Since executives announced Saturday that Disneyland's "Star Wars" attraction will be overhauled to reopen in 2011, fans have been trying to get them to crack loose some details, with limited success.
"Star Tours II" will be in 3D and "much more than a redo," Bruce Vaughn, chief creative executive for Walt Disney Imagineering, said in a press conference Sunday near the end of Disney's D23 Expo for fans.
The original "Star Tours," which will be retired in 2010, is a motion-simulation flight through space.
The 3D clip shown Saturday in announcing "Star Tours II" was from the pod racing sequence of "Star Wars: Episode I --The Phantom Menace" (the film that revived the franchise in 1999, 16 years after the completion of the first trilogy).
That choice created rumors that the new "Star Tours" would be fashioned around the pod race. Vaughn discouraged that idea, saying the attraction would include several worlds from the George Lucas films.
Details were more forthcoming on Cars Land, an addition to Disney's California Adventure coming in 2012. It is based on the 2006 Pixar film.
Kathy Mangum, of Walt Disney Imagineering, described Radiator Springs Racers at length. It will be an interactive thrill ride with a plot that has endings randomly generated by computer, she said. Guests in groups of six ride cars with personalities that are also computer generated.
The menu for Cars Land's eateries will be influenced by Imagineers' research trips on Route 66, she said.
"We had a lot of chili and we had a lot of pie."
Since executives announced Saturday that Disneyland's "Star Wars" attraction will be overhauled to reopen in 2011, fans have been trying to get them to crack loose some details, with limited success.