Star Tours – The Adventures Continue
| Star Tours – The Adventures Continue | |
|---|---|
| Park | Disney's Hollywood Studios |
| Land / area | Echo Lake |
| Type | 3D motion simulator |
| Opened | May 20, 2011 |
| Designer | Walt Disney Imagineering
|
| Status | Operating |
Star Tours – The Adventures Continue is a 3D motion simulator attraction at Disney's Hollywood Studios at Walt Disney World in Florida. Set in the Star Wars universe, it places guests aboard a Starspeeder 1000 flight that goes badly wrong, with the droids C-3PO and R2-D2 trying to deliver a Rebel spy safely to the Rebel Alliance. It opened on May 20, 2011, replacing the original Star Tours, and a version opened at Disneyland Park in California on June 3, 2011. Later versions followed at Tokyo Disneyland and Disneyland Paris.
History
The original Star Tours opened at Disneyland on January 9, 1987, and was among the first major Disney attractions built around a property Disney did not own. A Florida version followed when Disney-MGM Studios — now Disney's Hollywood Studios — opened in 1989. For more than two decades guests flew the same basic mission: a trip toward the forest moon of Endor, piloted by the nervous droid RX-24, that ended in an attack on the Death Star.
By the late 2000s the film, the projection and the story all showed their age, and the prequel trilogy had added worlds the ride could not visit. Walt Disney Imagineering worked with Lucasfilm and Industrial Light & Magic on a complete rebuild. The plan was announced at the D23 Expo in 2009, and both American versions of the original ride closed in 2010. The new attraction kept the motion-simulator cabins and the travel-agency premise but replaced almost everything guests saw and heard.
The Adventures Continue opened at Hollywood Studios at midnight on May 20, 2011, timed to that year's Star Wars Weekends event, after soft openings from May 14. The Disneyland version opened on June 3, 2011. In the years since, new film segments drawn from later Star Wars films have been added, so the attraction has kept changing long after its opening, unlike its predecessor, which flew essentially one film for its whole life.
Experience
Guests enter through a spaceport terminal for Star Tours, a commercial spaceline selling tours of the galaxy. The queue passes C-3PO and R2-D2 at work on a Starspeeder 1000 and a series of travel posters and departure boards, before guests collect 3D flight glasses and board a cabin seating several rows of passengers.
The story turns on an accident. C-3PO, aboard to carry out maintenance, is trapped in the pilot's seat when the flight departs, with R2-D2 in his usual position on the hull. Imperial forces stop the ship after it emerges that a Rebel spy — shown on screen as a guest selected from that cabin — is aboard. What follows is assembled at random from separate segments: an opening escape, a first planetary destination, a holographic message from a Star Wars hero asking for help, and a second destination and finale. At opening the system could combine its segments in dozens of ways — 54 combinations were widely reported — so repeat rides rarely played out the same way twice.
Destinations have included worlds from across the film series, from Tatooine, Hoth and Kashyyyk to locations introduced in later films. The cabin moves in time with a high-definition 3D film, and the flight ends, usually roughly, with a landing and C-3PO reluctantly accepting credit for the rescue.
The attraction stands in Echo Lake, a short walk from Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge, which opened in 2019 and gave the park a full Star Wars land. Star Tours itself was not moved into that land and remains a separate, earlier chapter of Star Wars at the park, one whose deliberately loose timeline lets characters and places from different eras appear in a single flight.
See also
- Star Tours
- Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge
- Disney's Hollywood Studios
- Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run
- Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance