Happy Birthday to Me

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

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