The Disney Era

The Adventure Continues carried on as it had launched before everything changed again. Just over a year later, Star Wars was no longer a third party license: Disney was its master. The deal by the studio to acquire Lucasfilm, and develop new Star Wars movies (and re-establish a whole new rebooted continuity along the way) was announced in October 2012, and now Star Tours alone represented a way for Disney to synergize with its new material in its parks.

Unlike the prequel era, which wouldn’t be integrated into Star Tours until well after it had concluded, the sequel trilogy came into Star Tours like an event with every release: 2015 brought with it The Force Awakens, and with it a chase sequence on the desert planet Jakku as well as new interstitials featuring Finn and BB-8, as well a tweaked alternative for the opening spacesport docking sequence to include Kylo Ren and First Order stormtroopers instead of Darth Vader and Imperial forces. The years 2017 and 2019 respectively brought with them additions based around The Last Jedi—a visit to the planet Crait inspired by the climax of the film—and The Rise of Skywalker—a return of sorts to the Endor sequence Star Tours began with decades prior, as you rode to the watery moon of Kef Bir and through the wreckage of the second Death Star.

With the arrival of material from the new films, Star Tours’ original continuity was diverged to classify sequel-era material as non-canonical, given that the rest of The Adventures Continue’s material was intended to be set between the events of Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope. But even in an age of transmedia continuity, that didn’t stop Star Tours from being a vital place for Disney to sell its own era of Star Wars to audiences.