Superstar Limo

The original concept for the attraction was to make riders into celebrities attempting to evade paparazzi on a wild high-speed ride through Hollywood. Reportedly, video clips of Michael Eisner (in his official role at the time as Disney chairman and chief executive officer) would have book-ended the ride. At the start, he would greet riders as they arrived at Los Angeles International Airport, remind them they had not yet signed their big contract with Disney, and promise he would be waiting at Grauman's Chinese Theatre with the contract after they escaped the paparazzi. At the end, he would appear again to politely explain the riders had been caught by paparazzi cameras and therefore the contract was void. Riders would then exit into the attached gift shop, where tabloid newspapers featuring their photographs (as taken during the chase) would be available for purchase.[2]

The unexpected death of Princess Diana in a car crash in Paris on August 31, 1997 forced Walt Disney Imagineering to radically redesign the ride. Since paparazzi had been following Diana at the time of her crash, a ride built around the tendency of paparazzi to chase celebrities at high speed "was rendered incredibly tasteless."[2] Eisner was replaced with a fictional Hollywood agent, and the ride was dramatically slowed down. Visual gags intended to be absorbed at high speed no longer made sense, so the ride was packed with celebrity figures to compensate for the change in pacing.[2]

Superstar Limo was situated in the Hollywood Pictures Backlot area and was one of the original attractions featured on the park's opening day on February 8, 2001.[1][2] The ride included figures of celebrities which were stylized and caricatured. Though most of them had moving arms and heads, none of Disney's human-like Audio-Animatronics technologies were used in the attraction.

The attraction closed in January 2002, due to poor reception,[1] making it the park's first attraction to permanently close. It has since been replaced by an attraction based on Disney·Pixar's Monsters, Inc. entitled Monsters, Inc. Mike & Sulley to the Rescue!, which opened on January 23, 2006.[1] The Monsters, Inc. ride uses the same track layout as Superstar Limo, with taxicabs taking the place of the original limos.[3]

In the 2019 documentary series The Imagineering Story, Bruce Vaughn, Chief Creative Executive (2007–2016) of Walt Disney Imagineering, described the creation of Superstar Limo as an example of Imagineering's failure to make the original California Adventure park work:

We're building California Adventure, and you end up with things like Superstar Limo, and you can't point to the people of Imagineers actually working on it. The culture wasn't really listening to each other. They would just go into these little pods of, 'this is my land', or 'this is my attraction, and I'm not... and I've lost touch with my peers,' and there's no sense of, 'hey, wait a minute, is this good enough?' Each step of the way, you sort of buy in further of, like, 'okay, there's no turning back, we just have to keep going.' The original conceit was probably too self-referential about Hollywood, it was a paparazzi ride and you're catching celebrities. Then you end up with Princess Diana dying right midway while the project is being installed, and suddenly paparazzi are, like, 'that's a really bad theme.' Well, you're, hey... You're almost done, what are you gonna do? So now it turns into, 'you're gonna be a star.' And then now it's an agent, but all the figures are these grotesque, kind of, like... It just didn't work.[4]

The attraction's purple "stretch limo" ride vehicles took riders through a cartoony rendition of Hollywood. Riders were introduced to animated figures modeled in the likeness of celebrities. The celebrities in the attraction were Joan Rivers (appearing only in puppet-form on TV screens in the attraction's queue), Regis Philbin, Melanie Griffith, Antonio Banderas, Cindy Crawford, Tim Allen, Jackie Chan, Drew Carey, Cher, and Whoopi Goldberg. A stereotypical Hollywood talent agent named Swifty La Rue appeared infrequently on small in-seat video screens, reminding the riders not to be late to their movie premiere.[1]

The story of the attraction placed the guest (rider) as Hollywood's newest celebrity, starting out at Los Angeles International Airport and then boarding a limousine taking them through a variety of stereotypical locations and situations on the way to the premiere of their new movie at Grauman's Chinese Theatre. Locations included the greater Los Angeles and Hollywood areas including Rodeo Drive, the Sunset Strip, Bel Air, Malibu, the interior of a soundstage, Grauman's Chinese Theatre, and a billboard that displayed an image captured of the guests. The ride ends with the talent agent declaring to the riders that their movie was a success and they are a superstar.[1]

Superstar Limo was criticized as lacking and poor in concept. Theme park reporter Brady MacDonald summed up the attraction as "a prime example of offensive theme park design."[5]

An early review of California Adventure by Anne Chalfant in The Boston Globe cited Superstar Limo as an example of the park's budget-cutting beginnings: "Kids will also like Superstar Limo, in the Hollywood Pictures Backlot area. Here you play the star, riding in your purple limo past a few audio-animatronic Hollywood celebrities. Adults will notice, however, that other painted plywood characters and sets are about on a par with college theater constructions."[6] Similarly, James Sterngold of The New York Times called it "probably the shlockiest attraction in the new park."[7]

An article by David Rorden in the Longview Daily News giving a mostly favorable review of the then-new theme park singled out Superstar Limo as a mistake, calling attention to the self-promotion in featuring stars like Drew Carey, who appeared on a sitcom aired on the Disney-owned network ABC: "I think they should change the name of this ride from Superstar Limo to 'It's a Shill World.' The space would be better devoted to something more entertaining, such as an Audioanimatronic dentist doing root canals on all Imagineers who came up with the idea for Superstar Limo."[8]

• List of former Disney California Adventure attractions