Star Tours - Star Tours: Tour To Endor

Star Tours: Tour To Endor

Advertised as "The Ultimate Star Wars Adventure!", Star Tours puts the guest in the role of a space tourist en route to the forest moon of Endor, the site of the climactic battle of Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi, via the Star Tours travel agency. Much is made of this throughout the ride queue, which is designed to look like a spaceship boarding terminal: posters advertise voyages to different planets, and a giant screen informs riders of the benefits of going to Endor. This area is stocked with Audio-Animatronic characters that seem to speak to the ride patrons (including C-3PO and R2-D2), as well as a life-size mock-up of a StarSpeeder 3000, the fictional spacecraft which riders are about to board. According to the book Disneyland Detective by Kendra Trahan, the figures of C-3PO and R2-D2 in the Disneyland attraction are actual props from the original film, modified to operate via Audio-Animatronics.

Guests then enter a maintenance area where an apparently underproductive G2 droid performs repairs on another droid while being distracted by the observing guests, and another droid inadvertently points out all the supposed flaws of the StarSpeeder 3000 and its RX pilots. The G2 droids are in fact the animatronic skeletons of two geese from the defunct Tomorrowland attraction America Sings. A ride attendant escorts guests to one of several loading stations where they wait for their turn to ride.

A television screen posts a countdown to take-off time and shows images of the Starspeeder 3000 spacecraft being serviced. As launch time approaches, a safety video is shown featuring Star Wars aliens, Disney Imagineers, and their families. It instructs guests how to fasten their seat belts and where to place belongings. Once the doors to the Starspeeder open, guests walk across bridges into one of several StarSpeeders, while C-3PO welcomes the riders and repeats the safety spiel. As the doors close, the bumbling pilot droid of the ship, RX-24 or Rex (voiced by Paul Reubens), chats up the guests about the trip as he sets up for his first flight.

Rex lowers the cockpit shield, and the hangar crew activates the flight platform. All goes well until a slight mistake on Captain Rex's part sends the Starspeeder crashing into the maintenance bay doors, and plummeting into the maintenance yard just barely crashing the control room and colliding with a giant mechanical arm. Once in space the Starspeeder sees another jump to lightspeed, and Rex makes the jump to lightspeed as well, but accidentally overshoots the ship's hyperdrive, and passes the Endor moon, and instead gets caught inside a comet cluster. The ship gets hit by several comets before getting trapped in one of the larger comets. The Starspeeder has to maze its way through the comet and escapes by crashing through one of the thinner walls. Upon escaping the comet, however, the ship encounters a Star Destroyer.

The ship gets caught in its tractor beam, but manages to get loose when a rebel X-wing fighter provides assistance by destroying the tractor beam's generator. With the tractor beam deactivated, the Starspeeder escapes the Star Destroyer. Soon the ship accompanies the Rebellion on a massive assault on the Death Star. Rex uses the StarSpeeder's lasers to eliminate several TIE fighters while a rebel pilot destroys the Death Star in the same manner Luke Skywalker did, by firing two proton torpedoes into the exhaust port. The X-Wings lightspeed away to avoid the Death Star's explosion, and a final lightspeed jump sends the StarSpeeder back to the spaceport, but not before a near collision with a fuel truck in the hangar. C-3PO thanks the people for riding and says to remain seated until the doors open.