The opening day attraction of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge at Disneyland in California, Millennium Falcon – Smugglers Run went online on May 31st of 2019, allowing guests to “ride in the famous cockpit of the Millennium Falcon on a daring flight” that includes “danger at every turn” as members of “discreet flight crews” hired by the Weequay pirate Hondo Ohnaka “to deliver a backlog of hard-to-find items to particular clientele.”
Ohnaka first appeared on the Star Wars: The Clone Wars‘ first season episode, “Dooku Captured,” making eight more appearances over five seasons before transitioning over to Star Wars Rebels where he appeared in five episodes, including his most recent appearance in the two-part fourth season outing “Family Reunion – and Farewell” in March of 2018. He would later appear in the last three issues of the five-part Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge comic book miniseries published by Marvel from April to August of 2019, which is set in the Black Spire Outpost on Batuu where the story of the Galaxy Edge’s theme parks take place.
The Smugglers Run attraction involves six-person flight crews borrowing the Falcon from Chewbacca and traveling to Corellia, the homeworld of Han Solo, to intercept a First Order train shipment of coaxium, the hyperfuel introduced in Han’s 2018 origin story, Solo: A Star Wars Story. During the flight, Hondo coaches the crew through their mission, after which he delivers a status report on the Falcon and gives them their score.
Now, the hosts of FreshBaked! have discovered a heretofore unknown hack that opens the attraction’s secret Chewie Mode, and they’ve assembled a ragtag crew of vloggers to show you how to do it for yourself. Like the famed Konami Code, the hack involves a sequence of maneuvers that must be executed before the cast member completes the pre-flight safety check.
The left pilot must hold their controls to the extreme left or right, and the right pilot must hold their controls to the extreme up or down, and then press their activation buttons. The engineers and gunners must also hold one of the white buttons on their consoles before pressing the orange activation button, “kind of like using the shift key on a keyboard.”
The end result removes Hondo and the canisters of coaxium from the story entirely, replacing them with the infuriated howling of Chewbacca, with the Wookie becoming more enraged as the ship sustains more damage. The covert narrative mode is the kind of buried reward that gamers love unearthing, and exactly the sort of immersive next-level storytelling that the Disney theme parks excel at.
Millennium Falcon – Smugglers Run can be experienced at Disneyland in Anaheim, California and at Disney’s Hollywood Studios in Orlando, Florida, with FastPasses available to be booked now.
