Trip Report: Universal Studios Orlando
Orlando, Florida - 11/14/2004

"You can't ride together in this line."

Saturday was a particularly grueling drive, but because I had the foresight to make Saturday a 12-hour (Right. More like fifteen hours.) drive instead of splitting the drive in half, Sunday I had only about a four-hour jaunt to my hotel in Orlando. I passed through town and arrived in the neighborhood of the human zoo called International Drive just before 2:00 pm. I decided to take a gamble. I steered directly into the Universal Orlando parking garage, hoping I could get a decent deal. On the way in, I paid the $8 parking fee, which is excessive, but not as excessive here as it is in a lot of other places. Here, at least, I get a covered space in a garage, with a network of escalators and moving walkways to take me from just a short distance from the car all the way down to CityWalk. In other words, I actually get something for my $8, unlike certain parks where $10 will get you a space at the extreme far end of the parking lot, on grass, mud or gravel, where the local birds will use your vehicle for target practice. Universal's facility is considerably classier than that!

I hadn't pre-ordered a ticket this time, as I hadn't known for certain that I would have time to visit Universal. So I inquired at the ticket booth. It turns out that there is no half-day option or twilight visit option available at the gate (had I known earlier, I could have bought an after-2pm ticket over the Web as an IAAPA convention perk). It cost me $58.31 to get into the park, and the park was closing at 6pm. I decided I had better hustle and try to get my money's worth!

I entered and started walking down the street. Before long, I was walking down a street in New York City, past storefronts, with a sidewalk on each side. The concrete was cracked, the curbs were crumbling and the asphalt street had cracked, been sealed, been patched, and in general, looked as though it had been through a few rough winters. Off to one side was a blind alley with a rusty fire escape positioned between a couple of brick buildings. The level of detail here is absolutely spectacular. The streetscape is reproduced so well here that most people tend to walk on the sidewalks rather than down the middle of the midway, something about a cultural bias against walking down the middle of a city street. I was, unfortunately, in too much of a hurry to get all the details of my first stop, and I know I missed a lot because as I approached the entrance to The Mummy I went in through the Single Rider Line. In a few moments I was at the boarding platform....well, one of them, anyway. I'd have boarded immediately, except that there was a group of six people ahead of me who clearly did not understand the concept of "single riders only".

The ride has two parallel boarding platforms, in a fairly cumbersome arrangement where the two tracks cannot be accessed from the same boarding area. The ride vehicle is a single car, I believe it is six rows of four riders. I was seated in the front row, on the extreme right-hand side. The seats are essentially Flight of Fear seats, with the Flight of Fear lap bars, only without the center divider tab or the go/no-go belt. The ride also differs from Flight of Fear in that there is significantly more space. The car floor is unobstructed, and in fact the ankle bar goes almost unnoticed. The lap bar is the only thing you have to hold onto; there is no grab bar. Sitting in the front row, I could see that the tightly-twisted track is equipped with a plurality of large rectangular metal boxes, which I am guessing are LIM stators. In the first show room, a conventional squeeze brake stopped the car for the first scene. I will not even attempt to describe the story, because I don't think I got it myself. There are several characters, all of which are difficult to understand. But there are a couple of animated figures at the beginning of the ride, one in particular that taunts the car and says something about our immortal souls, which are truly impressive for the sheer number of working joints and the full range of motion. This mechanical dead guy was more lively than some of the real people working the park today. Not quite as animated as the people in the Shrek attraction, but close...

Anyway, the ride proceeds through several scenes, including one with an impressive bit of fire. The train rolls into a chamber and stops at a dead end. I thought I saw a track ahead, but I was wrong...after a few moments, the track rotated a bit further than 90 degrees, and the train rocketed up what appeared to be a LIM-powered lift hill. Thus began the roller coaster part of the show. It's all in the dark, much of it accompanied by black-lit decoration. I'm reminded at this point of Rock 'N Roller Coaster. The decoration is eye candy, and it helps to remind you that you're going somewhere, but it doesn't really 'say' much. As a coaster, it isn't half bad, even featuring a slight airtime pop or two (!) and that alone may make it unique among Central Florida roller coasters. The layout is a sort of a cross between a Windstorm and Flight of Fear without the inversions. The ride pulls into a room and stops, and a recording says something about remaining seated until instructed to exit. It doesn't really look like the unload platform, but it looks as though it could be. But the operator in the tower turns out to be our "friend" from the first scene, and the ceiling bursts into a spectacular flame effect. Ultimately the flames are doused, we are moistened slightly, and the train pulls into the ready brake to a round of spontaneous applause. Indeed, the Mummy is an excellent ride. It's a mediocre coaster, but coming as it does in a park that had no coasters at all, it's a great addition.

I exited through the obligatory video arcade and back onto a New York street. As I walked down the street and around a corner, the scene changed a bit. The pavement got better, and a set of tracks appeared. In the space of a few hundred feet, I'd moved 3,000 miles until I was standing in the middle of San Francisco. The tracks led into a cable-car barn, and I followed. Inside, many people were waiting. On the walls were various street signs, each with a sticker on the front surface identifying it as property of the Universal Studios properties warehouse. The room itself looked a bit like a warehouse, only with queue rails. It was more or less at this point that I realized that the park has a bit of a split personality, and I suspect it is undergoing a gradual transformation...and this is one of the 'old' attractions which reflects the older model for the park. I'll get into this a little bit later. For now, I joined the group crowding into a gratuitous pre-show in which we were shown a few examples of special effects used in film, specifically weather effects. We moved into a larger preshow theater where we got more demonstrations of special effects, and a few examples of the use of models in film effects. Then we moved into the main show building, boarding a vehicle that looked like a cross between a subway train and a parking lot tram. That vehicle took us down a dark tunnel and into a subway station, which proceeded to fall apart before our eyes. The ceiling caved in, the support pillars failed, a section of the street above caved in, sending a propane truck sliding down and into a pillar where it burst into flames, the adjacent track buckled, our train rattled and shook, another train came in and derailed in spectacular fashion, and lots of water came tumbling down the steps to flood the station. In general, anything that could have gone wrong, went wrong. Then it all stopped, and a crew member stood on the platform with a bullhorn and told us the scene went well and we had all experienced a simulation of an 8.3 magnitude earthquake. He did a neat trick with the bullhorn. He was standing to the extreme right side of the set as I looked at it from the ride vehicle, but his voice came from the extreme left side. The scene began to reset, and as it did so, we cruised back down the tunnel to the boarding platform.

Now it's a really spectacular show. No doubt about that. But let me ask you this: Just what, if anything, does it have to do with filmmaking? Before we boarded the 'subway' the entire attraction was centered on how movie effects are produced. There was even some discussion about how models are used to create effects for things that need to be destroyed. There was talk about how movie models cost thousands, sometimes even millions of dollars and require months of effort to produce, only to be destroyed on screen in a matter of seconds. That's how they do it in the movies. In the amusement park, it's a little different. No, it's a lot different. In the park, everything has to be built to full scale. It must appear to be totally destroyed at the end of the gag, but it must NOT be destroyed. In fact, it is far more important that the gag be repeatable, and that it be able to reset itself in a matter of seconds. These are requirements that don't exist at all in the world of filmmaking. Add to that the practical need for automation, and the requirements that the spectators be kept in absolute safety...and the situation gets even more difficult in the amusement park. On screen, the actor must appear to be in mortal danger as he performs the stunt, although steps can be taken to make sure that he is not (in fact, that was done with one of the volunteers in the pre-show). The actor can be far removed from danger, and still give a convincing performance on screen. In an amusement park attraction, the audience is the participant, and the audience must be convinced that THEY are the ones in mortal danger! This is not about making movies. It isn't even about re-creating scenes from movies. It's about putting the audience in the position of the movie character. And it is an important distinction, because it gets to the heart of what the basic premise of the park is.

Universal Studios seems to be a kind of a schizophrenic park because of this distinction. The park started with the idea that it was a working movie studio, with attractions based around making movies. Apparently the park figured out pretty quickly that movie making, while lots of people are interested in it, really isn't all that exciting. The stuff that is approachable and interesting about movie making is all stuff that most people have seen a hundred times already. It's been done to death, and it doesn't make for an interesting amusement park experience. And in Central Florida, that is the first goal. Yeah, sure, Universal started by offering tours of their production facility out in California, but showing off a working studio isn't really what Universal Studios Florida is about. Where they have tried to be true to that goal, as with the Earthquake pre-shows, they are doomed to fail...because as a park, that isn't what Universal does best. What seems to work for them is to put their customers into the movie scene. Or to extend on the movie story we already know. This is what Universal's better attractions do, and they do it pretty well.

I returned to the midway, along the docks of San Francisco. On down the road, the architecture changed subtly, and I wasn't in California anymore, but rather somewhere in New England. Boats were running in the lagoon for the Jaws attraction, but even without an obvious line, I skipped it due to the time constraints. Behind it are some warehouse-looking buildings that appear to be performance sheds and sound stages, none of them busy on this Sunday evening. That's the other problem with building an amusement park around a working studio: production studios tend not to keep the same hours as tourists! Anyway, I went the other way, into an area with several buildings clustered around a pond, buildings constructed in that EPCOT-like White City style lifted from the '64 Worlds Fair. Hardly a surprise considering that one of the plot points in the movie, Men in Black was that the remnants of the '64 fair were actually alien spacecraft, and the attraction behind that facade is in fact the Men in Black dark ride.

There is no moviemaking back-story at Men in Black. The ride is an interactive shoot-em-up dark ride. Because I used the single rider entrance, I missed the queue and at least one pre-show briefing. I don't know if that had a negative impact on my score or not (my score was not particularly impressive). The ride, on the other hand, is most impressive, using a lot of animated figures, pop-up cutouts, and projected motion picture clips. So the ride has a simplified transportation system, but it uses certain tricks that were refined on the Spiderman attraction over at Islands of Adventure. Unfortunately, I can't remember much about the ride, apart from something about there not being any alien life forms in the galaxy.....

Next door to Men in Black is Back to the Future. I have been told over the years that it is the best simulator around, the standard by which later rides are to be judged. I went up the ramps and into the Institute for Future Technology, then into a preshow chamber where a classic 'chase and escape' scenario is set up. We adjourn into the waiting time vehicle. The lap bars are dropped, the doors are closed, the car lurches forward, then straight up, into the show building. The building proved to be an Omnimax theater. I'm pretty sure I was on the lowest of three levels, and positioned near the center of the screen. Within the car, I was in the extreme right-hand seat of the front row. What followed was a rather disjointed story that made about as much sense as the movie Back to the Future II [Footnote 1]. Worse than that, almost all of the action on the screen happened very high on the screen, meaning I was forced to look almost straight up just to see what was going on...that, and "follow the bouncing screen" as the motion base jounced, bounced and rattled through its hyper-violent program. I've been on simulators that were more violent, but this one was wild. Much of the action seemed almost random compared with the screen images, and I managed to bang my outboard knee pretty hard against the dashboard. When it was over, I wanted my 30 minutes back. I could have used the time to do something a little more rewarding, such as banging my head repeatedly against a wall. If this was one of the best simulator rides around, I can fully understand why most parks have wisely opted to concentrate on other ride concepts.

Thanks to the park's deescalated layout, it was a long walk to go a fairly short distance, to my next attraction stop, which was Woody Woodpecker's Nuthouse Coaster. It's a Vekoma Roller Skater, apparently in the same or similar configuration to Goofy's Barnstormer at Disney's Magic Kingdom. It was a predictable little ride with a couple of neat features. It has the little wheelchair transfer platform car on the back of the train which I last saw on IOA's Flying Unicorn...I understand the idea, but I can't help thinking that when nobody is looking, that platform is going to get intentionally misused, if you know what I mean. Above the operator's console there is a multi-pipe bellows whistle. It sounds just like a train whistle, and the operator pulls the cord to blow the whistle as the train departs. Then as the train hits the mid-course helix, a woodpecker sound effect plays. It's one of those few coasters that can be accurately described as, "cute". Being able to ride it with no wait at all was just a bonus.

Just down the midway was another major attraction, this one featuring E.T.. I still think that ET is the movie that Spielberg was really getting his award for when everybody was talking about Schindler's List. It was a better movie, but it wasn't the sort of movie that the Academy gives major awards to. I entered the nearly-empty queue house and proceeded directly to the obligatory, "stand back, these automatic doors open towards you" doors at the ride entrance. It was a good long wait at this point. Finally, the doors opened toward us, and all of the people waiting in line were taken into a small theater for an obligatory, but unneeded and mostly pointless, preshow film. It was unneeded because the premise for the ride would be set up again in the final queue. When that film was done, we split into two groups, each group checking in with a typist who entered our first names into the show computer and handed us each a bar-coded card. From there, we proceeded into the ride's main queue, a dense forest. It was cool and moist, with that smell of fresh pine and fog. It was an incredible re-creation. In the center of the queue, on top of a rock, "ET"'s planet-mate materialized in the fog and explained how we needed to help ET to get home. Finally, we boarded the vehicle, which kind of resembles a group of bicycles tied together with a basket on the front (and ET in the basket under a blanket). The ride is motor driven and suspended from an overhead monorail track; if this were a Disney park I'd say it is the Peter Pan's Flight ride system. But this is NOT a Disney park, so it's just uncannily similar to the Peter Pan's Flight ride. The ride carries us through the forest, and away from the government men who want to study E.T. and who are scared of him. We ride over a cliff, and go soaring above the forest, above the Earth, across the Moon, and finally we land on E.T's home world and drop him off. At the end of the ride, E.T. himself thanks us each by name as we ride past to return to our home. It's all very nicely done. Gearhead that I am, I also had to notice the pull-rings in the floor beneath the ride in E.T.'s home world. I presume those are for safety railings that pull up from the floor in the event the ride must be evacuated.

From E.T., I headed back across the park, where I had to choose from two different attractions. One was something related to Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius, and the other was Shrek 4D. I wasn't familiar with either, so I gambled and rode Jimmy Neutron's ride. It turned out to be another damned simulator, follow the bouncing screen, using polarized light 3D, with the stupid little glasses that don't work well with my eyeglasses. I really should get a pair of clip-on 3D lenses. They all seem to use the same polarization scheme, so I ought to be able to get a set of clip-ons that don't interfere with my normal glasses. This time, it was cartoon graphics, again with the 'chase and escape' plotline, this time chasing after various Nickelodeon characters, many of whom I simply don't know. The plot is a little easier to follow than that of Back to the Future, though I realize that isn't saying much. Something I did notice, which was also one of the irritating things about Back to the Future, was that in certain computer-generated animations, if there is fast motion I would see it as a double image. On Jimmy Neutron it is easy to assume it's a 3D artifact. But it's there on Back to the Future which is NOT a 3D movie, which means it has to be something else. It reminds me of the interlacing artifacts I get when I encode video from my camcorder to DVD. I wouldn't expect CGI for film to be interlaced, though...!

Anyway, Jimmy Neutron is far less violent than Back to the Future, and is a much more refined program. On the whole, I think it's a better show. That said, it loses several million style points because I can't stand the...no, I'd best not say it. Leave that as a surprise for anyone foolish enough to ride. It was a cruel trick, though. Anyway, the best thing about the ride was that it was over early enough that I had just enough time to hike across the street to see Shrek 4D.

Shrek was a great attraction to end the night with. Please bear in mind that I am probably the last person in the country who still has not seen any of the Shrek movies. That said, the pre-show begins in Fahrquad's torture chamber [Footnote 2]. The gentleman doing the pre-show was performing a schtick which was partly scripted, and partly based on the responses some of the canned jokes got, and he was pretty good at it. As the room filled, his performance gave way to the canned performances of a video screen and a few props scattered around the room. I do wonder why no mask was applied to the front-projection used for the magic mirror; the image fit and filled perfectly, but video black is not really black, so the projector lit up both sides of the mirror as well. A truly minor beef with a very well-prepared program. We moved into the theater.

The theater is a large auditorium, and a cursory inspection revealed lots of little things that needed to be watched for, but the seat itself proved to be 'clean'...that is, the surfaces were dry, there are no protrusions beneath the seat, and no mysterious holes in the back cushion. We were verbally warned that most of the seats (except for a few specially-marked ones) are on motion bases; in fact the host welcoming us to the theater instructed us to fasten our safety belts. Well, that made most people look, anyway [Footnote 3]. The film started shortly thereafter. This one has a fairy-tale beginning, where Shrek was about to live happily ever after, when his plans were interrupted by the re-appearance of a dead guy with a simple mission: to make Shrek's wife like him...i.e. *dead*...thus stealing her away once again. What followed, then, was the usual "chase and escape" simulator show, even though this really isn't a simulator theater. What it was is a 3D show with special effects which is very cleverly written, very nicely done, extraordinarily funny, and an excellent way to end my evening at Universal Studios.

Universal Studios Florida is a very nice park. There is no disputing that. Physically, it presents an environment every bit as detailed as the ones over in Islands of Adventure. The park is a little schizophrenic because it started out as a "movie making park" and gradually morphed into a "movie-themed park". Clearly the industry has decided that the latter is a broader theme, a more approachable theme, and an easier way to build a park, as both Universal and Disney have had to make that transition. What is missing from the park are outdoor attractions. I swear, the only ride that isn't in a building is Woody Woodpecker's Nuthouse Coaster. The result is that a lot of the energy normally found in an amusement park that comes from all that steel moving around simply isn't there. From the midway, you have...buildings. It isn't nearly as bad as another park I'll be writing about soon, but it is a problem, and it is not limited to Universal. Universal is a nice park, but you have to consider carefully what it has to offer. I was a little annoyed that they combined a 6:00 pm close with a ticket pricing scale that had me paying the full all-day price for a half-day visit, mostly because it is such an expensive park and yet has so little in it. I can't really complain that I didn't get my money's worth, because in that half-day I managed to ride almost all of the park's rides. I didn't see any of the live shows, but it isn't entirely clear that I would have anyway. The question an amusement park nut has to ask is, is the park worth $60 for one halfway decent coaster? I don't regret going, and I had a good time, though it certainly helps that my interest does extend beyond the coasters. Having been there, though, I must say there is precious little in that park that would prompt me to spend $60 again. For that kind of price, I would much sooner go to Islands of Adventure, which is a more traditional amusement park, and from my perspective is a more interesting park.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

Footnote 1: Which, you may recall, made absolutely no sense at all until the third movie was released... [Return to text]

Footnote 2: That name really doesn't sound broadcastable...! [Return to text]

Footnote 3 Of course, the theater is NOT so equipped, as my cursory examination of the seat had indicated before I sat down. [Return to text]

--DCAjr

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