FigmentJedi said:There's also some video of Tokyo's much more elaborate queue on YouTube and it'd be nice to get some translation of their exclusive stuff such as the droids before R2 and 3PO, the Mon Calamari on the screen and the whole postshow in general. They even got a few elements from Epcot's old Horizons ride for a spot in the exit advertising more Star Tours destinations.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aqgd5JkZnu8&feature=related
Hey those are great clips, I wish I'd seen them when I was trying to mentally reconstruct the Tokyo version last year.
So I'm not the only one obsessed with the expanded Tokyo queue?
I had the chance to interview the sculptor/puppeteer for the Mon Cal puppet for EndorExpress.net, but it's sort of in editorial limbo and hasn't been posted yet.
She said everyone referred to him as Admiral Ackbar, but that she has no idea what he was saying because she doesn't speak Japanese. Just that he was always ticked off.
This jibes with what I've pieced together from various sources, including careful analysis of photos and some older clips on YouTube, some of which no longer exist, sad to say.
The Ackbar puppet appears on a screen in Sector 2 Droidnostics, talking to R2-D7 (called R4-M9 at the Anaheim attraction) and his assistant IDA-4, a yellow loadlifter-type robot with a single large eye, his gripper arms loaded with parts boxes as he moves up and down on a track in the wall like a glorified platform elevator.
According to a Tokyo souvenir poster which I had a friend translate, R2-D7 is in charge of replacement parts, and IDA (which stands for Inventory Droid Assistant) is "a pain for the Mon Calamari and R2-D7 because if the work gets too hard, he plays hooky."
Near the exit is the 'Tourscan' video wall with that Horizons footage. Horizons, it should also be noted, contained a cameo by Star Tours' writer-producer Tom Fitzgerald as both an Audio-Animatronic character and a video image of the same.
Presented by Tourscan's PR-droid/video-host Dan Android (whose "relationship to actor Dan Aykroyd is unknown"), the Frontier Vacation Package, Family Adventure Package, and Deluxe Undersea Package are actually recycled footage from the three 'Choose Your Future' endings of the popular Epcot attraction which closed in 1999, making the Tokyo Star Tours the only place to see this wonderful miniature work.
Scrolling text on the Tourscan wall gives current temperature and weather conditions for planets like Tatooine and Kessel, while Horizons' sub-aquatic city of Sea Castle was recycld as the "Water Planet Praya" (possibly named after a river in Japan) which advertises "Deep Sea Food a Specialty" and the chance to "Hunt Treasure in Sunken Ships."
The desert landscape and citrus groves of Horizons' Mesa Verde became a Desert Planet touted for its "Zero-Gravity Golf Courses" and the space station Brava Centauri-- complete with a docking American space shuttle-- became a hotel on the Edge of the Galaxy billed as "the Closest Thing to Heaven". I'd love to see better footage of all that stuff. If I gleaned all of that info from the clips on YouTube, imagine what I could do with some really decent copies. Alex