Last year at Star Wars Celebration, it was announced that Star Tours would receive new destinations in the future. Now, it has just been announced at this year’s Star Wars Celebration that the ride will indeed be updated with locations we have not yet seen in the Star Wars Galaxy.
New Star Tours Destinations
The new locations will debut in 2024 at Disneyland Park in California, Disney’s Hollywood Studios in Florida, and Disneyland Paris in France.
The official Disney Parks Blog released their own announcement for this attraction update, though greater specifics on where exactly we’ll be going on our upcoming Star Tours flights aren’t available just yet.
Lightspeed to Innovation
Star Tours has been an enduring experience across several decades of Disney Parks history. Before the Star Wars franchise and Lucasfilm became involved, the notion of a motion simulator had been tossed around without any tangible progress. A space adventure themed after “The Black Hole” seemed promising, until the costly anticipated budget and lack of success for the 1979 Disney film.
Around the time George Lucas and Disney were collaborating on the “Captain EO” 3-D film, a partnership was negotiated to create a Star Wars attraction at Disneyland Park with military-grade motion simulators priced at around $500,000 per vehicle. It was the first time any intellectual property not originating from Disney itself had a home in the parks, and the experience was popular enough to prompt a version in Japan, Florida, and France.
The original Star Tours had a singular story, with the clumsy pilot droid Rex’s planned flight to Endor instead leads riders through a galactic battle of star destroyers and Death Star action. This changed in May 2011, when the California and Florida versions of the attraction reopened as Star Tours — The Adventures Continue. In this dramatic overhaul, the technology and quality of imagery was upgraded, while the ride itself expanded into an unpredictable array of countless different worlds and characters one could encounter at random on any given ride.
Ever since, the voyages of Star Tours have been interchangeable and adaptable, with this anticipated 2024 transformation being the first major change to the ride since sequences from “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” were incorporated.
This is a developing story; stay tuned for more updates.
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