The trouble with a park like Universal Studios is that the movies come and go, and very few of them matter ten years down the road much less twenty or thirty. So they've got to constantly update the rides.
I went to Universal Studios with my family in 1996, and the only ride that can still be found at the present day Universal Studios from the Universal Studios of that previous day is the E.T. ride. Much of the park is constantly out of date.
For example, we went on the Men In Black ride, and my eighteen-year-old daughter admitted that she had never seen Men In Black. Worse yet, the ten-year-old admitted that he'd never even heard of Men In Black.
Men In Black was a huge movie and it had three sequels (way more than most movies), but none of the sequels were good, and young people just aren't into the movies anymore. Needless to say, the ride wasn't particularly impressive to either of them, because they didn't know the context at all.
Weirdly, they removed the Back to the Future ride and replaced it with a Simpsons ride, despite Back to the Future still having much more cultural relevancy than the Simpsons (even though the zombie corpse of the Simpsons still keeps shuffling along on TV every Sunday on Fox).
I don't know if any of us liked the Simpsons ride very much, but I have a lot of nostalgia for the Simpsons, both going back to when I watched it as a teenager and the time that I saw much more of it in reruns while working at a Fox TV station.
I really liked all the buildings that they created from the town of Springfield. So, while the kids were riding the Kang & Kodos' Twirl 'n' Hurl and my wife was relaxing on a bench after a long day of slogging through the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, I walked around and got selfies at all the fun things they had to offer. Like the Kwik-E-Mart.
And Duffman.
And Moe's Tavern.
And the Krusty Burger.
And the comic book shop.
And the Lard Lad Donuts guy.
But the kids just walked right past all of that stuff without even giving it second looks. But then my son saw a replica of the DeLorean from Back to the Future, and insisted that I take a picture of him with it.
I guess they didn't get rid of everything from the Back to the Future ride when they swapped it out. Seems to me like they need to swap it back in, though, if they want people to be more excited to be there.
Far worse than the Simpsons, though, is that they have a kids land filled with such contemporary cartoon characters as Woody Woodpecker and Popeye.
Even crazier, they have a whole area dedicated to that craze that is sweeping the nation, you guessed, I'm talking about Sunday morning newspaper comic strips! Yeah, we just walked right past that. The kids didn't ask us to stop to see the Blondie stuff, or the Beetle Bailey stuff, or even the Sally Forth stuff.
We did, for some reason, decide to stop and ride the Popeye ride. It's called the Popeye & Bluto's Bilge-Rat Barges. Yes, it's a water ride.
There was no good reason for us to ride that ride, but on Friday afternoon, we decided to pull out our ponchos that we used a few days earlier (they smelled a little funky after spending days folded up wet in my wife's bag), and got on the boat ride that exists for no other reason than to get you wet.
It did its job too. This one was more effective at getting us wet than the water ride in the Animal Kingdom park or even the rain was on our day at Hollywood Studios. Better yet, my daughter decided that she didn't want to wear her poncho (because they smelled bad and were still a little moist from the last use). She, of course, got it the worst.
Why did we do that? What about this ride was worth being all wet in February? It was a bad idea. We walked around the rest of the day all wet, particularly our shoes. My wet shoes gave me a blister that I had to cover with Band-aids to be able to stand walking around on Saturday.
Another thing that still exists from when I went to Universal in the nineties is the diner.
While not a ride, it is a point of reference from those days to now. My son liked the old cars around the diner far more than he liked the Simpsons. He insisted that I take a picture of him leaning against each and every one of them.
Our favorite area aside from the Harry Potter stuff was Jurassic Park. This was mostly because of the velociraptor roller coaster, which in typical marketing style is shortened to the VelociCoaster. This was a really fun roller coaster.
Everybody really liked it, and I even fit in it, which is always a plus for me. Although the last time we rode it, I kept coming out of my seat on the hills and I wondered if I really did fit it or not. I didn't fly out and die, though, so I guess all is well.
My son particularly like the activities inside the building that was made to look like the Jurassic Park visitor center from the movie. After four, five, and even six days of walking around amusement parks, we were happy to sit on the benches in the activity center and let him play. Unfortunately, he's a social kid, and wanted to share what he'd been doing with us, so we never got to sit on the bench for long before he was calling us over.
Our other favorite was the Marvel Super Hero Island. The Hulk coaster was really good, and we rode it several times. My daughter said that on one of the times we rode it she started blacking out a little bit...seeing black around the edges of her vision. I think they call that greying out. I guess the roller coaster pulls too many Gs for her or something.
They had a Dr. Doom drop tower that the kids went on their own without my wife and I, and all around the area, the buildings were adorned with comic book drawings of Marvel characters.
I thought it was so weird that a Marvel area existed in the Universal Studios park while no such thing was a part of any Disney park. Especially considering that Disney bought Marvel three years earlier than they bought Star Wars. There's already a Star Wars section of the Disney parks, but no Marvel section yet, even though Marvel is arguable a good deal more popular these days.
An internet search reveals that the area opened at Universal Studios in 1999, ten years before Disney bought Marvel. For the time being, there's a contract Disney needs to honor. I'm sure when it runs out, however, it will not be renewed, and the Hulk coaster will have to be the Superman coaster or something like that...oh wait, I think the rights to the Hulk are owned separately. Who knows? Rights to intellectual properties are complicated and nasty. Disney may never get to open a real Marvel park.
One other roller coaster the kids really liked was the Hollywood Rip Ride Rockit. It was a fun ride with lots of loops and dives to keep you screaming. I tested the seat outside of the ride, and found that it was most likely that I wouldn't fit, so when they rode the ride, I found something else to do.
The last day at Universal, the kids went to ride the Rip Ride Rockit again, and I waited outside for them, and was surprised by a parade coming through where I was sitting. It was too bad that my son wasn't around, because the parade was not really for me. They had minions and more from Despicable Me.
While I didn't hate Despicable Me, I wasn't much of a fan. I do, however, despise minions and their over-saturation in TV, movies, and general culture. I just wish they would go away, not parade down the street in front of me.
They followed it up with SpongeBob SquarePants, which I've also never liked.
SpongeBob might annoy me, but at least it was big enough to be worth noticing. The next float was from the movie The Secret Life of Pets, which was never even relevant enough to make the effort of disliking.
They followed that up with a much bigger show, a cultural touchstone of its own, Dora the Explorer.
Too bad my daughter was in line at the Rip Ride Rockit. She was a big fan of Dora when she was younger, and still has a lot of nostalgia for the show. It doesn't hold such sentiment for me though, and I was the only one watching the parade. I just kind of felt sad that not one of the properties they showcased was something I appreciated.
Instead, I narrated the parade via texts to my wife, sending her the pictures you see above. She had no idea, however, because she was in line next to a thundering roller coaster, and never heard the text tones for any of my messages.
That grand parade is the last thing I have pictures from, and I believe that means it was the last thing we did at Universal. Our flight left for Houston a few hours later, and in no time we were back home again.
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