Podcast
Universal’s Florida Foreshadowing and the Road to Diagon Alley
Join theme park experts Jim Hill and Len Testa as they walk through the gates of Universal Studios Florida for a fascinating look at the park’s architecture, design philosophy, and evolutionary history. In this episode, the duo explores everything from the counterintuitive layout of the park’s Hollywood and New York backlots to the top-secret, game-changing expansion plans for Diagon Alley. Along the way, they share incredible, behind-the-scenes stories about Michael Eisner’s early involvement, Steven Spielberg’s legendary contract deals, the technical failures of opening day in 1990, and a canceled “Tooniversal” theme park that almost brought Batman and the Looney Tunes to Central Florida.
Universal’s Florida Foreshadowing and the Road to Diagon Alley Transcript
Len Testa: It’s another beautiful day here in downtown Orlando. I’m at Universal Studios with Jim Hill. This is another edition of the unofficial guide Disney Dish podcast with Jim Hill. Jim, welcome to Universal Studios Orlando. Nice to be back here. It’s nice. So we just walked through the entrance turnstiles, a very, Disney-esque experience all the way from the greeting to the ticket prices.
Jim Hill: Well, yeah, that’s again the complimentary defibrillator for those of you who’s like, how much for two days? You know, two parks, one day. So it’s $120 per adult to get in for one day for two parks. Good Lord.
Len Testa: All So where are we at now, Jim? We’re walking down a street here. We’ve got a…
Jim Hill: walking up Plaza of the Stars and we have our option of going up. I believe that’s Hollywood Boulevard there. Oh, excuse me, Rodeo Drive. directly across the way here is… it’s kind of interesting. Universal now actually has characters of its own. It doesn’t have to license. this is the Despicable Me redo of… well, it started off live as the Hanna-Barbera ride and then became the Jimmy Neutron-Nictune Blast. This is… actually, it’s been the home of some really fun simulator attractions. The word on Despicable Me is it’s going to be as fun if not more fun. But they’re little. This is Gru’s house they’re building outside here. You are going to go into Gru’s house and into his lair and hang out with the minions. It’s going to be very, very cool. this is the building, the first, I guess, main show building that you see on the left hand side, stage 42 as you’re going down the street. One of the things I noticed about the street too is that it’s not organized in a way similar to, say, Main Street. There is no camera shop. there’s no camera shop, know, stuff that you need for your day coming up on the right? No, absolutely. In fact, what’s interesting about Universal is right from the get-go, in fact, when Sid Sheinberg put this project into the works, this was a working movie studio that people could visit. So the idea was, I for example, you look here at Rodeo Drive, the road curbs, so you know, that you have a way to take shots here without it looking like, wait a minute, you’re trying to fake California in Florida.
I mean, there’s… and what’s kind of interesting is of course they’ve since stepped away from that idea. So, you know, but they’ll still clinging to the design of the park itself. Still keys off of that. but here you see it’s not the cute little Disney buildings, you know, it’s full-size facades. There’s two stories pretty much everywhere. Again, sort of a big Hollywood 1930s theme to this. But what’s fascinating again is because both Disney and Universal, in fact, the kind of controversial aspect of the history of this project was that Michael Eisner, when he was the head of Paramount, actually in 81, when Universal, I mean, Universal bought the land to build this place in 79. They spent $13 million on a chunk of land here.
Len Testa: Wow.
Jim Hill: But they were, in fact, really what’s kind of bizarre is they… If Sid Cheyne, or excuse me, if Lew Wasserman had been willing to pay $50,000 more in 1976, he could have had SeaWorld.
Len Testa: For $50,000?
Jim Hill: It was literally the bid. It was one of these situations where Sid didn’t like to bid. He made a price and SeaWorld came back and said, we have another buyer and can you bump up your bid a bit? And it’s like, I don’t bump up bids. And so that’s how SeaWorld went to Harcourt Brace Yovanovitch. And you know, Sid, excuse me, Lou, regretted that for the rest of his life. Anyway, just a quick note again, there’s such duplication of effort. mean, this is… walking past Universal’s version of the Brown Derby restaurant. Brown Derby hats, sorry. But again, there were two Brown Derby restaurants in Hollywood. And this was the more goofy design. And this is the one that Universal grabbed. It’s an actual hat.
Len Testa: So we’re walking down, this is Rodeo Drive.
Jim Hill: Yep.
Len Testa: Again, you’ve got the sort of 1930s, 1940s feel to it. The road curves to the left and then runs parallel to the other road, looks like.
Jim Hill: But again, it’s just fascinating to watch how they use the same playbook. mean, again, going with, know, Disney Hollywood Studios has the camera shop and that sort of thing. And here we’re walking by Schwab’s drugstore, you know, famous for supposedly where Lana Turner got discovered. Well, anyway, to get to the controversial story what ends up happening is that is there is that uh… at paramount they’re looking for financial partners and if they have a meeting in nineteen eighty one but to this day michael eiser swears he was an ad but i said i mean that he swears he’s not. it was not right but other people are said look it was the jack webb building i remember he was across the table from he asked a lot of questions and you he get a lot of informed questions about what was going into this park. And so now, jump ahead, 84, Michael Eisner is now in charge of the Walt Disney Company. And in 85, he announces, hey, we’re doing a studio. And Universal was like, what? And there was this weird moment, because they knew that Eisner knew all of their plans. He’d seen it a couple of years ago.
Len Testa: Yeah.
Jim Hill: And more to the point, Lou was still kind of, well, do we not? Do we do this? And what ends up happening is Universal actually reaches out to Disney and says, okay, we know you’re meeting without the studios because you need things for the studio. How about we go in together? We’ll do the Disney Universal Studio attraction. know, Disney sort of walks around and kicks the tires and then opts to go with MGM. Because again, as we talked about. MGM. Yeah, it’s cheaper in the long run.
Len Testa: How long did it take them to say yes to that MGM thing? Were they like, yeah, we’ll get back to you in a week? was it, okay, I’ll sign that deal right now. But you’re the junior assistant to the janitor. Look, I know we’re good here.
Jim Hill: That’s right. Just grab the paperwork. But again, talk about duplication effort. We have the darkroom. And it’s the same sort of look to the darkroom. It’s got the same sort of font, I think. It’s bigger here than… In studios, it’s one story, right? But yeah, I get it. But again, that’s the Disney went with the intimate scale to replicate Disneyland and universal went with full scale because they’re gonna get they were playing or shooting movies here. So this is their this is their main street.
Len Testa: Yep, and but interestingly you don’t directly walk on it.
Jim Hill: No.
Len Testa: Entering the park gets sort of off to the right. There is so much counterintuitive design here. And again the theme park people bumped up against the studio people left and right here because it’s sort of like, where can we put our attractions? Well, really, really deep in the park. And you know, it’s like, people need, you know, where’s the weenie? What draws them in? know, and in the case of their main drag, the, you know, the Plaza of the Stars, their weenie was literally a dimensional flat of the New York Public Library.
Len Testa: That draws me to New York. Right there. I want a book. Speaking of weenie, it’s really interesting. we’re at the end of the, sort of the end of the street where it intersects with a of things. And we’re looking around. I really can’t see any icon that jumps out that says, you know, walk towards me.
Jim Hill: No, no, and that again, you will see it’s like the it’s like the animal kingdom when you’re not looking at the tree of life. OK, this will change when we get over to Islands Adventure. That was designed from day one to be a really for real theme park.
Len Testa: Right.
Jim Hill: Again, just you’re going to constantly bump heads here. We’re walking past the horror makeup show. Is that still going on?
Len Testa: It’s it’s a it tends to be done on a seasonal basis, though I noticed that we have an 1130 start time over there. So, it’s back.
Jim Hill: Again, for a while there they updated that and now it really does sort of hinge off of the classic Universal Monsters. But anyway, let’s walk down to the lagoon where they’re about to do… What were you calling it? The fatalastic illusions… World of color. There we go. so…
Len Testa: This is where they do it?
Jim Hill: Well, yeah. Then now when the park initially opened, they had a Miami Vice stunt show. of a…
Len Testa: Exactly. Racing up and down. You the lagoon here and…
Jim Hill: And now, again, they’re looking to do… based off of the fact that this is Universal’s, literally, Universal Studios’ 100th year of operation. This is a nighttime show that’s going to have all sorts of tribute to all these genres that Universal has made movies of. this will at least give you a sense of… Again, here’s the same thing, same visual confusion. know, where would you want to go, Len?
Len Testa: So we’re in the, we sort of step down into the area right in front of the lagoon. To our right is Bulls Gym, Walgreens Drugs, and sort of the… kind of a, they’re New York area. Now feeding over into San Francisco, for example the Girardelli building. Yeah, but really there’s nothing here that says walk towards me. It looks like it’s just an endless series of… of city streets you can kinda see some show buildings back to the right a little bit but it looks industrial it doesn’t hmm.
Jim Hill: That’s really interesting. I’m not saying it’s bad. It’s just an interesting way of trust me there are some amazing attractions hidden. mean, for example walking down the street that we just came down did you notice that the Terminator 2 3D attraction was back there?
Len Testa: No didn’t notice at all.
Jim Hill: yeah. I mean literally it’s really down the street that we walked on we walked by one of their big, know, large marquee attractions and you walk right by it.
Len Testa: Didn’t even see it.
Jim Hill: Didn’t even see it. mean, wow. And that’s a problem. And again, it kind of makes me crazy because Universal does have all these wonderful attractions that, you know, when you’re in the park, it’s like, well, wait a minute. You know, you’re constantly consulting the map because the building is dressed as an actual set. In fact, if we walk out to the road here. So you can probably see the sign just sticking up. This is great. and I are looking for that Terminator 2 sign. there you go. See the recessed marquee there? T2 3D toward the end of street, right there at the turn.
Len Testa: Yeah, you gotta be kidding me. No. Yeah, we’d never find that. No, but that’s it. That’s it exactly. Wow. Props for making the making the thing look like a city street, but geez, that’s tough to find. All right, so we’re walking past Carmen’s Veranda. And again, Carmen’s Veranda. Get it. You know, the cast members should have fruit on their head. Now, this is their central park area, typically for Halloween Horror Nights. So we dress this. It’s actually with the trees hanging very atmospheric and they’ll typically throw a maze in over here.
Jim Hill: Oh nice, it’s a good place for a maze. They’ve got, they’ve got, um, wrought iron, black wrought iron fences. They’ve got a bunch of trees actually. I guess these trees do pretty well in the Florida, in the Florida climate. But again, idea was to, you chose trees that sold the idea of New York Central Park or a park, you know, against the lake. And, ah. This is really, this is really pretty. This isn’t bad at all. Now we start to get back into attractions, okay? So now we’re walking back towards, so we’ve ended the California area. We’re back towards Animal… Actors?
Len Testa: Right in front of us is the Animal Actors stage. This was an opening day attraction. And actually off to the right here we start to get into the stuff that they were really hoping would drive the bus. The E.T. adventure. One of the things at Universal right off the get-go, they wanted was to be different from Disney. And one of ways they chose to be different from Disney is they cut a deal with Steven Spielberg in 87. up happening was that Stephen, for any attraction that he consulted on, got a very large fee. I mean, you know, an incredibly large fee. As in, he gets 5 % of the gate here. Really.
Jim Hill: Um, again…
Len Testa: 5 %?
Jim Hill: 5 %. So, I just gave Steven Spielberg 5… 6 dollars. 12 dollars for two tickets. But it gets worse than that. He gets 5 % of the plush, gets 5 % of the food, he gets 5 % of everything. Wow. That’s a deal. Now this area is an opening for a bit yet, but you can see the universal Attraction back there. Massive, massive, massive attraction. It still does have a somewhat problematic ride system in that you are literally riding the bikes from the movie. Really? But it has one of the most amazing cues. You literally go in and you’re in a pine forest. again, you’ve got to understand this opened in 1990. Walk inside, it’s dark. and they pumped in the pine scent and you’re making your way along woodland trails and it’s to be honest the queue is I think better than the attraction because then you know you you end up being threatened by FBI agents your bicycle then flies to ET’s planet which evidently rents out to the kids from Small World, you know, so It’s very cute. But the the the big deal At least initially with this attraction is they pretend to you’re going on to a set and so you’re gonna need an ID. So at some point in the attraction you walked up to somebody and said, know Hello, Mike, my name is Len and they type it in they hand you a pass and they say give this to the attendant. And then at the end of the ride, as you’re leaving, know, last scene, here’s, you know, an ET audio animatronic, and he’s like, goodbye, Len. You know, just it names off everybody in her car. And one of the other attractions that this park was famous for was Back to the Future, the ride. And again, another Spielberg thing, another nice check for Steven. But this came on the heels of… Star Tours. In fact, it was kind of interesting that Spielberg, you know, literally talked about, know, hey, I went over with George and I rode Star Tours and it’s cool and couldn’t we do something like that with Back to the Future? And it’s like, okay. And was there a simulator ride that I missed in the story to Back to the I there’s the car, but. Well, that’s yeah, actually you, you literally, got in the DeLorean. In fact, that was what was genuinely charming about this, where as opposed to getting on, you know, the, the Star Tours of Starspeeder, where there’s 30 or 40 of you. With this one, you literally got into the DeLorean. There were eight of you. It was so intimate, you know, and the way they compensated it was literally was an OmniMax dome with off, let’s see, four cars on three different levels, two different domes. any 24 cars, 24 times eight. Yeah. mean, so they’re moving people that way. was an absolute, you know, it, it, it ate people and you know, the sad thing is again, this being the way this industry works. Over time it just you know it it lost popularity and so now we have the Simpsons and We’re walking up on the on the Simpsons land right now. We’re passing the quickie Mart the the iconic quick quickie Mars seriously have not done this right yet. No. Okay, we’re to pause here for a moment because Len has to do this right? is the meanest funniest right it It’s an equal opportunity offender it actually goes after Disney Universal and SeaWorld awesome, so Alright, we’re gonna pause here at the end of this street while we go on the Simpsons ride. We’ll see you guys in a minute.
Len Testa: Hi, this is Len and Jim. We’re back. We’ve just been on the Simpsons ride at Universal, which I’ve got to say is hysterical. The queue alone with all of the Simpsons characters and all of the jokes, especially the theme park jokes, the queue alone is worth a 30-minute wait just to see all of the jokes in the queue. The ride is a typical simulator. Simulators make me little queasy, but it’s really well done. There are probably 100 in-jokes in there in the ride. It was really, really well done. I really liked the cue quite a bit. And again, as a theme park, if you’re a theme park buff, mean, just the stuff they do, for example, in Captain Dinosaur Pirate Rip-Off Ride, if you’re paying attention there, they actually do, they duplicate the exact set from Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean ride. The gimmick is you go backwards through it. You actually start at the auction scene, go under the bridge and come up to the pirate ship. But again, if you just, you know, they turn it around and figure, okay, that’s enough. That’ll satisfy the legal department. The interesting thing though is this was not the first version of the ride. In fact, there was… You remember how Maggie becomes, you know, giant mutated creature that’s during Springfield. That’s a carryover from the first version of the ride. The initial version was actually… It was going to be bring your family to work day at Mr. Burns’ nuclear plant. And you you were going to be riding around on kind of a par go and and you know have this and then eventually you know from the Springfield nuclear power plant bus out into the town you know pursuing Maggie and what ended up happening is while everybody else agreed to come on board for this project Harry Shearer didn’t and he’s the voice of mr. Burns and it was basically one of these situations where I’m willing to do it if you pay me more money and eventually it was like you know, you know, just everybody else was coming in at one fee and everyone else was happy to be on board here and Harry every so often gets obstinate this way. And so it was like, okay, well, then we’ll just do a Mr. Burns free. You know, in fact, you do get to see Mr. Burns briefly in like the last moments of the attraction. He and Smithers go by in a hot air balloon, but then he never actually talks. that’s why? That’s why. um, but, but again, it’s, um, this is, you know, they deliberately packed as many jokes as they could into it. And just to be clear here, this was actually written by the writers of The Simpsons. Work was done on this attraction during the writers’ strike. They were thrilled to be able to take advantage of it. During their downtime, they were able to throw in jokes for the… That’s great. I can’t quite wrap my head around the idea that you haven’t done Men in Black, Alien Attack? I’ve done Men in Black. Okay, so you understand. Again… It’s sort of a Buzz Letyear-esque in the thing. No, very much so. But that coupled with, you know, great theme park jokes, you know, in fact, you know, again, constantly riffing on Disney. Oh, yeah. and even duplicating the towers here from the 1964 New York World’s Fair. It’s actually a pretty well done pavilion here. So we’re walking up on the Men in Black pavilion. It’s definitely got that retro future look to it with arches and sort of angular architecture. The signage and the plants are all sort of what people thought landscaping was going to look like in the 1960s. It’s very well done. The signage actually matches the the design of the landscaping. It’s pretty good. And of course, CNC Music Factory, of course, was one of the things that you had to see back in the future. Very cool. But now, you understand about the multiple ends of this attraction? Yes. All right. There literally is an end where you do become a men in black. I know if I ever got to that point. Well, you know, that you if you’ve actually achieved a high enough score for this, what happens is that the Will Smith character congratulates you, tells you, you know, pick up your suit and then a screen lights up and it’s an audio animatronic tailor who’s like, it’ll be ready Tuesday. Come back. That’s great. So we’re coming up on to what area we’re walking to. You will notice they didn’t kid around about Joe. That’s gone. Oh, it so the job. So we’re looking at straight ahead fear factors on our right I guess that was Amity. Yep. It was a was straight ahead, but now it’s Nothing. Yeah, and more to the point you can actually see the piles of earth that they’ve dug up They’ve dug out, know all of that, know that that’s too what is it 75 tons of concrete that made the lagoon. Wow, so No, this this project. I mean For a project that they haven’t officially announced yet, Universal is moving at warp speed on this thing. is the project? This is going to be Diagon Alley. This is going to be… They’re splitting Harry Potter across the two parks. really? Yeah. This is not a drill. you come here, back here in three years, this will be, in fact, if the stories are true, you will be able to enter through the leaky cauldron. They’ll actually do the wall opening and inside they’ll have all of the shops, you know, where Harry would go to get his books and, know, but more to the point, the Gringotts coaster that, you know, was used to in the final film of the series where you went down deep in the, I think it was used in the first film as well. It’s their new thrill ride. You’re going to… But yeah, they weren’t kidding around. This thing closed on January 2nd. By January 3rd, these construction walls were up. And they have been tearing it down ever since. There’s a lot of infrastructure that went in for for just because it been there since for a long time, right? yeah, no, and in fact, it’s was kind of how this park got its reputation And not necessarily a good one when it opened in June of 1990 I Mean again the whole notion of we’re doing different rides. We’re doing rougher. We’re doing tougher and You know, right and show the company that built the thing ended up They got the stuff loaded in, they didn’t have enough time to do tests and adjust. And so when the park opened up, Jaws didn’t work. King Kong really didn’t work all that efficiently. Earthquake didn’t work. And on opening day, you have three major attractions that people are seeing on billboards as they drive into the park aren’t working. Wow. Yeah, we actually we noted this in the unofficial guide that Universal went with because there were new rides, they went with new technology behind the rides. And to your point, I guess they didn’t have time for a test and adjust. And it just it bit them to the butt. In fact, you know, that was the famous image from the opening day of Universal in June of 1990. People standing in front of the ticket booth screaming for their money back. you know, thankfully again, that was before the age of cell phones. So was just, made the nightly news and it was hard for Universal to sort of reinvent itself, put that, get a reputation to bed. But now, I think if you look at the attractions that they brought into the parks, they have tried significantly in each case to improve. Now, it’s kind of interesting. We’re coming up here. And this is… walking towards the Amity Island Lobster and Smoked Fish Tower. Now, back on the other side of this though is what used to be the earthquake attraction is now known as disaster. this is the really interesting component of the Harry Potter expansion. And evidently it will be basically phase three. Phase three. Phase one was Hogwarts Castle and over in Ireland. Phase two will be Diagon Alley. Phase three will be the Hogwarts Express. Really? The train? The plan is they’re actually going link the two parks. And you’re going to be able to ride the Hogwarts Express in both directions, two different ride experiences. Wow, really? Universal is not kidding, this is… This is really going to become the Harry Potter park? Well, you know, face it. Harry Potter has been such a game changer for Universal between the way attendance is searched at the parks and merchandise sales are just straight through the roof. Oh, that’s great. So why not give them another place to shop and you know, why not give them the experience they really wanted to have, which is again, they want to go to Diagon Alley. They want to ride the Gingkringit’s coaster and they want to ride the Hogwarts Express. So Universal is like, if you’re willing to come here and pay $120 a day for a two park hopper, absolutely. Absolutely. We will give you what you want. That’s right. Anyway, so we’re walking down a street now. Does this street have a name? It looks like San Francisco. Yep, we are now officially in San Francisco. It’s an interesting bit of universal history here. This is Lombard’s Landing. This is their great seafood restaurant. fact, Nemo fans always like to go here because the ornamentation sort of the steampunk interior of the place. It’s 1995 and I’m here at the park with my ex and David Mumford, late Imagineer. And David wanted to come here because again, he’d heard about the Nemo theming. I get up to go use the restroom and the downstairs restrooms are shut down for some reason. They said go upstairs. And the problem is the restrooms aren’t really clearly designated upstairs, so I opened the wrong door and here’s a room on the, you know, on a boardroom table is the model of the yet to be announced expansion, the three billion dollar expansion of the Universal Orlando Resort. And I there and goggle for a moment and go back down and explain to David, again, David the Imagineer. You’re like, what? And again, David was such an honorable guy. You know, was one of these things where he said he went with me up to the the you know, the second floor of the restaurant But could not it’s I can’t if they catch me. I’ll lose my job. I can’t look in and so he literally he stood with his back to the wall I open the door look at it. What do you see? What do you Amazing things, but it was it was literally the design that we know today between the two giant parking structures the the hotels that you know sort of tee off of the You know coupled by the the new park side by side. But again, what was weird is that wasn’t islands. That was the first iteration of Universal’s. really? That was Tooniversal Park. Tooniversal? Well, you see the thing of it was is that Universal, you know, they again, they’d been working here in Florida for five years and they again, they had read, they kind of hit a plateau as to how many guests would come and they realized, you know, by going with all the rough scary rides, we haven’t got the kids and so we need build a companion park that is strictly for kids. it was, and again, another one of these, you know, there but for the grace of God. They cut a deal with Warner Brothers and for, you know, they were gonna get the rights to the entire library of DC characters. So we’re talking Batman, we’re talking Superman. They also were gonna get the rights to all the Warner Brothers characters, the Looney Tunes, the Tiny Tunes. And they literally designed this entire park where, you know, when you walked in, where Marvel Island is now was Metropolis, Batman, and you had, you know, the Hulk coaster was the Superman coaster. And to your right, where Soos’ landing is, you have You have Gotham City and Dark and know you know, sir rides based on the Joker and the penguin and all that and then across the way you know you literally looking out at Looney Tune land and Actually, it could get one of my favorite attractions on the planet that never got built. It was the the Roadrunner roller coaster And had the greatest launch sequence on the planet You literally made your way through the queue, which of course is you know desert and Canyon and this sort of thing right and you get on board a giant Acme rocket. And you know so now it’s launch time and so what happens that it’s time to launch they hit a button and a giant audio animatronic of Wile E. Coyote leans out with a sparkler and lights the firework and then you’re off. But anyway so everyone looks at it and is like wow this is amazing my god I like this part and is like cool it’s time for the negotiation and what Warner Brothers wanted and this again All they wanted was a one-time fee for the theme park rights into perpetuity for all of these cars. They wanted $40 million. A one-time payment of $40 million. $40 million. This is what year? This was, I want to say, 93, 94. OK. And in the end, it’s just then they did all this design work and built it all around this tune lagoon. And get it they come in well we lost wonders, but we do have this movie. We’re making with dinosaurs. Can you do anything with that and? You know again. It was just this sort of systematic thing of okay Take a Looney Tune land put in Jurassic Park land and on and on and on so we’re walking We’re walking towards the end of I guess the San Francisco. No, we’re still in San Francisco theme right well We’re about we’re transitioning here into New York. Oh, so then but the interesting thing to me. There’s an actual Starbucks coffee here in the intersection in the corner. Well, you know, I’m okay with it. They’re like cockroaches. you leave your car door open for five minutes. They’ll put one in there. So this is the New York street area and it said that the first impression they get from it is much bigger than the streets of America. So there’s actually one, two, three, four, four story buildings. They’ve got actual telephone poles with actual wires. It’s, I mean, it’s got actual, you know, it’s got actual things in it, like a real Starbucks, a real bedding. juries things that you would see Yeah, not in 1940s New York, but you know, things that you’d see on a typical city street. Now, and again, to just sort of point out how counterintuitive this is, we’re going to duck down this alley. I mean, right here, off of the street. It’s the, there’s an alley to the left that contains a pawn shop. Actually, Jim, it would be better if they put the pawn shop near the entrance so you could pay for the… This is an alley. Wow, this thing goes way back. That’s what I mean. But again, you can see this was designed to be an event, you know, a venue where films are actually shot. Though interestingly, for Halloween Horror Night, they do make use of this space. So we’re going way back into an alley here. So we’re at the point now in the alley. they’ve got actual doorways and everything here. We actually don’t see any other people in the theme park. We’re back to this part of alley. it’s, it’s, I guess the… The back end of the New York alley, it’s dark brick. It goes up a full three stories and there’s other stuff behind it. But it got what looks like a working sort of fire escape. It’s got windows and doors and it’s fully detailed. It’s not like they just stopped with the detailing when they got far back where people wouldn’t see it. It’s got some pretty ornate brickwork. It’s got arches. Think about this. Compare this to what we just saw yesterday where we at Disney Hollywood Studios. This is much more elaborate. No, totally. We got always intense It just curves around here. And it keeps going. Look at that. So you create all of these spaces. this would be great for photography. No, absolutely, absolutely. And again, the irony is that because of what happened here in Florida where it stopped being, they really stopped filming films here. Because it became that much easier to do blue screen and get a green screen. This is amazingly well detailed and they’ve kept it up too. No, that’s it exactly. Even the textures of the pavements and painting the individual cobblestones. Now, what’s weird though is that they have started using this as show space. In fact, if you come over here in the afternoon, this street right here is where they do the Bluthwerther show. Oh, makes sense. That’s right on the stoops here. um… oh This is great. But at the same time, mean, you know, for example, look at the textured pavement we got here, which makes this absolutely miserable for anybody who’s in a wheelchair. So they’ve got sidewalks for that. Wow, that’s really, really interesting. What’s the train over there? Well, that’s actually what’s left over from Back to the Future. That is actually the Emmett Brown. That used to sit outside of the Back to the Future attraction. And you’ve got the DeLorean there. In fact, what’s interesting is during the day, I guess Emmett’s on break. you know, it’s typical they’ll have a Doc Brown lurking there so you can get your picture taken. great. But wait, so what do want to do here? Which way? We could go up here toward Mummy. Let’s do that. anyway, Mummy is the replacement for King Kong confrontation, which again, what’s weird about King Kong confrontation was that in a lot of ways, this is one of the things that came out of the plans being shown to Michael Eisner. Because again, they were going to really do… clone of Universal Studios Hollywood that a lot of this part was going to be tram tour and you’re going to roll through buildings and have experiences but when they saw the plans you know for what Disney was planning on doing and it had a tram tour it’s like we got to do something different and creative officer here at Universal Bob Ward came up with a very interesting idea. was like, on a minute, you know, we have Jaws on the tram tour, we have Earthquake on the tram tour, we have King Kong on our tram tour at Hollywood. Why don’t we just bust those elements out and make them individual attractions? I mean, literally. And it’s like… what are you gonna get with that let’s do something great for universal let’s not have a trend towards and it was like and that was that literally drove the development of this part makes me sense it seems like it worked for them i mean of course the irony is for the first eighteen months of the park it did have a trend toward you know but it just drove you around through all of these environments going look at our amazing backlog. Now, I mean, again, the guys at Universal really are, I know Disney has great publicity, but the guys at Universal are incredibly clever as well. mean, take for example, the coaster we’re coming up on here. You get a RipRide rocket. This was a coaster that was built, this is literally straddling, you know, the center line of the park, all right? Not only that, it backs up against all of the sound stages they still use. It sits on top of main plumbing and electrical. And they were able to build this thing without once disrupting operations of the park. There was only one night where after all the guests had left that they had to dig down and do electrical. But again, this is, you know… cutting over facades that have been here forever because you’ve got your twister attraction here that never stopped running. It’s an impressive feat of civic planning. The amount of planning that went into this to make sure that it happened without disrupting the park. That’s really interesting because the coaster track goes above, behind, and through many of the buildings that we’re looking at. And in fact, as we walk up here, this is This again This was supposed to be your icon for the park This was you know, you’ve got the Guggenheim the much Museum of Modern Art, you know and then right beyond that was your New York Public Library and I think that was yep. There you go. You can see it right there the New York Public Library. yes right here it is iconic. It’s pretty big But again, is that enough to drive you deep into the park? No seen it from from way back there. No, I don’t think I would have would have seen it. The irony, I guess, is that, again, all theme parks change out of attractions. One of things they lost out on was their original Ghostbuster attraction, which was up until that time the biggest Pepper Ghost show on the planet. You literally sat in the theater and they recreated the end of the first Ghostbusters film. The top of the building and, I mean, literally to the point of, I mean, this is Landmark Entertainment put together, but they actually did the state-pub-marshmallow man’s head and hand came off. Oh it killer. It was killer. Though interestingly enough, because Disney and Universal were in direct competition for a lot of this stuff, an early, early, early version of the great movie actually did feature a Ghostbusters scene. The Adures had it designed, you were going to roll through it. Again, same thing, Pepper’s Ghost, but in the end, won the negotiation and they got those characters from Columbia. We’re walking up right now on the the twister attraction. Have you done this? Yeah, it’s actually it has some very neat effects, but the perhaps the neatest effect of the film if you’re watching in the pre show. Helen Hunt and Bill, I’m blanking the name of the gentleman who stars with her in Twister. It was a very, very difficult shoot. By end of the shoot, they hated one another. And so now it came time to do the theme park attraction. it was something that was mentioned in their contracts. And Helen Hunt said, look, I will do this. But I don’t want to be anywhere near Bill. All right. And so literally what’s fascinating is if you’re paying attention during the show, they don’t even appear in the same monitors. You know, it’s like Helen’s on one monitor, Bill’s on the other monitor. And, you know, they do interact, but you know they shot on different days and, okay, this is what Helen says, that bitch. know, It’s an interesting attraction because you actually get a vortex. That’s it exactly. inside the attraction. So it’s a two story room, there’s a huge cage around it, you don’t get really really close to it, but they actually create a miniature cyclone inside the attraction. Absolutely, and the other thing, was taking a tour here with an employee once and he said, you know, all right, try to open this door, the show’s on, and it’s literally, you’d have to do Bronco Nagurski to pull against, you know, the… Anyway, we’re coming up on the Universal Classic Monsters Cafe. You know Universal has struggled to find ways to bring the monsters into this part. They Frankenstein. Yeah, I mean, you know again that they’re a proud part of their heritage But they just can’t you know This is as close as they get something to work at a restaurant and it has some wonderful posters and that sort of thing But just not you know the success they hope for. on the other hand, you know right across here we have their show bowl and You know, this has proved to be you know a hugely popular facility for them so much What is it? Well, this is where, for example, during a Mardi Gras promotion, this coming Saturday, the Goo Goo Dolls will be playing here. This, you know, just past Saturday, Diana Ross was here. But this used to be actually where they had their boneyard. You could come and see props from Jaws and that sort of thing. But now it’s been created as a show space and again, not used every day of the week. you come here on a Saturday and that’ll be full of people. The streets here will be full of people, you know, all watching that concert. Great, you know, it’s a good use of space. No, it’s a nice. It’s a nice theater space There’s no seating but it’s a it’s wide open. It’s a you know, it’s sort of an amphitheater You’d see that maybe the small town, you know, it’s what’s clever about the planning notice that you have your show bowl your stage and The coaster this was built at the same time as the coaster. Uh-huh. There’s a roller coaster by the way two loops right behind a giant drop and a loop right behind rocket and what’s what’s fascinating is that the roller coaster actually operates during the concerts. So when Diana Ross is doing a slow sort of song? I would imagine for Miss Ross they’ll turn it off but no it’s… Again, what I like about Universal is if they’re number two in the market, they were really scrappy smart number two. And now with Potter and again, things like Despicable Me, they’re getting good about crafting things that people genuinely want to see. That’s great. How much does it cost them for something like Despicable Me now? it easier for them to get those kinds of film rights now that they’ve done well with Potter? Well, I mean again, you gotta remember Despicable Me is theirs. Alright, yeah, but okay, that’s an example, but in general. But for example, we’re here in front of Shrek. They did have to pay pretty dearly to Dreamworks. But they got with that, they got the rights to put the Shrek characters in the park. They also got the rights to bring other Dreamworks characters to the park. In fact, if you’re walking around, some days you’ll get the characters from Madagascar, you’ll get characters from the Penguins of Madagascar. Yep, I love the Penguins. Anyway, think we’re actually coming up on your lounge if you want to check that out. the American Express lounge that you get access to if you pay with your American Express card. Alright, let’s take a break. We’ll take a water break here and we’ll be back in a minute with more coverage.
Len Testa: back after a little water break we’ve walked back down the main street towards the entrance Jim when does RIP ride rocket what’s the name of that? When does the you mentioning something about RIP ride rocket as we were walking past a little anecdote, a little story?
Jim Hill: there’s actually two that, again, give you both an example of the good side of and the bad side of Universal. The key to Riff-Ride Rocket is that you can actually pick the song selection, that you can, you your on-board music, that again, just riff it, write it. And there were 30 authorized songs that Universal had, and you could literally, as you’re standing in the queue, collect them and punch the numbers in, and that’s the music that played for your seat. The secret was that, again, this is a keypad-driven system and there were 999 other tracks that, you know, if you keyed the right number you got, for example, you could ride the ride to Rainbow Connection from The Muppets, which of course Universal doesn’t own the rights to! You know and again it was a wonderful secret but again the problem is we live in the age of the web and it leaked out and there were artists that were genuinely flattered as they were on the secret list and there were other artists who were horrified and sued and so that kind of went away but actually we’re just down toward the front of the park and this is where Universal again Universal thinks about theme parks differently. I wonder when one of the things where they built rip-ride rocket you’ll notice all right again this goes all the way down to the front part in fact just on the edge of City Walk.
Len Testa: Yep.
Jim Hill: Alright. You can actually see part of it City Walk, Well, there’s a reason for that, okay? Because if you walk, if you go in through Blue Man Group, you will notice as you walk along it, there’s actually a fence next to the coaster and there’s a gate that opens. And the plan, if they’d actually implemented, the plan was that even after Universal had closed for the night, they were going to offer people who were going to pay $2 a ride coming in off of City Walk to be able to get into the park to ride this thing. Just that ride. was going to be an after hours, you know, you didn’t have to wait for universal meal but you want to ride Rippin Rocket while you’re at City Walk or you’re catching the hot center at the Hard Rock, you can do it. Too much for rides, not bad. Well, what ended up happening again is that the attorneys, the spoilsports, you know, kind of got in the way of it and it may yet happen. I think part of the problem of this going forward is anybody who’s familiar with Rippin Rocket is they had an awful first year. They missed their opening date and it you know by all as much as five months and by then you know the Frankly the company was kind of like all right. Just we’ll put this off to this idea That’s right, and now it’s been eclipsed by Harry Potter, but I again it’s an idea I hope they circle back on so All right, well, I think that you know We’re back at the entrance. It’s a good place for us to start Jim. Thanks for for touring Universal well Zeus we’re gonna head over to islands of adventure for the for the next podcast. see you guys real soon. Thanks for listening.
Podcast
Epic Universal Podcast – Aztec Dancers, Mariachis, Tequila, and Ceremonial Sacrifices?! (Ep. 45)
Release Date: April 4, 2025
Listen to the Show Ad Free on Patreon: patreon.com/jimhillmedia
Jim Hill and Eric Hersey return with more Epic Universe updates, rumors, and retro fun. From the Universal Portal Tour and Express Pass prices to Ghostbusters speculation and a throwback to Universal’s 1968 Mardi Gras event – this episode covers it all.
Eric’s Surprise Trip to Universal During Blackout Dates
Eric and his family were gifted a last-minute timeshare trip to Central Florida for Easter week. Unfortunately, their Power Passes are blacked out during the exact dates they’ll be there, leaving them with only April 12 and 13 to squeeze in a visit.
Jim’s Delayed Visit to Epic Universe
Jim shares that Nancy is scheduled for hip surgery on May 20 – just two days before the park opens. With flying and long drives off the table during recovery, Jim is likely postponing his first Epic Universe visit until September, possibly during IAPA.
Epic Universe Portal Tour Coming to Five Cities
Universal’s hype-building campaign hits the road with immersive Portal Tour setups featuring Kronos Tower photo ops, props, characters, and a collectible passport. Stops include:
- Orlando, FL – April 6 at Lake Eola Park
- Atlanta, GA – April 13 at Atlantic Station
- Philadelphia, PA – April 20 at Penn’s Landing
- New York, NY – April 27 at Flatiron Plaza
- Chicago, IL – May 4 at Pioneer Court
Permit Filed for Rip Ride Rockit Demolition
Universal filed a permit labeled “Project 902” that hints at demolition and reconstruction at the Rockit site. While no official confirmation has been made, the language in the permit strongly suggests a major change is coming.
Ghostbusters Attraction Rumors
Fan speculation is swirling around a potential Ghostbusters-themed attraction replacing Rip Ride Rockit. Reddit and forum posts mention a vertical layout and the possibility of reusing the New York backlot theming for a ghost-busting shooter or dark ride. Jim and Eric discuss the likelihood – and whether Fast & Furious is the more realistic option.
Monster Makeup Experience Now Bookable at Epic Universe
The Dark Universe land is offering guests the chance to become a classic Universal Monster using real prosthetics and special effects makeup. At $149.99, the package includes the transformation, a collectible lanyard, themed box, and photo ops.
Jim questions whether this experience will last or suffer the same fate as past attempts like Disney’s Pirates League. Eric compares the time and money commitment to face painting and Bippity Boppity Boutique.
Express Pass Pricing and Ride List Revealed
Universal confirmed the pricing tiers and eligible rides for Epic Universe Express and Express Unlimited. Prices start at $89.99 and may increase on peak days. Eligible rides include:
- Stardust Racers
- Mario Kart: Bowser’s Challenge
- Curse of the Werewolf
- Hiccup’s Wing Gliders
Drone Show Uncertainty for CineSational
Following an FAA suspension tied to a drone incident in Orlando, Epic Universe’s planned drone elements – including flying dragons over Isle of Berk – may be delayed or canceled entirely.
Jim notes that Disney encountered similar drone setbacks, with examples like the Quinjet project and Fantasyland dragon. Operational challenges and legal constraints often ground these high-tech spectacles.
History Segment: Mardi Gras in Mexico (1968)
Jim walks through the history of Universal’s 1968 after-hours “Mardi Gras in Mexico” event – a bold experiment in entertainment that included Aztec princesses, tequila tastings, and aerial performers.
The event featured:
- A recreated Mexican village marketplace
- A sacrificial princess stage show
- The Papalanta Flyers – performers who dive from a 100-foot pole as a ritual
Jack Benny’s Vault and the Creature Photo-Op
Universal originally planned a walkthrough attraction based on comedian Jack Benny’s vault, complete with gags from his TV show. When the vault concept was scrapped, they replaced it with a photo-op featuring the Creature from the Black Lagoon. The illusion used a curtained window and well-timed movement for a practical jump scare.
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Podcast
Walking Disney’s Hollywood Studios: Lost Attractions, Muppet Studios, and Imagineering’s Unbuilt Dreams
Join theme park insider Len Testa and veteran animation historian Jim Hill for an immersive walking tour through Disney’s Hollywood Studios. In this episode, the duo explores the fascinating architectural history of the park’s entrance, uncovers the high-stakes corporate deals made with MGM, and pulls back the curtain on legendary, never-built attractions—including the mythical Muppet Studios and a massive Monsters, Inc. roller coaster. Whether you are a lifelong Disney fan or an architecture enthusiast, this deep dive reveals the Hollywood that never was and always will be.
Walking Disney’s Hollywood Studios: Lost Attractions, Muppet Studios, and Imagineering’s Unbuilt Dreams Transcript
Len Testa: Hi, welcome to another episode of the unofficial guide to Walt Disney World Disney Dish podcast with Jim Hill. I’m Len Testa. We’re here today at the Disney Hollywood Studios, the one park that we’ve not yet covered. Jim, we have a lot of pressure here because, as you know, sequels are an embedded genre within the American experience and there have been some very good sequels. The Godfather 2, The Empire Strikes Back, Break Into Electric Boogaloo. There’s a lot to live up to. Do you feel any pressure here about getting started?
Jim Hill: Well, you took my electric boogaloo joke. Sorry, man. Pressure. What pressure? I’m fine. All right, we’re All right, so we’re starting today. We’re just at the entrance of Disney’s Hollywood Studios. We’ve just passed the entrance, actually, past the turnstiles, which are designed in a streamlined modern architecture. We’ve got the Oscar’s super service across from us. And we’re standing in front of Sid Kahuna’s One of a Kind, Antiques and Curious. Jim, what do you think of when you first get to the?
Len Testa: the studio’s entrance.
Jim Hill: The reason this park is the way it is, is because of Epcot. You have to understand that, you know, you’ve heard the joke, the acronym, that with Epcot is everybody comes out tired. That was a massive park and opens in 82. And they learned the hard way by creating this giant park with huge roadways and that sort of thing that people got overwhelmed. so when it came time to do…
Len Testa: you know at that was then known as disney and jam they bob weiss did a very clever thing they think you know just you knew from the complaints that they had to get if they had to address it make they literally hit the reset button and went back to disneyland and so what’s really intriguing about and jim is in fact that sadly the had a sort of disrupted this but
Len Testa: the cd literally bob got the length from the entrance of disneyland coming under the train station to the castle and that’s literally the distance from the gates here to the compete all its interest in stiles to the convention is the same distance as the exact same distance more of the point again or the the if you honestly if you take a look at it the scale of the buildings here along hollywood boulevard are disneyland it’s that intimate you know again the notion of let’s have an intimate experience in hollywood
Jim Hill: as opposed to a large grandiose experience. more to the point, that’s also why he picked the period that he did. This is all, all the architecture here is from 1920 to 1935. You know, and all one year, but again, what’s fascinating about it is.
Len Testa: Each of the individual buildings here, the Crossroads of the World icon building to Darkroom, these are all legitimate buildings in Los Angeles. You can go see some of them. That’s right. But that Bob himself stitched together to give this unified view. It’s incredible. But no, it’s a beautiful park, and particularly at night when the neon goes on. It’s very pretty at night. It’s actually a great park for architecture. Absolutely. Absolutely. And in fact, what’s kind of ironic about this whole thing is that as the guys were designing,
Jim Hill: Cars Land for California, they came out to study the neon here. Nice. but I know it’s a very charming park except for the screaming people. There’s always screaming people in a Disney park. So Jim, know a couple of things or a couple of design elements on every Disney entrance.
Len Testa: are the same. So you mentioned, I think when we go through the Magic Kingdom, they’ve got things like the camera shop on your right and we’ve got the darkroom here. What else is the same? What else is similar on the studio? Well, again, if you think about it, pretty much if we go around the corner here, the little coffee shop, that sort of thing. The notion is that people, as they’re entering the park on the right, are looking for things, whether it’s sunscreen or hats or I need my coffee and my donut. It’s right there.
Len Testa: Sadly though, the design of this park kind of falls apart once you get past its main street or its retail corridor. Why is that? Well, part of it is because, you know, for example, Sunset Boulevard was never built the way it was initially intended. That, you know, Tower of Terror was literally supposed to be one of five e-tickets that were going to be built over there. really fun. God, between Dick Tracy’s Crime Stoppers.
Jim Hill: know, Roger Rabbit’s Choontown Transit. was some amazing stuff that was gonna be built back there. Wow. Is it still on the drawing boards? mean, still stuff that they… Well, they’re probably not gonna go back to Dick Tracy, but… Well, the interesting thing about that one is that they actually built a full-size mock-up in the warehouse in Tahunka. And even when Dick Tracy was not doing the business that they’d hoped…
Len Testa: They were still trying to sell the Oriental Land Company on building it. And so a friend of mine who actually worked the mock-up said, the thing is the Oriental Land Company executives never travel alone, they always bring their wives. And so here are all these nice demure wives of giant corporate citizens of Japan.
Jim Hill: you know so they’ll go to the to the warehouse and they literally watch their husbands do the demo nearly drive around and and it literally there in these forty style
Len Testa: The
Len Testa: And it turns out the Japanese women were so much better and lethal and blowing. They were like, can we go again? It was like years of suppression and aggravation. The Japanese executive gave kind of a cursory, it’s like, okay, this is cool. The wives were blowing up the room left and right like, this is great, we gotta build it.
Jim Hill: Sadly no, did not go ahead with it. Let’s do this. Is there anything else on Hollywood Boulevard descent that we need to discuss? Otherwise we’re going to to the left. Well it’s worth noting, in fact, again you gotta remember this was the first park that was designed understanding that was going to have street-mosphere. for example… they specifically designed… really? Craig Mcdowell, Tony, in fact just up here I believe… we’re walking up towards the Keystone Clothiers.
Len Testa: water pipes in that the cast members could open and close. know, the Hollywood, you know, the Department of Public Works would have props to work with. that’s classic. You know, you know, example, the windows here. wait, we’re, we’re… made them practical so people could open the window and yell down and heckle at other people in the street. so at the, on the vintage shops in the, What’s that, what’s that store right there? the, the hat store. There’s a, the windows actually open?
Jim Hill: yeah, you know and I guess the other thing that frankly got lost here was that if you were here during the the first six opening months of the place You know, for example the five and dime literally had five and dime merchandise I mean you could go in and get you know plastic bracelets and I mean you walked in and it was the 1940s It was amazing. That’s fantastic
Len Testa: But, you know, again, the design continued right up to their castle, the Hollywood, you know, the Chinese theater. In fact, the only thing that Disney did differently, they literally, they got them to unearth the actual blueprints for the Chinese theater. I mean, it’s, you know, the exterior detail is dead on.
Len Testa: Right up until the actual roof, which they extended slightly because again, this is supposed to be the Hollywood that never was. So just to give it that little bit more of a fantasy edge, a little more of a fun edge. That’s right. The roof is sort of in the real Grumman state of the roof is sort of shrunk a little bit. It’s not quite to the scale of the rest of the building. This is the stuff I like this. So we’re standing outside right now. actually on at Sunset Plaza and Echo Park Drive. It’s the back of the Clothier shop and it’s still really well themed. It’s sort of an Egyptian.
Jim Hill: sort of theme in the back, right? Or a Chinese theme in the back. And it’s an ATM machine, but it’s surrounded by these giant dragon mouths, almost like lions guarding the gate of an estate. And that’s the thing that’s ornamenting the ATM machine, which I really love. mean, that kind of detail is lacking in a lot of other parks. Here, it’s wonderful. Absolutely, absolutely. But again, you know, the…
Len Testa: But these parks reflect the times that they were built. you have to remember that when this park was built, know, we’re talking, know, Disney turns the key on it basically in 85. And there was considerable pressure to get this built because, know, Universal. That’s exactly. And Eisner was privy to what Universal’s plans were. knew when it was going to open and we had to have this open ahead of that, you know, to claim the higher ground. And but the problem was that, again, this is 1985 Disney.
Jim Hill: that they haven’t really had a hit film since Herbie the Love Bug in 69, which is why they had to go out and literally cut the deal with MGM, to get their film library, to get people and characters to drop into these parks. How hard of a deal did MGM drive knowing that with Disney? Well, that’s an interesting part of the story, because it honestly wasn’t a very good deal at all, that for $100,000 a year,
Len Testa: starting and then it would creep up incrementally over 20-year period till, you know, final one licensing fee of a million dollars per year. Disney got the MGM name, they got, you know, Leo the Lion.
Len Testa: and they got access to basically their entire film library. $100,000 for the first year? When Kirk Corian found out he was furious, Kirk Kirk Corian, the head of MGM, and he actually spent the better part of five years in court trying to get the name away from Disney, because of course… After they signed the contract? Sellers regret? You Because again, you have to understand that this wasn’t just going to be a single part. There was a Disney, MGM, Japan in the works. There was a Disney, MGM,
Jim Hill: In it’s part of the opening special for Euro Disneyland. They devoted five minutes to get the studio part. Well, they had to do that contractually for Paris, right? Yeah. But anyway, so they were really struggling to find things to fill this park with. So the nice thing is that MGM is filled, excuse me, that Imagineery is filled with all these film buffs. So for example, we’re standing across from Min and Bill’s here, Wallace Berry. That’s right. There’s a lot of great…
Len Testa: affection for film history here. Again, the front part of the park holds together. It’s again, we begin to wonder out things get a little weird. That’s right. So we’re over in Echo Lake right now. Jim mentioned Min and Bill’s. we’re we’re we’ve got our backs to the Hollywood and Vine restaurant. And notice that the there’s office rents signs that say no actors. That’s great. And then in front of us is Echo Lake. Looks like they’re doing a little bit of construction or they’ve they’ve drained Echo Lake.
Len Testa: Oh, mean, it’s Winsor & McKay. mean, literally, first cartoon stuff.
Jim Hill: Clicking on buttons.
Len Testa: But speaking of cartoon searches, over here, know, 1928 building here, just behind that, we have the Eddie Valien’s offices. In fact, that was honestly when this park opened in May of 19, May 1st, 1989, that was the biggest film Disney had done up until that point. So Roger was everywhere in this park. You know, I mean, they literally painted his little pink feet, well, giant pink feet on the pavement to lead you around the place. Oh, that’s great.
Jim Hill: In fact, the finale of the backstage tram tour was as you came through New York Street, you actually passed the Acme warehouse and here was the dip machine out on the street spraying you. If there are any tunes on board, they’re in trouble. Oh, that’s great. All right, so anything about the Tune-In Lounge or 50’s Primetime Cafe? Well, now this is a big favorite restaurant. fact,
Len Testa: This was sort of the starting point of a new form of Disney dining. Really? Well, think about it, prime time. mean, you’re eating in these highly themed nooks and here’s mom feeding you comfort food. And not only that, mom gives you attitude. mean, this is kind of on the parallel track of, you know, this came into the world about the same time the Adventurers Club did. right. You know, the notion of let’s do Disney show but in a different way. And, no, there’s a reason.
Jim Hill: that this has stayed as popular as it has. People just walk out of here and evangelize for the dining experience. She made me stand in the corner because I didn’t eat my vegetables. It was cool. It was cool, exactly. Oh, funny. It’s not a bad restaurant. The bar was actually pretty good, too. Have ever had the peanut butter and jelly milkshake? Not with my cholesterol. No. It’s actually pretty good. We’re walking up towards the Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular. Now, here’s something interesting,
Len Testa: So we’re walking up towards it. On the left hand side we’ve got the Indiana Jones Adventure Outpost, which is the store where they sell all the stuff. But if you go back a ways back here, they’ve actually got props. Have you seen these? Oh yeah. They’ve got props for the Indiana Jones show. They’ve got tanks and cars and stuff. But nobody ever goes back here. Is it a standing room only area? Is this where the queue is supposed to go when Indiana Jones becomes popular again?
Jim Hill: You know every 20 years, you know, if you actually look in the ground here You can see the recessed points where yes that the you know, the the poles are supposed to go in and direct people back Yes on the ground that folks know these little circles these little brass circles where the the velvet rope as it were would that would go but in the very back here back behind the Man the sound stage. We’ve got we’ve got army cars. We’ve got the national lifestyles tank
Len Testa: We’ve got like a camp and stuff, all the stuff that very few people ever see. Yeah, I mean this is prop work that actually they pulled from Last Crusade. And in fact, that was what was kind of interesting. I have to remember that when this first opened, Last Crusade hadn’t been released yet.
Jim Hill: and 89 right and so what ended up happening was they are remember very simply being here for uh… the the opening press event and they’ll only showed the sort of the the the giant you know fight on the wing part of it uh… because again this was still in technical worse with that it stayed in technical reversal to well into the middle of the first summer of operation here because they were just weren’t but you know it’s part of the press conference you know people ask well all right
Len Testa: So this references the first film and a little bit of the second film. Will we see, you know, pieces of threefold internet? It’s like, well, we hope so, you know. I guess we should be happy. They didn’t continue that. We’re now watching the Crystal Skull Show. The interesting thing is you mentioned the Prop Shroom 3 and you notice on the left hand side of the tank, the art, our right hand side.
Len Testa: There’s the gun turret that exploded when Indy the rocket. That’s it exactly. And the only reason I that was because Last Crusade was on TBS last week. I happened to see it. Other than that, I know nothing about the movie. We named the dog Indiana. Is there any plans to refurbish Indiana Jones? boy. You would think that because it’s a stage show and they’ve got such elaborate props that refurbishing the show is like a multi-year project.
Jim Hill: And Disney doesn’t do multi-year projects like that well. That’s one of those things where the budget has to be done in a year. Look, I’ll tell you from having been down here in 95, 96, in fact I was here for an after hours event.
Len Testa: It was, it’s the Minnie’s Moonlight Madness. It’s, it’s, you ever heard about this? It’s a cast member event held after I was in the park where you’re bungied to three or four of your friends and, you know, racing through the park, answering trivia questions, that sort of thing. my then wife, Michelle Smith, and I had done it the year previous with, literally, my daughter Alice, it was only like three or four months old at that point, and she was in a Snuggie.
Jim Hill: Tied to your chest. Tied to my chest. That’s great. And they didn’t have an issue. So we went the next year to do it. We literally brought Allison a stroller. And nobody caught us till we were literally in the backstage area where suddenly this is rather a Fisher’s manager. It’s like, you’re going to have to take your child out of here. And it’s like, you know, this is a contest for adults. And it’s like, but she was here last year. It’s like, well, that may be the case. But it’s like, car is miles away. I have a giant Emil Younga stroller. The guy says, all right, tell you what.
Len Testa: know, one of you, one of your two parents are gonna have to stay out. So, and watch your child. But I can take you to a conference room backstage where you can sit and watch television, and it’s like, you know, and it’s like, okay. And we’re grumbling the whole way, and they take us deep into the administration building to, open up a conference room, and literally, the walls are covered with all of the concept art for Fantastic Cover. And you’re like, I’ll stay. I’m good, I’m good here. I’ll stay with the baby, I’ll stay with the baby, I’ll stay with the baby, I’ll stay with the baby. She loves me more!
Len Testa: Literally, you know, it’s like I’ve been there for hours sucking the art off the wall. I mean this is version of Fantastic for example that instead of the Pocahontas canoes had the Nautilus and the idea was that Nautilus came out from stage left the squid came from stage right and Mickey’s on stage and again I honestly wish they’d done this because it’s Mickey on stage playing this giant organ that’s belching steam and there was there were two versions of the art one was just Mickey, know hitting the organ and the other one was Mickey literally with the half mask for Phantom
Jim Hill: Look away So but among that to bring this full circle But among the pieces of art that’s always on the wall were all of the expansion pads for this part And one of the things they designated was right behind this area here You know, they’ve literally the overlay and on it said Indiana Jones adventure as in they were seriously considering in the 95 96 timeframe Pulling this down and dropping the Indiana Jones adventure, right?
Len Testa: from Disneyland in the park. Really? Yeah. That would have been interesting. It’s one of the few rides where I would say cloning it is probably an okay thing. It’s a good ride. Oh, I agree. And if you had to get rid of this for that, think everyone would say, most people would say that’s a fair trade. Anyway, long story of the story is I wish they had invented the digital camera 10 years I was gonna say, yeah. Kill me, kill me. Jim and I are right at the Indiana Jones prop that says warning, do not pull rope. So we’re gonna pull the rope and see what happens. Here you go.
Jim Hill: come on! Fuck, man!
Len Testa: Alright, that’s a little treat for you guys. Alright Jim, let’s keep going through Echo Lake. So we’ve got, we’re passing Indiana Jones on our left. It’s shuttered right now because the first show it’s not till I think 10.30 or so, 11.30 so we got a lot of time there. They’re doing a one, two, three, four, five shows today. That’s actually not bad for a late February show. We’ve got, we’ve got coming up straight ahead what’s left of Sounds Dangerous Jim.
Jim Hill: Sounds dangerous. Well, you know, now it sounds seasonal, you know, and more to the point if what they’re saying is true, we’re going to see that, what is it? comedy warehouse show come back. Did you see that during the holidays? No, I did not. heard great things about it though. Though I also heard that frankly that, you know, when the fire marshal came through and saw the amount of equipment, you know, again, you need a lot of equipment in the theater to actually do this.
Len Testa: It was one of things where it’s like, you can’t actually put that stuff against the door! So I saw it actually over Christmas, between Christmas and New Year. yeah, it’s a relatively small stage. They had drawn a curtain behind sort of half the stage. on it was every imaginable prop that they would have needed. So they had the piano, they had boxes full of…
Jim Hill: large, goofy hats and costumes. And then they had a blinking Christmas tree, which was, you because it was seasonal and stuff. that was good. It actually wasn’t a bad show. You could tell, though, that the improv guys hadn’t done improv like that in a long time. I think we caught one of the first shows that they had done. you could tell everyone was a little rusty. Parts of it were very funny. Parts of it were, you know, I just need to get through the next 30 seconds of this skit type thing.
Len Testa: And that was interesting. I’d love to see them bring it back there because it adds a little bit of, you know, the old days, you actually had more live performances here. no, no, absolutely. I mean, that was the whole point of this park. It was designed with street-mosphere. You would literally bump into the citizens of Hollywood. And, you know, now, you know, it’s just that, again, it’s the classic battle between budget and ops.
Len Testa: So that’s not an expensive thing to do though, Or is it the performances, the performers themselves that… Well, it’s not just that. mean, think about it. You need six equity performers on stage. You also need a sound guy. You need a light guy. You need a person standing backstage.
Jim Hill: you know, house manager. It just suddenly becomes really, really, really expensive. that’s true. we’re over… by the way, is there any reason why they couldn’t bring back the Monster Soundstage? Does anyone know who Chevy Chase is? They could do it. He needs one more vacation film. They could do it. I think it was more the case of not so much…
Len Testa: Again, not 1899 anymore. 1989 anymore. Just the post-show stuff of maintaining those props, let alone the 3D sound show, which again was supposed to be the savior of the park. That’s interesting. So we’re over in front of Star Tours right now. Have you been on the Star Tours too? absolutely. Yes, yes. think? It’s a wonderful update
Jim Hill: of the pre-existing attraction. Though the thing I personally like about it is that, for example, the pre-show is now four times as long. mean, just literally, you could stand there, they figured there were gonna be more people because of the multiple rides going through multiple times. So they literally created four times as much material in the pre-show area. There’s more audio, there’s more in-jokes, there’s more, and it just goes deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper.
Len Testa: Um, you know, likewise, um, I mean, when you think about how much footage they put together for the, multiple versions, uh, you know, that, that, that a, it was talking with somebody who would literally take six hours to write every iteration of this thing. And there’s all sorts of in jokes and, know, they, the guys that look at someone nuts, they just literally, they, they, you can rewrite this thing for days and not see things or see things you’ve never seen before. That’s great. So.
Len Testa: Has the ride lived up to Disney’s expectations regarding number of visits and number of guests that have been on it? Actually, no. In fact, again, that’s kind of a sore point. They did not get the attendance bump, at least here at this park, that they were expecting. It’s vastly more popular in California. Absolutely. But again, you have a culture out there that goes once every six months. And so it’s exciting for them to, let’s go on Star Wars and see if we can get a different version. We’re here, I mean, again.
Jim Hill: you you’ve all people know how often people come back here it’s what three point seven years is that that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s few years between between visits you know i just eat it it didn’t hit the way they expected expected they’re genuinely intrigued to what’s gonna happen when they open in japan though
Len Testa: Oh yeah, that will be interesting. Because Japan is a much more local thing too, so that might work out well there. I wonder if they take that into account when they design rides, like how much of this was going to be local population? Or is that something where they’ve only done it a little bit, they probably don’t have enough data to know really whether something’s going to be a hit with locals or not?
Jim Hill: Well, it’s finessing that. A mindset that they’re just coming to for Disneyland though it’s kind of ironic because of course they’re finishing this billion dollar makeover of DCA which they’re hoping will finally turn Disneyland from, and I mean this in the kindest possible way, the world’s most famous regional park to an actual resort, a multi-day destination resort. you know, mean yes, they fill those hotels but not nearly as much as they’d like. That’s true. We’re over in the Muppet Plaza right now, right in front of
Len Testa: Muppet Vision 3D. Are there any plans to redo any part of this attraction or the area based on the Muppet film? You the Muppet film, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And again, just a nice updating. To be honest, right now we are literally in the crucial moment with the Muppets. The movie, this… It did $88 million, right? Stateside, which is literally two-thirds of what Disney expected. in fact, well, they took…
Len Testa: It’s interesting. They took the numbers that Enchanted did, they took the numbers that Tangle did. The last four holiday films that Disney had open in the Thanksgiving period and averaged them and that was a hundred and thirty-five million dollars domestic. And so it’s like, okay, that’s what we should earn off of this thing. And it literally came in at two-thirds of that and…
Jim Hill: It’s an interesting situation because within Disney, it’s like, look, the franchise was dead. You know, I mean, we brought it back from the dead and this is going to pay us dividend dividends. But, you know, we have to put the time here. We have to put the energy in. And, you know, so you’ve got to be patient with this. You can’t expect this to just catch fire overnight. It had been neglected for a long time. But again, this is Disney, you know, owner of Marvel and all of its own characters. And it’s like in order to devote more time to bringing back the
Len Testa: Muppets that means money and time and energy has to come away from somebody else. So right now literally there are accounts at Disney just you know the blu-rays and the DVDs of Muppets are in the boxes shipping to stores and it’s like okay let’s see what those numbers look like. Now to be fair here I was just talking with the Muppet folks and they say they are busier than ever.
Jim Hill: Did you ever think you would you would under the line? I was just talking with the Muppet folks Go ahead. Well, they take in there are people who put their hands up these creatures Okay, you know and get a little handcrafted poor Dave Gold’s the guy who’s been doing gonzo for 30 plus years at this point literally had shoulder surgery because after all these years of standing and holding things up and he He’d blown out his arm. know, I mean again, there’s there’s whole aspects of this that people don’t know about but yeah, if
Len Testa: If the DVDs sell well, there’s a couple of things they’re considering. One is a holiday edition of the 3D movie, but would literally repurpose footage from the Michael Caine Christmas Carol.
Len Testa: and put there were so many things they left on the table that would been here with the old pizza planet was that you know this was in the initial plan this was going to be the the swedish chefs cooking school television and you know get a quick search interest from but you walk through under all these screens of the swedish chef cooking things and then mama melrose was literally going to be you know the great gonz’s pandemonium pizza parlor where dinner
Jim Hill: It was going to be amazing. mean, like when you look at all the woodwork and beams overhead. At Mama Melrose’s or? How thick there. There was a reason they were going to do practical, you know, little rat hand carts that were rolling around the restaurant with Parmesan cheese and boxes of pasta that was supposedly going in and out of the restaurant. the great thing is that, again, supposedly there was going be a common kitchen here.
Len Testa: Again, there’s so many great gags that got left on the table here like Who is this again? The guy who does the boomerang fish? All right But he was literally going to have a store here and you’d look in the window and there were gonna be little rubber fish flapping in the window and spinning I mean this was gonna be muppets floor to ceiling. So we’re back now behind We just passed pizza planet on our right. We’re back in front of The engine company number one the Parkside antiques you guys know where the snowman is
Jim Hill: on the the on the ground there’s there’s a Christmas store and then we’re directly facing mama Melrose is in the front so the so that was going to be Gonzo’s pizza parlor yeah and just and the great thing is you’d be eating in there and you’d be watching an overhead monitor and Gonzo would backstage in the kitchen standing in front of like the vent you know and if this we’re having trouble with the vent and Gonzo would get on the stove and sort of reach into it and you’d suddenly see him sucked up into the vent work and now in the restaurant you’d actually hear him
Len Testa: moving through the vents overhead and know, 3D audio sounds of him and Camilla clucking, you know, just like, wait, I think I can find our way out. know, it’s just so much wonderful stuff. But the killer, the absolute killer thing they were gonna do was just past here. In fact, we’re coming up on the backside of Muppets past on the Melrose’s. Now there’s a, so this is the exit to Muppets and where they do the Phineas and Ferb meet and greet now.
Len Testa: And literally, some of you may remember this, if you went on the tram tour in, I want to say, 90 or thereabouts, you would have passed a fence, construction fence here, where Sweetums was looming over it. you know, and sitting on the fence next to him was Robin. And this was where they were going to build Muppet Studios. And this was going to be the home of the great Muppet movie ride. And had the meanest, funniest jokes in the business.
Jim Hill: Literally, the idea was it was a riff on the great movie ride. And you’re going to be riding in little individual Pargos, sort of the golf cart things. actually, it starts off just like the great movie ride. You’re going to see that you enter this room that’s big screen clips of famous movies, only it’s Muppet versions. And so, for example, you’re seeing the scene from Dr. Zhivago where it’s the…
Len Testa: It’s Piggy and Kermit in a sleigh where snow is blowing in their faces. And Gonzo, who’s the director and the host of this attraction, on an armature and says, do you ever wonder how the movies are made? Well, follow me. You literally duck under the screen where you’ve been watching Kermit and Piggy in the snow in the sleigh. Now what you see are Kermit and Piggy inside of the world’s largest snow globe that’s being held by four puppet monsters that are shaking it. They’re little prouder than you are.
Len Testa: It just went on and on like that. I mean, they had so many wonderful gags. They did, for example, a monster movie. Only it’s Dr. Bunsen Honeydew as Dr. Frankenstein and it’s a 12-foot-tall beaker.
Jim Hill: They did this great riff on Disney animated films. They literally took you into Peter Pan theater the bedroom of Wendy Michael and John right only it’s it’s Kermit as Peter. It’s what he’s already got the green. Yeah, I it. It’s scooter as John and I’m blanking who Michael is but of course Tinkerbell is picky
Len Testa: Alright, and the thing is that she’s hanging off of this ridiculously strong rope and she’s swinging that out of control going through all of these back but you go behind the scenes and this again like 12 puppet monsters holding this rope straight in. This was all, mean Henson himself was so excited about making this attraction because he was, for his way of thinking…
Jim Hill: The Muppets were always, always, always, you know, meant to be audioanimatronic figures. Really? Because what do think about how limited they are? That, you know, if there wasn’t a person on planet who understood more, you know, the limitations of puppeteering. Right, yeah, that’s true. And, you know, that’s all audio animatronics is. And so it’s like he could not wait to make this a direction. And then, of course, you know, he dies of bacterial pneumonia.
Len Testa: The Henson family and the Disney family have been horrible falling out. Yeah, 20 years. Yeah, gone. That’s a shame. We passed an area where we’re doing Phineas and Ferb meet and greets and they’re actually out right now as well as, looks like some cars meet and greets. Are there any plans to do anything at all with Phineas and Ferb? God. Phineas coming this summer only gets huger. There’s the teal takeover.
Jim Hill: there’s a special Phineas and Ferb series of episodes coming this season where Perry the Platypus disappears and literally seriously and for and that it becomes where has Perry gone for an entire summer people are looking for Perry and then you know then he’s magically revealed and saved.
Len Testa: But, well, I blew that story. Now I don’t need to watch it. you go. But now that’s it. You know, if anything, they’re getting bigger and bigger. In fact, there is.
Jim Hill: I’m kind of not happy about this change, but there’s some serious conversations about taking Kim Possible. I heard this. Because again, the interesting thing is that Kim is still considered quite viable by the company. In fact, what’s kind of interesting is this summer in June in Long Beach, for the first time ever, they’re having a Kim Possible convention. It’s literally called a Kimvention.
Len Testa: You know, there’s a number of people at Disney who really believe that, look, we have this amazing franchise, we should be paying attention to it, but the problem is that Mark McCorkle and Bob Scully, the guys who created it, actually left Disney and are now working for DreamWorks Television Animation. They’re the ones who doing the Penguins of Madagascar show.
Jim Hill: It’s a similar humor. I you know that I really like a Kim Possible Jimmy just the names alone But the the interactions that Kim has with her parents absolutely are hysterical absolutely It was really well written. No. It’s a great show and and it’s it’s a franchise that I think the company should definitely do something with
Len Testa: Is that the reason why they stopped doing Kim Possible because the two lead guys left? And the saddest part of it is that they were going to do a Kim Possible live-action film. And in fact, they wrote a script that the studio absolutely loved. In fact, they loved it so much they turned to Bob and Mark and said…
Jim Hill: We’ve got this other script. He such a nice job with this. Could you punch up this other thing for us? Do you remember the film Sky High? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, superheroes, kids, yeah. Flying bus promo. And it literally, it’s like, you talking with Bob and Mark later, it’s like, we screwed ourselves out of a job. We did such a nice job of punching up the Sky High script. went, you know, we can always go back and do the Kim Possible thing, but we were working on Sky High for a while now. You did a nice job. We’re going to go with this, but we’re going to circle back in your thing. And they never did. Ah. That’s shame. Yeah, because it’s a franchise. They’ve done well with it.
Len Testa: And it’s… you never get that resolution of it like it just ended. No, that’s it exactly. To talk about Bob and Mark, they actually ended the show twice. They had literally, they wrapped up the third season, were sending her off to college, and then suddenly they came back, could we have like 13 more episodes? was like, Another end!
Len Testa: The Phineas and Ferb feature length film is coming. yeah, this is not a drill. It will be out mid July next summer. Really? Yep. Wow. So mid July 2013. Fantastic. So, but again, I don’t know how much juice you can actually get out of a platypus, but they’re going to do everything they can. Yeah. It’s good series. By the way, if you guys can hear us here in the background, we’ve got some traffic and that’s because we’re on the streets of America walking down
Jim Hill: past the Chinese restaurant, past used guys, we made a left and now we’re heading towards the Lights, Motor, Action, Extreme stunt show. wanna say something? Well, you you have to understand, again, when this park opened, Disney really struggled to find things to put into this park.
Len Testa: One of the things they cut a short-term licensing deal for the character Jim Carrey’s character ace Ventura detective Literally they had a stunt show out here on that corner where you know Ace was trying to save the albino bed Which was this obvious piece of rubber dangling off of the side of a building But you know they hired a Jim Carrey look-alike sound-alike it was
Jim Hill: the most god-awful thing but again they were trying they were making a legitimate effort but again this is part of the problem with new york street
Len Testa: This was never ever designed to be a guest, know, area that the guests were supposed to be able to walk through. This was always supposed to be viewed from the tram. In fact, coming up here, I remember going through this on the tram. This is right here, the Acme warehouse. This is as you headed back into get a tram offload. This is where the Acme warehouse was and where the the dip mobile would manage you. Let me just.
Len Testa: but they use the space over here after they decided to close it off of the board to do it so you know they were uh… what is it the goosebumps show was done here the teenage beat the turtles were here uh… you know the uh… i’m blanking the japanese fighting kids uh…
Jim Hill: body more from power rangers you blink on the mighty morphin power rangers time i can’t i’m sorry i have a daughter okay general just impossible remember so that’s the this area actually is pretty pretty good for the the osborne family spectacle absolutely absolutely so if there’s one redeeming thing that for three months out of the year
Len Testa: talked about that that that’s what you have to ultimately do with a Disney theme park is sometimes you will literally hold areas in reserve for that three months out of the year that you need them and the rest of the year is just like well what is here it’s like well it’s an interesting place you know if they put like tables you know and on the in the alleys and stuff you could actually have a nice little picnic area if they ever do something similar here
Jim Hill: like they did at the Animal Kingdom with the picnic in the park, you can throw some tables back there and people would like that. Today it’s not particularly sunny, but you so you could maybe put a little, some canvas.
Len Testa: over the tops it wouldn’t be bad at all. funny you mention this because one of things that this area is constantly used for is corporate events. mean they’ll set up the rounds here, they’ll give you food, whether it’s presenting a concert or that sort of thing. That’s nice. Alright we’re back behind Backlot Express.
Len Testa: I don’t know, this is always the interesting part of the park for me because again, this is, you gotta remember that this was how, when this park first opened, this area was never really meant to be open to the public. fact, on Mickey Avenue we’re looking Is this the back lot? Yeah, well, motor of the this was back of the house. mean, this walkway that Mickey Avenue, you know, Toy Story Mania and all that is located on, never intended for guest driving, never. Alright, you know, the original version of the tram tour, you it was a two-
Jim Hill: hour long experience. You got on the trams up toward where the animation building is. You then came backstage, they dumped you out here where you had an opportunity to eat, had the opportunity to go to the Acme gag factory with lots of interactive stuff. But then you begin your walking tour. You did? right, it a two-part tour. Yeah, and there wasn’t a mother on the planet who came in here with a stroller that was told you have to leave your stroller outside here by the tram tour. It’s like,
Len Testa: Let me explain this to you. This is a child. All right, it wears a diaper. All right, I have one diaper with me. All right, this is not gonna end well. This four-hour tour of yours is not going to go up. And you know, that was it exactly. That they had basically riots, you know, among parents and it’s like, okay, fine. This is officially open to the public now.
Jim Hill: But you know, I remember, you know here on opening day because they were again, they just opened they They really struggled to make this place look big and exciting and one of the things they did literally where we’re standing here right now Yeah, we’re by the way, we’re right in front of the bacala tour behind the the Muppets show building If you guys are familiar with the park, know that giant coca-cola stand is right in front of the the bacala tour entrance That’s where we are. So to make this seem more exciting than it actually was
Len Testa: for the 1985 version redo of Fantasyland at Disneyland. They actually built a giant inflatable, maleficent as a dragon balloon that they draped over, it literally loomed up out of, was taller than Sleeping Beauty Castle. so, you know, and it put its arms out, you know, on top of the castle and it was this killer shot, you know, they, they…
Len Testa: But again, they used it for a couple of weeks that they opened, you know, that park and then it went back into warehouse and somebody remembered. And so for the opening day, it’s like they inflated and put it here. so. And between the bathrooms, you know, but it’s like, wow, that’s amazing. That’s a killer prop. And disappeared overnight, never to be seen again. That’s it. Yeah. So back somewhere in the back lot in the in closet, a very big closet somewhere. Keep your eye on eBay,
Jim Hill: So, So, well, what are they, this is the hot set. They used to do a, we’re walking towards Pixar Place and we’ve got on the left what used to be the old Mickey meet and greet. What are they doing with this space? think it’s fairly large space. they ever actually get off to pot, is the Monster’s Inc. coaster. In fact, this is where it’s gonna go. Yeah, you know, and again, I know there’s a lot of people.
Len Testa: over the story and get a double of this thing is coming but uh… it’s kind of the fascinating story of the wall does the company how it operates at the cast members usually they had to know cast member newsletters the the eyes and ears the distant line couple years ago they started using what they call the cast member portaling literally you go back to a sit down at a video screen you can access your health files you could but among the things they did to get people to actually use this thing is the included
Jim Hill: little films that Imagineering had done, know, about upcoming projects and you could see behind the scenes stuff. And so what ends up happening is one night at midnight. One night at midnight. All right, you know, people who work on Third Shift, I wake up in the morning and I have literally eight emails from people. It’s like, my God, the cast portal has all this amazing artwork and, you know, a film up about the Monsters Inc. coaster. Have you heard anything about this? And it’s like, I’ve heard that they’re considering doing it.
Len Testa: But what they ended up doing was that by the time they woke up, you know, literally, nine o’clock in the morning, West Coast time, 12 noon, file got pulled down. Somebody by accident had put this thing up and it went live. And then, you know, but this was summer of 2008. And then we, of course, we had the banking crisis in the fall. And this thing literally moved, you know, not to the back burner, but way off the back burner. But if you can actually get into this building, they literally have spray painted on the floor.
Jim Hill: where the supports are supposed to go. mean, this is… You know, they were ready to roll with this thing. And in fact, that’s always been, for a number of you all I speak with an imaginary, it’s like, that’s the canary in the coal mine. If when they green light that again. And what’s interesting is if you know your Monsters Inc. you know, for example, the design look of the world of Monsters Inc. Take a look at this bridge.
Len Testa: It’s so though. It’s the bridge that identifies the beginning of a picks our place. It’s sort of a steampunk brass always in X’s Support beam thing, but that’s straight. You know they pulled that design on what straight out of Monsters Inc. So again
Jim Hill: this will eventually continue straight on into this building. That’s good point because on the other side it’s a brick. That’s exactly. Smart. More to the point, know, again, to give you some idea of the insane level of detail, the colored brick here that’s used here is actually, you know, the color brick that’s used for Pixar headquarters in Emeryville, California. mean, nice. You know, from where the old Demelty plant used to be. But anyway, mean, here again, this is is my problem.
Len Testa: Look at this street. Look at how crowded this street is now. Yeah, so we’re inside Pixar Place right now. We’re walking up on Toy Story Mini. It’s immediately to our left. We’ve got one of the green army men signing autographs. Actually, the line isn’t for a Monday in the end of February. The line isn’t terrible right now. It’s only 40 minutes. It’s like 10 o’clock in the morning. That’s actually not bad. It’s a pretty moderate day here at the studios. But yeah, you’re right, Jim.
Jim Hill: The Pixar place is not a wide street by any means. you come here in May, June, July where it’s holding the heat and you have record crowds and it’s it’s unpleasant to come down here. Yeah, mean it’s hard to… So two reasons. One, when people see the line for Toy Story Mania in the morning, everything just backs up. Number two, the way that they’ve got the FastPass machines oriented, the lines stretch back into the walkway which makes it even more difficult to get through this place because…
Len Testa: The line for Fast Passes in the morning for Toy Story Maynard could be 10-15 minutes. No, absolutely, absolutely. And again, but when you take into consideration that, again, space never meant for the public, and yet you look up and you see the glass bridges, the walkway that connected the sound stages, and again, that was another thing that bit them in the butt. They totally convinced themselves that if they built these enclosed walkways that people
Jim Hill: would have no problem. know, filmmakers said, no problem, people are looking at me while I work. I have no problem with this. And it’s like, exact opposite. They were, they spent more time hanging drapes for the few productions that actually came here than, you know, just never ever worked the way it was supposed to. This never became, you know, Hollywood East. I mean, we had a couple of relatively high profile things, mean, like the Tom Hanks mini series from the Earth to the Moon for HBO. that was here? Yep. I love that series.
Len Testa: You know, though actually a more telling film if you can, you know, if you can, if you can watch it, actually personally enjoy it. But if you watch Ernest Saves Christmas, it was the first feature film shot here and it’s actually shot as they’re constructing the sound stages. So there’s one point where Ernest has disguised himself as a snake handler. And if you can look over his shoulder, it’s literally, they’re filming on the construction site. There are sound stages being built behind it.
Jim Hill: What’s an artist film that budget was relatively low? that’s the other thing. It’s shot totally in Orlando. So they’re shooting action scenes out on World Drive and it amazing. So we’re in front of Walt Disney One Man’s dream right now. Any place to do anything with this attraction? I kind of like it the way it is. It’s got a ton of detail. Well, as long as D23 continues with the company, this will be safe. You know, that right now it has a sponsor.
Len Testa: And D23 is the sponsor? Oh, D23 welcomes you. Oh, that’s an addition. So as long as that stays alive and well, this will be here. But again, the irony is this exhibit was actually designed for the first iteration of that attraction, which was supposed to be inside the hat, which is supposed to be outside the entrance of this park.
Len Testa: Really? Yeah. They were gonna put all of Walt Disney One Man’s Dream inside the hat? It was supposed to be the entrance to the building, and then behind it was gonna sort of a standard warehouse type of building.
Len Testa: We’re walking through the the animation arch right now. We’ve got We’ve got Little Mermaid here on our left. We’ve got the magic of Disney animation in front of us You can hear in the background a float going past and on our right. We’ve got the Disney jr. Live on stage Jim is there anything going on with with Voyage of the Little Mermaid again? This is the the Energizer bunny of shows for Disney that every two years or so they talk about changing this one out putting something new in here, but Ariel remains
Jim Hill: such a driver of merchandise and such a popular character. It’s just sort of like, why spend the money to replace something that works? And so, there she’s still here. Yeah, there’s actually a line going back now for the show lining up. They don’t use FastPass for this anymore, but it still looks like, FastPass doesn’t work for shows in general. So that’s not an indication of the popularity of Boys of the Little Mermaid. It’s just, FastPass doesn’t work well for shows.
Len Testa: That’s interesting. they’ve got no plans to do anything with the show? Well, again, it’s why fix what ain’t broke. Mind you, got to remember that Mermaid replaced the show itself back in 8990, Here Comes the Muppet Show, which again had one of my favorite moments out of a Disney theme park show in that, you know, the entrance of the Electric Graham and Dr. Teeth where it’s just sort of like…
Jim Hill: you everyone’s late for the show but it’s okay that they’re taking the monorail over and Kermit’s like the monorail doesn’t come to Disney House, does now and it literally bursts through the wall and the characters spill out of the monorail and here’s you know here’s Animal reaching down off the edges of the edge menacing the first row and it’s a giant and it’s a it’s an animal walker on costume, it’s a rubberhead and you know from there it was just one of these things where it’s like it’s okay he’s eating today don’t worry about it
Len Testa: which brings to mind that the time that you know then first lady barbara bush broader grandchildren here along with the secret services christie wants to give her a good show so they put her in the front row with the so here comes animal reaching off the stage in the secret service stands up and it the story doesn’t end well but that’s it with with three secrets of the sky’s attacking animal
Len Testa: And again, it’s pre-recorded, so the audio is still going on while get a… audio, poor animals being wrestled to the ground. It’s hysterical. I would love to have seen that. What’s going on with the Magic of Disney animation? This is like one of those shows that could use a little TLC, I think. It’s just so sad because we are in, obviously, a transmission point. mean, remember, when this was initially built…
Jim Hill: you actually had the working Florida animation studio back. That’s right, they did like Brother Bear and they did a couple of other things, right? They did wonderful stuff here. did, you know, fact they, know, Mulan, Lilo and Stitch, you know, along with some killer shorts. and I still to this day insist that they should have left feature animation or hand-run animation up and running here and just made the change out in California. But when they made the decision in 2003 to literally consolidate the units, they shut down Paris, they shut down this studio.
Len Testa: They moved everybody to California. you know, don’t get me wrong, Disney is rebuilding. Obviously, Rapunzel, you know, was a hit and hearing some amazing things about Wreck-It Ralph. and it’s official. We do have another princess or excuse me, a queen movie in the works now. thank God, because I was worried that there weren’t enough princesses going on. But they’re doing the Snow Queen. It’s actually. really? Yep. And the title has gone from frozen to frosted. So, you know. Frosted like.
Jim Hill: Like this thing. Well there you go. Tangled, frosted. Yeah, so. Get your adjectives here. Lolly, lolly, lolly. No, no, it’s Adbirds. Sorry. Yeah, sorry, wrong thing, but still same idea. What about Disney Junior Live on Stage? This is new. They actually do keep this up.
Len Testa: every four five years or so they’re doing a new stage here. think because it’s relatively straightforward to do that. And more to the point, we are literally weeks out from the launch of Disney Junior. This is what replaces Soapnet. This is the standalone Disney Junior channel. Honestly, at Toy Fair just ten days ago, Disney revealed they have 130 different Disney Junior products in the works and that’s just wave one.
Len Testa: Wow. know, mean, no, this will just trust me. This will just get bigger. And if you think you’re paying attention to it now, just wait. The amazing thing is that there’s I don’t see a gift shop over there. Give them time. Yes. Yes. Gift shop, Mr. Testa. Yes.
Jim Hill: And now again, this is this is what just kind of makes me sad we’re walking up on the other Hollywood brown derby We’ve the animation courtyard. I like the brown derby quite a bit. It’s a little expensive But it’s a it’s a great facility But did you remember when this was actually? backed up against another restaurant the soundstage restaurant the Had the bar above the yeah, those were the days Jim those were the days But they had this amazing
Len Testa: restaurant literally again, they think same thing as the ABC facility. They knew what they were doing with one restaurant But they were sharing, you know a kitchen, right? And so they’ll what are we gonna do with this one with the soundstage and they had literally just made What is it a comedy with Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin I want to say
Jim Hill: risky business. I forget the name of it, but it’s actually set at the Plaza Hotel in New York. is it the premise for the Golden Ticket thing? Remember that the Bette Midler Golden Ticket thing that was here at the studio? Yeah, but this was secondary to that. This was literally a film that was done, I think, for Touchstone. But they literally had built the Plaza Hotel in the lobby of the Plaza Hotel in New York. so Michael Eisers is like, we spent all this money, what are we going to do with it?
Len Testa: And it’s like they shipped it to Florida and you actually could eat in the set. And then what got kind of interesting is that park had only been open a year or two and somebody noticed, well, wait a minute. We got Beauty and the Beast and that’s got kind of ornate looking things in it. they changed the, Sunstage restaurant went from a Bette Midler movie to Beauty and the Beast and then Aladdin. you know, it was a charming facility for a while. They don’t need a restaurant back there?
Len Testa: Well, not so much as they need something for children, know, preschoolers. Got it. So another attraction for preschoolers. That’s right, because before Toy Story came out, they really didn’t have a whole lot for kids to do early in the morning. Well, more to the point, remember that when this park opened in 89, literally, Roger Rabbit had come out and Mermaid was six months away from coming out.
Jim Hill: the animation revival hadn’t happened yet. So Disney was really struggling because obviously the characters, classic characters, live at the Magic Kingdom. And it’s like, so what is the studio? And in fact, there’s still this internal struggle as to how does the studio, you know, what’s the symbiotic relationship between the studio? Supposedly, the way it works is characters go to the studio to be introduced. And then after a year or a couple of years, they then go to live at the Magic Kingdom.
Len Testa: That, sadly, that rule has fallen apart. know, for example, Tangled, you know, literally opened… That’s usually popular too. That’s over at where they used to do Story Time for Bellamy. And if the rumors are true, we may see Beast of the long-running Beast Show here replaced by a Tangled musical. Really? Yeah.
Jim Hill: Well, we’re on Sunset Boulevard right now. To our left is Starring World’s Cafe. We’re right in front of the Sweet Spells Villains store and across the street from the Legends of Hollywood shop. I really like this area of the studios. This is my favorite part of the studios. We talked about this on the WWCA podcast a couple of weeks ago. And one of the things that we really like about it is they’ve integrated both the building facades
Len Testa: The music and sort of like the long view terminus there, the weenie of the tower, all works really, well. The interesting thing is, one of the most popular attractions in the park, the Rock and Roller Coaster, you can’t see from where we’re standing here. That’s because it wouldn’t fit in. They really did a great job there. Anything going on with the starting rules, by the way?
Len Testa: You know, it’s, again, this part of the park works, all right? And in fact, that’s right now, you know, when they talk about this park, it’s more about how do we drive people down toward lights, action. But again, that’s only something you have to worry about nine months out of the year, because you have the Osborne Lights driving people back there. mean, again, it’s more a case of what do we need? And again,
Jim Hill: when you talk about Walt Disney World, you are in direct competition with three other parks. It’s like, you know, cause Disney Hollywood Studios isn’t really wanting for anything right now. I mean, we’re here on a, you know, on Monday in February and it’s, it’s. This part of the park actually on Sunset Boulevard is fairly crowded right now. The streets are, they’re not packed, but they’re definitely, people walking around in it. There’s, there’s already people in line, I guess for, is it lunchtime? Well, you know, you can never.
Len Testa: Exactly, and they’ve got hot dogs and stuff and this actually part of the park works I think fairly well. They’ve got a good mix here of food. They’ve you they’ve got four or five different places you can get food. They’ve got retail on the right hand side food on the left. It’s well organized. It’s I think seating is a little bit lacking on this side of the park, but but other than that, it’s not bad at all. You mentioned Beauty and the Beast the stage shows coming up right here on the on the right. Yep, I mean and
Jim Hill: But again, I guess the thing of it is, being, having seen all the plans for what was supposed to go in here, it is nice, but the stuff that was going to go in would have moved this from nice to amazing. This would have been, this would have moved up from being the park behind Epcot to the park that you had to go to right after the kingdom.
Len Testa: Wow. mean, for example, where we are right here, we’re at the Sunset Rents Market. OK, this is where the Toontown Transit attraction was supposed to be. And the idea was that you come to this. It’s literally it’s it’s.
Len Testa: What we would just passed here, for example, would have been Mickeyland, which was a recreation of the studio on Hyperion. mean, just the little slow slung bungalows, and you would have gone in and been actually able to see, you know, the classic Disney characters, the pie-eyed versions. But next to this was going to be Toontown Transit, where you would have gotten on Gus the Bus. But this was the next generation of a simulator.
Jim Hill: in that what they were going to do was couple. Not only the, were going to have screens.
Len Testa: not only in front of you, to the side of you. So as you move through Toontown, you literally move through Toontown. you know, actually what was supposed to happen is you got in your load area and you would have, your driver wasn’t there and Roger takes the wheel and Roger takes you right up to the top of Mount Toonmore. And then, know, have the pinnacle overlooking this wonderful view of,
Jim Hill: You know, the Toontown and Roger, but who’s at the top of Mount Toonmore, but, you know, Jessica and baby Herman, you know, Jessica’s there, baby Herman in the carriage and Roger turns around and says, I got to out and talk to my honey. just so he pulls the brake and steps out and you literally see him in front of the bus and he’s talking with Jessica and that sort of thing. And while you’re in the car, you see the brakes slip and now now begin to roll back down the hill. And now Roger sees you and races after you. And it’s now Roger trying to get back into the bus that’s rolling backwards down at the Toontown.
Len Testa: And what was cool about it is Disney had found this version of Vacuform plastic. They had the solution that they loved to do. And in fact,
Len Testa: when they mocked it up. they do is you would, Roger at one point would be thrown in the air over the bus and you just hear him go up and then you hear him plummet back down and then the ceiling would cave in in Roger’s exact shape. Classic. You know, and just, and you’d see him move and then, you know, it bubble back, you know, just bump back into shape and Roger would drop back into the driver’s seat and, okay, we’re going to take you back. But no, it, it, there was so much cool stuff there, but back here, was, for example,
Jim Hill: I mean just Tower of Terror alone. mean, you know, this actually started out for example as the attraction that Disney wanted to do with Mel Brooks. know, one version of it was literally, you know, this was gonna be Frankenstein’s Castle that you were going to, you know, the Frankenstein. know, and you know, then there was, you know, that was Hotel Mel.
Len Testa: And in fact, to hear Craig McNair Wilson talk about it, what was going to be interesting, there was one iteration of the plan for this where literally the hotel, this was the sealed off, this whole building was the sealed off wing of the hotel. The rest of the hotel, which guests could have actually stayed in, extended all the way to the entrance. Wow. So from the back part of the park by Hollywood Tower Hotel over to the entrance. So behind where Beauty and the Beast is. In fact, in one version of that plan, just like Euro Disney.
Jim Hill: You know, you would have walked under the Hollywood, know, Disney’s Hollywood Hotel to get into the park. there’s so many amazing ideas. In fact, Craig’s the guy who basically created Streetmasphere for the parks. And what he wanted to do with this, it was sort of the next generation of what they do in the great movie ride where you have live actors interacting with AA figures.
Len Testa: Craig thought, wouldn’t it be interesting if you literally, for example, if you went into the lobby of the hotel and there were three figures, there was one live person and two audio animatronic figures. But the gimmick of the ride was that the audio animatronic figures were on a turntable at any one time during the day.
Len Testa: they could swap out the a figure was sitting in the lobby for a lot so you’d go in and you would literally never know who the live human ones and so but they were going to that throughout the whole right now i’m too many people absolutely absolutely or i mean now headed over toward rock and roll this was actually going to be where they did the horror thing cuz you remember when this park opened up disney didn’t disney do horror universal did horror right and so they were like well how
Jim Hill: we do this? And they finally came up with a concept for the show called The Creature’s Choice and the idea was it was literally an award show for monsters. Nice. And you, the interesting thing is it was going to be built like the Carousel of Progress and that you would rotate through a bunch of show scenes supposedly as part of this award show.
Len Testa: and the finale of the show is they give a lifetime achievement award to Godzilla and literally just his foot came through the ceiling. That’s classic. But that was here along with a great show about, they wanted to explore all process of filmmaking and one of the shows they created was a ghost writer.
Jim Hill: Ghost writer or writer? Ghost writer. And the gimmick of the show is it was going to be like you were sitting, you know the Pepper’s ghost effect for the mansion? You’re sitting in a theater where this entire show is a Pepper’s ghost effect. Really? You know, the idea is you’re, in fact, borrowing a page from Hitchcock, you’re, you
Len Testa: rear window. You’re in a apartment complex looking at a guy who’s working in, you know, like a greenhouse apartment thing and he’s working on, you know, a film noir and, you know, but as he’s sitting at his manual typewriter, as he dreams up characters, they appear in the room. So it’s like, you know, the mall comes out of the typewriter and the thug and they get the little weasel-y character and all that. as he would little and…
Len Testa: as he dealt with the meat you know all of these people that he’d written them on and they’d literally fall into the trash but yeah that was here as well and but of course the problem with that is you had to figure out a way to increase capacity they were they were going to put two theaters side by side to try to bump you know a number of people through an hour for this 15 minute show but in the end what people wanted were thrills and
Jim Hill: This what we have now. Rock and Roller Coaster. Are there any plans to, I mean, Aerosmith seems like they’re, every time you count them out, it seems like Aerosmith comes back. They’re gonna be around for a while. They’re happy with this, though the one thing you will see change over here relatively soon is the Rock and Roller Coaster lounge area, which again is part of the next gen. they’re gonna do that. So remember that, yeah, so a couple years ago, last year, they tested a sort of a group waiting area instead of waiting in the line.
Len Testa: You waited in an area and you were called by group to board the ride. They’re going to do something similar? What they’re going to do is literally bump out here into where the old ESPN thing was located. And it’s literally, you’re a rock star. So it’s like, hey, your ride isn’t ready yet. Come wait in the green room. And you come back and there’s going to be, for example, a place where…
Jim Hill: They’ve got a sponsorship deal lined up with Rockstar. I mean, literally, you can play the game on a widescreen. There will be a refreshment stand. There’ll be a DJ playing music. mean, just while you wait for your turn to get a, your ride’s here, sir, okay. But they’re gonna try to create the whole fawning green room experience. that’s great. But they’re gonna have to do it on massive scale, 500 people at a time. No, no, that’s it exactly. It’s a giant space.
Len Testa: But it’s gonna be literally, I mean, you’re friendly with the scene one concept, right? Yeah, It’s the intro scene, the queue, the pre-show, or the queue for any of the attractions. So just think of this as, you know, what they’re doing with Dumbo, the flying circus, the game interaction area. Think of that for adults, all right? You know, oh, we have a place for you to sit down. Oh, we can get you a beverage. Oh, you know, get up and play a game. You know, but yeah, that goes in right to the side, and you’ll now load in.
Len Testa: You you’ll sort of come in behind to the pre-show and that movie. so what’s the idea behind that? Is just to distract people from the fact that it’s a 40-minute wait?
Jim Hill: Pretty much. And you know, the weird thing of it is, is that, You know, I mean, that is always the sore point of a Walt Disney World vacation. That people are upset about waiting the lines. And if you can distract them from that moment, if you can entertain them to distraction…
Jim Hill: Right. You know, that they don’t obsess about the fact that I waited 40 minutes to get on it. It’s like, yeah, that’s the place where you and I played Rockstar together. Not the place where we spent 40 minutes of our lives and never get back. That’s it exactly. No, it’s about to get really interesting here. don’t know if, you know, I mean, everyone seems obsessed on the notion of, how’s Disney gonna battle Harry Potter? And, you know, I think when you get right down to it, when you compare Universal’s attendance, what is it, seven, eight million a year?
Len Testa: Okay, and the what the 22 million? You know it’s more about look we have market dominance We just have to you know find a way to make having them here that much more pleasant so That’s a that’s a that’s good point So there’s there’s not a lot that they they have to do in and really if they if they sunk you know three billion dollars four billion dollars whatever into the
Jim Hill: into a park like the studios. What could they realistically expect for return? It’s not like they’re gonna go from 9 million people a year at the studios to 17 million a year. No, that’s exactly Well, the park infrastructure doesn’t support it, number one. They have to build that out. Number two, that’s an unrealistic expectation. mean, they have to essentially double the size of the park. And even then, think of all the people who already been here who still have that preconceived idea of what the studios is like. So even if you tell them, we spent $5 billion, we 16 new attractions, they’re like…
Len Testa: And might get back to it, we might not. And again, that’s ultimately what people need to remember is that this…
Len Testa: a theme park is a people eating machine and this is a line of business for Disney and it’s just sort of like show me my return on investment. You mean just what just happened with, well, for example, we’re headed back toward, you know, American Idol right now. And what happened with star tours? You spend all this money, you know, you, you put this brand new version of the ride in with all these amazing details and you don’t see an attendance jump. Yeah, it was really, really tight. was like maybe a couple percent for a short period of time. Essentially all the, all the local
Jim Hill: everyone within a couple hundred mile radius who who hadn’t seen it before wanted to go see it they did that was it yeah and and so you know was that money well spent and and you know again arguing about idle
Len Testa: You know, all that money, cutting that licensing deal. And now, it’s like, please, please, please come sing. That’s right, yeah. We haven’t talked about American Idol. Are there any plans to do anything with that? I get the sense from American Idol that it’s one of those things where, like with Phineas and Ferb, they’re sort of striking while the iron is hot. This was one where they maybe struck after the iron had started cooling for a couple of years. Absolutely, absolutely. And fact, that’s now…
Jim Hill: You we’re back to the same problem. We have this amazing structure right in the middle of the park. Yeah, it’s very nice. And, what do you do with it? I mean, it just, you you, you know, people literally walk into this park and, you know, reach the hat and it’s like, it’s right there on the left. And it’s like, you need to figure out what to put in this because, you know, people want to believe that they’re getting value out of their trip. So,
Len Testa: So I know that the show is the last show of the day for American Idol is usually pretty crowded, but I’m looking at it now, there’s a show going on in half an hour, I literally don’t see anyone in, not half an hour, sorry, there’s a going on in 15 minutes, I don’t see anyone out in front for American Idol. And that is the problem, just, know, on paper this worked. The ratings for the show aren’t that good. And that’s the other thing, when you live and die, know, something like that, it’s a dairy product, and right now,
Len Testa: I don’t want to that it’s its death spiral. It’s just punk star range. not the single thing that everybody had to watch all the time. And that was the thing. Disney built this thing. It wasn’t even in the white hot moment of the show. was just sort of like… The year or two after, yeah. Is there any parting thoughts for Disney’s Hollywood Studios? Other than to be honest in a weird sort of way, this park…
Jim Hill: If you know your Disney history, this park only exists because they didn’t know… When they opened Epcot, people were desperate for Disney characters.
Len Testa: And, you know, just, was on these things, it was a Disney character-free zone, they had to figure out how to do it. Let’s build another park. You and what I… We still rented the construction equipment. Well, the other thing is they had literally spaced out between the land and imagination pavilion, they were going to put in an entertainment pavilion. And this was where you were going to get to, in fact, there was a rudimentary form of the great movie ride, where you get to see celebrities. But on the other side was literally a how we do Disney animated films, and it was going to be
Jim Hill: kind of a classic dark ride only you rode through watching them make the rescuers only but all the grips were like the grips with the seven dwarfs and you know that that you know you know donald was up in the the flies working the wires holding you know the the boat up for you know bernard and bianca to ride in and it was only eisner walking through the door and seeing that pavilion and more to the point knowing that universal was getting ready to do it studio it’s like i i know what we can do with that
Len Testa: And here we are today. Jim, thanks for doing this episode with us. We’ll be back with another episode soon. Always great fun.
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Len Testa and Jim Hill walk through Universal’s Islands of Adventure, tracing how Port of Entry, Marvel Super Hero Island, Toon Lagoon, Jurassic Park, Seuss Landing, and the Wizarding World of Harry Potter reveal Universal’s evolving approach to theme park storytelling. Along the way, they discuss the park’s Disney influences, the complicated Marvel rights situation, the rise of Harry Potter as Universal’s game-changer, and why Forbidden Journey set a new bar for immersive attractions.
Islands of Adventure and the Wizarding World’s Big Swing Transcript
Len Testa: Welcome to another edition of the unofficial guide Disney Dish podcast with Jim Hill. Today we’re at Islands of Adventure theme park with Jim Hill. We’ve just entered the park and welcome to all of you. Jim, how’s it going today at IOA?
Jim Hill: it’s going great because again, we’re in… Honestly, Universal’s, or to me, yes, the most ambitious Universal park. And to be honest, in a lot of ways it’s the most ambitious park here in Orlando. Really? I mean, think about it. We were just over in Universal Studios, which again, is a film studio. And as a direct result, because they were going to shoot movies there, there’s a lot of counterintuitive language. We’re here, right from the get-go. Island’s Adventure was supposed to be a theme park.
Jim Hill: You we are now in the retail quarter. This is their Main Street USA. But at the same time, it is one of the most densely packed storytelling Main Street USAs you’ll ever see. you know, as you wander around here, for example, we have the jail over here. And if you’re paying attention, you can actually see, you know, the ropes where prisoners snuck out and you can hear the audio loop. But no, just, this is a port of entry, literally is what it It says it is. It is, you know, you’re surrounded by ride vehicles whether, for example, looking at a bicycle cart here, we passed a rocket, know, all these adventurers came here to have…
Len Testa: So the ride vehicles represent how the people who populate the park supposedly got here.
Jim Hill: That’s it, exactly.
Len Testa: The entrance of the park is interesting. On the right hand side you’ve got some like, you’ve got different kinds of buildings for… from every different period of time in every different area. looks like you’ve got steampunk stuff there on the right, you’ve got some really funny stuff over there on the left, so it’s all pretty interesting.
Jim Hill: No, again, and all deliberate, all with the idea of giving you the sense of the world that lies just beyond port of entry here. But again, what I find fascinating is that as you walk into this park, you actually pass the great light. the lighthouse, one of the seven wonders of the world. The lighthouse at Alexandria. Yeah, but here’s the funny thing that if you, again, if you remember the initial concept for Tokyo Disney Seas for Tokyo, that was the icon for that park. you know, again, in the fine tradition of, you know, great artists steal, you know, the folks at Universal, it’s like, okay, that’s a cool idea. All right, we’re doing that too.
Len Testa: That isn’t the right vehicle. Yeah, that’s what I mean. But there’s a sleigh. This is a really well done sort of entryway. It feels kind of like a Middle Eastern bizarre meets, you know, sort of Mediterranean village.
Jim Hill: But at the same time, they look at again, universal correct system six. Remember how we were talking yesterday about you walk in past the camera shop, you know, they look across the way on the right side. There’s your bakery.
Len Testa: yes, yes.
Jim Hill: So you want your breakfast and you’re right-handed, you know, that’s where your vision is driven to. So yeah, and on the right-hand side coming back you’ve got your merchandise. So in many ways it does reflect sort of the design sensibility of a regular Disney theme park. And again, you know, now borrowing from two Disney theme parks, we walk out and see the lagoon from Epcot. But what’s across the way? The castle, you know, Jurassic Park. You know, the, you know, the visitor center for Jurassic Park. And… Of course, that’s how it was originally designed, but now, what do you see when you come in? You know, it’s kind of obscured by a tree, but there’s Hogwarts Castle. And if we stand here for a moment, we will watch fully two-thirds of the guests make an immediate hard right as they head off to Harry Potter.
Len Testa: Yeah, we mentioned this on the walkover from Universal Studios, but I would say fully out of every hundred guests that were coming out of the parking garage. 80 of them were going here to Iowa and only 20 of them were going to the studios. The park already, Iowa already feels much more crowded than Universal Studios did.
Jim Hill: And the irony again is previously anybody entering this park before Harry Potter was here made the left because of course the first thing you see is the Hulk coaster.
Len Testa: The Hulk coaster, right, the big green thing with loops and stuff. It’s a great coaster, have you been on it?
Jim Hill: yeah, yeah. Sadly had to ride the fat seat, but yes, I’ve ridden it.
Len Testa: It’s very smooth.
Jim Hill: No, absolutely. It’s amazingly smooth. Though, one of my favorite… Good morning? One of the more interesting aspects of the attraction, and this had to be put in, they began soft opening of this in March of 1999, a friend of Keir was working the bridge, and they had just fired up the whole coaster for this time. He’s standing there, and he suddenly hears smash, and there’s a camera lying in the street next to him. And they realized, oh my god, because in that loop that they go into, know, everything flies out of the car. So now they literally rigged up that net there to capture things and at the end of the day they go and collect them. you know, when your belongings fly out on a hulk, there isn’t actually a chance you can recover them. So.
Len Testa: You know what they should have in the park? What? A pawn shop. You can collect all the stuff. You need a Nikon. What kind of Nikon do you need?
Jim Hill: Well, this is true. This is true.
Len Testa: Hi, so we’re walking under the Hulk coaster. starting a, it looks like a clockwise tour of the park and we’re coming up on some sort of futuristic space looking cafe.
Jim Hill: Well again, here we are with the, we’re in Marvel Island and if I’m not mistaken that’s, what is it, the Fantastic Four Cafe?
Len Testa: Yeah, I’ll go with that.
Jim Hill: Well, and This is where life gets a little complicated because, you know, again, this is a Marvel land at a Universal theme park and Marvel now is of course owned by Disney. And so the question is always, sorry about that. The question has always been when is, you know, when is Disney gonna get the theme park rights to the Marvel characters? At least here in Florida, I don’t know, does the term hell freeze over mean anything? Part of the problem is that the licensing deal, the master licensing deals that Universal enjoys with Marvel are so specific.
Jim Hill: mean, literally, for example, we’re walking by all these buildings now with giant versions of the characters on the marquees. There’s a separate deal for each of these characters on the marquees, let alone the walk-around characters in the park, let alone the attractions. And all of them are very specific to the effect of, know, Universal has the rights for 250 miles. know, nobody else can have an attraction featuring these characters. Within 250 miles. Then, beyond that, it gets a little interesting because there is some additional language.
Jim Hill: And trust me, Disney’s attorneys have gone over and over and over this and they’ve tried to negotiate some deals with Universal. In fact, that’s the interesting thing. Disney has cut deals with Universal before. I think about it. They got Oswald the lucky rabbit back after 80 years. So there is a precedent. It can be done. And they’re trying to do it through back channels quietly, but the first attempt… failed so badly universally actually put money into redoing Spider-Man. In fact, that’s not only opening in a month or two here, as sort of a F-U to Disney. It’s like, you know, not only are we gonna hang on to these characters, we’re putting money back into the attractions.
Len Testa: this is Marvel Island. We’re walking past a comic store, a diner. I wonder if there’s a Chris Eliopoulos in the Marvel stuff. We’re walking past a diner. past an ice cream store. It’s pretty well themed in sort of a, I can definitely see this as a Marvel city.
Jim Hill: No, again, it’s wonderfully done for what it is. But part of the problem for islands is they literally had to go out and find properties. In fact, we’re now just reaching the outermost edges of Marvel’s superhero island. We’re about to go to Toon Lagoon and this is where the stitching really shows.
Jim Hill: I had a friend who actually worked on the construction of this thing. It literally was in the trailer, it was in the mud. You know, as they’re building this thing and literally, you know, your boss would come in and go, we got Prince Valiant! It’s like really, know, what, for pocket chains that was on top of the dresser? You walk through here and it’s all of these comic book characters from the 60s and the 70s and this is what they could get.
Len Testa: If you listen to the other podcast… We’ve got Judge Parker ride! There you go. Mary Wirth’s. Mary Mary Wirth’s. You they just did what they could. They do have the puppy ride, or the Pup Eye ride. They do have the Dudley Doo ride. You mentioned that we’ve got the Broomhilda stand here. These are characters that you’ve seen before, but they’re sort of like the stuff that Hanna Barbera would show at 3am on Cartoon Network.
Jim Hill: absolutely. And again, you… You walk through here and it’s like looking, you know, we’re getting into the depth of the land that is Marquis after Marquis after Marquis, I Brenda Starr. know, and again, Blondie.
Len Testa: Yeah. Although, there’s Bullwinkle and Rocky. I’ll give them that.
Jim Hill: Well, but that, again, another interesting story of how personal and frankly kind of mean the battle between Disney and Universal was. If you remember- back in the early 80s of the airbugs, Disney actually had the rights, VHS rights, to the Rocky and Bollicle show and they had released eight or nine of them and Disney was actually assuming that because they had this deal that they would begin developing theme park attractions because we have this wonderful working relationship with J Ward’s daughter Ramona and so they were planning on actually, and again this is the eighties before disney had you know it’s it’s an initial revival with all that and beauty of the beast so they were scrambling for characters that did for example to put into the disney hollywood studios and universal some canny lawyer universalism wait they got the video rights but not the theme park roads and they swooped in and and literally snagged them off one disney and disney was so pissed that they actually they had plans for twenty thirty vhs is in the bowl equal dvd series And they shut it down. just, after eight, it’s like, that’s it, we’re done. We don’t do anything else with you.
Len Testa: Eight.
Jim Hill: Yep. And so again, this is a very cutthroat personal business. But again, because they got the J Ward rights, that’s where they got Dudley Do-Right from. it’s not, don’t get me wrong. It’s not that this is necessarily, you know, I mean, it’s got some charm, but it’s an awfully cluttered design.
Len Testa: And a lot of the time you’re looking at it like, do I know that character? mean, well, I mean, I’m looking at Pogo. I know Pogo. Yeah, Pogo, we got the Phantom, Buddy, sorry, Betty Boop, Kathy, Heathcliff. but you know, they gave it a shot. And to be fair, they’re iconic characters. mean, here we’ve got, you know, Little Nemo, know, Winsor McCay. Yeah. You know, there is some good stuff here. Oh, God, there is Family Circus. There you go. I was joking, it’s true.
Jim Hill: And what’s killer though is leading away from the Family Circus is they literally have the dot. You can chase Billy!
Len Testa: So on the Sunday strips of Family Circus, sometimes they’ll do a dotted strip where they show what Billy did. know, for like take out the trash and they’ll show him going through the entire neighborhood. Take out the trash, they do one of those.
Jim Hill: Don’t get me wrong, they’re clever ideas. You have your water fountain. with every cartoon strip dog known to man. I mean, there are some fun ideas here, but it’s kind of cluttered, it’s kind of busy.
Len Testa: There are definitely a of water features here. feels… cooler because the water features. that’s… Ah, the Dagwood sandwich. This is actually, and they will serve it to you here. You actually can get a Dagwood sandwich.
Jim Hill: Really?
Len Testa: What’s in it?
Jim Hill: Everything. I think actually furniture.
Len Testa: Furniture. Do they have it on the list? I’d love to see what the ingredients are in the Dagwood sandwich. Let’s take a look. We’re going to go in and see if there’s to see if there’s an ingredient. Oh, there is. It’s $8.99. All right. Our famous Dagwood sandwich. fresh baked onion and poppy seed bread piled high with baked ham, turkey, roast beef, American Swiss cheese, topped with lettuce, tomatoes, mayonnaise, and mustard. Wow. That’s a sandwich. That’s pretty impressive.
Jim Hill: I’m sorry, if it doesn’t come with a complimentary Metamucil, I’m not having it. There’s not enough fiber in that one. There we go.
Len Testa: comes with a complimentary wicker charity.
Jim Hill: Anyway, this is, you talked about the water features. One of the reasons there’s so much water in this land, this, again, this is the park where you get wet. have, know, Popeye and Bluto’s, Bill Trav, Ratfuck. And then just beyond that is Jurassic Park. And you don’t just get wet on these things. It’s literally, you can go swimming and be drier.
Len Testa: way around getting completely
Jim Hill: No, absolutely. mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s a quality ride, it’s done well, it’s certainly, you you compare this to Cali River Rapids where it’s just, know, that somebody can swatch you with a wet sponge. But they have a wonderful, do you want to go take a look? Okay. A wonderful kid play area and again, that coupled with a just flat out terrific view across the water at Hogwarts. So. But again, sad thing is that anybody who rides Popeye isn’t necessarily re-riding Popeye.
Len Testa: No, no, Once you’ve done it, you’re that’s right. Okay, I am stoked for the week, thank you. So the ride vehicles for Popeye look a lot like the ride vehicles for Collier River Rapids. It’s a similar type of ride, but I don’t think on the same scale.
Jim Hill: But at the same time, mean look, we’re as busy as the park is today. It’s a five minute wait.
Len Testa: Yeah, and it’s warm outside.
Jim Hill: Yeah. So what does that tell you? You know? But at the same time, we have the Wimpy’s burgers over here and that’s again staying, you know, consistent to give the characters of the storyline, you know, coupled with our, our Popeye themed water plate or. know, climbing area play area here.
Len Testa: Sweet Pea’s climbing area?
Jim Hill: Yeah, they do some nice stuff. And again, there’s some great design back here.
Len Testa: We’re walking past a group of people who are just completely drenched. And they’re taking their clothes off and wringing them out. And frankly, some of them shouldn’t be, Charles.
Jim Hill: But anyway. Let’s go and find something nicer to look at, all right?
Len Testa: I think I’m blind, though, Jim. I think I’m blind. and uh… we’re walking up towards the olive which is uh… it’s like a boat play area for
Jim Hill: no and again great climbing great playing but again you know think about it you if you’ve been out to disneyland and been to you know the miss daisy compared that to you know uh… this three story structure
Len Testa: We’re walking over the bridge that is the Popeye attraction and we’re walking past a tugboat scene that is just dumping water all over one half of the rafts in the Popeye ride. I’m not talking about like a sprit. It looks like the waterfall on Jungle Cruise. It’s that much water. That’s incredible and we’re walking up now so we’re kind of elevated right now. We’re kind of up about one story. Have a great view of the Hulk, a great view of the other parts of the park. Jim, what’s that land straight across?
Jim Hill: Well again, we’re looking at Marvel. In fact, we’re looking at the footings for the Hulk coaster. And then if we come over here, we’ve got Sus’s Landing.
Len Testa: then Mithos. Mithos, is that a restaurant?
Jim Hill: Yes, but that’s, and again, this is where things get interesting. This is supposedly the best review of theme park restaurant in all of Orlando. And I’ve always had a little trouble with that story because it’s like, it’s never open. How could it be the best reviewed when anytime I ever go by it, it’s closed. You know, I mean, again, you know, just the fine people get in there.
Len Testa: Rape. It’s like Victoria and Albert’s. That’s why it must be one of them. Ah, got it. OK. But for burgers.
Jim Hill: So, but anyway, now you see just sort of the tale of Hogwarts.
Len Testa: Okay, so we’re looking, uh, Mithos, to the left of Mithos is Hogwarts Village.
Jim Hill: And Plymouth Rock!
Len Testa: Oh my Oh wow, I thought it was farther north. It’s shaped like a Plymouth. That’s funny. Okay. Um… No. The cruiser might be little quieter. We’re about 200 yards away from the Hulk Coaster, which tells you how loud that thing is. If you can hear it in the background.
Jim Hill: But as we stand here, you can see kind of one of the problems with this part. So much of it. mean, look over at Soos’ landing. All right, the vibrant, vibrant colors. it just, means when you commit to Soos’ world, you commit to Soos’ world. In fact, we were watching their little train thing work. That was an opening day attraction that never made it off the table. That was supposed to be Gerald Bucky McBean’s amazing train machine. Never quite worked the way it was supposed to. So this is what they were finally able to jury-rig it into working.
Len Testa: It’s an elevated, slow-moving train ride through Susa’s land, looks like. You’re right. In terms of visual contrast, going from right to We’ve got the green of the Hulk coaster. We’ve got the Mediterranean sort of look of the end of the the entryway. We’ve got Seuss’s landing, which is all sort of Technicolor odd-shaped structures. You’ve got a roller coaster in the back. That’s RupRide. You got Mythos, which is it looks like it’s carved out of rock. And then you’ve got Hogwarts. You’ve really got, you know, you know, we’re missing here is the Chrysler building because that would be that would be every every type of architecture you could possibly do.
Jim Hill: Well again, the irony here is if they had actually gone ahead with the Two Universal Project, right there was where Gotham City was going to be built and Marvel was going to be Metropolis. And in fact, what was kind of interesting is the lagoon, how they were going to close the park out every night, was they were going to do this massive lagoon show. In fact, the path we’re on was where guests were going to go to stand to see it, literally, idea was that elements from all four islands would come out and form a brand new island that will only come out at night and you know for example sailing out of Gotham City would be an iceberg that had been created by Mr. Freeze you know and now it would have been an amazing nighttime show but never quite again they did make that deal though interestingly enough one of the only reasons that Universal got Harry Potter was because of Seuss.
Jim Hill: Well, interesting thing that, you know, Disney had the first shot at JK Rowling and they actually, designed two attractions. There was a defense against the Dark Heart ride and then there was going to be, if you can believe it, a care and feeding of magical creatures petting zoo.
Len Testa: Wow.
Jim Hill: But it was only these two attractions. was only going to be, you know, and Disney was going back and forth about whether it was going to be in Fantasyland at the Magic Kingdom where they’re going to build it at the studio. And they basically… They totally mishandled J.K. Rowling. Long story short, this is a woman who was very hands-on. In a sort of way, Disney should have known better because it was like, it took them 15 years to convince P.L. Travers to give Walt Disney himself the rights to Mary Poppins. And Travers was a pushover compared to J.K. Rowling.
Jim Hill: But they basically… told her, honey, know, we’re Disney, we’re the very best at what we do, when we want your input, we’ll ask for it. And the negotiations just crashed and burned. Meanwhile, Universal gets wind of, you know, that the fact that she’s on the market again. And they’re so smart about it. They contact her and literally it’s like, look, Miss Rowling, understand you. know, theme park rides are available and we’d be so honored if you’d be part of our, you know, and we’d love to work with you. In fact, we’d consult you on every phase of the park.
Jim Hill: And so they fly around here and they literally walk her over to Seuss’s landing and say, look, you know, the Dr. Seuss stories. Look at how carefully we sculpt the characters. Look how lovingly we maintain these buildings. You know, we, we followed exactly what, Geisel did. And better yet, here’s Audrey Geisel, Dr. Seuss’s widow. Give her a call. Tell her, ask her how it was to work with Universal. And Audrey, Audrey was a huge pain in the ass. Audrey, when they were opening this park back in 99, she’s walking around going, that’s the wrong color, it. And they painted it.
Jim Hill: And that was the thing that said, look, I was really, really demanding. I put these guys through hell, and they did it. They did exactly what I want. I have no complaint at all about Universal. if you’re thinking of bringing Harry there I wholly you know a big thumbs up go with those guys and that’s what happened she decided to sign because of Suzy’s landing so that’s a great story yeah so anyway speaking of go Potter and walking for another three hours we’ll get there
Len Testa: I haven’t been to this park in years so it’s a completely lost as well right we’re walking back towards Jurassic Park is that it
Jim Hill: well we’re sort of screwed in the water here trying to figure out if we can actually get back out to Dudley Duroyd here.
Len Testa: We may have to swim for it, Jim.
Jim Hill: Well that’s another little, you know, of fascinating story of universal history because Dudley was supposed to be the attraction that opened the spring after the park opened. It was deliberately held in reserve.
Len Testa: Okay. for something else to do?
Jim Hill: And… They’re four months out from opening and they’re not, you know, we’re gonna need it. Is that all right? I think we go down here and go right. All right. problem is, we’re not ready. So…
Len Testa: that’s a dead end. And apparently we’re meeting up with other people who are stuck in the dead end. Do think we have to go back up that way? Okay. Alright, I’m following you at this point.
Jim Hill: Anyway!
Len Testa: And they were never heard from again. Let this podcast be a recording of our last thoughts on Earth. Alright, anyway, back to… I didn’t look like it went anywhere. Let me check, hold on, there’s an area over here. let me look, me look, let me look, let me look. Nope, that’s nothing, dead end. Does anybody have any food?
Jim Hill: said, I’d miss.
Len Testa: Jim’s playing Battleship. that’d be funny. Anyway. That’s what we need, a theme park based on board games.
Jim Hill: Do not give them any ideas. Remember, Battleship the movie is actually opening this year.
Len Testa: Is it really?
Jim Hill: yes. Yes.
Len Testa: Seriously. What? There’s a plot?
Jim Hill: Aliens. And fact, what’s fascinating is that when the aliens actually attack the battleship, they fire what look like big white plastic pegs into the side of the ship.
Len Testa: that’s beautiful. if you’re a literalist when playing the game, you’ll be completely happy. There you go.
Jim Hill: Anyway, back to Dudley again. So they have four months and they get it open. But it’s like, look, we don’t we have show scenes that aren’t done. like, I don’t care.
Len Testa: And they’re still not done.
Jim Hill: They’re still not done. Still not done. 15 years later. Yeah, was one of these things where it’s like, we’re going to have to get back to that at some time. And I never have. Wow. Now, you’ve ridden Dudley at some point, right?
Len Testa: Oh, yeah. I got soaked on it.
Jim Hill: So, but you remember the Pirates of the Caribbean gag at the end?
Len Testa: No, I don’t remember it.
Jim Hill: Well, the last scene before you get to the offload area is Snidely Whiplash, you know, in jail, literally. aping the scene from Pirates of the Caribbean.
Len Testa: a dog?
Jim Hill: Only in this case it’s a beaver holding the set of pears.
Len Testa: That’s great. I think we can go up and to the right to to Jurassic Park.
Jim Hill: I Anyway, pushing on. So, I don’t know, I remember from… Angela my friend who actually worked this project just the poor thing being out here in this mudfield This was literally the last land to get done because they didn’t know from day to day Who they’d land the rights for? Which which characters that we’ve got and it’s just sort of like okay, and let’s hurry and get that facade built so
Len Testa: Wow, all right, so we’re walking over we’re leaving the The land of cartoons and we’re heading over towards Jurassic park.
Jim Hill: And again, this was when this place opened. This was their castle. This was what was supposed to drive you ever deeper into this park. some of this stuff works back here and some of it does not. I mean, for example, we’re working at Pterodon Flyers right now. And a wonderful attraction if you weigh three pounds.
Len Testa: Yeah, it’s got height requirements that prevent lots and lots and lots of people from riding it,
Jim Hill: Absolutely, and coupled with the fact that it’s got virtually zero capacity. Charming idea, you know, when it came time to actually build the thing, it just never quite came together the way it was supposed to.
Len Testa: Anyway, here we come up on Ripsaw Falls, which has the wonderful exploding building effect. Here we go. so we’re passing by Ripsaw Falls. on our left. It’s got a sort of a splash mountainy type feel to it. There’s tons and tons of water just pouring out of the rapids, actually, Ripsaw Falls, I guess. And as each ride vehicle goes down, water can shoot out and spray everywhere. It’s just a ton of water. It’s a great effect, though. very, visually, it’s very interesting.
Jim Hill: Absolutely, absolutely. Again, it just would have been interesting if it had been built as designed and more to the point finished. But I’m funny that way. I complete it still.
Len Testa: We’re coming up on the entry to Jurassic Park. It’s got the big doors from the movie. Yeah, the Pterodon flyers look like it’s a relatively straightforward attraction, hanging sort of coaster for kids.
Jim Hill: So that said, one of the nicest things about the success of Harry Potter was that because they were suddenly dealing with that many more people in the park, they actually brought back their Triceratops encounter attraction here. You ever done that?
Len Testa: No.
Jim Hill: It’s… It’s this incredibly sophisticated… You know, again… Basically, it’s the guys in Canada who did the robotic space arm for the shuttle. And what they did is they built an audio animatronic triceratops that you literally go into the barn. And there’s a trainer there who’s, you hi, you have a four and five minute encounter with an animal that doesn’t exist. It’s really, really clever. But they actually shut it down because… Well, again, circling back to our Tomorrowland story, the entrance path was so obscure. that people didn’t know what to do.
Len Testa: We’re now walking through the Jurassic Parkland. So one of the things I like about the entrance here, Jim, is just like the Animal Kingdom, they’ve themed the walkway. So it’s got plant imprints on it, like fossils and stuff. And the plants themselves on either side are representative of early time, so ferns, simpler plants, and things like that.
Jim Hill: No, absolutely. Though the flip side of this is this comes at a cost, that if you’re in a wheelchair or you’re in a DA vehicle, it makes the pavement that much rougher. you know, so it’s always a balancing act when you’re talking with ops. Never mind the fact that these are harder to maintain, because you know, not only have to paint the pavement, but you have to paint in a little shadow to sell the idea that, that’s a fraud, or that’s a footprint, you know, nice.
Jim Hill: Speaking of nice though, the Camp Jurassic here, the kiddie play area, I think again among the best in Orlando. The only thing, as an adult, if you take your child in there, you can lose them for days. I remember coming here with EJ and Jonathan White and just two small boys who, I think we were here for two hours and then eventually it’s like look, Let another family adopt you. We’ve waited long enough. We can’t find you. That’s it.
Len Testa: Wow. So that was a boat that just came out of the Jurassic Park ride. That is a tremendous amount of water.
Jim Hill: Absolutely. Absolutely. But that’s the interesting thing is people here like to do the water triathlon. They will do this, then they’ll go over and do Dudley, and then they’ll build Dread, and then they’ll dribble throughout the rest of the park.
Len Testa: Wow. It’s good way of universal to irrigate the rest of the park. moisture wicking from the guests.
Jim Hill: Yeah, because of course, know, in Florida they have that, they need more humidity.
Len Testa: Yeah, that’s it. This is a place that just, you know, it’s not damp enough. It needs to be, it’s so arid normally that we need more moisture. We’re walking past one of those fans that… blow the missing fans. That’s a little bit of noise. So I think Camp Jurassic one entrance so at least you you have a half a chance of actually getting your children back. You can play zone. There we go. we go. So the Jurassic Park land has a restaurant, has a gift shop of course, and it’s got two or three attractions if you include the camp right?
Jim Hill: Absolutely. But again remember the Triceratops thing and actually there’s an expansion pad that they have yet to use back here.
Len Testa: Really?
Jim Hill: Behind the outfitters? Yep. And this is actually for a Jurassic Park Jeep attraction that they have, they literally, they’ve had it designed now for 15 years. They’re ready to go. But it takes the thing from the movie that everybody saw, riding in the ride vehicle and something goes horribly wrong. Right. But, you know, who knows? Maybe someday, I know that there is talk at Universal about doing a fourth Jurassic Park film, fact, maybe rebooting the series. And perhaps as part of that, they’ll finally take that idea out of, know, out of hock, so to speak.
Len Testa: We’re walking now towards the, through the back end of Jurassic Park. We’re coming up on, I guess there’s place to get temporary tattoos, pizza. You know, the interesting thing though, still, I mean, we’re, the view leaving the Jurassic Park isn’t terrible. Hogwarts castle looming in the distance but this pizza place, the theme fits in with the land. It’s really not bad. They’ve got a show building that’s, I guess the Hogwarts show building which is pretty big but overall they’ve done pretty well with the… with the sight lines.
Jim Hill: No, and again, the only problem is that, in fact, this is why we’re seeing, you know, when Hogwarts bumps out, it’s going to go down the hill toward Sinbad, let alone what they’re doing over at Universal Studios Florida. just, this is as far as they can go in this direction. This is as far as Hogwarts can go without taking out the Jurassic Park stuff. And, you know, the sad part of it is that they were… They were hoping that they’d actually be able to do here the dining experience. They give people a meal in the Great Hall and they’re still circling around on that idea.
Len Testa: Would they have to expand out this way?
Jim Hill: Well, that’s the problem. You’d really want to take out, I mean, don’t know what sort of support buildings are behind here, but you’ve got restrooms, you’ve got a pizza place, you’ve got room to do it. Well, the problem is that as they want to do the Great Hall, first of all, know, when are you going to pay $60, $70, $80 for for that sort of character dining, is what we’re talking about. They’re gonna wanna at least think that they’re going into Hogwarts Castle, so you have to build it in this area, and you have to figure out how to load people in.
Jim Hill: More to the point, though, it’s gotta be built. The Great Hall itself has to be built on the second floor, because the kitchens have to be below. There’s an effect they’ve got planned for the show that’s absolutely killer.
Len Testa: That, what is it?
Jim Hill: Well, basically, again, if you know from the Harry Potter films, starts with the food magically appearing. So people who are dining at the Great Hall are going to want to see the food magically appear. and they’ve figured out how to do it. And it’s actually a really clever idea that that. What they’ll do is that you’ll sit at long common tables and there’ll be what appears to be an empty silver platter in front of you. And then the wait staff will walk in with the top of a tureen, which they show you without showing you that it’s empty. There is nothing in it. It’s light.
Jim Hill: They’re sort of spinning. And they put it down on the table and on a five count they lift it and it’s filled with food. It’s steaming hot chicken and beef. And everyone’s like, wow, how did you do that? Well, how they do that is that again, kitchen blow and they put the food on a hydra. like ram. The platter in front of you literally is like a drawer. It slides out of place, food comes up, and the food is there. The couple of tests they’ve done, it’s really good with chicken, it’s great with beef, not so much with the mashed potatoes.
Len Testa: Well that’s exactly, you lift up the top of the turian and you scoop out the mashed potatoes.
Jim Hill: But they’ll figure it out. that’s what they wanted, because again, the survey work, that was literally one of the top three that people who came to Harry Potter they love what they have here but they want to ride the Gingras Coaster they want to ride Hogwarts and they want to eat the Great Hall and so it’s like two of those they figured out and now it’s just finding space for the third.
Len Testa: That’s good segue so we’re about to enter Harry Potter land here. We’re still going sorry sorry sorry no this is the visitor center here. I totally edit this out so it doesn’t make us make me sound like I don’t know what I’m talking about and by totally edit out I mean let’s keep it in because that’s what happened. this again I guess is closed for the season now but this is where the Triceratops attraction is located that I guess now it’s open on a seasonal basis which is a shame it’s great fun to see the gate through there. see the queue.
Jim Hill: So, by the way again this is your castle this is what’s supposed to drive you deep into the park but you know if you do hear a complaint about islands it’s that The walkways are very, very, very twisty.
Len Testa: It is,
Jim Hill: But again, you want to give that sense of more space than there actually is here. Because that’s the other problem with this park is that given how massive so many of these attractions are, you need giant show buildings. mean, if you’re out driving on Sand Lake Road, you can see the size. of the Jurassic Park Riveride building. It’s huge. It’s like the tiny version of the vehicle assembly building at NASA.
Len Testa: I think they have tons of room for expansion. We’re walking past the dinosaur in the Discovery Center. It doesn’t look like that populated to me.
Jim Hill: Here’s the problem. this is this to me universal owns Jurassic Park They don’t have to pay and it well, okay. All right, have to pay Michael Crichton’s estate. Okay and Random House Okay, but everything else they own Whereas with Harry Potter everything is in negotiation, you know, you got to go back to JK. In fact, you know You take for example that this One the reasons they haven’t officially announced what they’re doing over in USF is that they still haven’t got her to completely sign on board with it. So it’s like, you’re going to agree to do this? Yeah, in principle. It’s like, well, could you sign a contract? In principle. In theory, I could sign a contract.
Len Testa: All right, we’re leaving Jurassic Park. We’re about to go over the bridge to, I guess this is Harry Potter Land?
Jim Hill: All right, this is a good place to stop. We’ll pick up again in a minute.
Len Testa: Alright Jim, we’re getting ready to walk into the Dr. Seuss Land? What’s the…
Jim Hill: Seuss Landing. And again, just for those of you who are purists, yes, we cheated. Alright, we were in Jurassic Park, we are now, you know, at Seuss Landing.
Len Testa: Magically in Seuss Landing.
Jim Hill: We, and through the magic of editing, we may splice all this together to appear seamless.
Len Testa: there we go. Alright. Okay. this is…
Jim Hill: Again, the… This is the land where Universal really, really, really tried to show, you know, this is their equivalent of Fantasyland and what they could do. And the fact that it’s such a great physical representation of Geisel’s books doesn’t necessarily mean that it was all successful. I for example, we’re standing across from the long-shuttered Green Eggs and Ham Shop, which… You know, again, a great idea on paper, because they did it authentically. They actually sold green eggs. They sold green eggs and ham.
Len Testa: Really?
Jim Hill: It was eggs with green food coloring. And people would get in line and this is wonderful. This is cool. And I’m not eating this. so they were trash cans full of this just right off to the side where people would take one bite and then throw it away. Because, you know, green eggs and ham.
Len Testa: And the ham was green too?
Jim Hill: No, the ham was actually the right color, but green eggs. anyway, we have, cool. Did you, I’m sorry, you just missed it. Universal has feral cats. No, seriously, one just ran out of, in fact ironic, if I ran the zoo, ran out of, you know. The feral cat ran out of the, if I ran the zoo exhibit. In if you’ll notice, we have a Universal employee with a net trying to catch the feral cat. so with really big gloves to like, Like the kind of gloves that if you were blowing glass, then you need to stick your hands in an oven. Those are the kind of gloves the man has on.
Len Testa: He went that-a-way. He went that-a-way. Jimmy’s directioning in the way the cat went. Okay.
Jim Hill: Anyone? No! It’s kind of ironic they’re trying to catch it because Disney, least in California, actually cultivates its feral cats because, of course, they keep the rodent population down. You know, which is kind of ironic. Again, Mickey Mouse, but we’ll get into that later.
Len Testa: We’re walking past the Carousel.
Jim Hill: Which, again, you Disney collectibles fan, a lot of the authentic Seuss animals for the Carousel were actually sculpted by Maggie Parr, the Imagineer who You know, worked for years on sadly projects that didn’t get made for Disney like Beastly Kingdom for Disney’s animal kingdom. But you know, she now mostly makes her living painting wonderful Disney paintings that recreate settings from the parks and put the characters in them. But one of her earlier gigs after she left Disney was doing this carousel.
Len Testa: Nice. We’re walking past the Cat in the Hat right now. What does that look like,
Jim Hill: Well, to be honest, it’s a dark ride that is very well done but could have benefited from a little less spinning. fact, that’s one of the complaints that parents make a lot about this ride is that their kids would love it except for the fact that… Every so often, the vehicles really whip around and sort of freak out the kids.
Len Testa: Ah, that’s a shame. And then we’re passing one fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish, which is essentially Dumbo. It’s a spinner ride.
Jim Hill: Dumbo when you get spat. Well, it’s actually closer to the magic carpet to Aladdin because you do get spat on in this thing.
Len Testa: That’s right. There’s water feature where the fish spit on you during the ride.
Jim Hill: again, they did such a nice job when it comes to sculpting. you know the Seuss characters and just taking the world of the books and making it three-dimensional and And but the interesting thing is the back door component of this is that because they had this working relationship now with Audrey Geisel that then allowed them to make movies like The Grinch which we won’t talk about and just opening this week in The Lorax.
Len Testa: and we’re walking by the other Trafila trees right now and the Lorax was behind us. The Trafila trees here are a little bit faded.
Jim Hill: Yeah well that and and again this is part of the problem with committing to something like this that because the colors and the stylization in the Seuss books are so distinct. know, a painting crew basically starts at one end of this thing, finishes, and then goes right back. Because, you know, this is central Florida, colors get burned out immediately.
Len Testa: You can tell actually where they’re at right now. So they’re not quite at the Lorax yet, but they’ve definitely completed the Dr. Seuss All the Books You Can Read store because those colors are really, really vibrant.
Jim Hill: Absolutely, and as we get deeper in here, mean, just the Gerter McFuzz, you know, I mean, this part of it pops, but…
Len Testa: It’s hysterical, the difference, because I that’s a great green right
Jim Hill: Yeah, yeah. But again, come back in three months and it’ll be faded. You know, just these sorts of colors just can’t, you know, just can’t deal with the harsh Florida sun, central Florida sun, so… But again, to be fair, they have committed to doing it right. And now, again, everybody knows about Hidden Mickeys. What I love about Seuss’ landing is we actually have a hidden Dr. Seuss.
Len Testa: We have a hidden Dr. Seuss in Seuss’ Okay, over here.
Jim Hill: Alright, we’re over by the police car. Mulberry Street. If you see the police car, there’s a band full of three dignitaries. Look at the one on the far left. That’s Cedar Rock Castle. could also be Bob Salinger. I’m not entirely sure. I’m going with Geisel. Okay, but again, they do a nice, nice job.
Len Testa: That’s great. We’re passing the Mulberry Street store, the Gizmo’s Gadgets and Goodies Galore.
Jim Hill: And it’s nice to see they got the train attraction finally going through. This was an opening day thing that never quite got out of the box. It took them four and five years to finally get something up and running.
Len Testa: Wow. It’s an elevated train ride around Seuss’s Landing. I like the name of the store. Goose Juice.
Jim Hill: I think around the corner we actually have Moose Juice.
Len Testa: Goose Juice and Moose Juice?
Jim Hill: Come on. Gotta read your Dr. Seuss.
Len Testa: And now we’re walking over the bridge. we’re at the end of the Seuss Landing. We’re at the bridge to go to Harry Potter Land.
Jim Hill: Shall we go, Injun? Dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun will probably go under the knife in the next four or five years. The only thing that’s supposedly hands off is mythos and even then there’s talk of you know would this be that much more popular as a Harry Potter themed restaurant. mean face it you can’t really go wrong at Universal these days when it comes if you put Harry Potter something you know people get on line for it yeah and you know and it’s right now they have the demand exceeds supply and they’re just looking for ways to bump that out.
Jim Hill: So, I take for example here, we’re walking up on the edge of Poseidon’s fury. One of the concepts that has been kicked around is using this theater, this facility for a chamber of secrets show. Second Harry Potter book, you know, the notion is that you would go into this space and, you know, to be deep under, you know, the hills of Hogwarts and, you know, come face to face with a basilisk. So, but again, it’s a shame because this has, you look at, I love the statue that fell in and it’s over. I mean, here you have Poseidon’s head, his foot, his arm. mean, there’s so much great detail, great work here that, but again, you have to, this is the second iteration of the show because the first version, people were like, the show’s called Poseidon’s Fury. Where is Poseidon? You know.
Len Testa: They had to literally change it out to create a new version that heavily featured Poseidon. So this is another, another of the Seven Wonders of the World, right? So out front was the lighthouse at Alexandria. Another one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World was a Poseidon sitting astride the harbor at, and then it was destroyed in an earthquake.
Jim Hill: that’s interesting, that’s interesting theme. there any other wonders in the? I think, you see the problem is that was the design idea that they were married to initially, but continued to fall away. And you know, it’s a shame. But again, I just, love these giant chunks of the statue. just.
Len Testa: It’s really well done. You see the feet. standing in stride, the entrance to the theater. That really is thinking, actually. It’s pretty clever.
Jim Hill: Again, there’s some wonderful storytelling in this part. And sadly, the story is coming to an end relatively soon. Make way for more Potter. Like some background music back here, it’s nice. And again, just fun little retail shops, but of course, who, I can’t know. No one’s buying Poseidon merchandise these days.
Len Testa: There there you go. It’s like, you’re walking by somebody reading a Harry Potter book. It’s just, all right, okay. Just some notes. They’re starting before they ride the ride, just to make sure.
Jim Hill: I want to make sure I get There’s a quiz at the end right here. So anyway, if all… If what they’re saying is true, that what will happen in phase three of Pawdakas, phase two of course is the Diagon Alley project for Universal Studios Florida, you’re now going to bump out the borders of Hogsmeade Village and this is going to be basically the hillside that the students walk down to go to the Hogwarts at Cress and there will be pretty much approximately where Sinbad is right now. by a train station that will run back and forth between the two parks. in fact, the disaster attraction over there will be redressed as white, there’s a white chapel, no, King’s Cross Station. And that’s where, back and forth, you’ll ride from one Harry Potter experience to the other.
Len Testa: So you’ll get on the train, you’ll go to one park, you’ll get off the train, you’ll be in another park, then you get back on the train to come back to your original park?
Jim Hill: Yes, that’s it exactly. but again, they’re hoping that you do in fact wander out away from Harry Potter at some point. that you don’t just get off the train and get back on? And here’s the sad part, we’re gonna lose fun little… I mean… Now mind you, the fountain didn’t used to play music like this, but this is the interactive fountain where the… You know, there’s a playoff stage watching through a camera who’s busy assaulting children via water.
Len Testa: So we’re out in front of the eighth voyage of Sinbad and there’s a water fountain that’s normally just sort of a relatively calm fountain, you know, that the water stays inside the area that it’s supposed to. But then apparently it occasionally erupts. and sprays water 20 feet across. The one disconcerting thing that Jim mentioned is that the background music that was playing while the fountain was going off was Cypress Hills, Insane in the Membrane. Not exactly true to form for. I’ve seen this in bad movie. Maybe there was in the stop motion one that I didn’t see entirely all the way through. Moving on, moving on. Now that song is going be in our heads for the rest of the day.
Jim Hill: But again, just, to be honest, you look around this, this isn’t going to be an area that necessarily is going to be missed. I we’re in a gaming section. It’s not designed, it’s the area.
Len Testa: No, and as much money as the games make, they probably make more with Potter.
Jim Hill: absolutely, absolutely. But, you know, as we walk up to the gates of Hogsmeade Village, just picture this going 300 feet further back there.
Len Testa: Frankly, mean, looking at it, I’m surprised they haven’t done it already.
Jim Hill: Well, because you have to close it to do it. And it’s like, you’re gonna turn off the money machine? yeah, yeah. Again, one of the things they hope to address while doing this is the issue with the Dragon Challenge Coaster. When this was the Ice Dragon, the Fire Dragon, back when it was lost content, this was one of the most popular attractions in the entire park. They would have epic lines. And now, it does less than a third or the fourth of the business. But again, it comes back to a theme that we’ve talked about before. mean, come on over, take a look.
Len Testa: Hi, we’re over in Harry Potterland. We’ve just passed the Hogwarts Express train. We’re passing by Hogsmeade Station. We’ve got Honeydukes on our left. We’ve got these amazing Butterbeer Cruts. It’s really like walking into Grand Central Station, you know, on New Year’s Eve. There’s just people everywhere, all around. It’s the middle of the day. It’s really, really warm. Excuse me, go ahead. Kids running underfoot, it’s a circle.
Jim Hill: As busy as it is, notice how few people are actually going to Dragon Challenge. It’s because it’s this little modest recessed door. There’s a five minute wait right now for Dragon Challenge. So we’re in the busiest land, in the busiest of the Universal theme parks, and there’s a Harry Potter themed attraction for which there’s a five minute wait. And the amazing thing is if you go up the hill here, there’s wonderful props. And in fact, that’s the other thing to understand about the The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. It’s a very specific time. This is set in the fourth book, the fourth film. You’re literally in the middle of the Triwizard Tournament. you are in the world of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire on the day of the Dragon Challenge, before things start to go south. So it’s still a relatively happy time in the Potter universe. And that’s literally where they’ve frozen the characters.
Jim Hill: And in fact you go up the hill here and hero all of the banner the handmade banners by the Hogwarts students for their their heroes and If I get as smart as they’ve been with all of the propping here is you actually go in a top of the hill There is a goblet of fire when you go into the next room There are these wonderful amazing fifty thousand dollars worth of tapestries that Universal had made in Hungary that are gonna depict the great wizards of the past watching the tournament However, they are in the room with the candles dangling down. And in order to sell the candle effect, they had to turn down the light. So literally, if you want to see some amazing tapestry, bring your camera with a flash, all right? And when you’re in that space, wait till other guests pass through and take a couple of shots. So when you go home, look at the wonderful tapestries, because you can’t see them here.
Len Testa: Wow. Just walking to see them here. Sure, sure, So walking past one of the Butterbeer carts, and I’m going to count the number of people in line. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. There’s like 50 people in line for Butterbeer.
Jim Hill: In a lot of ways it’s the biggest attraction here and certainly it’s the most profitable. mean, when you think about, know, it’s not exactly in Coca-Cola country as in Coca-Cola is what? eight ounces of water and you know three pennies worth of syrup but it’s a relatively short list of ingredients relatively cheap to make and they’re making money hand over fist.
Len Testa: that’s great. Anyway to get- What’s this structure right here that we’re Sort of like a-
Jim Hill: This is if you know your Harry Potter stories that- Okay all messages travel by owl the owl post and so what you’re seeing here is literally you know the owl read that this is where all and in fact what I love about their attention to detail is we have plastic owls in here that’s heads that swivel but again assuming that they’re real owls there’s owl poop under each of the…
Len Testa: there is, there is.
Jim Hill: you know just but again the idea was to make this as lived in you know I mean literally the idea is you walked into the books you walked into the movies and the only problem with that is that and this this really only becomes an issue during the summer months but because This area is almost all black and gray stone. It doesn’t just hold the heat. It’s an easy bake oven. again, there’s a reason that people are looking for beverages because they’re dying here. But no, has, there is honestly so much, we could do an entire podcast just about this land. There is so much attention to detail. Whether it’s the snowy roofs of Hogsmeade Village. or the individual windows of each of the stores that, for example, where you buy your quidditch equipment, there’s a snitch flying around in the window. I mean, just so much, the only problem right now is this is so hugely popular, it’s almost impossible to move in here. just, you know.
Len Testa: I wouldn’t want to bring a stroller in here.
Jim Hill: Well, and that’s the thing. In fact, at certain times of the year, it’s a… one way traffic only. You come in one side and they direct you out the other. You know, they cut off access through Jurassic Park area.
Len Testa: What’s that straight ahead, Jim?
Jim Hill: That is the three broomsticks along with the hogshead tavern. fact, let us stuck in there and get you a beverage.
Len Testa: A beverage, you say? All right, we’ll walk over there and see what we can do about a beverage. I’m intrigued. You guys hear the background music? So this is a bar, shop, drink shop? place where we file taxes. We’re going into the Hog’s Head. Apparently some sort of refreshment stand. We’ll see how long the line is for whatever it is that we’re doing. it’s a bar, it’s a bar.
Jim Hill: it is. Now, I was actually here for the grand opening of The Wizarding World. again, through, again, didn’t do this deliberately. was, the first went off of the press bus. They had a red carpet set up and I ended up, but it was covered with, was raining, it was covered with plastic, and some Universal employee shooed me off of it. And I finally wound up. in the day out, see? My prom day found work. So, I was the only reporter let in to the Wizarding World for 90 minutes. And I had the place basically to myself.
Jim Hill: And so I ended up going from store store interviewing people and got some amazing information about, for example, the typical guest when they got into the Harry Potter stores during the soft opening, they were spending $175 a person. on robes and on average. they were talking about there had been some families, one family that came over from Britain that spent $1,500. They had to have one of everything. anyway, so I end up here in the Hogshead Tavern frantically taking notes. And I’m really not paying attention to what’s going on around me.
Jim Hill: And they had decided to bring in 30 to 50 Universal employees and dress them as wizards. for the press event. And this became the facility that they held them in. So I look up and I’m literally I am now in the movie, all right? Because they’re all sitting here waiting. And it’s like, oh jeez, know, it’s literally in my brain, was like, one of these things is not liked yet. So I gotta get out of here. I’m trying to discreetly get out of the room and I must have stepped on the back of 30 different cloaks because it was like, ow, ow, ow, ow.
Jim Hill: So I end up back in the three broomsticks portion, which is now empty. And I’m sitting there and there’s this English family, you know, just sort of sitting alone and I grab the other table and sit down. and eventually become aware of the conversation and it’s like, what do you think, Her Majesty is coming out this evening? It’s like, well, she has to. She’s been working with them all week. And it’s like, I eventually realized it’s J.K. Rowling’s family that had flown over for the event. And they proceed to talk about how the poor woman had been out in the park after hours with literally, I mean, her attention to detail here was almost insane. She was walking around talking about correcting the moss on the side of the building here.
Jim Hill: I have different species in mind. It would have been here longer, so it needs to be a little larger here, and this is damp, and it just, it was fascinating, and again, it’s just one these things where you’re sitting, listening, and trying not to, I’m really not a creepy eavesdropper, you know, I happen to be in the area hearing this conversation. But, but again, I just, I love this facility, but.
Len Testa: But the other thing is, think about it, you just talked about 50 people being in line. In line for a beverage. Okay, we just walked into this place, we are now what, fifth in line? Yeah, so a quick tip is if you actually want the Butterbeer, it’s faster to go into the Hogshead Tavern? Yes. Hogsmeat Hogs
Jim Hill: It’s also the only for the audio and the metatronic hogshead behind the bar that periodically comes to life.
Len Testa: Yeah, it’s kind of interesting, it’s a pretty large hogshead. So what are you gonna do? You’re gonna do… You gonna do Frozen or you gonna do…
Jim Hill: How about one of each? That way you can…
Len Testa: Are you buying the butter beer?
Jim Hill: I’ll buy the butter
Len Testa: Jim is buying the butter beer, folks. excited here. This line is a… Actually this is fairly detailed. Is there upstairs seating? that what those stairs are for? that a prop?
Jim Hill: No, no, no. In fact, we’ll step into the deeper part of the bar here, but with this…
Len Testa: Oh, it goes way back.
Jim Hill: In fact, what’s fascinating is if you actually go in into the… Again, this is a geeky little touch. But go into the three broomsticks and look up. This is Florida. They need air conditioning. They need duct work. You can’t see it. Alright, they’ve literally put a false ceiling in of a tavern, you know, in the Harry Potter world. And then all the duck work is above that, hidden away. mean…
Len Testa: It’s genius.
Jim Hill: Yeah, absolutely. So…
Len Testa: So we’re doing one of these.
Jim Hill: One frozen and one regular. Fabulous.
Len Testa: Alright folks, we’re gonna pause this for second until we get our Butterbeer and then we’ll be back. Alright, so we’re taking a break inside the Hogshead Brewery. We’ve got Jim’s buying the drinks. Thank you Jim. Ha, interesting. Alright, so we’ve got two drinks here. We’ve got the frozen version and then we’ve got the liquid version. So on the non-frozen version, it looks like this bubbling marshmallows.
Jim Hill: The head is added at the end. It’s literally the finishing touch. It’s a separate station where they added almost like the whipped cream on a cake.
Len Testa: It looks like a… It’s hard to describe. It looks like it’s wet bubbles. All right, here we go. It’s like gum. Cream soda, butterscotch, and it’s really sweet. Sweeter even. Laurel’s making the yucky face. It’s been a while. I’m going to try the frozen version now. Here, give it a shot. It’s almost like a mocha. It’s a different flavor for me.
Jim Hill: Maybe they need to chain the hog head. I could get used to the frozen versions. The cold really helps it a lot. The downside of this is, as Nancy pointed out at lunch today, it’s a fast lane to a brain freeze.
Len Testa: yeah, I can already feel it. It’s really good, thank you Jim.
Jim Hill: But it’s almost worth it alone, rather than to pay cash to do this at a credit card because they literally hand you a quill.
Len Testa: Really?
Jim Hill: So it’s like, well, you have to sign your card. It’s in.
Len Testa: So, no, I’m Here’s your inkwell. There you go.
Jim Hill: No, there’s, again, I think the storytelling particularly here in the Three Gorms, Six Hogs, is so well done. What’s fascinating though is that at the opening, I got to chat with Stuart Craig and he said the problem was that we had done three movies that featured scenes in, you know, The Hog’s Head and The Three Broomsticks and each time we had changed the look of it, you know, coupled with what it said in the book and what the layout of this place was like. And so it was literally trying to take all of these elements and give it a unified view while at the same time making it a restaurant that worked at a theme park. that they can plug with like, you know, fire regulation.
Jim Hill: But at same time, just across the way here with the three broomsticks, they, that’s authentic English fare. I mean, you know, you can get scotch eggs, can get bangers and mash, fish and chips. And what’s particularly fun about it is that their menu board is done in the style of the wanted posters from the movies. So, you know, where you saw serious black screaming that, It’s that large woodblock kind of print with images that fade out. But again, the details, the dedication to bringing the world of the books and the movies to life here is just kind of stunning. now, you know, that’s where kind of the gauntlet has been thrown down for Disney.
Jim Hill: It’s going to be interesting, you know, between Cars Land in California coupled with Fantasyland Forest as to whether or not… Disney can reclaim the high ground when it comes to themed entertainment. It’s going to be difficult for them to reach this level of detail in Venezuela because they probably started this…
Len Testa: I don’t know if they aspire to this level of detail. The room that we’re in is, what, three horse stories tall? Yep. And it’s detailed from the ground all the way up to the very top of the ceiling. I mean, just look across the way at the dining room. You have all of these mismatched chairs.
Jim Hill: Yep. Because again, this is a tavern. This is a place where people just come to eat, and it’s got to service a lot of people. But again, they’ve done… Such a nice job, and to Disney’s credit, it’s gonna be interesting to see what happens when Be Our Guest opens. Because that is gonna be… That’s gonna be a joint comparison here. That’s exactly it. You can dine in the West Wing, you can dine in the Grand Ballroom, or you can literally dine in the Be Our Guest dining room, with the giant tables and all that. That’s gonna be fascinating.
Jim Hill: The one thing I was hearing about that though is they have been having trouble with the Living Character Initiative figures. that they wanted to do that. If you remember the early concept paintings for it, you would actually see sort of tea trays being pushed through and on each of these there was an audio animatronic lumiere, there was a Mrs. Potts and Chip, and it’s like, it’s one thing to do Remy the Rat when he’s six inches tall and really doesn’t have to say anything. Me, me, me, me, me, me, he’s done. It’s quite another thing to figure out who’s backstage doing the Jerry Vorbach impression. Hello! You know, so.
Jim Hill: But I don’t know, again, the only complaint you can make about Harry Potter is that literally the Wizarding World is too popular. It’s not big enough. It’s not big enough. And that’s kind of a good problem to have. But yeah, universal internally fought about this, about how big is too big. when it came down to it, it’s like, well, obviously we have to do the ride right. In fact, that’s…
Len Testa: That’s where we’re headed next, you think? Or… We are. Just one last thing on this. One of the things that’s amazing to me about the architecture of the Tamarisk, obviously it’s a modern restaurant. It meets fire code. It meets all the health and safety measures. But you don’t see like a giant air conditioning turret at the top, you?
Jim Hill: No, absolutely. And in fact, that’s really one of the wonders of… This complex you can look up and it looks like an authentic 16th century tavern But the ductwork the electrical, you know, again, this is air-conditioned right here. It’s all here You just can’t see it, you know, they’ve hidden it all very very well
Len Testa: This tremendous trying to I’ve been in temperature in England and this is pretty darn close. I mean I Would imagine you’re not going to get the same response from asking for butter beer though.
Jim Hill: No, I will tell you this much while I was at the bar There’s this interesting conversation, again, this lovely suburban woman comes up and she’s negotiating that she and her family want six butter beers and a real beer and they want an empty glass. Because they want to pour Amstel Light into a glass with butter beer and see what it tastes like. I’ve never seen, you the Universal employee was so trying to talk her out of it so hard it’s like, you don’t understand, this will all separate. All right, the alcohol will mix with this. and you’ll have glop. And in fact, I don’t know what it will form, but I wouldn’t drink it.
Len Testa: There’s a small chance of potential explosion.
Jim Hill: But she was determined. She was walking off with her empty cup in her amp still and all of her children with their butterbeer. So watch the news tonight, folks. There could be a really ugly story.
Len Testa: I would love to know how they make this. We’re going have to do a… All right, should we go ride the ride?
Jim Hill: Sure.
Len Testa: See you in a minute. Sorry, so you’ve just ridden Forbidden Journey with Harry Potter. It’s a remarkable attraction. It’s got an incredible amount of detail in the queue. The ride itself is fantastic. You’re on a Kuka arm that goes along a track, and you’re swinging from scene to scene. I thought it was gonna be all CGI, Jim, but a lot of it is actual sets that they’ve established. But the interesting thing is, going through the queue, you realize that there’s so much detail in there, it’s gonna be really interesting to see how Disney responds to that.
Jim Hill: No, in fact, again, Cars Land Radiator Springs Racer is supposedly Disney’s response. And don’t get me wrong, they’re wonderful characters, but again, it’s two films versus seven books and eight movies. you know, and in fact, that’s the thing I think that was so smart about this is getting the actual cast to film this before, you know, they got to work on, you know, the last of the half-bored prints. it’s just, you know, between the audio and the visuals, and it’s just… and mixing back and forth from the film to the practical sets. it’s the new gold standard for a themed attraction.
Len Testa: It really is the, you you’re walking through the queue and it’s not just static rooms you’re going through. There are things to interact with in virtually every room. There’s films or there’s paintings that come alive. There’s lighting, there’s rich detail everywhere.
Jim Hill: And I say this as a fat guy and remember that the big worry and the big problem with this attraction initially was that they had, know, that people of a certain heft couldn’t ride. And a few months in, they very bright thing, they took the two outside seats and made them fat friendly. And now, again, it’s just a question of, yes, you get on board the ride and it’s like, again, suck it in, fatty, but basically anybody can ride.
Len Testa: It’s really good. Yeah, it’ll be interesting to see what Disney does in response to this. I can’t imagine how Beast’s Castle or anything in the New Fantasyland is going to… be as detailed as this but I’m really excited to see it. It’s been really good. Any last thoughts, Jim, before we close this episode?
Jim Hill: I expecto patronus.
Len Testa: Okay, there we go. All right. Well, thank you guys for listening to the to the podcast We’ll be back with with more really really soon Don’t forget to leave comments on iTunes and rate the show, please if you like it We’ll do more if you don’t like it. We’ll probably do even more than that. Talk to you guys later. Thanks.
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