24 April 2011 by By Jason Garcia and Sara K. Clarke, Orlando Sentinel
Walt Disney World clearly expects large crowds to descend on Disney's Hollywood Studios next month when the resort's annual Star Wars Weekends begin — and the resort opens its rebuilt Star Tours simulator ride.
While resort officials won't discuss attendance projections, they plan to nearly double — from eight to 15 — the number of daily performances of Jedi Training Academy, the interactive children's show staged next to Star Tours.
Disney has also extended Hollywood Studios' hours, according to WDWMagic.com. The website says Hollywood Studios' planned opening on May 20 — the day the new Star Tours is scheduled to debut — has been pushed up to 8 a.m. from 9 a.m., whlile the park's closing has been pushed back from 9 p.m. until midnight.
Lucasfilm on board
Disney executives aren't the only ones expecting big things from the re-launched ride, which is also being redone at Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif.. So, too, are officials at Lucasfilm Ltd., the movie studio that created the Star Wars franchise and which has filmed fresh scenes for the ride.
"I think it's one of many ways that people stay engaged with Star Wars," Howard Roffman, president of the company's Lucas Licensing division, said in a recent interview.
Disney and Lucasfilm designed Star Tours, which opened in Orlando in 1989, to be easily updatable over time. But the original attraction remained consistently popular over time, so Disney operations managers were reluctant to take a valuable, crowd-eating ride offline for an extended period of time, particularly because Hollywood Studios has a relatively small roster of rides compared with the other theme parks. (It has more shows than other parks.)
"I think there was kind of a mentality among some of the management of Disney about why mess with something that's working," Roffman said.
A big reason Disney finally decided to go forward with a Star Tours redesign was the success of a new Hollywood Studios ride, Toy Story Mania!, which opened in 2008. Officials say that attraction has proven so popular that they need to make another big-ticket addition elsewhere in the park to even out crowd flow.
Thrills versus themes
In addition to noise and traffic issues, the proposed Orlando Thrill Park ran up against another concern last week when it was rejected by the city of Orlando's Municipal Planning Board: the quality of its infrastructure.
The developers behind the thrill-ride park said during the meeting that they're working with four well-known ride manufacturers: S&S Worldwide, Intamin, Vekoma and Mack. But they made it clear they wouldn't feature custom-built rides at the park, as large theme parks often do. Instead, they plan to use existing ride designs, tweaking the "off-the-shelf" models in some cases to provide experiences unique to Orlando.
A spokeswoman for Orange County Commissioner Tiffany Moore Russell, who represents homeowners living just south of the proposed park site, raised concerns about the park's infrastructure. She told planning board members that Moore Russell wanted to make sure "any projects in the field of tourism in the I-Drive area are developed with pristine technology" and "done to the highest specification."
The developers said they don't plan to include any second-hand rides. They also said that, because they're going for thrills, they're not confined by themes, which can also add to the cost of an attraction. A major ride in a large theme park can cost $100 million or more.
"The thing that's different between us and Disney is we don't have to outlay the capital that Disney does to keep their standards going," Doug Rutledge, of OTP Group LLC, said prior to last week's planning meeting. "We don't have to live within those thematic environments."
Infrastructure didn't appear to play a big role in the unanimous vote by planning board members against the park's requested zoning changes. Members seemed more concerned about quality-of-life issues for residents of the adjacent Tangelo Park neighborhood, especially the possibility of excessive noise from the roller coasters and their screaming riders.
GO BACK