What sci-fi film fan hasn’t watched an episode of the Skywalker Saga and wished they could have a mechanical companion like R2-D2 or BB-8 to hang out with? Well, thanks to the Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge expansions that opened over the summer at Disneyland and Walt Disney World, you no longer need to barter with Jawas in order to own an astromech. You just have to visit Mubo’s Droid Depot in Black Spire Outpost and design your very own droid, as we did in this video of Disney’s complete custom droid-building experience.
As you can see from the video, there’s a little more to bringing home your own personalized pint-sized R2 or BB droid than simply selecting a color and slapping it together.
We didn’t expect much going in to the Droid Depot building experience, but it ended up being a lot of fun to sift through the parts, really making the droid our own. At Mubo’s Droid Depot, you pick robot parts off of conveyor belts piece by piece.
You’re then taken to a station where you can assemble the droid with actual tools. The experience wraps up with a delightful little moment where you activate the droid and it begins beeping and booping. The droids themselves are sturdy and made of good-quality components, and each includes a remote control.
Once complete, your droid will then communicate with its full-scale counterparts around the land. You’ll be encouraged to keep it inside its box until you get home, but we sometimes saw guests rolling their new pals around the Outpost. The unit we adopted—dubbed “R2-Blue-2”—mostly just sits in our living room, and occasionally terrorizes our cat.
At $100, the droid-building experience is half the cost of a custom light-saber at Savi’s Workshop. While we found the lightsaber experience more emotionally satisfying, the hands-on building of the droid is more fun, and you have a greater range of options to combine.
If you want to visit the Droid Depot, reservations are available up to 60 days in advance through the Disneyland app or at disneyland.disney.go.com/shops/disneyland/droid-depot.
Seth Kubersky is the coauthor of The Unofficial Guide to Disneyland and a contributor to The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World. Make sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. If you enjoyed this post, sign up for our newsletter here.
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That looks amazing!
