Star Tours

• 1. Introduction

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  Star Tours opened at Disneyland on the 9th of January 1987, and from the very first day, guests dressed up as Star Wars characters to be part of it. The park stayed open for a 60-hour marathon to handle the crowds. The final bill came to $32 million. What drew people wasn't just the Star Wars brand name. It was something genuinely new: a motion simulator that put you inside the story, piloted by a bumbling droid named Rex and voiced by Paul Reubens. The questions worth asking are how a ride that began as a proposal for a completely different film became one of the most influential attractions in theme park history, what it felt like to actually board that StarSpeeder 3000, and why, after running for 29 years across four parks on multiple continents, it took a live theatrical event with a thermal detonator to bring it to a close.

• 2. A Black Hole That Became a Star

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  The ride that became Star Tours was first conceived around the 1979 Disney live-action film The Black Hole. Planners imagined an interactive simulator where guests could choose their own route through the experience. The concept was shelved after preliminary work, partly because the costs were enormous and partly because the film itself had failed to connect with audiences. Rather than abandon the simulator idea entirely, Disney looked elsewhere. A partnership with George Lucas had already taken root in 1986, when Captain EO opened at the California park. That 3-D musical film, starring Michael Jackson, established the creative channel. Disney then approached Lucas about a Star Wars-themed ride, and he agreed. Disney Imagineers purchased four military-grade flight simulators at $500,000 each. At Industrial Light and Magic, Lucas and his special effects team built the first-person film that would play inside the cabins. Once both pieces were ready, a programmer sat inside a simulator with a joystick and manually synchronized the cabin's movement to the action on screen.

• 3. The World Inside the Terminal

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  Advertised as "The Ultimate Star Wars Adventure!", Star Tours cast guests as space tourists heading to the Forest Moon of Endor, the site of the climactic battle depicted in Return of the Jedi. The queue was designed to look like a spaceship boarding terminal. Posters advertised voyages to distant planets. A giant screen promoted the benefits of traveling to Endor. Audio-Animatronic versions of C-3PO and R2-D2 appeared to interact with the crowd. According to the book Disneyland Detective by Kendra Trahan, those Disneyland figures were actual props from the original trilogy, modified to move via Audio-Animatronics. A life-size mock-up of the fictional StarSpeeder 3000 spacecraft filled part of the space. Further into the queue, a G2 droid performed repairs while being distracted by onlookers, and a second droid listed supposed flaws in the StarSpeeder and its RX-series pilots. The pre-show above the queue ran a safety video featuring Star Wars aliens alongside Disney Imagineers and their families.

• 4. Rex at the Controls

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  Paul Reubens voiced Captain RX-24, the droid pilot everyone called Rex, and his casting had a specific backstory. One year before Star Tours opened, Reubens had voiced a shipboard computer named Max in the Disney film Flight of the Navigator, listed in the credits as Paul Mall. He later credited that earlier role with landing him the part of Rex. Once the starspeeder doors closed, Rex appeared on a side screen and chatted with guests while R2-D2 was loaded aboard. A small mistake on Rex's part sent the ship crashing through the maintenance bay doors and plummeting into the maintenance yard, narrowly missing a giant mechanical arm. In space, an accidental overshoot brought the starspeeder into a comet cluster instead of Endor. The ship was struck by several comets and became trapped inside one of the larger ones before weaving its way out through a wall. Waiting on the other side was a Star Destroyer of the Imperial Remnant, whose tractor beam grabbed the ship. A New Republic X-wing destroyed the tractor beam generator to free them. The StarSpeeder then joined a Republic assault on what appeared to be a Death Star. Leland Chee revealed in 2013 that the structure was actually a habitation sphere disguised to distract the New Republic by an Imperial warlord. Rex fired the ship's lasers at TIE fighters while a Republic pilot destroyed the sphere by sending two proton torpedoes into its exhaust port, mirroring Luke Skywalker's method exactly. The ride ended with the starspeeder nearly hitting a fuel truck in the hangar, and C-3PO calmly thanking passengers for flying, apparently unaware of what they had just survived.

• 5. The Technology Behind the Motion

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  The simulator system used hydraulic motion base cabins capable of six degrees of freedom, with the ability to move 35 degrees in the X-Y-Z plane. Disney patented it under the name Advanced Technology Leisure Application Simulator, or ATLAS. The technology had been designed originally by Rediffusion Simulation in Sussex, England, a company later acquired by Thales Training and Simulation, which had previously operated as Thomson-CSF. Rediffusion had first developed the simulator for a simpler Canadian attraction called Tour of the Universe, where it used a single entrance-and-exit door at the rear and a standard video projector. For Star Tours, the film was front-projected onto the screen from a 70 mm film projector located beneath the cockpit barrier. The original Disneyland installation had four simulator cabins. Tokyo Disneyland, Disneyland Paris, and Disney's Hollywood Studios each ran six motion bases. Star Tours also carried the distinction of being the first attraction at Disneyland based on a licensed intellectual property from outside Disney's own portfolio.

• 6. The Last Flight

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  On the 14th of August 2010, Disney's Hollywood Studios hosted an event called "Last Tour To Endor" exclusively for attendees of Celebration V, running from 8 p.m. to 1 a.m. The evening included George Lucas in person, character appearances, a Death Star Disco, a Bespin Stage Dance Party, a live fan film show titled Raiders of the Lost Jedi Temple of Doom: A Fan Film of Epic Proportions, Hyperspace Hoopla, and a Symphony in the Stars fireworks display. The shutdown ceremony itself featured C-3PO, R2-D2, Boba Fett, Darth Vader, and a contingent of Stormtroopers. Rather than having R2-D2 perform the power-down quietly, Boba Fett destroyed the ride's power supply using a thermal detonator, the effect achieved through pyrotechnics. The original attraction continued operating after that ceremony until the 7th of September 2010, when a final event exclusive to D23 members marked the true end of the run at Disney's Hollywood Studios. Tokyo Disneyland and Disneyland Paris later closed their versions for conversion in 2012 and 2016 respectively, bringing the original ride's total run to 29 years.

• 7. What Came After Rex

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  The successor attraction, Star Tours - The Adventures Continue, opened at Disney's Hollywood Studios on the 20th of May 2011, and at Disneyland on the 3rd of June 2011. It carried an updated ride system with high-definition video, a Dolby 3D screen, improved motion simulators, and new Audio-Animatronics. The new version shifted the timeline to the period between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, with C-3PO as the pilot. Rex did not disappear entirely. In The Adventures Continue queue, he appears as a newly delivered droid. He later turned up as the house DJ of Oga's Cantina in Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge, a role treated as official Star Wars canon and set roughly three decades after the events of the original ride. An episode of The Mandalorian on Disney+ also featured a group of RX-series droids, connecting the bumbling pilot category that Rex helped establish to the broader ongoing Star Wars universe.