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I was digging through some old papers the other day and I came across an envelope I thought had disappeared more than 40 years ago. I have thought about this every once in a while, especially while I was working on the update to Star Tours years ago. It was the winter of 1978, my family had just been on our first trip to Disneyland and when we’d gotten home, my brother and I had a great idea that we were sure no one had thought of.

We had seen Star Wars that last summer ( without a doubt, that totally changed my life). After coming back from Disneyland (which also made a huge impression on me), we figured wouldn’t it be awesome to combine the two? Jon and I brainstormed for probably a whole afternoon and came up with a crazy idea. What if there was a Star Wars Ride at Disneyland?

(Yes, my spelling was atrocious back then and has only got slightly better)

What followed was a detailed (well detailed for a 10 and 7 year old) blueprint for a Star Wars ride, complete with a walk past various characters and vehicles as you waited in line for the ride. This by itself would not have stuck much in my mind, but what I came up with for the end always made me realize I was thinking far ahead of what a “normal” 10 year old might come up with.

As you near the end of the ride, you’d get into an X-wing (10 year old me was not concerned with moving volumes of people through a ride at a reasonable rate). I didn’t know what a motion simulator was at the time, but that was the basic idea. The ship would move around as you steer it with a joystick.

You would fly the X-Wing towards a huge rear projection screen and personally blow up the Death Star. I get that it’s not EXACTLY like what they ended up creating, but to me it was eerily similar to the idea I had as a young boy.  

  In Disney’s defense, the fine people at Imagineering never saw this. When my mother gave me the letter years later, she told me it was returned with a short note from Disney Legal that said basically “Don’t send us this kind of stuff”. So even though our crude idea did not actually bring about Star Tours, I still like to think that even as a young boy, I had the ideas and imagination to eventually make it in this wonderful field. I did end up working on updated Star Tours ride where I did the lighting and rendering of the Naboo section (and I maybe one other? - it’s been a while) as well as some of the holograms that pop up in-between sections. I also rendered most of the elements you see while you’re getting instructions before the ride. 

Star Tours was first proposed in 1979 and eventually opened in 1987.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Tours