours: The Adventures Continue. Disney's Hollywood Studios closed its attraction on September 7, 2010 in anticipation of the same conversion which was completed on May 20, 2011. Tokyo Disneyland's Star Tours will close on April 2, 2012, to make way for Star Tours: The Adventures Continue which will open in Spring 2013.[1] No announcement has been made regarding the future of the attraction in France.

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History

The ride that became Star Tours first saw light as a proposal for an attraction based on the 1979 Disney live-action film The Black Hole. It would have been an interactive ride simulator attraction, where guests would have had the ability to choose the ride car's route, but after preliminary planning, the Black Hole attraction was shelved due to its enormous cost—approximately $50 million USD—as well as the unpopularity of the film itself.

But instead of completely dismissing the idea of a simulator, the company decided to make use of a partnership between Disney and George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars, that began in 1986 with the opening of Captain EO (a 3-D musical film starring Michael Jackson) at the California park. Disneyland then approached Lucas with the idea for Star Tours. With Lucas' approval, Disney Imagineers purchased four military-grade flight simulators at a cost of $500,000 each and designed the ride structure.

Meanwhile, Lucas and his team of special effects technicians at Industrial Light & Magic produced the first-person perspective film that would be projected inside the simulators. When both simulator and film were completed, a programmer then sat inside and, with the aid of a joystick, manually synchronized the movement of the simulator with the apparent movement on screen. On January 9, 1987, at a final cost of $32 million, almost twice the cost of building the entire park in 1955, the ride opened to throngs of patrons, many of whom dressed up as Star Wars characters for the occasion. In celebration, Disneyland remained open for a special 60-hour marathon from January 9, 1987 at 10 am to January 11, 1987 at 10 pm.

Star Tours: Tour to Endor

Advertised as "The Ultimate Star Wars Adventure!", Star Tours puts the guest in the role of a space tourist en route to the forest moon of Endor, the site of the climactic battle of Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi, via the Star Tours travel agency. Much is made of this throughout the ride queue, which is designed to look like a spaceship boarding terminal: posters advertise voyages to different planets, and a giant screen informs riders of the benefits of going to Endor. This area is stocked with Audio-Animatronic characters that seem to speak to the ride patrons (including C-3PO and R2-D2), as well as a life-size mock-up of a StarSpeeder 3000, the fictional spacecraft which riders are about to board. According to the book Disneyland Detective by Kendra Trahan, the figures of C-3PO and R2-D2 in the Disneyland attraction are actual props from the original film, modified to operate via Audio-Animatronics.

Guests then enter a maintenance area where an apparently underproductive G2 droid performs repairs on another droid while being distracted by the observing guests, and another droid inadvertently points out all the supposed flaws of the StarSpeeder 3000 and its RX pilots. The G2 droids are in fact the animatronic skeletons of two geese from the defunct Tomorrowland attraction America Sings. A ride attendant escorts guests to one of several loading stations where they wait for their turn to ride.

A television screen posts a countdown to take-off time and shows images of the Starspeeder 3000 spacecraft being serviced. As launch time approaches, a safety video is shown featuring Star Wars aliens, Disney Imagineers, and their families. It instructs guests how to fasten their seat belts and where to place belongings. Once the doors to the Starspeeder open, guests walk across bridges into one of several ride theatres. As the doors close, the bumbling pilot droid of the ship, RX-24 or Rex (voiced by Paul Reubens), chats up the guests about the trip as he sets up. It happens to be his first flight.

All goes well until a slight mistake on Rex's part sends the ship down the wrong tunnel and plummeting down into a maintenance yard, just managing to escape to open space before a giant mechanical appendage would have crushed the ship. Once in space, Rex puts the ship into light speed, but overshoots the ship's intended destination, passing the Endor moon, instead getting caught inside a comet cluster. The ship gets trapped inside one of the larger comets and has to maze its way out. Upon escaping the comet, the ship encounters a Star Destroyer.

The ship gets caught in its tractor beam, but manages to get loose when a rebel X-wing fighter (played by ILM modelmaker Steve Gawley and not to be confused with Wedge Antilles, the popular survivor of three Star Wars films, who was played by Denis Lawson) provides assistance by destroying the tractor beam's generator. With the tractor beam deactivated, the StarSpeeder escapes the Star Destroyer. Soon the ship accompanies the Rebellion on a massive assault on a Death Star. Rex uses the StarSpeeder's lasers to eliminate TIE fighters while a rebel destroys the Death Star in the same manner as Luke Skywalker did in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. A final light speed jump sends the StarSpeeder back where it started, but not before a near collision with a fuel truck in the spaceport.

Cast

(In order of appearance; all are uncredited)

Muren, Gawley, and Keeler are all Industrial Light & Magic special effects staff.

Ride system

Star Tours utilizes a hydraulic motion base cabin featuring 4 degrees of freedom. The trade name for this simulator is Advanced Technology Leisure Application Simulator, or ATLAS. The ATLAS was designed by Rediffusion Simulation in Sussex, England, now owned by Thomson-CSF. The Rediffusion 'Leisure' simulator was originally developed for a much simpler show in Canada called "Tour of the Universe", where it featured a single entrance/exit door in the rear of the cabin and a video projector. The film is front-projected onto the screen from a 70 mm film projector located beneath the cockpit barrier. George Lucas has mentioned that the next generation of the attraction will feature digital high-definition video and motion bases capable of up to 6 degrees of freedom. The Disneyland original has four simulators, while the other versions have six.

"Last Tour To Endor"

On Saturday, August 14, 2010, Walt Disney World hosted "Last Tour To Endor" exclusively for Celebration V attendees at Disney's Hollywood Studios from 8pm to 1am. Entertainment features and events at "Last Tour To Endor" included George Lucas, character appearances, Jedi Training Academy, Death Star Disco, Bespin Stage Dance Party, Raiders Of The Lost Jedi Temple of Doom: A Fan Film of Epic Proportions live show, Hyperspace Hoopla, Symphony in the Stars fireworks, and the Star Tours shutdown ceremony. The Star Tours shutdown ceremony was a live show with characters C-3PO, R2-D2, Boba Fett, Darth Vader and a few Stormtroopers, culminating in the official power-down of the original Disney World Star Tours attraction. However, instead of R2-D2 simply shutting it down, Boba Fett blows it up using a thermal detonator (achieved using pyrotechnics).

Star Tours: The Adventures Continue

The attraction opened in Disney's Hollywood Studios on May 20, 2011 and replaced the original Star Tours: Tour of Endor. It features an updated ride system, which consists of a new high-definition video, a Disney Digital 3-D high-definition screen, an improved motion simulator and several newly added special effects.

In the original version, passengers rode in a vehicle named the "Starspeeder 3000". Since the new attraction is set before the original film, the new ride vehicle is referred to as a "Starspeeder 1000".[3] The new vehicles are 'piloted' by an animatronic AC-38 droid, though during the show the controls are handed over to a new pilot, C-3PO.[4]

Gallery

See also

References

External links