Star Tours Reboot

The new incarnation of the Star Tours ride is a fun adventure through the imaginary world of Star Wars. We get to see a variety of lands we’ve enjoyed through the movies, even the universally loved character Jar-Jar Binks.

In most of the information Disneyland is putting out it’s mentioning that there are 54 different ride experiences. No when I first heard the statement I processed in my head that I would need to ride the ride 54 times to see them all. But the more I think about it, the more I think that’s wrong, it would take far less times to see the entire ride. Now I’m not saying that I would be able to see all of the segments in order, but that I would be able to see the footage used in the ride in less than 54.

The way I think it’s set up is that there is a Prologue, Beginning, Middle, End and Epilogue. I suspect the Prologue and Epilogue are the same for each ride experience. The Prologue departs from the Star Tours location at Disneyland and the Epilogue strangely leaves us at a different location in the universe, but we still end up walking out into the store peddling Star Tours merchandise at Disneyland. That leaves the Beginning, Middle and End to vary.

Since a good story has a Beginning, Middle and End, and Disneyland attempts to include them in most of their rides (except for some reason Pinocchio), it’s a good bet that those don’t get repeated. Using a bit of math we can attempt to determine how many variations occur for each. Since we know that final answer has to be 54 we need to find a combination that equals 54. 3x3x3 = 27 is close to being correct. It would indicate that the Prologue or Epilogue gets a second experience, since 27 x 2 = 54. Since the end of the ride has a physical component, I’d have to assume the Prologue is the one with two experiences.

54 is the number of permeations that the ride may have. But since there may be only 3 experiences per story segment we can see all of them in as few as 3 rides.

So if my assumptions are correct, it would take a minimum of 3 times to see all of the experiences in the ride. No it probably would take longer, but could be done in 3 times riding the ride.

No my math is probably a bit off since it’s been a while since I had to learn the concepts, but I think I’m pretty close to the answer. I also could be wrong on the number of experiences, since I’ve only rode the ride once, not a big enough sample to fully derive the correct answer.