The opening ceremonies, streamed live this morning, began with the booming voice of Tom Kane and an opening title crawl that places the ride quite definitively between Episode 3 and 4. Star Tours was created by Captain Antillies, where he assigns Artoo and Threepio to help operate the travel company, fueling Imperial speculation that it’s a rebel operation.
Then, sadly, they cut to a pair of cheesy TV personalities that were incredibly obnoxious.
Then a carnival barker arrived on the Sorceror’s Hat stage and introduced Artoo and Threepio. Who in turn introduced Anthony Daniels, which in turn led to the arrival of Darth Vader to crash the party. Two hooded Jedi Knights cut their way through a dozen stormtroopers who turn out to be George Lucas and Disney CEO Bob Iger.
Vader put a shield over Star Tours and Artoo Detoo needed shoot an Ion cannon at it.
Aside from that, it was a pretty standard welcome to the new ride. Iger spoke of how much they loved Star Wars at Disney, Lucas talked about how the ride exceeded all of his expectations. One interesting thing to note was that their intention was to change the video on the ride every couple of years, but circumstances prevented that from happening.
The event was a little cheesy, but that’s what I’d expect from Walt Disney World in Florida. And as cheesy as it was, it was easier more well written than the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie.
If they post the video of the presentation, I’ll post it here for you to see. Until then, the ride in Florida is officially open and it’ll be opening in Anaheim on June 3rd. There’s a significant chance I won’t make it on Star Tours until July, but I’ll be riding it at both parks (I went to the closing at both parks, I’ll be happy to be revisiting them both. Well, I’ll be happy to revisit Disneyland.)
UPDATE: It seems as though they’re running the opening presentation here on a loop.