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S01E15: Scour with Star Tours!
43 Plays1 year ago
Our "Star Wars in the Parks" series continues with a look at Star Tours, the original Star Wars attraction and still one of the best. Hop on your Starcruiser 3000 and join us!
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Transcript
Introduction to Star Tours
00:00:01
Speaker
It's Lightspeed to Endor as we explore Star Tours! Grab your droids and brooms, it's a Star Wars cleaning crew!
00:00:09
Speaker
Welcome back to the Star Wars cleaning crew. We are continuing our series on Star Wars at the parks at the Disney parks specifically. And today it's just you guys, your kitchens and me as we explore the OG of Star Wars attractions at the Disney parks. So,
Original vs New Star Wars Attractions
00:00:30
Speaker
you know, when most people think about Star Wars, Disneyland, Disney world, Hollywood studios, they're thinking Star Wars Galaxy's Edge, they're thinking Black Spire Outpost and a visit to Batuu, or they're to thinking about the Star Cruiser that we talked about for the last couple of weeks, right? But I want to remind you that right on the other side of the park,
00:00:55
Speaker
So if you're at Disneyland on the other side of the park in Tomorrowland, if you're at Hollywood Studios on the other side of the park from Galaxy's Edge in whatever they call that part of the park where it sits, you will find this.
00:01:11
Speaker
That's right. It is Star Tours, the original Star Wars attraction. So I wanted to spend this episode of The Cleaning Crew really diving into Star Tours, which is one of my favorites. It holds up and it's something that has been continually updated, kind of in the spirit that Walt Disney always said that Disneyland would never be done. I feel like Star Tours will never be done. which is just phenomenal for us. So let's dive in and talk a little bit about the history of this ride. They first started kicking around the idea of this. I just learned this from doing research on the internet about this. The original idea was to do a ride focused on the movie, The Black Hole.
00:01:52
Speaker
And it sounds like that ride would have been kind of a omnimover shooting ride. It sounds a lot like what we wound up getting with Buzz Lightyear's Astro Blasters. But the idea there was you wouldn't always have the same experience every time. You could go into different parts of the black hole, I guess you were exploring. Well, those plans got shelved when the Black Hole basically got shelved. It was not a successful movie. It wasn't really that great of a movie either. ah So those plans went back onto the shelf as they do it, imagineering quite often. But then in the late 1980s, Disney, fresh off of the collaboration with George Lucas on the Michael Jackson, Captain EO 3D film, they got together and they said, what if we did a Star Wars attraction?
00:02:42
Speaker
And what we wound up with was Star Tours opened up in 1987 at Disneyland.
The Ride Experience and Initial Skepticism
00:02:50
Speaker
And if you've never been on Star Tours, you are in a motion simulator. So in the story, you start off in an intergalactic spaceport. You are about to board a tourist trip. to the planet of Endor, a star tour to Endor. And so you get on this ship, it's kind of like a big bus and of course something goes wrong. Now what's happening in the real world is, like I said, it's a motion simulator. So it uses really advanced flight simulator technology.
00:03:22
Speaker
so that the entire cabin of the spaceship that you're sitting in is moving up, down, left, right, back, forth, rotating, uh, all degrees of freedom. And that is in sync with the movie that you were seeing through the quote unquote cockpit out the front of the screen. And you have your very own Star Wars adventures. on star tours When I first heard about what this ride was going to be, and I remember seeing back in the eighties at this time, I was in college. I remember seeing some of the videos of like on board in that cabin and people.
00:03:57
Speaker
whooping it up and having a great time. And I remember being very skeptical that it was nearly as cool as they were letting on. I thought, you know, okay, so you're in this little ship. It's moving and shaking in sync with a movie. And I think I was a little bit off put because when I was in high school, I had worked at a little amusement park, Santa's Village in Dundee, Illinois. And one of the rides that we had there was a little spaceship that you could get on the spaceship with, you know, bring your kids on the spaceship. ah The doors would close in the back of the ship. There was a console where the the ride operator who was kind of the pilot would sit.
00:04:38
Speaker
and they would play a movie in the front of the screen it was like a really bad old Japanese sci-fi movie with really really bad special effects and the operator had a joystick to move left right up and down and if you were the operator on this it was your job to try to keep it in sync and of course you know you got a bunch of high school kids some of them worked on keeping it in sync some of them didn't and then Your brain was moving one way and your eyes were moving a different way and you could get really sick on that thing. It was pretty nasty. So I was pretty skeptical about Star Tours. so I do remember though, ah my friend Steve Gross and Steve, I don't know if you've
Nostalgia and the Original Ride
00:05:18
Speaker
heard this podcast yet. I hope you do. I hope you you've found it.
00:05:21
Speaker
um Steve had been out to Disneyland and I ran into him over Christmas break and he told me that he went on Star Tours and it was really spectacular. So I was pretty excited about it at that point. But I didn't get the chance to actually visit it until 1989 in December. I was out in Florida with my now-formally college roommate, because we had just graduated from college, Todd Drake, who I know listens to this podcast. So Todd, this one's for you. Hopefully your memories of this are as good as mine. We were out there for ah for a University of Illinois football game for the for the Citrus Bowl, and we went to Hollywood Studios, and they were soft opening Star Tours there. So we got a chance to ride it before it actually opened to the public. like
00:06:08
Speaker
And I absolutely loved it. I remember walking off and being in tears. yeah I know I'm a schmaltz. It happens all the time. But I was just so excited to have this experience of feeling like I really was in a Star Wars movie. Now, that very first version, ah the original version of Star Tours, had a great storyline. You would get on the ship and it was being piloted by a droid, Captain Rex. And this is how Captain Rex would greet you. Welcome aboard. This is Captain Rex from the cockpit. I know this is probably your first flight, and it's mine too. So of course it's his first time because it's a Disney ride. Something has to go incredibly wrong. and But you might have recognized already that voice was a familiar voice. Yes, it's Paul Rubens, the actor who played Pee Wee Herman. He played Captain Rex and he took you on this space voyage. So
00:07:05
Speaker
It's a trip to Endor after being in the space station, taking a few wrong turns, getting a little bit lost. You hyper space to Endor, you see Endor in the screen ahead of you and you shoot right by it and it goes past and you see it in the rear view. mirror monitor behind you. And the next thing you know, you are in a storm of comets. So if you remember this, you're going in and out and back and forth through the comets. It was very reminiscent of the asteroid scene in The Empire Strikes Back. And at one point you actually go inside one of the commentst comets and there is a crystalline cave and you know you're going through all of these crystals. Ultimately, you have to shoot some of the crystals to
00:07:48
Speaker
free yourself and get away from this cave. Now remember that we're going to come back to that idea of the crystals with the comets because it's really pretty cool. Okay so after the comets you got captured by a star destroyer well you got caught in the tractor beam luckily there was a squad of x-wings there and they were able to rescue you from the star destroyer but the reason the x-wings were there was because the death star was there too so you ultimately find yourself in the death star battle from star wars episode four you get hit, you start falling towards the surface, and the next thing you know, you are joining with the X-Wings on the trench run, and Captain Rex says this.
00:08:33
Speaker
now And of course, that's what we're always are all feeling as we're swooping into the Death Star. We all wanted to do this and take out the Death Star and go on the trench run and we get the chance to do that. So we destroy the Death Star, we hyperspace back, we get back to the space station, and after slamming on the brakes, we are safe and that's the end of the ride. well I loved it in 1989. People loved it even more in 1987. It was a huge hit. People were lined up at Disneyland and then at Hollywood Studios for hours to ride this ride. It really was the premier e-ticket attraction. And one of the things that was always exciting about Star Tours was that
00:09:19
Speaker
It was relatively easy to modify because you could just create a new ride film and reprogram the movement of the of the ship and you could have a whole new ride. So people for years were thinking, when are we going to get a new version of Star Tours? Well, in 1998, as work was going on with Star Wars Episode One, the Imagineers started working on a new version of Star Tours, and this was going to be a pod race in episode one pod race experience so you would wear 3d glasses that were going to look like those goggles that anakin wore in episode one and you were going to get back onto the star speeder captain rex was going to pilot you this time instead of going to endor you're going to go to tattooine
00:10:08
Speaker
And sure enough, you're going to wind up with a couple of pod engines on the star speeder and you are going to participate in the race. Well, that
Updates and Evolution of Star Tours
00:10:17
Speaker
sounded great. It sounded like a really, really exciting ride, but the Imagineers realized that if they created this episode one exclusive version, episode two was going to come out into a couple of years after that and episode three, three years after that. And the episode one version would get dated very quick. So they decided to wait until all of the prequels were were done. And sure enough, in 2005 at Star Wars Celebration in Indianapolis, George Lucas, I was there. It was really cool. ah George Lucas announced to the whole crowd that Star Tours 2 was in production. So we were very excited. Well, that was 2005.
00:11:00
Speaker
We didn't get the new version until 2011. So Disney made us wait a little bit as they often do. And that what new version was Star Wars The Adventures Continue. Now, they picked up on some of those ideas they had talked about before. It was all in 3D, so you wore 3D glasses. And the thing that was magical about the new version of Star Tours was that it was different every time. So they filmed different sequences for the different parts of the ride. So for example, act one, when you are on the space station and you're getting ready to take off, there's a couple of different things that can happen. You can get invaded by Darth Vader, ah who kind of intimidates you and tries to capture you and you shoot your way out past Darth Vader. Or you can get intimidated by the storm troopers who, you know, similarly are trying to shoot at you and you follow the Millennium Falcon out.
00:11:53
Speaker
yeah So, you don't know what it's going to be when you get on there. It's going to be different every time. Same thing, after you go to hyperspace, you could wind up on Hoth and participate in the Walker battle from the Empire Strikes Back. Or, like they originally planned, you could wind up in Tatooine and do the Pod Race. or you could go to Kashyyyk and you could work with the Wookiees and fight against the the clones. So it was capturing all sorts of different points of time and it was very cool. It was very, very enjoyable. What Disney wound up doing then was as the sequel movies came out, they started adapting Star Tours for the sequels. So
00:12:32
Speaker
they changed Darth Vader to Kylo Ren. It was basically the same scene, but instead of Darth Vader in act one, it was Kylo Ren, and it was the sequel version of the Stormtroopers that would would attack you. And then they added Jakku, the desert planet from The Force Awakens. When The Force Awakens came out, you could visit Jakku. When The Last Jedi came out, you could visit Krayt. When Rise of Skywalker came out, you could visit Kef Beer. the close moon of Endor where the Death Star 2 wreckage was. And so they were able to keep expanding it and adding it.
00:13:07
Speaker
Now here's a fun fact. Remember I told you to stick a pin in that idea of going through the comets and the crystal cave in the first version of Star Tours. Well, Ryan Johnson was so inspired. He loved that part of the ride and he was so inspired by that that he paid homage to it in the last Jedi. If you remember the Millennium Falcon on crate goes into a crystal cave and has to shoot its way out and they actually, play the John Williams music from the original version of Star Tours during that scene. And then, so he put that in the movie. And then when they did Crate in Star Tours 2, they brought that scene back. So it came full circle all the way around again. It was a very cool thing.
Recent Additions and Future Teasers
00:13:51
Speaker
And now, just recently, they have even newer versions, so ah you do get the opportunity to hear from Ahsoka Tano, from Cassian Andor, or from the Mandalorian in Grogu, and then you can have a final adventure where you are flying with Ahsoka, with the Pergo, with the giant space whales. and so it's really fun. It's really special. Star Tours is just a great experience. It's always fun whenever you go on it. It's even more fun when you get to be the rebel spy if you know you know. So that is Star Tours in a nutshell.
00:14:29
Speaker
Thanks for listening. ah here's Here's what's coming up on Star Wars Cleaning Crew. So next week, in commemoration of the wrap up of the Acolyte, we're going to do a show, kind of a debrief on the Acolyte, our final reactions to it. And then we are going to dive back into our Star Wars at the Park series with a couple of really, really special episodes. You're not going to want to miss them. So thank you again for joining us, make sure that you come back, keep your kitchens clean, may the force be with you, hit like, hit subscribe, tell all your friends, we'll see you next week. Bye bye.