This opening day attraction at California Adventure was a truly wild ride, but it’s one that did have some charm (and plenty of surprises).

Ask longtime Disneyland fans to choose their least favorite ride ever, and odds are you’re going to hear quite a lot about Superstar Limo. This long-gone attraction is iconic for all the wrong reasons, namely its lackluster design and uninspired storyline. And for many, it symbolizes many of the reasons Disney California Adventure Park failed to draw guests in its first years.

But I don’t hate Superstar Limo. In fact, I kind of love it.

Looking back on Superstar Limo more than two decades later, I’ve come to see the attraction in a new light. It’s not nostalgia that makes me appreciate Superstar Limo – Y2K may be all the rage once again, but if there’s one thing I don’t miss, it’s the early aughts. Rather, I always found the weird, wacky, and straight up confusing attraction fascinating. And despite all of its flaws, Superstar Limo really did capture a unique moment in Disneyland history.

What Was Superstar Limo?

Superstar Limo was one of the opening day attractions at California Adventure, located in the park’s Hollywood Pictures Backlot. 

Originally designed as a high-speed paparazzi chase through the streets of Hollywood that took guests from Los Angeles International Airport to Grauman’s Chinese Theater, Superstar Limo was completely reworked before Disneyland’s second theme park ever welcomed its first guests. In the midst of the ride’s design process, the sudden death of Princess Diana in 1997 – which involved a high-speed paparazzi chase – forced Imagineers to revamp the attraction and its storyline.

When the ride officially opened on February 8, 2001, Superstar Limo was a slow-moving dark ride featuring a fictional Hollywood agent, famous celebrities, and visual gags. It featured no Audio-Animatronics (though many of the celebrities featured did have moving arms and heads), and it featured exaggerated, caricature-like visuals. The new premise? Guests were celebrities arriving in Hollywood. After entering a limo, they were driven around the city and met various celebrities, passing iconic landmarks along the way.

Superstar Limo was panned by guests and critics alike. As David Rorden of the Longview Daily News summed it up, “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.”

The New York Times wasn’t much kinder, describing the ride as “probably the shlockiest attraction in the new park.”

While these criticisms were harsh, the attraction’s critics weren’t exactly wrong. Superstar Limo was a stark departure from the Disney attractions guests knew and loved – and, as Imagineers admitted in 2019’s The Imagineering Story, it simply didn’t work on multiple levels. The sudden course change in both the storyline and the attraction’s speed did the ride no favors. 

Less than a year after it opened, Superstar Limo closed permanently on January 11, 2002.

There Was Truly Nothing Like Superstar Limo

Photo courtesy of Thrill.Space

Disneyland had mastered the art of the classic dark ride – a slow-moving indoor attraction featuring elaborate set pieces, special effects, Audio-Animatronics (or just animatronics), and a clear storyline – by the time California Adventure opened in 2001. But while Superstar Limo was, at first glance, your typical dark ride, it was actually a pretty surprising departure from the kind you’d find over at Disneyland Park.

All of Disneyland’s iconic dark rides feature characters and stories guests know and already love. Superstar Limo had none of this. 

Sure, familiar celebrities from the late 1990s and early 2000s lined the ride’s path. But there were no characters from Disney’s films – there was, in fact, no Disney IP anywhere to be found in this attraction, like so many other rides from California Adventure’s earliest days.

The storyline may have made little sense, but it was a Disney original. And unlike other dark rides, it put guests at the center of the storyline instead of relegating them to the role of passive viewer rolling through scenes. Riders were the star, just as Imagineers intended, even if they didn’t quite love the script they were given to engage with.

Superstar Limo Captured the Early 2000s Perfectly

If any Disneyland ride summed up the first decade of the 21st century, it was Superstar Limo. It was truly a product of its time, from its colorful aesthetic to the celebrities it featured – and even its emphasis on celebrities themselves.

Looking back on the early 2000s, celebrities were everywhere. Imagineers captured the zeitgeist of the time period perfectly: Tabloids and paparazzi were synonymous with the noughties, and celebrities were followed, hounded, and photographed at every turn. Superstar Limo delivered on its promise to make riders feel like celebrities, as flashbulbs went off, oversized faces popped up around every corner, and your limo couldn’t escape the hubbub of Hollywood.

It’s hard now to sum up just how prevalent tabloids and paparazzi were during those years. But Superstar Limo really did serve as a snapshot of the time, reflecting our obsession with all things celebrity back then. 

Its maximalist aesthetic was also very late ‘90s and early ‘00s. Superstar Limo’s style was absolutely over the top, from its exaggerated two-dimensional landmarks to the eye-catching and bold colors. It was loud, unapologetic, a little funky, and in your face, just like the aesthetic of the era itself.

There’s perhaps no detail I love more than Superstar Limo’s picturephone. Each limo ride vehicle featured a picturephone, which was really just a speaker with a screen. But this early spin on smartphones with video is fascinating to look back on, and at the time seemed incredibly high-tech and advanced. After all, the first camera-equipped cell phone didn’t become widely available until 2001. Superstar Limo, in this way, was ahead of its time.

In my opinion, it’s hard to think of a single thing that captured the essence of 2000 to 2002 better than Superstar Limo. If it were still around in its original form, it’d be a time capsule to these years, one that might be appreciated and enjoyed a little more (though I still have nightmares about Swifty La Rue, who can stay safely in the past).

Superstar Limo Was Kind of Terrifying

Photo courtesy of WDWMagic forums

I’ll admit that I was no fan of Superstar Limo during its short lifespan. In fact, when I first rode the attraction, I was surprised at how frightening the celebrities looked. They weren’t your average animatronics – rather, just like the overall cartoon-inspired artwork inside, they had exaggerated features and looked like, well, the stuff of nightmares.

Many of the celebrities scattered throughout Superstar Limo were unrecognizable. Drew Carey and Whoopi Goldberg were easy to identify; Tim Allen and Cindy Crawford just looked like normal people with oversized heads. Melanie Griffith and Antonio Banderas were especially weird (and I’ll never forget the way Antonio’s eyes threatened every limo that rode by).

Even Joan Rivers, who kicked things off in the attraction’s queue, was terrifying. A plastic puppet-like figure, she shouted at guests how big and famous they were from TV screens, her face looking like an oddly-fitting mask from Spirit Halloween.

The scariest of all? It was undeniably Swifty La Rue, your “agent” who popped up in the limos’ picturephones to shout things at guests like “Everybody’s waitin’, capiche?” and “It’s big time boffo”. Like Joan, his appearances were scary, his face an odd mask that seemed unnatural and, well, disconcerting. But Swifty sure got your attention, and I appreciate how he added some (albeit very silly) humor to an otherwise uneventful storyline.

But ironically, the frightening nature of the celebrity figures, Swifty shouting from your picturephone, and the general cacophony of the ride do make it funny. Sure, many of the gags originally planned for the ride didn’t pan out. But Superstar Limo did have its own charm, and its oddities made it very memorable – I still vividly recall its scenes and its audio nearly 25 years later. 

After all, where else could you experience such a one-of-a-kind attraction than that first year of California Adventure? If I could go back in time to 2001, I’d absolutely take another spin or two on Superstar Limo.