Some of you may be skeptical of my equating the Universal Studios Tour with the mythical hellplanet maintained by DC Comic’s uber-badguy, Darkseid. So I admit right off the top, that there are perhaps not Lakes of Fire ™ into which the insufficiently profligate tourists are cast, in which they writhe and burn until such time as they surrender their Visa and MasterCard numbers to the cashier, thence to be laden down with bulky plastic sacks of made-in-China souvenir crapola … but said Lakes of Fire ™ are surely on a PowerPoint Presentation somewhere in The Black Tower of NBC/Universal.
Sample dialogue: "Say Bob, can we get some numbers on what kind of uptick we can expect once we implement the secuestration and torture segment on the adults standing in the Shrek 4-D line? I mean, the electric bills for warming up the hot irons are going to be a significant fixed expense … what? No, we can’t go with coal-fired braziers. We made a commitment to "Go Green" this year. You don’t want the treehuggers all over us, right?"
I wouldn’t mind it so much, if there weren’t constant blaring marketing messages at VOLUME LEVEL ELEVENTY-JILLION coming at you from speakers fiendishly concealed in every flat, level surface. I really want to bring in one of my audio-expert friends to check this out – record it, and try to zeef out all the noise and music until we get down to the subliminal messages that I just know are there… probably something to do with flickering images of The Pirate Bay on our retinas along with short blast of 11hZ sound waves to instill intestinal-deep panic at the thought of using BitTorrent to download Universal products illegally.
The park has changed since the first time I went there in the early 90s. Back then it was still a total shuck&jive to fleece tourists out of their coin, but at least here and there, it had a kind of cheesiness that, well, I don’t know – at least it seemed a little more authentic then. There were parts of it that were interesting to people like me, who grew up worshipping movies and wanting to know more about the process of making them. The tram rides actually stopped a couple of times, you got out, walked around, got to go thru a few soundstages, saw actual actors kicking back and smoking (horrors!) and heard the guides point out what a grip was, and how the old-time directors used their ingenuity and camera angles to make the same cheap-ass building fronts look like four totally different towns.
That’s all been replaced by this:
This is a shot from the Jurassic Park splash ride – which in summer months, might be a refreshing change from the oven-like heat of The Valley, but on a chilly December afternoon, is like being waterboarded in Antarctica.
This is the part where they pretend they’re dropping a truck on your head.
Shortly after this, giant mechanical T-rexes rear up and try to chomp down on the little raft.
I dunno – maybe it’s because my first time at the Universal tour, we got to get out of the trams and wander around on the set of Back to the Future II, where they had transformed the familiar City Square into the hover take-off and landing zone seen in the movie.
Maybe it was the fact that all the parking lots were empty there. The writer’s strike has hollowed out the back lot; there are maybe three shows still running on the fumes of the scripts wrung out of the exhausted writers during the summer.
My next post (and I know I’ve been terribly neglecting this blog, but a month of travel and a week of playing tour guide will do that) will be about the evidence, literally in My Own Back Yard, of how the writer’s strike is having a much bigger ripple effect on L.A. than has been noticed in the regular media.