STAR WARS DAY BONUS! After-Action Report: A Tale of Two Tours

This post is sort of an After-Action Report and a Sentimental Paleontology in one. You can most definitely go to Disneyland and ride Star Tours in the present...but it's on its second incarnation, which is different enough from the original to almost be considered a new attraction. Whether it really is or not is a matter of opinion and perception, but it seems like Disney is counting it that way. Either way, such a major change to a long-standing E-ticket level attraction inevitably invites a Before vs. After comparison. And that's exactly what you're gonna get here.

It might surprise you to learn that I even have a preference vis-a-vis the two versions of Star Tours, after I thoroughly decried the presence of Star Wars material in Disneyland at all, in large part because I'm just not into the franchise. But here's the thing: I don't hate Star Wars. I can appreciate the importance of this film series in terms of its effects on the art of filmmaking and popular culture as a whole. I can understand why people find it so cool. I can even, from time to time, enjoy watching the movies, although no more than a chunk or two at a time.

And I do, for the most part, enjoy Star Tours. It's effective both as an adaptation of its source material and as a fun ride in its own right. Do I ride it every time I go to Disneyland? Heck no. But I ride it often enough to intelligently weigh in.

I'll begin by doing something I rarely do here at the Disneyland Dilettante: recap the attraction. Normally I like to assume my readers have a certain level of familiarity with the things I am going on about—and if they don't, that they can look further into it on their own initiative—and cut straight to the analysis. But this sort of side-by-side comparison pretty much requires that I actually set the two things side-by-side. So here we go.

The original Star Tours debuted at Disneyland in 1987 (a scant four years after Return of the Jedi capped off the original film trilogy and long before anyone thought George Lucas would ever make more of these damn things) as the park's first motion-simulator attraction. The ride was set in the Star Wars universe not long after the events of the films, with the premise that with the Galaxy now at peace, a tourism industry had sprung up around the sites that featured prominently in the recent Rebels vs. Empire clash. The queue was themed as a commercial spaceport complete with travel ads and PA announcements and the guests were cast in the roles of tourists making their way through the necessary checkpoints to board their flight to the forest moon of Endor. Humorous tension was established right away—an ad extolling the marvels of the Star Tours company's “Starspeeder 3000” vehicles and RX droid pilots stood in sharp contrast to an actual Starspeeder on display in front of you and beat to hell by whatever it had been through on its last trip. If you were paying enough attention to notice the discrepancy, you might well wonder whether it and its pilot were really all they were cracked up to be.

And your concern would turn out to be well-founded, since RX-24 or “Captain Rex” was a robo-goofball making his first ever flight and badly unqualified to do so. Granted, this may not have been entirely his fault:

But in any case, thanks to Captain Rex's bumbling, your “tour” was a complete fiasco, starting with a wrong turn in the hangar and featuring such highlights as a swarm of comets and a straight-up remake of the Death Star trench run before you returned to Star Tours headquarters and nearly crashed into a fuel tank. A thrill ride in the “goes horribly wrong” mold, in other words.

It was fun stuff, but as the ride passed the 20-year mark—with the film showing its age, few first-time riders in a typical day's crowd (spoiling the gag where Rex reveals that it's his first trip also), and a new generation coming of age with more attachment to the prequel trilogy of their own childhoods—it was decided that a wholesale makeover drawing upon both trilogies for material was in order.

“The Adventures Continue” has not only all-new ride footage presented in 3-D, but the queue has been updated...or perhaps down-dated, since this version is supposed to take place during the 18-odd years between the two sets of movies. The vehicles have been repainted and rechristened Starspeeder 1000's, an earlier model. Likewise, the RX droid apparently is still in development and your pilot is a more humanoid model...but you never get to see it perform, because due to a stroke of bad timing, your ship is unexpectedly helmed by C-3PO himself. The queue video screen now shows, in addition to travel ads, lists of arrivals and departures and weather forecasts for various planets.* The second queue area, previously a droid repair workshop, is now a baggage check station where you can see on the scanner what your fellow passengers are packing. Perhaps most exciting of all (and certainly most heavily promoted in the advertising), your adventure is now unpredictable. Instead of the same trip every time, you get a random sequence of locations and characters spanning all six movies, with a total of 54 possible combinations. Ultimately they all add up to variations on a single theme—one of the passengers on your tour (seriously, they show a photo of one of the guests on the ride) is secretly a Rebel spy who needs to evade Empire forces and rendezvous with other members of the Rebellion.

I haven't gotten all 54 possible trips yet, but I have seen all of the individual segments. So I'm working from complete information.

Now to the big question: Which version of Star Tours do I prefer? While I love the concept of randomized sequences and the new queue video and think the 3-D helps you really feel the size of the spaces being portrayed...I have to give the edge to the original. Wow, big surprise, right? My reasoning should be equally unsurprising to anyone who has been closely following this blog.

Star Tours 1.0 functioned as a sequel/side story to the film trilogy without putting the specific characters and events of said trilogy front and center. Yes, the climax of the ride featured the trench run and R2-D2 was your ship's navigator, but anything else you might directly recognize from the movies was confined to the pre- and post-show, and the main human characters didn't appear at all. It was just enough to confirm that yes, this was indeed the bona-fide Star Wars universe, while indicating that there was a lot more to that universe than just what we saw in the movies. The clash between heroes and villains had left its mark, but the major players didn't need to be physically present to make things interesting.

Whatever your personal feelings about Star Wars, that is a brilliant premise. Do you know why? Because the narrative within the ride and the meta-narrative of Disneyland guests going on the ride are exactly the same. The great thing about Star Wars—or Harry Potter or the Marvel movies or Game of Thrones or any number of the other big blockbuster nerd franchises currently dominating pop culture—is that their worldbuilding makes them self-sustaining. The settings are places you want to visit, not necessarily because you might run into characters you love, but just because they are cool settings. Star Tours 1.0 basically cast you as yourself—a tourist excited to be traveling to places in the Star Wars universe. It doesn't get much more immersive than that.

Star Tours: The Adventures Continue, as you might have guessed, turns this on its head. Not only is C-3PO your pilot (and R2-D2 still your navigator), but the various segments give you the chance to encounter Darth Vader, Han Solo, Yoda, Princess Leia, Boba Fett, Jar Jar Binks, and/or Admiral Ackbar. Everywhere you go in the Galaxy, you're not just visiting prominent locations from the movies but rehashing the events that took place there—pod racing on Tatooine, dodging AT-ATs on Hoth, repelling buzz droids over Coruscant, nearly being eaten in the ocean core of Naboo. Even if you overlook the trashing of the films' continuity (When does all this take place, again?), your reaction as a Disneyland guest (Darth Vader? COOL!) is directly at odds with your reaction as a character in the ride's narrative (Darth Vader? CRAP!), breaking immersion.

Nor can you simply choose to ignore one perspective or the other—decide to be either a Disneyland guest or a patron of Star Tours. The ride demands that you be both. The demand that you inhabit your role as a citizen in the Star Wars universe comes via the Rebel spy premise. If you're the spy, then not only are you part of that setting, you're partially complicit in everything that happens during the ride. If you're not the spy, you're still sort of drafted into their quest. This kind of thing never happens on the Tea Cups.

But there's a snag. That snag is that the queue goes out of its way to remind you that you're in a Disney park. Remember the baggage scanner? Here's some of what it reveals in those suitcases:

I know my favorite part of The Empire Strikes Back is when Yoda gives Luke his beloved Goofy plushie as a souvenir of his time on Dagobah. But hey, maybe some civilization in the Republic came up with toys like these completely by coincidence. Let's go with that.

I dunno, these coincidences are starting to pile up to suspicious levels...

Oh, come ON!

There is no point in pretending that these cameos serve any purpose other than cheerleading for the Disney brand. It's all about nudging and winking at the guests: “Are you having fun yet? This sure is some swell theme park you're at, isn't it? By the way, isn't it great that we OWN Star Wars now?” People chuckle, because it's kinda funny to see that the outwardly dignified denizens of the Galaxy go on vacation with Disney toys just like people in this universe. But in order to process that humor, your brain has to yank itself from immersion in the Star Wars setting back to this universe.

And then after a stunt like that, the attraction asks you to not only re-immerse yourself in its fiction, but kick it up a notch by accepting that you or one of your fellow travelers is actually part of the action.

You can't have it both ways, ride. Either we're having a grand adventure in the Star Wars universe, where we live as citizens of the Republic/Empire, or we're goofing around in Disneyland. Make up your damn mind.

And there's another big downside to all the character spam: It shrinks the setting. Whereas we learned from Star Tours 1.0 that there were things in the Galaxy—comet swarms and holdouts of pro-Empire sentiment and Star Tours itself—that hadn't been shown in the movies, “The Adventures Continue” dials that back. Nope, sorry kids, there's nothing happening here that you're not already aware of. (Unless you're the spy, in which case you get to be illogically surprised to learn that you're the spy.)

Lest this all come across as too negative, let me reiterate that I still find Star Tours fun. And it did honestly need to be updated, if for no other reason than to get rid of that thoroughly tired “first flight” gag. I just think the new version misses the mark for why Star Tours is fun. And that itself is just a symptom of a larger issue plaguing the parks, which is Management's assumption that the main thing everyone wants out of their Disney day is to see characters they like.

With the upcoming release of yet another Star Wars trilogy—this time under the Disney banner—it seems likely that Star Tours will be updated again at some point. I honestly don't see it happening immediately; “The Adventures Continue” is only a few years old at this point and they probably want to get some more mileage out of it before closing it for an extended period and going through the hassle of re-programming the simulators again. But here's hoping that when Star Tours 3.0 does come along, it combines the best features of the first two versions to give us a Galaxy that's both bigger than we know and unpredictable.

And that it gets rid of the damn baggage scanner.

May the Fourth be with you!

* My favorite: “Cloud City: Cloudy.”