Imagineer Tom Fitzgerald Explains the Latest Additions to Star Tours — The Adventures Continue
After 37 years, Diseny’s original Star Wars attraction may still be its best.
Star Tours — The Adventures Continue has fulfilled fan’s desire to enter the galaxy far, far away and rub elbows with the franchise’s great heroes and villains for almost 40 years now. Earlier this year, however, the attraction got another infusion of Star Wars magic when new scenes based on the popular Disney+ streaming series Ahsoka, The Mandalorian, and Andor were added to the attraction.
“Each time we look at updating Star Tours, we search for iconic moments from Star Wars that would lend themselves to a unique adventure,” says Tom Fitzgerald, senior creative executive at Walt Disney Imagineering.
“George Lucas once referred to Star Tours as a ‘Greatest Hits Attraction,’ and we are excited that with our partners at Lucasfilm the adventures can continue to…continue. We have many sequences featuring various ships, but the idea of flying through a pod of space whales was too good to pass up!”
Purrgil, Peridea, and Peril
In the new Ahsoka scene, guests must rendezvous with the former Jedi to help deliver the Rebel Spy.
Jumping through hyperspace, guests find themselves in the midst of a firefight high above the planet Peridea. Surrounded by purrgil (the giant space whales seen in Star Wars Rebels, The Mandalorian, and Ahsoka), R2-D2 must maneuver the Starspeeder to safety.
Interestingly, when creating the new scene, Imagineers had a tough time tackling the massive scope of the purrgil.
“One of the key challenges with the purrgil was how to establish their massive scale,” Fitzgerald says.
Working With Industrial Light & Magic
To come up with a solution, Imagineering turned to Industrial Light & Magic and their longtime visual effects supervisor, Bill George.
Image: Star Wars
“With the stereoscopic format, we were able to use tricks of the trade to convey their size,” notes Fitzgerald. “Since the motion of our simulator is a key storytelling device in Star Tours, we look for ways to add moments and movements that are unique to our show yet feel like a natural extension of what the audience would see in the original shows.”
In the end, the Star Tours experience has always been about putting fans in the middle of the Star Wars action. Now, they can do so with the latest batch of heroes.
“In Star Tours, the main focus is clearly the action sequences, yet we know guests also want to see their favorite characters,” Fitzgerald says.
“Over the years, we’ve tried to incorporate as many as possible to keep the show surprising.”
A Unique Experience
With the addition of the three new scenes, there are now 250 variants of Star Tours — The Adventures Continue that guests can possibly experience. The goal is for each one to be unique.
“With Grogu, we put the emphasis on comedy, Andor a darker more mysterious tone, and Ahsoka a warm and friendly tone since she knows R2-D2.”
Photo: Also Disney
You can experience Star Tours — The Adventures Continue at Disneyland, Walt Disney World, and Disneyland Paris.
