Trivia / Star Tours

---

• Ascended Fanon: There were rumors that the first Star Tours actually had an option to fly to Endor, along with the other planets featured. The Adventures Continue version actually does let you visit other planets... though sadly not Endor. The 2019 update comes the closest, with the Starspeeder passing Endor again and instead landing on its neighboring moon Kef Bir.
• Development Gag: The Mighty Microscope from Adventures Thru Inner Space can be seen near the beginning. Star Tours replaced it at Disneyland.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: After the original Star Tours closed down, footage for the ride was only available through bootlegs. In 2022, Lucasfilm released a better-quality version of the original footage to attendees of Star Wars Celebration Anaheim, which they subsequently uploaded online.
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends:
  • A common rumor is that the technician that the ship nearly crashes into at the ride's conclusion was actually a cameo by George Lucas. It wasn't — it was actually an Industrial Lights & Magic modelmaker by the name of Ira Keeler.
  • Another common rumor that Mark Hamill was the voice of the unseen supervisor telling C-3PO and R2-D2 to "get back to work" in the queue. Though the owner of the voice is still unknown, it has been confirmed that it was never Hamill doing the voice.
• Promoted Fanboy: George Lucas was a longtime fan of Disneyland, being one of the first guests to attend the park on its second day of operations, so he jumped at the opportunity to be involved with the ride — and was more than happy to help with reimagining it before becoming one of Disney's largest shareholders after the sale of Lucasfilm.
• Prop Recycling:
  • The two G2 droids at the Disneyland version of the ride are skinned Goose audio-animatronics from the America Sings attraction with replaced heads. In both the original and The Adventures Continue versions of the show, G2-9T sings a parody of "I've Been Working On The Railroad", one of the songs the Goose quartet he originated from sang in the America Sings show.
  • Also exclusive to the Disneyland version, DL-X2, or the "Sector 2 Security" droid was originally built for a season three episode of the Hill Street Blues television show.
• Refitted for Sequel: One of the original plans for the Star Tours ride was to make a conventional roller coaster that began with Yoda greeting guests as they rose out of Dagobah before they went to a branching adventures throughout the galaxy far, far away, before the ride would branch off again. This idea was scrapped both due to being a technically-impractical concept, and a lack of ride space to pull such an endeavor off, but the concept of splitting pathways would eventually become the template of what The Adventures Continue would do.
• Similarly Named Works: Shares its name with the fourth episode of Oscar's Orchestra.
• Urban Legend of Zelda: There are constant rumors that guests can be chosen as the Rebel spy through methods such as sitting in specific seats, facing forward at the right time, etc. None of these are true; everyone’s photo is taken after the guests are seated and the ride chooses one at random. The cast member overseeing the ride can choose someone from the photo selection if they wish, usually children or anyone who was nice to them.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The ride was initially planned to be based on The Black Hole, but this was scrapped when the film became a Box Office Bomb. Realizing the studio had no recent hits to based a thrill ride on, Disney decided they would need to partner with an outside filmmaker and narrowed their choices down to Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. After deciding Spielberg would probably say no due to his close relationship with competitor Universal Studios, they picked Lucas.
  • Rex went through several personality changes during the attraction's development. At first, he was conceived as a witty tour guide. Later, he was conceived as a brazen veteran—a deranged and broken-down droid left over from the Clone Wars named "Crazy Harry".
  • The original plan for the second iteration, which entered the planning stages during the time that the prequel trilogy was in development, was for the story to take place entirely on Tatooine with The Boonta Eve Classic Podrace as the centerpiece. The Imagineers held off on it because they wanted to see how the other two prequels played out. Eventually, they came up with several other ideas based off those films and that's when Imagineer Tom Fitzgerald approached Lucas with the multi-branching concept.
  • According to Imagineer Jason Surrell, Hoth was planned to be an encounter with the creatures of the planet (Tauntauns and Wampas). George Lucas asked if it could be the Battle Of Hoth, from The Empire Strikes Back, instead; he even suggested a way to explain the continuity issue by claiming there was an earlier battle on Hoth, and the Rebels later decided to build another base there figuring the Empire wouldn’t think they would return to that same location.
  • In some storyboards for Coruscant, rather than it being Republic & Separatist Forces, as seen in Revenge Of The Sith, it would have been Rebel X-Wings & Imperial Tie Fighters.
  • Rather than the Empire hunting the Ship for a Rebel Spy, it would have been that the Death Star plans were on the ship. This idea was changed, as the Expanded Universe, up to that point, had so many explanations for how the Rebels got the Death Star plans. Disney would later make an entire movie about the origin of the stolen Death Star plans, then add a transmission from one of its protagonists, Cassian Andor, to the 2024 round of Star Tours updates.
  • A demo video indicated that, AC-38 was going to be the pilot rather than C-3PO.

---