Star Wars Celebration Japan 2025: Disney Experiences: Building the Galaxy with Walt Disney Imagineering
Two years ago at Star Wars Celebration Europe 2023, the Disney Parks panel felt more like an extended promotional presentation for the (now-defunct) Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser experience at Walt Disney World than a convention panel to celebrate the franchise with its biggest fans. Fortunately, the comparable panel at Star Wars Celebration Japan 2025 delivered a much better experience for the fans in attendance.
Moderated by Ashley Eckstein, well known for being a lifelong Disney Parks fan herself, the panel included familiar faces Asa Kalama from Walt Disney Imagineering and Matt Martin from Lucasfilm, along with new participants Anisha Deshmane from Walt Disney Imagineering and Michael Serna from Disney Live Entertainment. The panel began with each speaker discussing their entry point into the Star Wars fandom and what working on the franchise in a professional capacity means to them. This conversation was interesting, funny, and well suited to the Celebration context.
The core discussion of this year’s panel involved the upcoming changes to the Millennium Falcon: Smuggler’s Run attraction at Galaxy’s Edge on both coasts, and the story elements driving those changes. As previously announced at SXSW, a new version of the ride tying into The Mandalorian & Grogu movie will launch in the parks on May 22, 2026, the same day as the film’s release. The attraction apparently will retain the overall context of Ohnaka Transport Solutions and Hondo’s preshow narration setting up the mission. In the new story, the crew will be assisting Mando and Grogu in collecting bounties on Imperials for the New Republic – while also, naturally, performing a task for Hondo’s completely legitimate cargo shipping business along the way. The panelists explained that the development of the new experience will extend over 18 months, from the initial story ideas created in collaboration with Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni to the ILM visual development to the iterative process of testing the new version in the actual attraction cockpits for a crew. Because the attractions are operating on a daily basis in the parks, the Imagineers are testing the new version after hours; Martin joked that the Falcon cockpit is “not the worst” place to find oneself working at three o’clock in the morning.
The new story will begin with a mission to Tatooine, followed by an additional jaunt to either Bespin, Endor, or Coruscant. Deshmane confirmed that this change means guests will have to ride Smuggler’s Run multiple times to see all of the planets. Addressing a question about the use of familiar locations, Deshmane explained that fans will experience “classic places from new perspectives” as part of a new story that is “not reliving” what we’ve already “seen in the movies.” Kalama acknowledged longstanding guest feedback that the Engineer role in the cockpit is considerably less desirable than Pilot or Gunner in the current version of the ride, and the Imagineers have taken this into account in the new version in two ways. First, the Engineer role will decide which of the three planets the crew visits for the second segment of the mission. Second, the Engineers will interact with Grogu on their cockpit display screens during the flight, which surely will be far more compelling than pressing buttons to “repair” damage to the ship. The panel audience responded enthusiastically to these reveals, even though guests won’t be able to experience them for ourselves for over a year.
The rest of the panel also highlighted the theme of the interaction between Star Wars storytelling and the Disney Experiences iterations of the franchise. When discussing the latest additions to the Star Tours attraction – which had arrived at Tokyo Disneyland only ten days before Celebration began – they played a brief video clip of Diego Luna expressing that it was “so fun seeing Cassian in a new way” in the hologram message recorded for the update. Martin and Serna discussed why Season of the Force in 2025 was the right time to finally bring Luke Skywalker into Galaxy’s Edge as a roaming interactive character at Disneyland. Serna then described the process for developing and designing the new “Shadows of Memory” projection show at Disneyland. Explaining the technological and logistical challenges, such as creating seven slightly different versions to correspond to the different fireworks shows at the park, Serna revealed that new music was recorded to fill in some of the gaps in the existing available soundtracks. Serna also emphasized the goal to “find a unique way to tell a familiar story” from the Skywalker family saga and the ultimate decision to lean into the idea of “mythology in universe” to appeal to the wide range of guests at Disneyland. Martin agreed, noting that the projection show allows the story to be told the way it would be told in their galaxy.
Another commonality between Lucasfilm and Imagineering is the constant push to advance storytelling technology. At the panel, this involved a brief presentation about the BDX droids built to be interactive characters in the parks (and who, it was previously revealed, will also be appearing in The Mandalorian & Grogu feature film). Kalama discussed the process, lasting about a year, to develop and train the droids through a process called reinforcement learning, which occurred first within digital spaces on the computer before transferring into the real world. Although the BDX droids were initially heavily puppeteered, including taking on some of the personality traits of their human operators, the learning algorithms in their operating system increasingly allows each droid to do more itself. As the BDX droids become more autonomous, they will feel more and more like characters in their own right.
Related Links:
- SXSW: New Details for Mando and Grogu’s Millennium Falcon Mission Revealed (Disney Parks Blog; Mar. 8, 2025)
- New Savi’s Workshop Lightsaber Offering and More (Disney Parks Blog; Apr. 21, 2025)
- SWCJ 2025: What’s Coming to Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge (StarWars.com; Apr. 20, 2025)
B.J. has served as editor of FANgirl Blog from its inception, as well as contributing reviews and posts on a range of topics. He edited Tricia’s novel Wynde, and is collaborating with her on several future projects set in that original universe.
Currently a tenured law professor in Florida, B.J. has been a practicing lawyer in Washington, D.C., a law clerk to a federal appeals court judge, and a law journal editor-in-chief. He is also a proud geek dad whose son who is a big fan of Star Wars and The Clone Wars.
