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Star Toursright Star Tours is a motion simulator-based ride attraction located in many of the Disney theme parks, including Disneyland Park in California, Disney-MGM Studios in Florida, Disneyland Paris in France, and Tokyo Disneyland in Japan. The ride is based on the successful "Star Wars" franchise of movies, created by George Lucas. This made it, notably, the first of the park's attractions that did not use Disney-designed imagery. Although it has been in existence since 1987, it is considered by many aficionados to be the epitome of the ride form, melding a full sensory experience with the familiarity of a proven entertainment franchise. The first incarnation of the ride appeared in Tomorrowland at Disneyland Park in 1987, replacing the previous attraction, Adventure Thru Inner Space. Concept Star Tours puts the guest in the role of a space tourist en route to the forest moon of Endor via the Star Tours travel agency. Much is made of this throughout the ride queue, and the theming of the inside holding area is convincingly modeled to look like a spaceship boarding terminal. This area is stocked with Audio-Animatronic characters that seem to interact with the ride patrons (including versions of Star Wars favorites C-3PO and R2-D2, delivering a typical Laurel and Hardy-esque routine), as well as a life size mock-up of the StarSpeeder 3000, the space ship/ride simulator that guests embark on. 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. Once at the head of the line, the ride operators escort guests 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. All goes well until a slight mistake on Rex's part sends the ship down the wrong tunnel and plummetting down into a maintenance yard, just managing to escape to open space before a giant mechanical appendage crushes the ship. That same scene features a tribute to the "Adventure Thru Inner Space" attraction: The "Mighty Microscope" is clearly visible to the right of the screen after the appendage sweeps by. Once in space, Rex puts the ship into light speed, but pulls out too late to catch the ship's intended destination, instead getting caught inside a comet field. The ship gets trapped inside one of the larger comets and has to maze its way out. Just when all the trouble seems to be over, 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 (possibly Wedge Antilles) provides assistance. 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 . 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. Development The ride that became Star Tours first saw light as a proposal for an attraction based on the 1979 Disney live-action flop 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 3D musical film starring Michael Jackson) at the California park. Lucas was approached with the idea for Star Tours. With his approval, Disney Imagineers purchased four large military 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 and Magic worked on 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 the film. On January 9, 1987, at a final cost of $32 million, almost twice the cost of building the entire park in 1955, the ride finally opened to throngs of patrons, many of whom dressed up as Star Wars characters for the occasion. External link
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