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Star Tours, Little Mermaid take off at Disneyland, California Adventure
The new Star Tours reopens at Disneyland as a 3-D adventure ride. The original ride opened in 1987, but closed last year to undergo the renovation.
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Guests in line at Star Tours can rub elbows with some classic characters from the "Star Wars" movies, including C-3PO, a main character in the ride.
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Susan Valot/KPCC
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Star Tours, Little Mermaid take off at Disneyland, California Adventure
Star Tours, Little Mermaid take off at Disneyland, California Adventure
Two major rides open in Anaheim’s Disneyland Resort today. A new Little Mermaid Ride swims into action at California Adventure – and the newly renovated Star Tours blasts back to life at Disneyland.
Good ol’ C-3PO and R2-D2 are at the helm of the new Star Tours ride. Where you sit in the spaceship looks pretty much like the old Star Tours. But this time around, it’s a wild 3-D ride to different planets featured in all six Star Wars movies.
The ride has 54 different scenes that are interchangeable and randomly chosen.
Disneyland cast member and Star Wars fan Carlos Campos was on his fifth trip to the various Star Wars planets.
"What I think is great about this ride is that you get something different each time because you go to two planets and you know, you go to one planet and then you have someone talk to you and then you go to another planet. And all those things change," Campos said after his ride.
"And this time we had Darth Vader, trying to keep us there with the Force, which was really neat," said Campos. "That’s an extra thing at the beginning before you even visit a planet. So I think the 'come back' factor is huge because you want to see what the possibilities are, what other planets you’ll go to."
The first Star Tours ride opened at Disneyland in the mid-1980s. It closed a little less than a year ago for the technological makeover.
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Diego Parras of Walt Disney Imagineering says the revamp has been in the works for a while.
"We waited for George Lucas to really finish all of his movies," Parras said. "And the big part of that was that it would give us more options in regards to the destinations that we would be able to visit and the characters we would be able to meet."
The Star Tours and Little Mermaid ride openings kick off the summer season at the Disneyland Resort, the largest employer “force” in Orange County.
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