Aug
2
Two years ago, a section of the Universal Studios backlot caught fire, and the King Kong attraction on the tram tour burned to the ground. It was a wonderfully analog part of the Universal tour. The tram would enter a soundstage and cross a bridge that’s being attacked by the 30-foot-tall ape with banana breath. It wasn’t anywhere near as high-concept as the now-defunct Kongfrontation ride at Universal Orlando, where gondola riders are being evacuated from Manhattan during a lengthy Kong attack. But the attraction at Universal Studios Hollywood was always like visiting an old friend. Well, until it was reduced to ash anyway.
After the studio got over its initial reticence to rebuild the attraction, Universal drafted filmmaker Peter Jackson, who’d directed the bloated 2005 remake of “King Kong,” to work some of his magic on a brand new encounter with the big hairy ape. And now, some two years later, Kong has returned to the backlot tour in style in “King Kong 360 3D.”
I have an annual pass for Universal Studios, and I happened to be in the neighborhood last Saturday. So, I bounced over to the park and got in line for the backlot tour. Before the Kong attraction was added, the wait time usually hovered around 15 to 20 minutes. I stood in line for over an hour and a half this time. It was insane. But, it was worth it.
“King Kong 360 3D” is better than I expected, and I expected one hell of a ride to begin with. Jackson’s “King Kong” is a seemingly interminable film. But, to the director’s credit, the King Kong action in the movie is spectacular. The ride at Universal is on par with the bone-crunching and vertigo-inducing chaos from the film, as the tram is attacked by Tyrannosaurus Rexes (or V-rexes or whatever the hell) before Kong swoops in to save the day. The 3D effects are astonishing. The tram enters an auditorium with an IMAX screen on either side, making it seem as though you’re actually on a Skull Island safari. Once all hell breaks loose, you feel the impact as the tram’s attacked by hungry dinos that rip and tear at the vehicle before Kong comes to the rescue. He hurdles the tram (twice), and beats the snot out of the thunder lizards; you can actually feel them hissing and spitting on you.
Because the action’s happening all around you, it’s impossible to take it all in during your first trip through. The tour guide even said that different cars have slightly different experiences. Had the tram tour not been closed for the day by the time we got back, I might’ve gone again. It’s now my favorite attraction at the park, even trumping “Jurassic Park: The Ride.”
Welcome back, King Kong.
-Brad Lohan
Jun
3
The Walt Disney World College Progam
Filed Under Theme Parks | 1 Comment
A friend of mine called me the other day and asked me about the underground city that’s beneath Disney World. Well, it’s technically not a city. It’s a network of tunnels. And it doesn’t run beneath all of Disney World, since the property covers something like 440 acres. The Utilador only exists beneath the Magic Kingdom. It’s hardly a city. It’s more like a ginormous sub-basement. In the Utilador, there are giant tubes attached to the ceiling where garbage is transported from one end of the park to the other with the help of huge fans. It also has a commissary, men’s and women’s locker rooms and a vending machine that sells black socks. All Disney Cast Members must wear black shoes and socks!
So how do I know all of this? Well, ten years ago, I signed up for the Walt Disney World College Program and spent the summer of 1999 wearing pleated yellow polyester pants and dealing with sub-humanoids who wouldn’t know how to have fun if it jumped up and bit them on the nose.
I could probably fill a book with all the weirdness that took place during my two and a half month tenure at the Mouse. It’s a whole ‘nother world. There were some truly emotionally stunted human beings who worked at the park. I briefly dated this one gal who would pour Kool-Aid powder into straight Vodka and drink it like that. Angels with a broken wing are awesome!
All the college interns, including myself and that drunkie I just told you about, lived in Vista Way, an apartment complex on the Disney property. I didn’t know this beforehand, but apparently Vista Way had been recently voted the #1 place for college students to hook-up by readers of “Playboy” magazine. You’d think that Disney interns would be the most boringly G-rated lameos in the state of Florida. And you would be wrong. The first night I was there, six dudes were sent home for throwing a wild party in their apartment. One of them even punched a hole in the wall.
I lived in a three-bedroom apartment with five other guys. They were pretty easy to get along with for the most part. They drank and partied, but didn’t put holes in anything. None of them really knew what to do with me. At 19, I was even more difficult to get along with than I am now. I was a teetotaler, too, something that blew them all away. Virtually everyone I met at Vista Way had a fake ID; a gal from Long Island even had one that said she was younger because she was creeping up on 30.
It wasn’t just drinking and partying at Vista Way. No, there was an educational component to the WDW Program. Once a week, we all had to drag ourselves out of bed at sparrow fart to sit through another insufferable seminar on how Disney does business. The only thing I learned from those seminars that I can remember to this day was how to tie a tie. The seminars were a slog, three hours of the most thuddingly dull and blatantly obvious ways of conducting business.
The worst of the worst, the most miserable seminar I ever had to sit through was “Traditions.” It was an epic, 8-hour introduction to the magical world of Disney that every Cast Member has to endure when he or she is first hired. I think it’s in violation of Geneva Conventions, it’s so torturous.
Interestingly enough, the day I had to do “Traditions,” I was operating on about 2 hours of sleep. I’d gone to Pleasure Island (which sounds like a strip joint until you realize it’s named after a place in “Pinocchio”) with that drunkie girl the night before and danced the night away in a country-western club. At any rate, I was dead tired and drank large amounts of coffee during the first endless hour of “Traditions.” It’s been a decade since I’ve had a cup of coffee. The last time I did was during “Traditions.” See, I learned something about myself that day: coffee makes me blow mud.
At one point during “Traditions,” we visited Fantasyland in the Magic Kingdom. It was then that I realized I had to get something done on paper…like now. I popped into one of the restrooms near the Dumbo ride and broke one of the litany of dumbass rules Cast Members must abide by: we can’t make in the Guest restrooms. Fortunately, I was not sent home with the dudes who smash through walls. But I’ve since learned a valuable lesson about drinking coffee.
Lots of people went home early during the program. It’s hard to imagine — at least it was for us — that working at Walt Disney World — wasn’t anywhere near as much fun as being one of the sunburned troglodytes we had to deal with everyday. Our roles insulted our intelligence, the pay was low ($5.85/hr) and some kids got homesick. I hated it. I was an Attractions Host, a fanciful way of saying “ride operator,” and worked the Peter Pan Ride, Cinderella’s Carrousel, the Dumbo Ride and corralled people into an auditorium for the Lion King puppet show.
Sometimes I’d be rotated out of Attractions Hosting and have to work the Electric Light Parade. Holy effing shit, I’d rather chew broken glass than ever do that again. Mind you, I wasn’t in the parade. I was a poor schmendrick trying to make sure people didn’t stand in places where there weren’t supposed to. People would show up the moment the parade was scheduled to begin and find themselves without a place to watch the dazzling floats go by. So they’d go stand in the crosswalk area that I’d been trying to keep clear for, oh, the past three hours. Then they’d be mad at me for asking them to move.
I remember that I consciously began speaking in a deeper register while I was working at Disney World because people tend to do what you tell them if you sound all manly.
The whole experience wasn’t a complete bust. I did meet a girl — not the drunkie girl, but another girl — about a month into the program that I really hit it off with. She was a creative type, like me, and I don’t know how I would’ve made it through the rest of the experience without her. In hindsight, I’ve come to realize she was a Socialist to her very core. However, not knowing much about politics at the time, all her rantings went over my head. She and I tried to keep our relationship going after the program ended. She lived about 7 hours away by car in the Land of Potatoes. Things eventually fell apart, as long distance relationships often do.
Ten years later, I still think about my summer in Orlando from time to time. It wasn’t all bad. Being a Cast Member meant that I could get into any of the four parks (The Magic Kingdom, EPCOT, The Disney-MGM Studios and Animal Kingdom) for free. And I got a discount at the local AMC with my Disney ID. As such, I saw “The Phantom Menace” more times than any rational human being should. But in retrospect, I’m glad I did it. I still managed to have some fun in spite of myself. Hell, I even went back for another four months in the winter of 2000.
-Brad Lohan
Oct
5
Halloween Mediocre Nights
Filed Under Cult Films, Movies, Theme Parks | Leave a Comment
Last year and the year before that, I had an excellent time at Universal Studios’ Halloween Horror Nights. This year, not so much. Like many of the horror movies the event is based upon, it had some good moments, but at times it was a bit too draggy or simply downright boring.
I went with a buddy of mine from work, which was definitely a saving grace. I hadn’t minded being alone so much the previous two years, since it’s a little scarier that way. This time around, I probably would’ve lost my damn mind, not having anyone to B.S. with between some of the more tepid attractions.
Now, don’t get me wrong. There were some great mazes; Friday the 13th: Camp Blood, A Nightmare on Elm Street: Home Sweet Hell, and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre: Back in Business were all top notch. Beyond that, the only other really good reason to go is the elaborate theming and the chainsaw-wielding costumed characters who lurk in every corner of the park. I loved walking through the section of the Upper Lot that’s made to look like a zombie plague has broken out, or seeing the bullet-riddled, reanimated corpse of Tony Montana from “Scarface” shambling around.
I was just let down by the stunt show, “SlaughterWorld 3,” as well as the Backlot Tour — two attractions that I’d love to pieces in ‘06 and ‘07. The former felt the third installment of any trilogy, forced and uneven. The latter took us on a walking tour of a portion of the backlot, but the path was teeming with slow-moving, yellow-bellied tourists, making it one incredibly long slog with too few scares. I said at one point, “This feels like the f***ing 405!”
The event is only 4 hours long, an ongoing sticking point for me. It’s a mathematical impossibility to do everything, unless you have a Front-of-the-Line Pass. I still haven’t seen Chucky’s Insult Emporium, though it’s been running for the past three years, because there’s nowhere to fit it in among all the other attractions. In retrospect, we should’ve skipped SlaughterWorld. Of course, it took us 40 merciless minutes to get into the park because security’s tighter than LAX. That was a colossal time-suck, and it was just to walk through a friggin’ turnstile.
What I think Universal should do is admit about half of their usual sellout capacity into the park and host the event on twice as many nights. That would split the wait-times for everything (theoretically) in two. Everyone would have a better shot at doing everything and maybe even some things twice. What’s more, if you do something that’s the pits, you didn’t just flush 45 minutes to an hour of your evening down the toilet.
At any rate, a weaker than usual Halloween Horror Nights is still better than none at all. It’s unrealistic to expect everything to go off without a hitch, I suppose. They’d just raised the bar so high the previous two years, I was hoping for no less than perfection. But just like the churro I ate last night, the event is becoming a little stale.
-Brad Lohan
Oct
3
Staycation Plans
Filed Under Culture, Movies, Theatre, Theme Parks | Leave a Comment
Living in L.A., I often take for granted all the crap there is to do here. I think some of that has to do with the fact I work 40 hours a week and have a car that needs more maintenance than any number of girls I’ve dated in the past few years. That said, I don’t often have enough free time or disposable income to enjoy everything Los Angeles has to offer. But, I’ve squirreled away a little cash and requested some time off. Next week, I’m going on “staycation.”
I’ve always been a bit of a homebody. Staycations sort of make sense to me. Some people travel to all sorts of exotic locales for Christmas or Spring Break or Talk Like a Pirate Day. I, however, like sleeping in my own bed, playing with the cat and maybe hitting a theme park that’s just a stone’s throw away. I mean, it’s not like I’m a million miles from vacation hot spots; this city’s lousy with them. That said, Staycations in L.A. are far and away more exciting than the ones I went on in Spokane.
My co-people at work have been asking me what I’ve got planned. So I’ve created an action item list:
10/3 – “The Shining” at the Nuart
10/4 – Halloween Horror Nights
10/5 – “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sunday” at the Groundlings
10/6 – Disney’s California Adventure
10/7 – “Evilspeak” at the Silent Movie Theater
10/8 – Knott’s Halloween Haunt
10/9 – TBA
10/10 – “Clue” at the Nuart
Most of those activities are in the evening, leaving my days open for me to do a whole lot of nothin’. Apart from “The Shining,” “Evilspeak” and “Clue,” there are a half-dozen or so other movies I’d like to check out, too (“Religulous,” “Blindness,” “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist,” “Rachel Getting Married,” “Choke,” “Quarantine” and “Body of Lies”). I’ll have to fit those in somewhere. I’m also about 15 pages into a script I started writing earlier this week; I’d like to keep knocking out a couple pages a day on that leviathan. And I should read at least one book, something angry and political.
I’ll try to keep up on my blog as well. Expect reviews of some of the abovementioned activities and films. Special editions of “Psycho” and “Sleeping Beauty” hit DVD next Tuesday, and yes, I’m going to buy them both because I’m just that weird. I’ll see if I can’t review those.
I seem to have a lot on my plate for my staycation. If I’m not careful, it’s going to start feeling like work.
-Brad Lohan
Aug
13
Happy Birthday to Me
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Happy birthday, Casey Affleck, Bruce Greenwood, Dominique Swain, George Hamilton, Rebecca Gayheart, and John Cazale! Oh, and me as well. August 12th isn’t just any other day for us. No, it’s the day we get cards and presents and cake; well, John Cazale’s dead, so he probably doesn’t. At any rate, it’s our big day.
I took the day off from work. It’s always the pits, having to work on my birthday. So I burned up a floating holiday and went to Universal Studios. I’d been wanting to get some more mileage out of my annual pass. Things started out okay. The Simpsons Ride didn’t have too long a line or anything. No, it was when I got on the Backlot Tour tram that my adventure sorta came off the rails.
I managed to find the one seat where I couldn’t see the motherless TV monitors. I figured it wouldn’t be the end of the world until I realized how often the guide kept saying, “If you’ll look at your monitors…” I would like to point out that I think the monitors on the tram tour are a product of our TV-obsessed culture having lost its already tenuous grip on reality; in fact, people now seem to prefer “reality” TV over actual reality. I just find it a little stupid that even theme park rides have to be equipped with TVs or else people might get bored.
But, with the guide we had for that particular Universal tour, I could understand why some folks might lose interest rather quickly. He didn’t really seem to have his spiel down and kept rattling off bits of trivia that were patently false (“Oscar-winner Paul Giamatti!”) or just plain non-sensical. He said a collapsible bridge was built in the ’70s for TV shows like “The Bionic Woman” and…”Quantum Leap” — a series that debuted in 1989. It made him seem almost like Dr. Manhattan from “Watchmen,” someone who sees the past, present and future occurring simultaneously.
Maybe I’m being nitpicky and a little too hard on the guy. It’s not like all that stuff ruined my afternoon. I just kept finding myself wishing that the tour would just be over, so I wouldn’t have to listen to his misremembered spiel and such tasty morsels of screwed up syntax like “it took three months and a half to build.” “Three months and a half?!” A half of what?
Later I went on the Jurassic Park ride. I noticed that they’d touched up the dinos — each bastard of science had been given a fresh coat of paint — and even added a couple baby Iguanadons. They should’ve also given our watercraft some more oomph. As the boat was making its slow ascent into the Ingen building, it suddenly started moving slower and then even slower, like we weren’t going to reach the top. We ultimately did, but damn, that was an awful feeling, knowing that the ride’s a little “off.” It happened a second time, too, right before the big 80-foot drop. A P.A. system in the building was announcing that the life support systems were going to turn off in ten seconds and began counting down. Well, it got to one, and we were still up there, staring at a curtain of water with a Tyrannosaurs Rex waiting for his cue to burst through it. Finally we were sent plunging out of the building and summarily drenched with gallons of recycled water. For a few seconds there, I never thought we’d make it.
I decided the best way to dry off after Jurassic Park was to sit in an open-air amphitheater and watch the Waterworld stunt show. But I’d missed it by five minutes. Instead I went to see the Terminator 2 3-D show in a dark, air-conditioned auditorium. For those of you who haven’t seen the show, when everything goes as it’s supposed to, it’s pretty awesome. It starts out with stunt performers who look vaguely like characters from the film yelling and/or shooting at each other on stage in front of you. Then Arnold’s stunt double and Eddie Furlong’s stunt double take a time portal to the future — fully clothed, in an unexplained departure from the film series — and the audience watches the real Arnold and the real Eddie Furlong in a short, James Cameron-directed 3-D movie.
Well, it didn’t quite work out as well as it has in the past. The motorcycle that Arnold’s stunt double is supposed to ride on stage broke down before it got to its mark. He had to get off it, collect Eddie Furlong’s stunt double and then they ran off stage together, launching the action into the 3-D movie…where the Terminator and John Conner appear in the future, riding a motorcycle. Okay, it’s a continuity goof. Who cares, right? I guess it wouldn’t have been such a big deal if there wasn’t this giant gaping hole at the bottom of the movie screen that the motorcycle and the stunt doubles astride it are to supposed to pass through when everything’s working properly. The effect is usually covered up by strobe and fog effects before the screen sorts itself out and you in the audience aren’t supposed to see the big friggin’ hole at all. Yet there it was. A black square cutting into the movie. I was afraid that some stagehand wasn’t going to be able to correct it, but it did go away eventually.
I’ve had worse theme park experiences. I remember in ‘99 when I went to the Islands of Adventure theme park in Orlando. The 3-D effects for “The Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man” were on the blink, so our car just went from one room to the next, parked in front of a black screen and shook and shimmied for no particular reason. Nothing that awful happened on my birthday. It would’ve been nice if everything had gone off without a hitch, though.
I wonder how Casey Affleck’s birthday went.
-Brad Lohan
Jun
7
“The Simpsons Ride” at Universal Studios Hollywood
Filed Under TV, Theme Parks | 1 Comment
This review comes a week later than I’d originally intended. Last Sunday, a fire broke out at Universal Studios Hollywood, and the park was closed for the entire day, the same day I’d been planning to go and ride the new Simpsons attraction. The devastation was confined only to the backlot, leveling the “Back to the Future” clock tower, the King Kong attraction from the Studio Tour and a video vault that contained “Knocked Up” and 39,999 other titles from Universal’s film library. Fortunately, duplicate copies of “Knocked Up” are kept in another vault off the property, so scenes with Katherine Heigl making love with her bra still on have not been lost forever. Whew!
Now one of the major regrets of my adult life — one that doesn’t involve women, anyway — is that I didn’t go on the “Back to the Future” ride when I went to Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios in 2006. Had I known the attraction was going to soon be shuttered, I’d have enjoyed it at least one last time. But I thought it’d never close, not in a million years. After all, it’s one of the attractions there that’s actually based on a Universal Pictures movie. I’m looking at you, “Shrek 4-D” and “T2:3-D!”
As it turns out, I’m wrong about a lot of things. And one of them was the fate of the BTTF ride. It was ultimately closed down, and in its place, “The Simpsons Ride” (a 20th Century Fox property for anyone keeping score) was built. I’m a fan of “The Simpsons.” I actually enjoyed the film last summer more than most people, so I wasn’t opposed to the idea of the ride’s existence. I’d just prefer it if they hadn’t put it exactly where one of my long-time favorite rides once stood.
Bitterness aside, “The Simpsons Ride” is great fun. It’s a motion simulator, like BTTF, but it’s also quite possible that it exceeds the quality of BTTF. To be fair, “Back to the Future: The Ride” was something like fifteen years old. It was a little dated, but not quite as primordial as “Star Tours” at Disneyland. Still, an older ride isn’t without its charms. Every time I visit Universal — about once a year or so — I absolutely have to go on “Jurassic Park: The Ride,” an attraction that’s getting a little long in the tooth itself. But I’d boycott Universal for 100 lifetimes if they were ever to shut it down.
At any rate, the two times I went on “The Simpsons Ride” today were absolutely amazing and wowed me enough to no longer begrudge it for taking “Back to the Future: The Ride” away from me. The queue — or the “pre-show area” — is designed to look like Krustyland. You actually enter the line by walking through Krusty the Clown’s mouth on a “red carpet” that’s his unfurled, not to mention kinda squishy, tongue. The queue line is impressive in its detail, stopping short of painting all the tourists yellow to make them authentic-looking Simpsons characters. You really feel like you’re in Springfield. As you’re waiting interminably in line, ceiling-mounted TVs play selected clips from “The Simpsons,” mostly the episode where they go to a theme park and Itchy and Scratchy robots go beserk, a la “Westworld.” There’s also a great scene created for the attraction that explains why the BTTF ride was closed down and replaced by “The Simpsons Ride,” keeping with the show’s brilliant self-awareness.
The ride itself puts you in a car directly behind the Simpsons on a ginormous roller coaster. Sideshow Bob has taken control of the park and has begun wrecking shop. You and the Simpsons are hurled from one Krustyland attraction to the next. It’s impossible to keep up with the amount of jokes that are tossed off or take in all of the fantastic visuals throughout the ride. The video projection is all-CGI, not 2-D hand-drawn animation like the television show. Where it may sound jarring, like the “Homer³” segment in an old “Treehouse of Horror” episode, I think computer graphics make the world more immersive.
Universal may have broken my heart by closing down “Back to the Future: The Ride,” but they could’ve done a lot worse than having “The Simpsons Ride” take its place. That said, they should do something about lowering the price of their Duff energy drink. I’m not a huge fan of energy drinks. I am, however, a huge fan of clever theming and occasionally buy crap in gift shops I should’ve absolutely put back on the shelf. It was north of $5. For 12 ounces of Full Throttle. In a can that said “Duff.”
D’oh.
-Brad Lohan
See “Knocked Up,” now available from Universal Home Video.
Jun
1
Universal Studios Goes Up in Flames
Filed Under Blockbusters, Movies, Theme Parks | 1 Comment
I had been planning on going to Universal Studios Hollywood this weekend anyway. The Simpsons ride had recently opened, and although I’ll never forgive the park developers for putting it where “Back to the Future: The Ride” once stood, I still wanted to check it out. Then this morning, I read on Yahoo that a fire had broken out on the backlot, demolishing sections of the Studio Tour, including the King Kong attraction and the Clock Tower set from “Back to the Future.” Fate has been rather unkind to BTTF of late. And all of this happened because they were filming some dopey commercial.
At any rate, the Universal Studios Hollywood website pushed back the park opening to noon. I hastily bought a ticket online and made off for Universal City. The added value of the park being one ginormous inferno was a strong enough selling point to spice up my Sunday; imagine the photos.
Well, as I got closer to the the parking lot entrance, I found myself already sitting in another parking lot — hundreds of cars at a dead stop, waiting to get in. It turned out that the entrance off Cahuenga was closed altogether. Not wanting to spoil the surprise, the parking lot attendants allowed us to slowly creep towards the entrance and discover for ourselves that it was blocked off by a row of orange cones.
So I got back on the freeway and tried the other entrance off Vineland. It at least appeared to be open. Cars were moving every so often, going somewhere. There I also had a better view of the giant plume of smoke coming from the backlot. When I ultimately got to the intersection right before the parking lot entrance, I asked an attendant if the park was indeed open. He said the it was still closed. Why this was being kept secret was anyone’s guess.
Had my online ticket not been good until December 31st, I would’ve pulled a Clark W. Griswold and forced them to open the park at the barrel of a BB gun. Instead I went to the store and picked up some things I’d forgotten to get last night. Of course, when I got home, I rechecked the Universal Studios Hollywood website. It now said the park had opened at 1, about fifteen minutes after I’d bailed.
I believe Homer Simpson would’ve said, “D’oh.” What I said was NSFW.
UPDATED: According to Wikipedia, the park remained closed for the entire day.
-Brad Lohan