Universal Studios Beijing

Tongzhou, Beijing, China – Wednesday, April 24th, 2024

I’m always a little disappointed by leftovers for dinner. Invariably the texture and consistency isn’t as good as it was the first time around, and even for the few food categories that do keep and reheat well, there’s still the ennui of “I just did this recently.” But not everyone feels that way about their takeout the next day. Some people have a real talent for remixing components of yesterday’s meal into something fresh and exciting. Others may just be comforted by the simplicity of the old and familiar.

Universal Studios Beijing brings to mind a plate of Chinese leftovers. Half of the park are warmly reheated copies of lands and attractions found elsewhere; all of them good the first time, and perhaps slightly less impressive here. Half of the other remaining half are creative re-mixes using leftover ingredients, leaving only about a quarter of the plate being truly new, fresh ingredients. Assuming you’ve visited other Universal parks around the world, how you feel about Universal Beijing may depend on the attitude you carry to other things in life, such as your feelings about leftovers. To each their own.

But I’ll note that even the plate itself, the park’s very existence in Beijing, seems a bit like Universal taking the leftovers of the Chinese market after Disney took the prime Shanghai (and Hong Kong) regions for themselves. That’s not meant as shade to Beijing itself; it’s absolutely an A-tier global city, and the rivalry between itself and Shanghai is well-matched. But as a city to host a major western theme park and media brand, it’s a bit of an odd fit. Shanghai (and Hong Kong) pride themselves on being very cosmopolitan, whereas Beijing is proudly the nexus of Chinese culture and politics. Its northern climate and suffocating seasonal smog1 also pose more of a challenge for outdoor entertainment than its more southern counterparts. Beijing absolutely deserves a major world-class theme park, and I believe Universal was correct that it would have been more successful claiming such an important metro market for themselves rather than trying to compete next door to the Mouse, as they must do stateside.2 Still, if you’re picking straws over who gets which major Chinese market capable of hosting an international theme park resort, it’s clear that Universal drew last.

They may have also drawn a little late. Universal Beijing hardly had the glamorous red-carpet debut they may have hoped for due to a delayed opening in the middle of the COVID pandemic. International visitors had few opportunities to see the new park until nearly two years after its debut when tourist visas were finally reinstated. Given China’s increasingly authoritarian backsliding that was exacerbated by COVID, the business wisdom of a major capital investment to access the Chinese market seems on less solid footing. If Universal had waited any longer on a mainland Chinese resort, I’m not certain it would have happened at all.

To stretch this metaphor a little further, my own feeling towards Universal Beijing is far from an “essential Universal meal,” but also not quite “disappointing leftovers.” It’s more of a pleasant extra helping of Universal Parks that I didn’t need, but as long as it’s being served up I’ll gladly take it. It’s frankly a miracle this park got built at all, and fingers crossed that it finds its footing among the local population, and will continue to exist long into the future. Tomorrow is always a good option for more leftovers.3

Hollywood

The worst line of the day was getting in. When the park says they open at 10:00am, that means they start processing tickets at 10:00. No holding area in the Hollywood entry plaza prior. Despite arriving at 9:20am, there was already enough of a line that we didn’t actually get our tickets scanned until 10:40. The need to cross-check your ticket with ID (meaning you must carry your passport with you to the park) and scan your image for the facial recognition technology used throughout the resort slows things down considerably. Especially if you’ve grown a beard since your passport photo was last taken. So either get there very early or stay at an on-site hotel to enjoy the relatively quiet first half hour of the day as everyone else is still stuck at the front gate.

Anyway, as can be expected at a Universal Studios park, on the other side of the ticket gates is a Hollywood zone. With its broad avenue and utilitarian shade canopy, Universal Beijing’s rendition emphasizes function over form. Having lived in Los Angeles for over a decade, I’m not certain if these romanticized Old Hollywood facades would theoretically resonate more or less with myself vs. an average Beijinger who’s never been to California. Regardless, they don’t resonate for me. While they try to find interesting colors and details to emphasize among the architectural vernacular, the facades are all too two-dimensional to have the energy of a real city. It gets us to the lagoon to start our day, and that’s about it.

That said, the Hollywood land does terminate into a very nice waterfront park that I appreciated getting to walk along. The views of Jurassic World (and to a lesser extend, Minions Land) generate plenty of excitement and photo opportunities, while not giving away the entire park in a single vantage point as happens at Islands of Adventure or Universal Studios Singapore. There’s still more to explore beyond.

Lights Camera Action!

A special effects show imported from Universal Studios Singapore, with an extended widescreen pre-show filmed for Beijing featuring directors Steven Spielberg and Zhang Yimou. It’s significantly more involved than the simple talking head format that features Spielberg at the E.T. Adventure, although their thesis message that soundstages are places where directors have complete control to let their imaginations run wild is somewhat undercut by the fact that most of their demonstrations are primarily CG, and neither Spielberg nor Zhang seem particularly enthusiastic or even aware of the action happening around them.

The main show is about two and a half minutes, taking place in a shipping yard as a major storm rolls in. The sequence of events is a little nonsensical. Rain pours in from the sealed roof, and things catch fire or fly across the room for seemingly no reason. The finale features a miniature steam ship pulling in through the bay doors and docking in front of us; toot toot. Uh, disaster? It’s clearly trying to adapt the beats of the classic Earthquake experience on the Universal Tram Tour, but is just missing the underlying logic and sense of danger that ties the sequence together in ever-escalating peril.

Apparently the show was a political challenge to produce, as local codes forbade Universal from open flames indoors. Rather than script a new experience that could work within the restrictions, Universal fought to keep the show as it exists in Singapore, working the authorities and calling in favors to eventually get an exception to the codes. A marvelous achievement given the way Chinese bureaucracy typically works, but I can’t help but wonder if simply removing roadblocks was preferable to finding creative new solutions to work around them?

 

Untrainable

This Broadway-style stage show based on Dreamwork’s How to Train Your Dragon franchise has been celebrated as one of the best new offerings at Universal Beijing; a similar show at Universal’s Epic Universe is one of the few elements that groundbreaking park will recycle from elsewhere. While live shows were further down my priority list with limited time, I knew this was a must-do.

Unfortunately the show was missing two things for me. The first was English captioning, which is understandably not included owing to the audience demographics, but I did feel I was missing a key element of the story that couldn’t be expressed visually or via tone and body language. The CliffNotes interpretation I got from my wife was that an untrainable dragon arrived in Berk, people were once again mad and fearful about the dragon, but Hiccup wanted to prove it was trainable, which it in fact was. Okay. Perhaps a little formulaic compared with other entries in the How to Train Your Dragon story world. Maybe understanding the missing nuance will resonate more when I experience it in Florida.

However the other big missing component was Toothless himself. I knew that the actor playing Hiccup riding a suspended Toothless puppet above the audience was the show’s big “wow” moment. I thus thought it odd when an early scene spent several minutes “flying” through fog and mapped projection clouds with nothing else happening. I kept eagerly awaiting for Toothless to appear, only to realize as the show was wrapping up that clearly there was some technical fault that forced our show into a Toothless-less B-mode. The rest of Untrainable clearly had promise (the untrainable dragon itself is also a very impressive puppet), but I unfortunately didn’t quite leave the theater walking on air.

Jurassic World: Isla Nublar

Universal Studios Singapore had the unfortunate luck of being built at an awkward time for the Jurassic franchise, with the original films all well on their way to legacy media that resulted in more conservative theme park offerings. Universal Studios Beijing, by contrast, came at a much more opportune moment, when the revamped Jurassic World had proven its box office bonafides as one of Universal’s top-performing in-house franchises, and executives were confident to green-light a much more ambitious program for their first ground-up theme park land based on the reinvigorated franchise.

The narrative of the Jurassic World films made clear that it is mutually exclusive from the classic Jurassic Park, so (almost) no mixing of the two here. And while Jurassic World is obviously the more timely franchise and current box office champion, it’s also, to put it bluntly, a worse film. Whereas the original films (and rides) were sci-fi cautionary tales about humankind’s hubris in the face of a chaotic and terrifying natural order, Jurassic World is simply a dumb old-fashioned monster movie, with a lumpy, formless, brown-grey antagonist as the new unstoppable monster baddie.

Fortunately, most of Jurassic World: Isla Nublar is a pretty good substitute for what works at the other Jurassic Park lands, only substituting red and yellow for blue and silver, bamboo and thatching for steel and concrete. On the downside, I wish the natural environment could be a bit more lush and rugged, but landscape architecture has never before been one of Universal’s strong suits, and that continues to be the case here. The primary two rides are likewise a bit of a mixed bag.

Jurassic World Adventure

If there’s a reason for a hardcore theme park fan to travel around the world to check off Universal Studios Beijing, I suspect Jurassic World Adventure will be at the top of that list. Spoiler alert: It was for me, and it largely succeeded.

Critical comparisons of the “Park” vs. “World” stories aside, Jurassic World Adventure is pretty close to what the best possible ride directly based on the Jurassic World film looks like. Not necessarily the best possible of all Jurassic rides (that’s still the now-defunct Jurassic Park: The Ride), nor the best possible ride that happens to have a Jurassic World theme (that’s VelociCoaster), but if you have to take the 2015 movie and translate it into a narrative-based ride, this might be the best possible outcome.

First up: the queue is great! That entry atrium not only looks architecturally impressive, but comes to life with well-produced media installations that almost made me wish we had a longer wait. The ride system is similar to Spider-Man and Transformers, only here you get an even larger reliance on practical sets and animatronics (a good thing given that a clone of Transformers is close by). This means it’s entirely indoor show sets, and is going to have a much faster pacing compared to the deliberate evolution from beauty to terror of the original Jurassic Park: The Ride.

The first scene may be the worst of the ride, an overly-squinched wraparound screen that tries to recall the wonder of the original JP: The Ride’s first encounter with the brachiosaur, but within seconds the mood is interrupted as something goes wrong. From then on it’s non-stop dino rampage with nary a moment to catch your breath.

The non-stop maximalism works because it puts in the effort to always surprise and astonish. There’s the most internet-famous moment when the Indominus Rex chases the ride vehicle along its pathway of motion via a clever turntable mechanism. It works so well you wonder how this is possibly the first theme park ride to think of it. Later on, life-sized I-Rex and T-Rex battle it out overhead, the sense of scale as you move between them very impressive. Yet one of the most effective stunts comes at the very end, when the I-Rex is pushed off screen, a split second later its physical head and neck violently snapping over an opening with surprising realism. The stunt is all the more effective for its brevity, avoiding the fallacy to “get their budget’s worth” by lingering at the animatronic for too long.

I won’t pretend that Jurassic World Adventure isn’t all just a dumb dinosaur spook house. But it does everything you want a big, loud theme park ride to do, and is generally very good at it… to a degree that puts many other big, loud theme park rides to shame. The level of craft is so high, and it’s so singularly good at eliciting that primal fear factor, it’d feel ridiculous to ask Jurassic World Adventure for deeper ideas or emotions.

 

Jurassic Flyers

As part of a theme park design team, to introduce the concept of “guest expectations” during a creative workshop, often someone in the room would cite this example: “If you’re doing the Jurassic Park ride and you don’t see any dinosaurs, you’ve failed guest expectations.” Stupidly simple. And yet, in Jurassic Flyers, that’s exactly what happened. Oops.

It’s not hard to trace the causal chain of how that happened. The first full Jurassic Park land opened at Islands of Adventure in 1999, and included a simple kid’s suspended pteranodon coaster circling the Camp Jurassic playground. It had low capacity that required strict rider height restrictions to manage demand, because despite being a simple C-tier attraction, everyone wants to fly with a pteranodon. It became a necessary component of all future Jurassic lands, even as the original manufacturer went out of business; Singapore’s system by SetPoint was bigger and beefier, but still subject to slow-moving queues; Japan’s B&M flyer was very high thrill and exclusionary to younger and more timid guests. Twenty-plus years later, Universal Beijing made the push for Mack’s suspended powered coaster, enabling a longer layout, higher capacity, and a still family-friendly experience that eluded all previous examples. Makes sense! But it’s also one of the most expensive and technologically advanced coaster systems on the market.

What was originally conceived of as a simple C-tier concept was promoted to an A-tier ride system. And park guests realize that! Even with its continuously loading platform, Jurassic Flyers routinely gets the longest lines in the park. It looks cool, and with its imposing mountain and waterfall seems to promise a lot! But there’s no pteranodons, or any other dinos. The vehicles can’t even represent dinosaurs, instead becoming robotic InGen conveyance things because they have to look realistically in-world somehow. There’s one spot in the caves that looks like a dino was intended to go there, but it’s left empty. The most exciting on-ride visual you get is a brief glimpse at the backside of water… wrong franchise! Even the moments that should just focus on the joy of flying through the enclosure are let down by an obtrusive catwalk system that seems like a late addition for compliance reasons.

Not every ride should be a blockbuster. I don’t know any serious theme park designers or fans who wouldn’t extol the virtues of the smaller, secondary attraction line-up. But you can’t just call one of the most expensive and technologically-advanced ride systems in the park a minor supporting attraction and expect guest expectations to also be set accordingly low. Jurassic Flyers clearly promises to be so much more, and it’s a disappointment when it feels held back by either a misallocated budget or by the mandate that this is only “supposed” to be a simple kids ride.

 

Transformers Metrobase

On the list of “things that are cool,” giant fighting robots must rank highly alongside giant fighting dinosaurs. Universal knows how to give the people what they want, even if it means paying other studios a license fee for their IP. In this case, the standalone Transformers ride has now been expanded into an entire land.

Look closely: it’s essentially a programmatic duplicate of Islands of Adventure’s Marvel Super Hero Island, minus the drop towers.4 When planning a new theme park, designers often have a very specific formula for how to make sure the attraction program is “balanced” amongst all interest types and demographics. It’s not uncommon for that formula to spit out the exact same set of rides even for completely different lands.

The land is very different, though. It’s less recognizable as a metropolis and more a collection of buildings and follies dripping with cyberpunk gak. I found a sign (on right) that nobly attempts a narrative justification of the look by imagining a larger sci-fi metrobase continuing deep under the surface, although it doesn’t explain why everything above ground is in a completely different style. It’s all ridiculously over-the-top, which in honesty is infinitely preferable to taking the material too seriously. As a franchise, Transformers has all-too-easily slipped into becoming a thinly veiled advertisement for the military-industrial complex. At least here, it’s not much more than an advertisement for brightly colored children’s car and robot toys.

 

Decepticoaster

As a clone of the ever-popular Incredible Hulk Coaster, the Decepticoaster makes some improvements (Vest restraints! Magnetic braking! Rad-looking launch tunnel! An only moderately inconvenient and poorly planned locker and metal detection setup!) while also showing some comparative weaknesses (Slightly slower launch! Worse soundtrack! Drab colors! Weird placement next to a forest that hides the first big inversions and makes them feel oddly much smaller! Theme and characters I don’t give a shit about!)

The thing that has me scratching my head is that, assuming this was in development around the same time as VelociCoaster, why didn’t we get a clone (or better, a new original layout) of that coaster instead? I like the Incredible Hulk perfectly well as an icon of the late-90s park it debuted at, but it’s not exactly at the vanguard of modern coaster design for the 2020s. It was developed at a time when coaster centerlines were primarily geared around an endless sequence of inversions and banked curves. Modern designs, even from B&M, now tend to incorporate a lot more element diversity, including sprinkles of negative G-forces throughout. That’s not just because enthusiasts love airtime. It was a necessary evolution for rider comfort, to prevent the continual onslaught of body-compressing positive G-forces from inhibiting blood circulation and causing disorientation, tunnel-vision, and nausea. They’ve tuned the launch speed down compared to Florida so it doesn’t have quite the same OMG factor around the first several elements, but it just means the rest of the positive-G focused layout is slightly duller and more drawn out. My wife rode once in the front row, and announced that was enough for her. Based on the five minute queue all day, I suspect she wasn’t alone. Even as the big draw for coaster enthusiasts, this feels like another example of this park getting yesterday’s leftovers. Even B&M lovers will find the nearby Happy Valley Beijing more than has their needs covered.

 

Transformers: Battle for the Allspark

I didn’t ride it. No single rider queue, and I wasn’t going to spend a half hour of my day on a copy of a ride I’ve ridden countless times at Universal Studios Hollywood and still don’t particularly like. But since I haven’t reviewed that park yet, I’ll include some brief thoughts on it here.

This ride needs music. For a while there was this trend that for a theme park to feel completely “real” and “immersive” it has to get rid of anything that could be perceived as artifice, and that includes non-diegetic soundtracks. Transformers: The Ride comes across so emotionally flat as a result. The Foley artists banging pots and pans are front-and-center in the final mix. If all the audio must be diegetic to the on-screen action (it’s nearly all screen-based), then why not make Bumblebee the guide to provide a lively pop soundtrack for all the scenes instead of just two brief cameos? It sure would beat Evac’s tedious narration of what’s happening in every scene.

Also, there’s a point where you’re “trapped” in a dead end tunnel, which we know because Evac announces we are. Yet the vehicle rotates to reveal this dead-end from the side where you can first clearly see the exit into the next scene. And it just seems representative of a ride where none of the story really matters and no one really cares.

 

Bumblebee Boogie

Previous attempts by Universal to include a teacups style flat ride5 were fairly lackluster, with names that promised speed and excitement but in reality were overbuilt variants of the carnival classic, heavily dampening the spinning on a short ride cycle. I was expecting the same from Bumblebee Boogie; yet while the ride hardware is fairly similar, I was pleasantly surprised that the thematic package has been upgraded so that this ride is actually fun to watch and to ride.

An impressively scaled, fluid-moving Bumblebee animatronic presides as a disc jockey at the center of the rotating turntable. A different pop soundtrack will play with each cycle, and the entire ride area lights up like a discotheque. At some point within the past decade theme parks realized that flat rides are more fun with lights and music, unlocking a deeply-held secret that was previously known only to dance clubs and kids birthday parties. The spinning wasn’t half bad either, although it’s far from Knott’s Mexican Hat Dance, but twirling under a disco ball may have helped. A dark horse candidate among the park’s five best rides.

Kung Fu Panda: Land of Awesomeness

Growing up, DreamWorks Animation was always the Pepsi to Pixar’s Coca-Cola; fine if it was the only option, but a little too saccharine in its quest to embed itself in the mainstream of popular culture, so you prefer the other brand whenever possible. Now with younger production companies like Illumination cranking those hyperactive qualities up to 11, DreamWorks has emerged as a more respectable grand dame of the CG animation industry, even if it still hasn’t managed to eclipse Pixar despite that studio’s recent woes.

Yet despite Pixar being part of the Disney Parks behemoth, somehow DreamWorks has turned out surprisingly competitive in the themed attraction landscape that if forced to pick my preference, I would give serious consideration to DreamWorks’ offerings. This is primarily based on the strength of the wonderful DreamWorks indoor section of Motiongate Dubai, especially with its top-in-class Shrek dark ride and innovative HTTYD powered coaster. But Universal Creative was able to prove that wasn’t a one-off fluke of UAE economic incentives when they built their first immersive land based on a single DreamWorks property since NBCUniversal fully acquired the studio in 2016. Kung Fu Panda: Land of Awesomeness is, by some measure, the best land designed for Universal Studios Beijing. It even readily eclipses the Kung Fu Panda subzone of Motiongate (although still falls well short of the full four-zone package; Kung Fu Panda is generally considered the weakest of the four subzones at Motiongate’s DreamWorks land).

Land of Awesomeness is richly detailed, in a way that’s fun but not tacky or dumbed down. It even made me reconsider the film franchise in a more appreciative light. They use the indoor setting to their advantage, with dramatic lighting design and more delicate props and scenic details than is possible outdoors. Sometimes the budget gets blown on the building and the interior is little more than a decorated warehouse, but fortunately they didn’t fall into that trap here. I spent about an hour just exploring the environment, full of ambient elements including lanterns, statues, forts, waterfalls, bridges, and the ever-changing Peach Tree of Heavenly Wisdom (a mapped projection effect that wouldn’t feel out of place at a teamLab exhibit).

Rides also add to the ambience, including the Lantern of Legendary Legends, and the Carousel of Kung Fu Heroes. We ended up using the one lower-tier Express Pass included in our bundle in order to do the carousel, and I’m glad we did. The wooden character figures are funny and adorable, and further proof that modern IP can co-exist just fine with century-old classic amusement technology.

     

Kung Fu Panda: Journey of the Dragon Warrior

Oh dear. After lavishing praise on the land itself, I regret to inform you that its flagship attraction, the family dark water flume ride Kung Fu Panda: Journey of the Dragon Warrior, is not good. It seems likely a situation where the land show box and ride box were pulled from different budget pools, and the amounts were not distributed equally to their needs.

In the endless fan debate on the merits of animatronic figures over screens, Journey of the Dragon Warrior seems determined to put a plague upon both your houses. While the animatronics attempt a fuller range of motion compared to some cartoon-based rides that rely on simpler static figures, the result falls deep in the uncanny valley. Skin and fur don’t fit the bodies quite right; eyelids are too big for the eyes, which themselves seem to have gummed-up actuators that result in a distant, dead-eyed stare of a sleepless addict. Real nightmare stuff.

The middle section heralds the arrival of a screen-based sequence, which is something of a relief in as much as the characters now appear on-model and do kung-fu moves as you would expect from the films. But unfortunately this sequence is the worst excess of the “nothing but screens” mentality in dark ride design. Characters simply float and fight amid abstract backdrops that have no relation to the minimal scenic design surrounding it. Just a procession of big glowing rectangles presenting a story that is scarcely more involved than floating past a library of Kung Fu Panda-themed screensavers. A small drop into a media dome provides a brief kick of action near the end, but then you’re back to the creepy animatronics for the finale.

Where the ride does succeed is in capacity. I suspect that’s the whole reason it exists, because the park had to guarantee a certain minimum hourly capacity, and including a dual-station high-capacity boat ride that puts through 2500+ people per hour is one way to meet that quota while sticking to a budget. The empty, endless queue is a telltale sign of capacity planning gone awry; probably specified to hold something like two hours of queue during Lunar New Year, meaning around 5000 bodies at once. Hilariously, the biggest line of people always formed outside the queuing area spilling into the land itself, due to the presence of a single turnstile at the general entrance. Assuming one person can pass a turnstile every two to three seconds, that puts the hourly capacity of that turnstile at 1200 to 1800… well below the 2000+ I’d estimate the ride is capable of based on some back of the envelope figuring. Barring technical delays or an influx of Express users, it’s nearly impossible to imagine how that massive queue could ever fill. It was never anything other than a five minute posted wait during our visit.

   

WaterWorld

I get it, WaterWorld is a stunt show classic that should always be a part of the Universal Studios legacy. That’s a good reason for keeping it in Hollywood, but it doesn’t change how surreal it is to see a show based on Waterworld—Kevin Costner’s 1995 box office flop Waterworld!—being built anew in the Year of Our Lord Twenty-Twenty-One. I too wish theme parks could represent more of the classics within the film libraries of the media conglomerates that own them, but Waterworld is not one of them.

WaterWorld’s presence at Universal Beijing is not so much an argument for evergreen IP as it is that the IP is irrelevant. Universal happened to make a successful stunt show decades ago when a Waterworld tie-in was the mandate of the day, and now it seems the executives are scared to mess with the formula lest it turns out less successful, and the producers and other loyalists within the organization are scared lest it turn out more successful, thus mandating the rationally long-overdue updating to a more relevant film property at all locations.

I should say that we didn’t see the show. Just not a priority with limited time. It’s way out in the middle of an otherwise undeveloped plot of land at the back of the park, with enough room for a small themed plaza in front with some food and retail options. We did stop to get a bottle of water, which I suppose counts as a themed beverage experience!

The Wizarding World of Harry Potter

All previous Wizarding World locations had to fit into challenging sites at existing parks, which limited the options for controlling sightlines and guest flow. Universal Beijing is the first copy of the original Hogsmeade design to open at a new park, meaning they had complete control over how the land would be positioned in the rest of the park. The choice to locate it in the most remote corner with lots of undeveloped land around it suggests it may be intended as an anchor for future park expansions to build around.

Yet despite being given the freedom of a blank canvas, somehow Beijing’s Wizarding World is the most awkwardly fitted to its park. Approaching from Kung-Fu Panda/WaterWorld—it’s a loop park layout so anyone who’s progressing in clockwise order will take this route—you enter the land from the back and are presented with a clear view of the Forbidden Journey show building butting up to the back of Hogswarts Castle. I don’t consider myself an “immersion purist” by any means, but I had to take a moment when I realized how bad this view was as a first impression of their signature land.6

Once you’re inside it’s still the same immersive land you know and love (or hate, or are indifferent to), although I will note that the quality of finish in many of the details seems a little bit lower here than what you’ll find in the other installations. Graphic design details inside the shops are simplified or reduced, due to the need to either translate to Chinese or else only serve as decorative visuals in English. Gladrags Wizardwear gets a nice overhead installation that I didn’t recognize from Hollywood, although the floor space for Zonko’s has been completely eliminated in favor of more Honeydukes, awkwardly leaving only the exterior facade of the bright red joke shop that enters into a pastel-colored sweets store.

As a local to Universal Studios Hollywood, I was clearly not the target audience, as evidenced by the throngs of locals taking photos that far outstripped the popularity of the parks’ other lands. Pity those who buy a wand here with the intent of using it in this park, as nearly every interactive location had a queue formed for social media photo sessions instead. For me, I found the harsh Beijing sky—sunny, cloudless, yet with a faint gray haze over everything—made it difficult to take photos or feel the intended mood of the Scottish Highlands. We wouldn’t linger for too long.

 

Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey

We probably would have skipped this, if not for having a Universal Express package that allowed us to avoid the posted 40 minute wait.7 One difference we found from the U.S. versions is that lockers are placed at the merge point for Express and standby. I’m not sure what the queue entailed before this point, but afterward there was only a staircase up the portrait gallery and then into the Sorting Hat hall onto the boarding platform. While offering lockers closer to loading is ostensibly a good idea, it evidently created a bottleneck that starved the loading platform, as we walked right up to the vehicle and observed a number of seats and benches being sent out empty. (Or else the 40 minute wait was a lie and we paid to skip the queue of a walk-on attraction.)

The ride itself is nearly identical to the Hollywood version I’m familiar with, except all dubbed in Mandarin. (Honestly, not understanding the dialogue may be an improvement.) Despite the depth of literary material it’s based on, the ride is still a spook house through and through, as it jumps between non sequitur scenes that make zero sense as a story but each works perfectly fine on its own as a theme park thrill. I find this “greatest hits” formula works better when it’s the only major Harry Potter ride in the park, since it has to do the heavy lifting for the entire franchise within a five minute ride time. Time will tell if Beijing’s stays isolated like Hollywood and Osaka’s Hogsmeades, or if the ample expansion plots surrounding it are used for more of Florida’s subsequent Wizarding Worlds to expand the story focus (and thus make Forbidden Journey’s frenetic catch-all style all the more unnecessary).

 

Flight of the Hippogriff

An off-the-shelf Vekoma junior coaster originally intended as a low-budget filler attraction in a forgotten park corner a quarter century ago, later given a fairly simple reskin when Comcast made its big, risky bet on the Potter franchise to pull the Universal Parks division out of its doldrums, has now become a seemingly non-negotiable component to all future Wizarding World installations, getting cloned three additional times by two different manufacturers.

Which is weird, because is Flight of the Hippogriff really that beloved by guests? It checks some boxes for demographic purposes, although with two other family coasters also included in the park, that rationale seems less essential in Beijing. Surely a family thrill coaster like Hagrid’s Magical Creatures Motorbike Adventure would make more demographic sense to fill the gap between Jurassic Flyers and Decepticoaster. As the fourth iteration of the Wizarding World, its success is all but guaranteed at this point, so the risk of a larger or custom secondary attraction seems more than justified. And there’s clearly more than enough room to build it. Sure, I can also see the justifications in favor of including another copy of Flight of the Hippogriff as the secondary attraction, but I’m curious if the discussion of something different was ever on the table at all?

Anyway, it’s the same experience as the Mack Rides version in Hollywood, except with a chain lift instead of a tire drive. Louder, but it also somehow feels more like a “real” coaster experience than a kid’s ride. With a 40 minute wait (that I paid to skip), it’s clearly a popular ride here. I hope guests find that wait worth their twenty seconds of swooping around in circles.

 

Minion Land

Part of my distaste for the Minions is how ruthlessly commercial they are. The pill shape, primary colors, interchangeable features, and slapstick, non-verbal humor are all transparently the product of an intellectual property lab tasked with creating the perfect children’s character that can be duplicated and sold in any context in any international market. I mean, I can admire the success of the Minions as the perfect pop-cultural objects, but I don’t have to personally like them. Because why would I give the marketers and other commodifiers of art that satisfaction?

I’ll be honest, I didn’t even walk through the entirety of Universal Beijing’s Minion Land, now the largest in the world. The Universal on Parade parade was coming through during our allotted time in the land, and rather than fight the crowds to explore further, we decided to stay put and watch. From a distance it’s all the swirly pastels and taffy architecture I’d expect, with the added benefit of waterfront features. The indoor structure for the Super Silly Fun Land sub-zone at the center of the land is pretty utilitarian, and marks the third kid’s area in the park to be located indoors. Apparently children in Beijing are like gremlins and you can’t get them wet.

 

Loop-Dee Doop-Dee

Located in Super Silly Fun Land, this is a pretty similarly sized kids coaster as Flight of the Hippogriff, only this one was produced locally by Jinma Rides. I’ll hazard a guess there were some political stipulations that a certain amount of the park be made in China, and with so many specialized systems elsewhere, we get this slightly redundant filler attraction in Minions Land.

For what it’s worth, the hardware by Jinma handles capably, with the vehicle build and individual lapbars as robust as any comparable family coaster you’d find by Zamperla or the like. Where the ride is still not quite there compared to its western counterparts is in the centerline engineering. Curves are wide with very drawn-out transitions and gentle straight sections in between. It seems Jinma’s plan to maintain a smooth ride profile is to design as cautious of a layout as possible rather than figure out more advanced formulas. Also, there are no left turns in the entire layout. But technically this counts as one of Universal Studios Beijing’s completely original attractions, and after a twenty minute standby wait I got the fourth and final +1 to my coaster count.

Despicable Me: Minion Mayhem

Yet another copy and paste from the other Universal parks. I didn’t ride it in Beijing, as I had plenty of experience with the same simulator in Hollywood; itself an enlarged clone of the ride in Orlando that was the second overlay of The Funtastic World of Hanna-Barbera simulator from over thirty years prior. While being one of the most thoroughly reheated leftovers to reach Beijing, it’s also one of the most sensible. Minions are still extremely popular, and the ride film has a good mix of humor and peril within a forward-moving action setup that typifies successful theme park simulators. The dance party exit room is cute even if no one ever uses it. It gets a pass since this is mercifully the only motion simulator in this park after the much maligned Fast & Furious: Supercharged clone was cancelled.

I don’t have much to add to this one, so I’ll just share a story about how I participated in the opening day ceremony of Despicable Me: Minion Mayhem at Hollywood in 2014. I helped wrangle the balloons that, at the climax of the ceremony, would all pop and throw yellow confetti over the audience. Unfortunately the balloon vendor had overfilled many of the balloons with helium, which as they warmed would continue to expand. Several of my balloons ended up popping at random times during opening remarks, and all I could do was just continue to stand there holding my now limp ropes with a sheepish “it wasn’t me!” look. I still have the yellow Minion construction hat I got to wear for the event in my closet. So I guess I still retain the smallest bit of sentimental attachment to this ride.

Conclusion

With the debut of Epic Universe likely ushering in a new age for Universal Destinations & Experiences, Universal Studios Beijing seems set to serve as a capstone for the post-Potter era of Universal theme parks. Everything here is competent, even if there are relatively few surprises. If I had to pick right now, this may be my bottom rated Universal park, simply because I like the coaster line-up at the more easily walkable Singapore park just a little bit more. But it’s also clear this park has gobs of room to grow in a way that its other Asian compatriots can’t, so it will be interesting to see if this park continues to get copies of proven attractions and lands from the other parks, or if like Universal Studios Japan it may find a niche that allows it to come into its own unique identity. Either way I’m glad I got to experience it near the beginning of its journey and will look forward to how it grows into the future.

     

April 24th, 2024 | Tags: , , , | Category: Universal Studios Beijing | One comment

Universal's Islands of Adventure

When it first opened in 1999 Universal’s Islands of Adventure promised it would redefine the very concept of what a theme park could be. The foamers mostly accepted this as an a priori truism, but revisiting a decade after my first encounter I’m struck by how much the opposite is actually the case. Islands of Adventure does no redefining, no transforming, no advancing of the theme park as an artistically credible medium. Instead, the Islands are a crystallized summary of everything that defined what theme parks had become in the fifty-odd years since Walt Disney introduced us to the term.

The aesthetic principles are the same: colorful hyperreal environments that simulate an ‘escape’ from life in the postmodern capitalist society. The entertainment is the same: a collection of dressed-up mechanical rides as well as some shows and playgrounds, many of which are synergized with recognizable media franchises. And the infrastructure is the same: there’s a gift-shop festooned entry midway leading to a series of themed lands one can traverse circularly around a central point of focus. Really, the biggest innovation of Islands of Adventure was the use of negative space for the lagoon rather than positive space for the castle landmark. Islands of Adventure is basically Universal’s rip-off of Disney’s Magic Kingdom, probably as revenge for Disney’s Hollywood Studios which was a rip-off of Universal Studios.

In the end there’s nothing radically new under the Floridian sun. Islands of Adventure felt radical because it had with a bigger budget and more confidence when using buzzwords such as “immersive environment”, “interactive media”, and the perennial favorite: “storytelling”. Theme park experts looooove to talk about the importance of “storytelling” and “crafting a compelling narrative” (these kinds of ‘experts’ are easy to identity because they always refer to theme parks as “the industry”), even though they don’t have much justification for why storytelling is so important.

If I were to play the part of the cynic (imagine that!) I’d say it’s because there is no real justification, ‘storytelling’ has become just another commodity for the 21st century, a high-class label that brands theme parks apart from regular amusement parks. The content of the story is a cipher; as long as the recognizable structure of storytelling in the abstract is there we’ll commend them for the “creative effort”. Film school and Hollywood are much the same, and they keep us addicted to thinking about life in terms of basic narrative while never facing us with the question of why it’s important to structure shared experiences according to the modes of traditional storytelling. Beyond economics, what role are movies and theme parks supposed to play in society?

Visiting the Universal Orlando complex you won’t encounter stories, you’ll encounter one (1) story repackaged and retold in nearly every attraction that significantly involves narrative. The basic form of the story is this:

“The status quo is disrupted by an outside force, and it must return to the status quo.”

And is usually more directly expressed as:

“Oh no, something has gone wrong!!!”

Granted, this form is very, well… universal. According to certain authorities there are only seven or eight basic stories ever told in the history of mankind, but after five global theme parks you still can’t find a major attraction with a significant narrative aspect that utilizes one of those other arcs. Even Disney uses at least two or three. I suspect the continual recycling throughout their theme parks is less a deliberate artistic choice than it is a result of following the path of least resistance when it comes to finding a story that matches the emotional response typically generated by thrill ride hardware. An internal status quo being disrupted by external forces for a few moments before achieving a return to stasis pretty well describes the emotional arc on any unthemed roller coaster experience at Six Flags or Cedar Point, which raises the question of whether Islands of Adventure has even completely transcended the ordinary amusement park, or if it’s all an elaborate pig in lipstick.

Technology or scientific pursuits are most commonly employed as the disruptive outside force that causes the mayhem and destruction, which at least signifies a complete reversal of the narrative of utopian technological determinism you’d get in the Mouse House at Epcot or Tomorrowland. This is particularly true in Jurassic Park and Marvel Superhero Island, although it’s also present in attractions such as Poseidon’s Fury. Yet it’s also an odd if not slightly hypocritical choice given how much Universal relies on high technology to exert perfect control over their audience-manipulating environments, if stories are indeed supposed to be “lies that tell the truth”.

However, more problematic is the fact that the sense of agency is reduced if not completely eliminated from Universal’s story form. Even though it’s oft marketed as a chance to “ride the movies”, to completely interact and immerse yourself in the action, audiences/riders are rarely treated as more than passive spectators. Exactly as the inciting action tends to be inexplicable to us (the technology happens to fail at a crucial moment for whatever reason, or an evil spirit happens to be angered by the presence of scientists just as we’re passing through), plots are usually resolved not because you or any other characters took action, but just… because.

One moment we’re facing hopeless peril, and then the next a deus ex machina is dropped in and we’re told that somewhere a few seconds ago just desserts had been served and we’ve emerged victorious. We nod, satisfied with the resolution but confused as to how exactly it happened. Certainly it was not the result of anything we did personally, but if Universal wants to give us credit for it we’re not going to refuse, and we reciprocate our appreciation in the ubiquitous gift shop.

Port of Entry

The Adventure Begins…

Speaking of ubiquitous gift shops, the tour begins in the Port of Entry, a mixture of Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and Asian architecture that promises a convergence of diverse cultures and ideas, but delivers much less. The monopolistic micro-economy of a closed-gate theme park means the variety (and pricing) of goods on sale isn’t remotely what you’d find at a real world bazaar, mostly variations on the Universal Globe branded merchandise regardless of where in the world the vendor purports to be from. Nor are the textures that make up the façades quite as deep and rich as such an eclectic ethnic meeting place would suggest. Most of the original Islands demonstrate a lot of artistic talent on the conceptual drawing pads, but to make these worlds a reality they’re almost all sculpted out of styrofoam, fiberglass, and other cheap, easily moldable building materials, meaning any textures that are not already inherent in these materials must be painted on. Even when you have elegant Grecian domes standing next to a crumbling Arabian mud fortress, if you look too quickly they all tend to blend together in a way that screams “this is a theme park”. It’s a big idea that proved to be bigger than Universal could build.

Confisco Grill

There was a missed opportunity to make the Port of Entry a unique culinary midway with shops and stands offering a wide variety of exotic delicacies. As it stands, the only option for food is at the Confisco Grill, which now that the Mythos Restaurant in Lost Continent has been reduced to a school catering menu (at least so I’ve been told from a couple sources; on that advice I didn’t bother to see for myself) is possibly one of the better establishments in the park to get a sit-down meal. There’s some diversity on the menu, though nothing more exciting than you’d find at a trendy chain restaurant adjacent an upscale shopping mall; I ordered a French dip sandwich and had no regrets when the bill was paid. The interior decoration is more interesting than the gift shops, with props and references to the other islands scattered around the Mediterranean interior like Easter eggs.

Seuss Landing

Part of the pain of growing up is the world steadily becomes much smaller and muted than you remember it. In a place where I was once dazzled, I now find myself nitpicking. C’est la vie. Much like Port of Entry, Seuss Landing’s construction has a deficiency of texture and depth that’s exacerbated by the fact it attempts to make an exact carbon copy of Geisel’s artwork but in three dimensional space. It probably looked fantastic in the conceptual drawings, and the finished product can look similarly fantastic in photographs… as long as the medium is two dimensional, there’s not a problem. But actually watching these characters and inhabiting this space in a moving, tactile world, it can feel eerily sterile and lifeless if examined too closely.

Viewing a cartoon world mediated through a drawing or image, there’s an unbounded quality where the mind fills in missing spatiotemporal information that allows it to coherently ‘exist’ as an independent reality, since information flow is one-directional and there’s no way we can actually have contact with this world. However, in a real environment there’s dialectical interaction between subject and object, i.e. perceiving an object also always reflects back information about ourselves: our location, duties, choices, sensory experiences, etc, which vary depending on the world we observe in front of us, and are absent when viewing a representational image. Because of this interaction, the whimsical structures all become subconsciously bounded to the mind’s expectations of a coherent reality grounded in physical laws, and the limited nature of the design can appear as if something intangible is missing, inviting closer scrutiny than intended.

Or maybe I’m overanalyzing it, and the difference from twelve years ago is that the colors in a fictional cartoon reality need to pop in out-of-this-world fashion. Today’s Seuss Landing, while still vivid, has become subtly sun-faded with time. As long as the kids still find it wonderful, that’s what’s important, right?

The Cat in the Hat

Another dark ride in a long tradition of dark rides that attempt to re-create a cherished childhood story that you can drive a car through in under five minutes… because stories are always better when experienced in the same way as one does a fast food restaurant. Nevertheless, The Cat in the Hat is a bit better than many of its peers because while the format hasn’t changed (five minutes or less of riding past mostly static physical scenes with only basic animated movement), the source material it copies is more appropriate to said format. A ten minute short story with illustrations viewed by turning the page, or an hour-plus fully animated and voice acted feature film: somehow it took until 1999 to figure out that the former is better than the latter at making the translation to a theme park setting. It’s still largely incomprehensible if you don’t already know the original story, and the set design feels a bit undercooked due to a too-literal translation of a 2D picture book into a 3D environment. At least it’s faithful to Geisel’s story and is sweet without becoming saccharine… something the recent CG feature length films (also by Universal) have not managed.

Grade: C

The Lost Continent

How is this still alive? It used to be the best island in the park, the one place on Universal Orlando property that retained a franchised purity as if it had actually been born from the imaginations of a few bright-eyed and ambitious creative directors, each burning to share her or his vision with the world. But now it’s just lying there, chopped in half, its vital organs slowly being digested by the media juggernaut that looms overhead while the bottom end of it just barely manages to survive, mostly by producing bile. One wishes Harry Potter would simply finish the deed so we don’t have to watch it suffer in its lame state anymore, before our good memories of it become completely smeared with the raw entrails that have been left behind. But the boy wizard has other dining plans first…

Poseidon’s Fury

Never before has the battle to save not only our own lives but perhaps all of mankind been so tedious. This walk-through stunt show/effects extravaganza tries to tell a reasonably involved story (twenty minutes by theme park standards is epic) and does so with a fair amount of theatrical flourish. The drawback: it only has two good special effects for the entire show… one for each plot point. Most of this attraction is filler and padding, such as an introductory chamber in which our archeological guide does ‘improvisational comedy’ while simultaneously providing backstory and initial developments; both involve the nervous flapping of hands while stuttering for five minutes. Even when the stage expands and we’re caught in the middle of an ancient battle of the gods, the audience is still completely passive despite the supposed stakes at hand, everyone gawking at the fire while waiting patiently for Jeremy Irons to appear in his Halloween costume and give us a few more wham-bang special effects before showing us the exit door. Poseidon’s Fury gets interesting when the effect technicians show up for work, but as the story is about an angry, power-hungry deity, the human element by comparison is predictably negligible.

Grade: C-

Eighth Voyage of Sindbad

Here are some examples of the quality of writing you can expect from this live-action stunt show: A noisy comic relief character is named “Kebab”, which gives the handsome protagonist the priceless one-liner “shush, Kebab”. Said comic relief character also farts on one of the bad guys, and kicks or gets kicked in the groin not once, nor twice, but three times. Meanwhile the hero, Sindbad, has a black belt in chopsocky, and by the end of the show falls in love with the strong and sassy princess whom he sweeps off her feet after saving her from an evil and ugly bitch… er, witch. Some researchers warn that roller coasters have the potential to kill brain cells, but methinks they’re studying the wrong attraction.

Grade: F

The Wizarding World of Harry Potter

In the decade or so since Islands of Adventure opened, Universal Creative appear to have learned a few things with the debut of the Wizarding World of Harry Potter in 2010. The buildings are made with real masonry and hardwoods (or, at least, more convincing synthetics), which lend the land deeper textures and a richer, even warmer feel, even as it simulates a crumbling village in wintertime.

However, they also seem to have forgotten a few things… crowd management, sightlines, and even a few basics of storytelling, are all fine details that plague the Wizarding World’s claim to representing the worldwide pinnacle of themed design. I remain stumped by the choice to represent Hogsmeade under a blanket of heavy snow and icicles despite the perpetual weather promised by the Sunshine State. Is Universal simply thumbing their noses at the idea that cognitive dissonance could ever apply to them? Or was that choice made in the same daredevil spirit that allowed so many other deficiencies to hide in plain sight? (Further details below.)

Perhaps the biggest question regarding such esoteric aesthetics, as I stand amid gaggles of Harry Potter fanatics and tired middle-class parents policing their children on vacation: am I the only one here to notice, or care? After millions upon millions of dollars, I feel a touch alone in my guilt for thinking that it still needed more.

Dragon Challenge – Chinese Fireball

A few years ago I would have thought the infusion of the world’s hottest property (with all the extra foot traffic and capital spending it brings) would have been a good thing for revitalizing the Dueling Dragons. A few years ago I would have been wrong. Beyond losing the ability to duel, the roller coaster has also lost a certain poetic quality that made the original so pleasurable. Choose thy fate? “Fire and Ice” is a Robert Frost poem; “Hungarian Horntail and Chinese Fireball” is a National Spelling Bee competition. The entrance is literally the difference between a sculpted work of art and a brick wall. The massive queue, from the beginning wasted on the highest capacity ride in the park, at least made an entertaining walkthrough attraction with memorable flourishes like the suspended knightsicle. Now I’m making mental notes that I’ve walked past a hair over fifty bright red EXIT signs on my way through a generic dark and gloomy castle that can just as easily fit the next franchise that moves in.

The experience at the end of it is still a big ol’ B&M inverted coaster built over a Florida cesspool. With the dueling aspect now absent, the biggest appeal of the coaster for me is the completely non-standard layout, qualified by the note that non-standard does not equal better, just different. The mandatory vertical loop is now found midway through the configuration rather than at the very beginning, and the Fireball side has a couple maneuvers you won’t find on any other below-the-rails track by B&M: a large camelback hill (not much airtime), and a tilted Immelmann-like inversion with a wrap-around spiral on the way back down (strong positive G-forces on this one, especially in the back). Beyond the bigger serving of geez Fire doles out, a faster maximum speed on the 115’ first drop and a second surprise corkscrew after the signature interlocking corkscrews makes the red track the preferred side of Dragon Challenge to enthusiasts and casual riders alike. Not that it’s significantly better than most single-tracked inverted coasters, even within the same state.

Grade: B-

Dragon Challenge – Hungarian Horntail

The Horntail’s layout is a completely different element line-up from the Fireball’s, but when both are essentially random sequences, so what? Blue used to emphasize the visuals from the front row (the castle-skimming cobra roll, or the long straightaway anticipating the dueling loops) in the same way red emphasized G-forces from the back, but now that synchronized dispatching is a thing of the past the Horntail experience gets the short straw. Not helping is a meandering finish that competes with the Great Bear for most lackluster finale ever on a B&M coaster. On the plus side it makes Fireball seem a more ‘complete’ coaster than it otherwise should, due to the immediate and inevitable comparison.

Grade: C+

Ollivanders Wand Shop

This is a new low: the first time I ever queued to enter a gift shop. There’s a short live show before entering the shop that recreates the famous “wand choosing” scene from the first film with a small child chosen from the audience that’s the cause for this queue, which can sometimes take over an hour. The special effects are all basic light-and-audio cues, although I respect the effort of the gentleman portraying Mr. Ollivander, as it was only momentarily evident that this was his hundredth iteration so far today of his eternal scenario. Given the price of the wands I can only imagine it’s something of a horror show for parents as well: a piece of wood magically selecting their starry-eyed child in front of a small cheering audience, Mr. Ollivander leading them in private to the back room to talk financing options after the show is over. It’s a selling technique that’s the envy of car salesmen the world over.

Grade: D

Flight of the Hippogriff

Not much to say here, except that it obviously fared better in the makeover from Lost Continent to the Wizarding World than Dueling Dragons. I’m glad they didn’t try to make the trains look like a real mythological beast even though that’s what we’re supposed to be riding, instead using wicker replicas and keeping the lifelike animatronics off to the side of the track where it can keep the correct proportions. Hey, it’s a Vekoma Roller Skater, are you really going to wait a half-hour in line just so you can hear Robbie Coltrane give the safety spiel?

Grade: D+

The Three Broomsticks Inn

You can buy a plate overfilled with food that reasonably approximates authentic British cuisine. Whether or not that’s a good thing I will leave to the reader to decide. For me I think it was the first time I ever had vegetables not situated in a sesame seed bun in a theme park. Soft beverage options for those who want the full “Harry Potter experience” are basically liquid or frozen butterbeer, which is basically a butterscotch root beer concoction. Purists may want to opt for the liquid variety seen in the movies, but for whatever chemical reason the flavors are much stronger in frozen butterbeer; both are frankly pretty damn good.

Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey

From a distance the forced perspective Hogwarts castle looks awesome. Walk closer to it and it begins forcing so much perspective on visitors that I worry someone is likely to herniate. Then you notice the rocky outcropping it’s sitting on appears oddly square-shaped as if it’s covering up a big box… much like the white warehouse behind the castle that remains firmly within sightlines from both the overflow queue to the left and the main walkway to the right. The experience inside is much the same as from the outside: dazzling first impressions, but the magical illusion crumbles all too easily with even the most rudimentary critical thinking. One might have hoped the nuances of storytelling and subtleties of character would have transferred to Florida, and under J.K. Rowling’s guidance the Forbidden Journey could have signaled a new era of theme park attractions as an interactive storytelling medium. Instead what they built regresses from that objective, and is a nothing more than a non-stop assault of five of the senses: visual, aural, tactile, olfactory, and common.

The story, as others have analyzed, is moronic. The closest thing to narrative we get is in the very first dragon scene: there’s a micro story-arc from Hagrid’s introduction, the escalating action in the video screen chase, the suspense in the covered bridge, and then an odd climax/resolution combo when we confront the full-sized animatronic dragon… an awkward moment of staring certain death in the face, diffused when it breathes a refreshing mist on us instead, and the plot, realizing it can’t go any further with this strand, yanks us someplace completely unrelated. After that it’s a non sequitur of random, isolated dark ride gags based with no regard for continuity, even jumping from night scenes to day scenes in the span of a few seconds. They’re included for no apparent reason other than they all must have ranked highly in focus group discussions about which scenes from the movie series would people most like to ride in a theme park. Dialogue is also non-existent, as the actors only shout single lines of caveman-like exposition to highlight the action already happening in front of us.

The Forbidden Journey strikes me as the creation of a cynical marketing director who believes that uninterrupted stimuli that looks cool and expensive, packaged with a familiar and loved intellectual property, is all that’s needed for a blockbuster hit. And I fear the Forbidden Journey’s success amongst audiences will only confirm that cynicism. When I got off I felt a little bit like retching, although that could have just been from rocking back and forth in front of surround video projections for five minutes.

Grade: C-

Jurassic Park

The natural landscaping has helped Jurassic Park age more gracefully than some of the other islands. The vegetation fills in wherever artifice is unable, and any weathering to the edifices generally improves rather than detracts from the appearance. The movie was essentially about a zoological theme park that could plausibly exist with some almost-believable science fiction, so it makes perfect sense that the fictional theme park world would translate naturally in a real theme park environment.

That is, until they start messing with the meta-narrative too much. Why do the ‘fake’ spinosaurus and tyrannosaurus photo-op statues along the midway look more realistic than the ‘real’ dinosaurs (with droopy latex skin and stilted movement) we’ll encounter along the River Adventure? Are the children riding above the canopy in fake real or real fake pterandons? How much of this island is themed to a theme park, and how much is just plain theme park themeing? And will anyone ever manage to wrap their mind around these questions, let alone the answers?

Jurassic Park Discovery Center

The Discovery Center remains an impressive piece of construction even as it becomes taken for granted among most of the Island’s visitors. The multi-story battle between a skeletal carnivore and herbivore is even more awesome in person than it was in the film, and the center could almost be mistaken for a branch of the Field Museum. However, the center’s primary shortcoming is its mix of edutainment activities on the lower level, which are skewed more towards the second half of the portmanteau. No self-respecting twelve year-old boy will walk away from here having learned anything new, and because a lot of the activities use custom computer programs that haven’t been upgraded since the late nineties, a sense of tedium can often replace the supposed entertainment value. Best is still the live raptor-hatching show that performs every twenty minutes or so, although I’d imagine the DNA Mixer (which takes facial scans and a ‘blood sample’ to superimpose your genetic makeup onto a dinosaur) can also be sort of amusing if you try it while drunk.

Grade: C

Camp Jurassic

You can get lost exploring in here for hours… okay, maybe lost for one hour, if you insist on scouting out every last trail. The climbing area is a little too idiot-proof to be very much fun for kids or adults (you can thank the lawyers for that), although the subterranean caverns can be a chill place to get away from the heat and humanity for a few minutes, especially when the volcanic hot springs start performing. It’s more exercise than most theme park nerds will ever get elsewhere, so I won’t complain.

Grade: C

Pteranodon Flyers

I’m not sure which is worse: the fact that this ride exists in one of the world’s premier theme parks, the fact that it was duplicated ten years later at an international sister park, or the fact that real human beings were responsible for greenlighting both projects. Daily capacity on this ride is less than some other attractions’ hourly figures, and their solution is to ban anyone over the 48” height maximum who is not the sole possible guardian of a small child. One young lad just a hair over the limit started to break down in tears when he was told he was not allowed to ride with his younger sisters, which I took a perverse pleasure in visualizing this incident being discussed with an analyst years later. My early morning attempt to sweet talk my way onto the ride when they were still cycling empty cars was met with a surprisingly candid and urgent answer: “I personally wouldn’t mind, but you have to understand… Big Brother is always watching us.” Good to know management has at least a few of their priorities straight.

Grade: F

Jurassic Park River Adventure

In terms of story, mood, suspense, and thrills, the JP River Adventure is actually pretty good. Like… really good. Themes of man’s isolated struggle against both nature and technology (“oh no, something has gone wrong!”) are represented over an emotional arc from subliminal wonderment to survivalist terror, effectively affecting audiences within a six minute journey that feels much longer. The opening scenes proceed at a slow and contemplative pace, atypical among theme park attractions, and it helps amplify the contrast with the scream-inducing second half. Perched on the cusp with a tyrannosaur bellowing in our face, the climax feels epic because every second from when we first entered the queue was focused on our inevitable arrival at this moment: you know the boat’s gotta drop just as you know you’ve gotta face the T-rex sooner or later. It’s a basic story well-suited for a theme park ride, but you won’t find it done better anywhere else.

Of course, none of this should come as a surprise given that the ride’s story beats are almost identical with the movie. Rather than be entrusted to create an original storyline within the Jurassic Park universe, the designers are simply translators from the cinematic language to a theme park medium where attention spans are compressed and human characters are eliminated as pesky distractions from the beautiful action. It’s not like anyone watched Jurassic Park for the interpersonal drama, right? The trick to a successful synergy isn’t to make theme park attractions more like movies, it’s to make movies that are more like theme park attractions, and in the case of this franchise it worked.

Grade: B+

Toon Lagoon

It’s colorful, wacky, phantasmagoric, and funny. Everything a theme park should be, right? Praise for Toon Lagoon’s “attention to detail” means something slightly different here than in other themed environs; it’s not the detailed authenticity of fake rock strata that leaves us awed, it’s the quantity of sight gags and one-liners the artists and writers had to devise that staggers the mind. With nearly eighty different characters represented on this island it could possibly take someone an hour just to read through Toon Lagoon.

Yet as one of three islands based on two-dimensional illustrations it suffers from some of the same problems of flatness and sterility that plague Seuss Landing and Marvel Superhero Island, especially when the paint starts to fade or crack even the tiniest amount. However, I’d say it’s largely more successful than the other two because the wide variety of contrasting artistic styles, most of which are presented simply as a larger-than-life Sunday paper edition, means we’re not asked to inhabit a singular fictional universe. Around every corner you can still get a laugh (okay, maybe a grin, seeing as most of the licenses are from the generation-ago King Features) without the suspension of disbelief ever entering the aesthetic equation. No, it doesn’t simulate “total immersion” very well, but as long as the four adjectives that opened this capsule review hold true, few foamers will ever care.

The biggest drawback to Toon Lagoon is that there are only two major attractions anchoring this area, and both are extremely soaking water rides (hence “Lagoon”). My rule is that if I do water rides I do them back-to-back in the hottest part of the afternoon so I’ll only have to dry out once afterward. Resultantly, this island has the lowest overall repeat value for me, and tends to be the most overlooked section in a day at Islands of Adventure.

Dudley Do-Right’s Ripsaw Falls

Universal differentiates themselves from competitors by selling storytelling, in roller coasters, dark rides, effect shows, and water attractions. Yet their roller coasters are all generic or randomly sequenced with the story stopping shortly beyond the stations, and the shows and dark rides… well, I point to Sindbad, Forbidden Journey, et al. This leaves the one category that Islands of Adventure unequivocally shines above the competition to be their water attractions. Like on the JP River Adventure, narrative action mixes relatively well with the ride hardware on Ripsaw Falls, using a typical Snidely Whiplash kidnapping saga to underscore the thrills of the big drops and to keep us entertained on the normally dull bits of a log flume. However, compared to Jurassic Park’s mastery of integrating narration with water, the story is a quite a bit busier (and, honestly, more confusing), while the emotional range is much narrower, befitting its Saturday morning cartoon show origins. In spite of some special effects that haven’t aged as gracefully as the rest of the park, there are a couple steep drops (and more) that appeal most to coaster enthusiasts which are what have helped keep Ripsaw Falls’ ranking high in the annual water attraction polls. Plus, from the bridge it offers one of the most iconic photo op locations in all of Islands of Adventure.

Grade: B-

Popeye and Bluto’s Bilge-Rat Barges

There’s a fine art to dumping a gallon of water down the back of someone’s shirt on a rapids ride. During the ride people try to protect themselves from getting wet as much as possible, but they’ll also be very disappointed if they return to the unload platform bone dry. Balancing these contradictory desires to create the most satisfying overall outcome requires a great deal of strategy on behalf of the designers. There are rules: it can’t be arbitrary, it can’t come from a single source, it must fit the narrative arc of the themed storyline, it must be distributed among riders equitably yet not necessarily equally, and it can’t feel like a form of sadism. By the last rule, I mean that the dumping of water down shirts should appear to happen as if it were a spontaneous act of the gods, not as if some engineer decided to lock us into place and hold us under a waterfall for five seconds. Just as in Shakespeare, where man simultaneously has free command over his actions and yet is inexorably tied to his fateful demise, on a water attraction we must feel as though it’s within our power to stay dry, even though subconsciously we know that we’re fated to our ultimate soaking.

Although it started promisingly, Popeye and Bluto’s Bilge-Rat Barges faltered in the final act when the lift hill dragged us under several water spouts that got a few people in unlucky positions really soaked (and nothing they could do about it), and then the climactic drop finale it had been building to failed to get anyone on our raft wet. As for the storyline, just replace all the roles from Dudley Do-Right with their equivalent from the Popeye comics, and add a sprinkle more confusion from the spinning while removing the roller coaster drops, and that’s Bilge-Rat Barges for you.

Grade: C+

Marvel Superhero Island

The problem with theme parks themed to urban areas is that they can never replicate the scale of real cities, and most of us, if we don’t live in a city, are familiar enough with them that the comparison is unimpressive. I like the over-the-top Art Deco flourishes around Marvel Superhero Island and the pop-culture energy that gives the island its pulsing lifeblood, but at the end of the day this is the one part of the park that most closely resembles the average Six Flags. Most of the superheroes you’ll see are either 2D cutouts oddly affixed on the front of the buildings, or a scrawny dude in a Spiderman Halloween costume.

Doctor Doom’s Fearfall

Twin stock S&S turbo shots. If the line is more than fifteen minutes long it’s good for only one of two people: those who have never ridden a turbo shot before, or the obsessive fanatics who have ridden copies a hundred times before, and are interested in the little thematic flourishes Universal used to dress it up before it takes off and you’re given a bird-eye view of the theme park’s storage lot. Keeping the towers hidden from eyesight but not earshot prior to boarding is a neat psychological trick, but after the fraction of a second of weightlessness is over as we wait for the compressed air chambers to empty, I’m twiddling my thumbs and thinking how much I’d rather be riding the Hulk (although not the Accelatron).

Grade: D+

The Amazing Adventures of Spiderman

Perhaps the thing I dislike most about the Forbidden Journey is now all theme park hipsters (relatively speaking) can look cool by saying they still think Spiderman is the  best dark ride at Universal Studios. And they’d be right. Especially with the 2012 digital upgrades, Spiderman is a much better ride than Harry Potter… but I still find it somewhat overrated. This is the best narrative-based dark ride (featuring characters and a plot, and not simply a sequence of events) in the entire world, possibly thanks to its comic book origins. Comics and dark rides seem like they’d go hand-in-hand with each other, as both have to communicate a short story using an arranged sequence of static visual images that draw the eye through in a certain way. The translation process from one medium to the other seems far more natural in a theme park setting than, say, live-action film, and the fact that there are many superhero comics (or graphic novels, if that’s the politically correct term) regarded as great pop-art makes me optimistic that dark rides might make the same claim one day soon.

The problem is, even though the story is quite strong compared to other dark rides, compared to established storytelling media it’s rather primitive and even laughable, barely rising above the level of a bad Saturday morning cartoon show. Spiderman is reduced to a background character who only shows up at the beginning and end to give a few lame one liners, there are four villains when one would have been sufficient for the narration to advance, and the dramatic action must stop cold for a long section in the middle so each member of the crowd can get some individual screen time coupled with a special effect gag. Sequences that could be randomly rearranged or even cut with no impact on the rest of the story are a big red flag that the writing isn’t as tight as it should be. Things start to cook when the anti-gravity gun is turned on us, but the resolution to this sequence is a total cop-out by the writers, going from certain death to victory in a couple of seconds with no real struggle apparently involved. The reason the ride has so much emotional impact I think is attributable simply to the concrete aesthetic presence, the fact that the story takes a highly visceral form we’re not accustomed to. The ride is undoubtedly a great technical achievement that conveys an immense sense of scale, unsurprising given the budget. However, the most important rule any other artist working in a narrative-based medium has to follow is “story first”, and the Amazing Adventures of Spiderman, burdened under too much technology and stimulating viscera, made story a secondary or even tertiary concern.

Grade: B-

The Incredible Hulk

“I think, I think this time it’s going to work. Uh oh… NOOOOOO!!!” Evidentially Dr. Banner and I were thinking the exact same thing, although for slightly different reasons. Of the mainstream superhero characters the Hulk has always been a favorite amongst pop-art connoisseurs for his tragic antihero origins, creating a modern Jekyll and Hyde persona in which the battle against one’s own dualistic inner nature is as dangerous as the massive physical battles against the outside world. It’s a rich character for experienced storytellers to work with, and there are glimmers of this potential partially glimpsed while waiting in line. But then we board the attraction and this potential is wadded up and thrown out in favor of yet another “oh no, something has gone wrong!!!” reaction to technological development. The story effectively ends with the launch tunnel since not much narrative progression in a roller coaster circling around an empty lot, although I suppose something could be said about the catharsis after an adrenal release tying into the Hulk’s story… I’m skeptical many people would read that deeply anyway.

The big technological innovation that sets the Hulk apart is the upward launch tunnel, but this was misplaced at the beginning of the ride because usually B&M coasters are pretty exciting for the first few maneuvers anyway… it’s in the second half when they need a creative team to make something new that will keep it unpredictable and engaging. Instead the opposite is the case, with both Universal and B&M frontloading all their best ideas while responsibility for the final thirty seconds feels like it was handed off to a low-ranking engineer who grinded out a layout configuration the night before their deadline to send it to fabrication. It gets the job done, but so much more was possible with this coaster.

Grade: B

Summary

Is Islands of Adventure the landmark in theme park innovation it claims to be? Maybe, but it relies more on technological innovation than creative innovation, when it needed to be the other way around.

Overall Grade: C+

Next: Universal Studios Florida

Universal’s Islands of Adventure Photo Journal

March 1st, 2012 | Tags: , , , , , , , , | Category: Universal's Islands of Adventure | 7 comments