FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

November 16, 2011

Publicity Department Oriental Land Co., Ltd.

Tokyo Disneyland Attraction Star Tours to be Reintroduced in a New Version!

Star Tours: The Adventures Continue Opening Spring 2013

URAYASU, CHIBA— Tokyo Disneyland® Park announced that its attraction Star Tours in Tomorrowland will be revamped, reopening with the new title, Star Tours: The Adventures Continue.    The new version of the attraction will open in spring 2013.

The current Star Tours is an immersive motion-based adventure that lets guests experience the thrills of space travel in the world of the Star Wars film series.    The attraction opened at Tokyo Disneyland in 1989, and now after more than 20 years, it still remains popular among guests of all ages.

The main feature of the revamped attraction is that guests can enjoy the thrills of a new and unpredictable experience with every ride.    The ride is comprised of several scenes, each with multiple scenarios for each scene that are selected at random.    This means that guests never know what they will encounter out of the more than 50 possible story combinations for every ride.    The attraction will also feature 3-D images for the first time, allowing guests to feel like they’ve truly entered into the world of the Star Wars film series.

Star Tours: The Adventures Continue promises manifold fun and thrills for guests of all ages – for fans of the Star Wars series as well as those unfamiliar with the film. The attraction will create a whole new world of excitement in space travel at Tokyo Disneyland.

Attraction Facts
Opening date: Spring 2013
Duration: 4 minutes 30 seconds
Capacity: 40 seats per cabin
Number of cabins: 6 cabins
Investment: About 7 billion yen

Note: In preparation for this renewal, Star Tours will close as of April 2, 2012.

For inquiries please contact:
Tokyo Disney Resort Information Center    0570-00-8632 (9:00 a.m. – 7:00 p.m.)

Note: From overseas, and from some mobile phones and IP phones, please call 045-330-5211.

Star Tours – The Adventures Continue was honored with the award for Outstanding Achievement – Attraction Refresh.

Congratulations!

Of course, there are also a few misspelled words. I recently downloaded an Aurebesh font for my computer, and discovered that it can be disconcerting to type in an unfamiliar alphabet, without the usual ease of telling at a glance whether you’ve mis-keyed. (I wish the Imagineers had learned my new trick… type it in English, double-check your spelling, highlight it, and THEN switch fonts!)

But late last night, while translating a new batch of pics that my buddy David Yeh sent of the screen behind C-3PO, I found a new inside joke that tops all the previous ones and makes even the worst typos forgiveable!

Among the various system readouts of the Starspeeder 1000 (deflector shields, nav comp, hyperdrive, thruster vents, countermeasures, life support, repulsors, laser cannons), seven little letters can be found which spell out FLUX CAP.

As in “flux capacitor”, the thing that makes time travel possible for Doc Brown’s Delorean time machine in Back to the Future!

So maybe that Hoth vignette isn’t out of the timeline after all… perhaps Threepio and Artoo have been taking you on a trip across time as well as space. It would certainly explain how characters from “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” seem to exist in perpetual stasis here on Earth (and every twenty years or so, they even go backwards in their timeline while we inexorably go forward in our own!)

Of course, this begs the question… did the classic Starspeeder 3000, a later model, also include a flux capacitor? Could it too travel through time? We’re not sure.

It would further complicate the timeline placement, better known as the infamous “Third Death Star” debate. Since Doc Brown’s technology meant two Marty McFlys could co-exist at the same time, maybe R2-D2 actually can be in two places at once during the Battle of Yavin or the Battle of Endor. This would certainly help explain that ‘extra’ R2-D2 seen in the Tokyo post-show.

But Doc always warned Marty about having contact with his future or past self. And perhaps the two (or more) Artoos led to a localized rip in the space-time continuum. Just the sort of thing that might lead to G2 droids repeating themselves every five minutes, or a self-proclaimed rookie pilot making more than two decades’ worth of ‘first flights’.

This isn’t the first time a ‘flux capacitor’ reference has appeared in the Star Wars universe. As David unearthed, Tim Zahn’s short story “First Contact” from SW Adventure Journal #1 first borrowed the term, just as his other novels embraced concepts like Pink Five and Star Tours and snuck them into the rest of the canon as well.

And of course, there’s also the ‘theme park competition’ connection. I very fondly remember my trip to Orlando in 1991, riding my first-ever simulator (Star Tours) on one day, and my second-ever on the next— the 8-passenger Delorean in Universal Studios Florida’s sorely-missed Back to the Future: The Ride.

So, yeah, I love this inside joke.

Can the two franchises actually co-exist in one cohesive universe? Nah, of course not. By the single line of dialogue “I am Darth Vader, from the planet Vulcan!”, we know that Marty McFly saw the Star Wars— and Star Trek— movies as a kid in the 70′s and 80′s, just like we did, so in his reality they’re nothing more than fiction.

But to quote George Lucas’ alleged rationalization of the Hoth timeline error, “Ah, who cares?”

Having a flux capacitor on a StarSpeeder 1000 is FUN. Don’t overthink it, okay?

Shows what I know!

Around the time of the prequels, suddenly the Aurebesh was everywhere. In Phantom Menace, the filmmakers used the old RPG characters for a screen translating Artoo’s droidspeak into Basic, and this ‘official use’ lit the fan community afire. After Revenge of the Sith came out I purchased an action figure multi-pack which contained a Senate Pod, and was charmed to discover that Hasbro had hidden a message in Aurebesh on the sticker for the computer screen. I deciphered it as “SW FANS RULE”, and quickly reported this inside joke to my fellow collectors.

While looking for Aurebesh fonts online, I stumbled across an editorial by ErikStormtrooper, entitled “What does that screen say?” [ http://erikstormtrooper.com/ed_galbasic1.htm ] I found inspiration in Erik’s diligence at trying to decode a screen of text seen in Return of the Jedi, even though ultimately the screen was revealed to be nothing more than repeated blocks of ‘mood gibberish’ as Erik termed it.

Subconsciously influenced by this, in 2007, I zoomed my videocamera in on tiny stickers on the old blue-and-white Starspeeder 3000 in the queue in Orlando. It wasn’t Aurebesh, the classic ride had come too early for that development. But although the characters were our plain old alphabet, the words were tantalizingly foreign. Back home, I spent an evening freezing the tape and copying down what I saw… but all it turned out to be was backwards snippets of text from a book on printing. Like the screen in ROTJ, it had never been designed for close scrutiny.

The only Aurebesh of note in Orlando in 2007 was the sign outside Tatooine Traders, added in a post-Prequels refurb, and even that was arguably mis-translated. As I’ve discussed many times before, the Aurebesh contains a single glyph ‘orenth’ for the ‘oo’ sound, but the sign for Tatooine Traders uses the letter ‘osk’ (o) twice instead.

But now, for Star Tours: The Adventures Continue, the Aurebesh is everywhere! And not unlike the ‘Mara’ alphabet from Disneyland’s Indiana Jones ride, this secret code is a fun puzzle for fans to decipher while waiting in line. What will we find? Let’s take a look…

These graphics are enhancements of the papercraft model of the SS1K. I’ve actually taken the details from the perfectly-level port side graphic and flipped them around to match the slightly downhill starboard side, which is the angle we normally see the ship in the queue.

(These might make for some cool refrigerator or car-door magnets if anyone wanted to print them off on magnetic paper.)

ignoring the numbers, that’s:

R2D2
STAR TOURS
ASTROMECH DROID

-  DROID  ID

CAUTION:

AUTOMATIC DOOR* OPENS OUTWARD.
PLEASE REMAIN BACK UNTIL DOOR
COMPLETELY SWINGS OPEN.

[* Their old Tatooine Traders extra-letter typo pops up again. Rather than using the single glyph 'orenth' to denote a double O, they have used two 'osk' glyphs.]

Same text on the starboard side… but the colon is now oddly placed.

AUTOMATIC DOOR* OPENS OUTWARD.             CAUTION:
PLEASE REMAIN BACK UNTIL DOOR
COMPLETELY SWINGS OPEN.

CAUTION:

DO NOT REMOVE
THESE 2 SCREWS.
REFER TO MANUAL
FOR INSTRUCTIONS.

<         DANGER   INTAKE

AISLE:   5

CARGO  BAY 01  .1401

So far, these all seem fairly straightforward. Where are the inside jokes? Well, as Kevin Yee pointed out in his review of the ride, the number of the ship is 1401, the street number of Imagineering. Here’s another such joke…

WDI [Walt Disney Imagineering]                           WED [Walter Elias Disney]

HYPER GEAR DRIVE NO. 01.045,9

Or my favorite bit of Disney referencing in the Aurebesh, these two lines on the underside of the newly painted X-Wing which has been restored to The Star Trader:

“THE CHESHIRE CAT
THE MAD HATTER”

And look at this interesting little pattern just forward of the front landing skids.

Turn it on its side, and what does that resemble?

I wonder if that’s present on the actual ship?

Now, I have to admit, I had a little problem with seeing SO MUCH Aurebesh on the ship. Sure, it’s a logical progression here in the real world, but in the backwards timeline of the entire Star Tours history, why did it all suddenly disappear one day? I think somewhere between Star Tours: The Adventures Continue and classic Star Tours, there must’ve been some lawsuits by the indigenous people of this planet against the travel agency, forcing them to streamline their vehicular signage to all native languages. Let’s face it, it doesn’t make good business sense to open a travel agency on the planet Earth and cover the ship with door instructions and danger warnings in an alien language that the Earthlings can’t read.

But elsewhere throughout the queue, the Aurebesh is presented alongside its English equivalents. Screens showing planetary destinations transition from all-Aurebesh to all-English. Directory signs have large English and small Aurebesh underneath. And good ol’ Captain REX has a cameo sporting a ‘DEFECTIVE – RETURN TO FACTORY’ sticker, with the English words appearing in nice bold letters above a smaller Aurebesh translation.

I love the attention to retro-continuity here, remember we will ‘later’ hear G2-4T say “I’m not the one who purchased all those defective RX pilots!” Apparently, after those ‘confusing signage’ lawsuits, they had to save a few bucks and snatch up all the discounted pilot droids they could find.

When you go to ride Star Tours: The Adventures Continue, you might want to carry a little Aurebesh translation card to entertain you throughout the queue. We at Endor Express hope this will give you something extra to help pass the time while you’re waiting in the queue lines!

Enjoy!

Our media host Angela (dressed in a familiar hairstyle) is operating the Star Tours front desk with only one seat remaining.  Who will it go to?  The Jedi or Darth Vader?  An all out war (or the best of the Jedi Training Academy can offer) takes place until a mysterious Jedi appears with two lightsabers, double-fisting Darth Vader into submission.  This mysterious warrior earns the last seat but who is he?

Why, he’s Walt Disney Parks & Resorts Chairman Tom Staggs and without breaking a sweat, introduces us to the brand new attraction while thanking many of the hard working Imagineers and ILMers for their time and dedication.

The ribbon is cut and Disneyland’s version of Star Tours: The Adventures continue is at last open to the public.   With 54 possible combinations, lines remained at an average of 3 hours.  But of course, we waited this long for an updated attraction, what’s a few hours?

While the celebration didn’t come close to matching the celebrity clout that Disney Hollywood Studios had, kudos still goes to the Imagineers and Disneyland team that delivered this attraction successfully.