For the second time since they opened in 1990, I was talked into going to Universal Studios in Orlando. It took all of 10 minutes to remember why I hadn’t been back.
(cue flashback fog) The two things that stood out from my last visit were the pointless herding of visitors by employees and the lines. When I go to a theme park, I expect to wait to get on rides. Fifteen years ago, no one had invented the likes of Disney’s FastPass system and access to specific attractions was the closest thing to a communist utopia you’d find in the free world – that is to say, everyone had an equal opportunity to stand in long lines. What aggravated me most was how the lines were managed. Mostly, they weren’t. The lines consisted of endless zigzags of chains winding a twisting path through some area with nothing to do except eavesdrop on your immediate neighbors and whine about how hot it is. Unlike the megalithic competition, Universal offered nothing in the way of distraction to make you forget how annoying bored eight year olds can possibly get after 60 minutes of imitating cattle on the way to the slaughterhouse.
I’m sure some efficiency engineer was paid a handsome sum to design the layout of the public areas to maximize traffic flow. For instance, in the name of efficiency, this person (or group of persons if anyone else wants in on the credit) figured out the optimal way to cram cars onto a fixed slab of pavement. Measured in cars/acre and rate of parking, I’m willing to bet they got a hefty bonus. Too bad they neglected to consider that people may not want to drive past a half mile of empty pavement to park in the spot physically furthest from the theme park entrance. Even to my untrained eye, I could see where they could have routed the traffic differently without making cars and pedestrians battle for right of way.
So, it was with great apprehension that I learned my wife had scored a pair of “Star Tickets” for admission to the park. Realizing that fifteen years had passed and that things surely had changed, I decided to give it a go. Besides, the tickets were free, so what did we have to lose? Someday, I’ll learn that unbridled optimism is for suckers. Clearly, that day was not here yet.
We had two tickets, we needed three, so we were going to spend some money on the third ticket plus parking. I figured $60 plus a tank of gas, so at $83/gallon, we’d have some fun for under a grand. I know… gas didn’t quite make it to $83/gallon, but one can’t be sure about these things when Exxon/Mobile has record quarterly profits to exceed. Looking on Universal’s website (screenshot), I see that they’re open until 7pm, so we’ll have about six hours to play once we get there.
Getting there was easy considering the entire route is along I-4 where they’ve conveniently replicated Tampa’s Malfunction Junction at regular intervals so that we won’t miss it when the fix is completed sometime next year.
The lines at the parking booths were encouragingly short with no more than two cars per gate. The price went up a buck from the last time we visited Margaritaville earlier in the year, but such is life. Since our last visit, Universal replaced the asphalt parking lots with a series of enormous parking decks. It took about ten minutes to navigate past the traffic cones and bored attendants before we got to the deck and level that was actively being filled. I was starting to feel optimistic about the trip when I noticed that they had setup two lanes of traffic feeding a single lane around a 90 degree turn. Most people politely lined up and behaved, but inevitably, some Type A tourist in a rented luxury sedan would decide his time was much more important than everyone elses and would jump into the empty lane to cut in line. Let me pause briefly to give kudos to the Florida crackers in the old Chevy pickup who decided to straddle both lanes after the second Andretti wannabe attempted passing while under caution flags. Naturally, after the turn, we had two lanes again and suffered from deja vu as yet another set of the self-appointed elite tried their luck against the dually.
Parking matters aside, the walk to the front gates was somehow longer than the walk from the back 9 at my local duffer course. Universal does provide moving sidewalks, which is nice. Oddly, they had at least one completely turned off for each segment of the walk. I blame either human error or the Return Of The Efficiency Expert (coming soon to a themepark near you).
Sheesh, I’m getting wordy and I haven’t even talked about how badly they implemented what little technology they had. Ticket booth – second in line. The one window we waited at was staffed by an employee who types about 12 char/min. That’s right, characters. I’ve seen people fill out tax returns faster than this lady could enter the bare essentials for two people buying annual passes. Hey Universal! How about basic training for your frontline staff if you’re going to require more background information than my mortgage banker. It honestly took over 20 minutes to take care of one customer. I finally jumped lines and finished my transaction about the same time as the people buying the passes.
Had we bought tickets, they would have been $60/person for one person/one day. I mistakenly thought that the Florida resident special was adding a second day for free. Turns out, it’s adding the second park, but no extra days. Furthermore, the Star Tickets were only good for Universal, not Islands of Adventure, so that bonus was useless. To add insult to injury, on that day, Universal closed at 6pm instead of 7pm as stated on their website. Every employee I asked (there were four total) insisted I was mistaken and looked at the wrong park’s hours on their website. Not one bothered to check. How wrong they were.
All told, we lost about half an hour and got into the park about 1:30. We decided against the “added value” options ($20 per head for all you can eat all day in three separate restaurants – excluding beverages and $15 for the express option which lets you skip most of the lines). Inside the park, there weren’t many people. We knew it wouldn’t last. At 4pm, they would be allowing 32,000 Christian rockers through the gates for Rock The Universe.
Let me just summarize my annoyances with the rides we had time to experience:
Jimmy Neutron’s Nicktoon Blast. Are the misters that come off the big fans supposed to spray you with a volume of water equivalent to a light rain? I’m guessing not and suspect they were ready for adjustment. The holding cell where the audience is queued prior to the actual ride had one big screen for everyone to watch. My daughter (one would think she is the primary audience for this attraction) could only see the screen after I hoisted her onto my shoulders. Why not place a few monitors around the room? Oh, and turn the volume up a bit so we can hear it over the majority of people who wouldn’t shut up.
Shrek 4-D. Same complaint about the holding cell. Note to future theme park designers – if you there is ANY chance your audience will be stuck in the holding cell longer than anticipated, please find an audio track longer than 20 seconds to loop while you stall for time. In addition, being the last person left in the entire United States who hasn’t seen the movie, I found the teenagers with the scripted attitudes and insults to be intensely annoying. Once we were seated, we got just past the donkey sneeze and the show stopped. After two minutes of tolerating yet more scripted insults, they started over. At least the second time, I knew to cover my face before getting it sprayed with simulated donkey snot. The water in the face thing seems to be the only immersive element Universal mastered throughout the park.
Revenge of the Mummy. The ride itself was fun. As a bonus, I noticed they replaced the chains in the queues with fixed sections of stainless steel railings. I’m not sure, but I guess that’s progress. I’ll have to check with an efficiency expert on that and get back to you. The actual queue – still boring. I think they need to fire the efficiency experts and hire some Imagineers to work on ways to keep people occupied as they shuffle through the neverending lines. Thankfully, the park was pretty empty and none of the waits were more than 15 minutes (for now).
Another interesting point.. they provide free lockers for your bags while you are on the ride. For this ride, the lockers are free for up to 2.5 hours at which point you pay $2 per half hour. The lockers are controlled by a fingerprint scanner. It takes two scans of your thumb and assigns you a locker. When you are ready to retrieve your bag, you enter your locker number into a keypad and then let it scan your thumb again. Here’s the rub – there are two stations on each bank of lockers and they aren’t networked! You can only go to the station you originally used to retrieve your belongings. Stupid.
E.T. Adventure. This one annoyed the crap out of me. The ride was fun. It is reminiscent of the Peter Pan ride at the Magic Kingdom. Getting onto the ride required obtaining a “badge” from two employees. This bottleneck turned out to be merely an unnecessary waste of time. To get the badge, you have to give them your first name and they then hand you a vinyl card with a barcode on it. When I got the card, I’m thinking this might be cool.. Maybe E.T. will say my name or something on the ride. *BZZZZT!* Wrong! Before getting on the ride, another employee collected the badges and dropped them into a bin where they remained unscanned. WTF is up with that?
Twister. Huge outdoor line but they at least provided video. The video clips are scarier than the ride.
I’m actually pretty settled down at this point because, although we are short on time, things are moving along pretty well and my daughter is having a good time. We’ve now been in the park about 90 minutes and done five rides. We decide to head over to Hollywood and grab a couple of frosty lemonades on the way. Here’s where things went south. Next stop..
Back To The Future -The Ride. After we got in line, we hit the first checkpoint. An employee directed us to a path and told us to go that way. I think it took longer to scale the ramps we walked up than it took to experience this ride. The ramps were all in full sun and we had no shade. At this point, I was wishing someone would throw more water in my face.
<digression>Universal has been open for over fifteen years now. Why didn’t they plant some shade trees along the major walkways? Everywhere you walk, you are in the sun. And it is HOT in Florida eight months of the year. I blame efficiency engineers.</digression>
BTTF:TR was fun once we got going. It’s your basic motion simulator and the ride is hosted by the esteemed Dr. Emmett Brown. It’s not terribly high tech, but that might explain why it didn’t malfunction.
Men In Black: Alien Attack. This ride looked like it would be the most fun of all. You ride around in a vehicle along a track and shoot at aliens. Sort of like Buzz Lightyear at MK but not cartoonish. The aliens are all animatronic and you have an LED scorecard at your seat to tell you how you’re doing. Because of the nature of the ride, all bags are again to be stored in free lockers. The trouble with this plan is that these lockers are only free for 45 minutes. The ride takes about 10 minutes and we were told the wait would be 30 minutes. We went for it and it turned out the line was only 20 minutes. We decided to go again, so I waited in line to retrieve my stuff figuring I would redeposit it into another locker for another 45 minutes. My wife’s thumb sufficed and I didn’t try my thumb on a second go, so don’t ask if they check.
We got back in line and were again told the line was 30 minutes long. The line was substantially longer this time, so I was a bit nervous about the time. I asked the attendant why the time limit was so restrictive. Rather than answer, he told me to come find him if the line ran long and he’d help me retrieve my things. Back in line, we moved about 20 feet in 20 minutes. I’m about to start getting agitated when word trickles back from the front of the line that the ride was down. It crashed and there was no ETA for when it would be back. The attendant confirmed this, so I waiting another ten minutes to get my things from the locker and we decided to catch the final T2:3D show.
I should point out that at this point, we managed to get through two rides in about two hours. It was now well after 4pm and hordes of marauding pubescent teenagers were streaming into the park at an alarming rate. Rock The Universe was starting to look like the Crusades as performed by Attilla and the Huns. That is to say, these kids were charged up and pretty much running roughshod over anyone between them and wherever they were headed.
Terminator 2:3D Battle Across Time. We got back to the line for this one about 20 minutes before the show which starts on the half hour. The show was listed on the program as the last show of the day. 20 minutes was what the attendants told us to plan around to ensure a seat. As it was, the line was already extremely long and they cut it off just behind us. This attraction looked like it was going to top MIB in terms of fun and we were all excited to see it. Think of it as a 3D movie with live action role playing. The show actually started in the holding tank where a live actor introduced the theme and we were treated to a commercial for Skynet and Cyberdyne, the fictitious company who creates the homicidal weapons systems and robots. The commercial is interrupted by rebels from the future… you get the picture. It was fun.
After the introduction, semi-automatic doors open into the theater and it’s a free for all for seating. We ended up with some center seats near the front and settled in to finish the show. It goes along smoothly for about three or four minutes and then it stops. Suddenly. Without warning. I’m secretly hoping that this is another “interruption” by the rebels, but alas, my optimism is shredded when drone #2 announces that the attraction has broken and we are to immediately exit the theater. Oh, and by the way, come back later for priority seating for your inconvenience. Needless to say, we’re horribly disappointed.
More insult to compound the injury – outside the attraction, they are already loading the next herd into the holding cell. The show wasn’t broken, they just decided to unload us to keep their schedule rather than restart it. I’m beyond speechless by this realization. Because of the broken rides, we have done nothing but wait in lines for the last two hours. Yes, it’s 6pm and we have to leave. We finished our one turn on MIB precisely at 4pm.
I hope they improve things a bit before I come back again in 2020.
