Released today to celebrate 25 years of the Star Tours ride at Disneyland® Resort is the “25th Anniversary of Star Tours” Attraction” pin.
The pin features the Star Tours logo on one side and on the reverse C-3PO, R2-D2, the RX-24 pilot (Rex) and the Starspeeder 3000 itself.
The pin is available in a limited edition of 1000.
About Star Tours
Star Tours is a motion simulator attraction currently operating at Disneyland, Disney’s Hollywood Studios at Disneyworld, Tokyo Disneyland and Disneyland Park at Disneyland Paris. The ride is based on the successful Star Wars film series created by George Lucas, making it the first Disney attraction based on a non-Disney produced film.
The ride that became Star Tours first saw light as a proposal for an attraction based on the 1979 Disney live-action film The Black Hole. It would have been an interactive ride simulator attraction, where guests would have had the ability to choose the ride car’s route, but after preliminary planning, the Black Hole attraction was shelved due to its enormous cost—approximately $50 million USD—as well as the unpopularity of the film itself.
But instead of completely dismissing the idea of a simulator, the company decided to make use of a partnership between Disney and George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars, that began in 1986 with the opening of Captain EO (a 3-D musical film starring Michael Jackson) at the California park. Disneyland then approached Lucas with the idea for Star Tours. With Lucas’ approval, Disney Imagineers purchased four military-grade flight simulators at a cost of $500,000 each and designed the ride structure.
Meanwhile, Lucas and his team of special effects technicians at Industrial Light & Magic produced the first-person perspective film that would be projected inside the simulators. When both simulator and film were completed, a programmer then sat inside and, with the aid of a joystick, manually synchronized the movement of the simulator with the apparent movement on screen. On January 9, 1987, at a final cost of $32 million, almost twice the cost of building the entire park in 1955, the ride opened to throngs of patrons, many of whom dressed up as Star Wars characters for the occasion. In celebration, Disneyland remained open for a special 60-hour marathon from January 9, 1987 at 10 am to January 11, 1987 at 10 pm.
Star Tours at Disneyland closed on July 27, 2010 to allow for the conversion to Star Tours: The Adventures Continue.
